clienthunter

Regulation enables this kind of thing systemically. Let this happen a few times without regulation and the market will demand trustworthy solutions, not some politician waving a magic wand and declaring something safe. As we've seen recently that system doesn't work too well.

Everyone who lost money in this knew the risks. Nobody is calling for accountability beyond the guy that actually is accountable. How refreshing is that? How refreshing is it to actually have a name of the person who fucked up, instead of a stream of pseudonymous apologetic soundbites from banks/regulators/politicians?

Not to mention the fact this whole problem is completely self contained. There is no talk of rescuing MtGox with tax money, or the need for a "national debate" on how to run this shit in the future. If you didn't run MtGox or have money in MtGox or don't outright choose to be involve yourself in some other way then you can go to bed at night and sleep well knowing it is absolutely not your problem.

This, friends, is one example of the many long forgotten benefits of private trade.

We moan a lot louder than we cheer.

This is a win. We should celebrate.

You're absolutely correct.

I agree with both you and the fanboys on this point, however. Our current system is better than the old, for sure, but at the end of the day it is true that an insane amount of money is paid to these oligopolous firms as fees for doing a very simple job. Payment processing really is a case of moving database rows around, albeit in a highly available manner, yet they demand huge percentages. My bank goes down about as often as my Gmail, and the latter's free and deals with more information than my bank.

The present is better than the old, but very bad compared to what could be.

When did the world get so sensitive? I don't know if I grew up in some bubble of hate but where I come from people were brought up to be able to handle themselves.

> "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me."

Today it seems more like "Sticks and stones may break my bones but that's okay because there'll likely be DNA evidence; names are not allowed because it breaches my human right to be."

I'm sorry, but my kids will be brought up to ignore names and to punch the bully back twice as hard in person, not in the press; and they will be taught to appreciate differences, not gloss over them and pretend they don't exist. Perhaps most of all they'll be taught to pity those that have brought politics-level bullshit into everyday life, and to rail against it at every opportunity. The Github meritocracy rug fiasco makes me feel physically sick - meritocracy is now offensive? We're now being held at gunpoint by professional victims who have a problem with professional status being merit based? Fuck me.

Humanity has been at war of one kind or another forever, when are we going to learn to stop trying to change each other and just get on with it? I never understand those people in bars who get into fights with others who say something they deem offensive. What a waste of time. Sure you might change the view of 1 in a 100, but that's 100 shitty nights out you've had. What's the point? And who's to say you're right and he's wrong? If you think there's such a thing as a moral absolute, I'm afraid you haven't thought long enough. Despite how the NSA might like things, we're all sovereign beings and no one has the right to dictate the contents of another's mind. So cluster with the ones you like and forget the rest. Life's too damn short.

Oh, and don't feel the need to tell me I don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this stuff. Just don't.

I use the workman keyboard layout. This was a complete mindfuck until I realised what was happening.

This man is peddling a book. I'm not saying that precludes his correctness but it does mean that the more analytical of us should apply a little more salt to our appraisal of his motivations than a journalist might.

The absurdity of this kind of thought is just profound. Thinking like this may be useful as a means of encouraging hope when all hope is lost, but Bitcoin is nowhere near there yet. Most of all this kind of talk smacks of deep desperation - "why won't people love me?"

I understand fully why one might feel so desperate. Bitcoin may have the potential to be truly revolutionary. Bitcoin solves the problem of orchestrating an international currency in a manner that limits the implementation details to the design, not banking/payment industry/political types who historically - for one reason or another - end up building in significant rigidities to the system.

It doesn't take a PhD in Economics to see the potential benefits of eradicating PayPal and consumer banks (although it may take one to see the potential pitfalls). More than this though, Bitcoin opens the door to truly free capital flow. It is possible to work in the Western world for a month or two and move, say, far East, and live like a king on the savings for a year or more. Why can't we just buy the stuff over there cheaply and consume it at home? One major reason is the rigidities in capital flow - it is hard, risky business in the current system. As a large company in a Bitcoin world you don't have to worry about a great class of risks of international trade, dumping money into the Cambodian economy is no longer a question of FX risk and "can I get it back out?"

This is a great step forward on the way to homogenising international capital stores i.e. ceteris paribus, rich people buy where things are cheapest, like in Cambodia, thereby flowing capital to, and driving up prices in, Cambodia. Cambodians get richer and the West gets poorer. Bitcoin has the vague potential to be the great equalizer.

We have seen some evidence of this at work in the EU with the Euro, if you look past the troubling dynamics of transition. Imagine how very different the US would be if every state had a different currency and payment processing rules, the diversity in income would be profound.

An educated economist will see a great many problems with this utopian vision, but will likely agree the aim is noble and that the basis - Bitcoin - is the closest thing we have so far to a workable solution.

Bitcoin may be as revolutionary as the fanboys want it to be, even if they don't understand why. My personal thought is that Bitcoin will soon be seen as the thing that started it all, but the solution won't be Bitcoin itself. There are too many problems - no matter how many times you read that a fixed supply currency is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it really isn't. It's also woefully easy to steal and the mining/verification mechanism is far too resource intensive and encouraging of looney speculation making its value at any point in time completely impossible to reason about.

If you love BTC today, don't spout bullshit strings of meaningless words in some grandiose display of being ahead of the times. Make it stronger and better because if you don't history will judge this whole thing very severely in 10 years time, when it really is just a way of buying drugs and hitmen.

This is really secondary to the actual real value these things would represent. Yes, they must be limited in supply, just as money must be - money would be useless if it grew on trees.

Your comment really only deals with the inflation rate of hashcash, which is a nominal thing and can be discounted in the presence of efficiency.

As I explained at more length in a comment on the post itself, the value of these things is a function of the dirty spammy goods they represent. To quote myself...

> Just as money is "stored labour", hashcash would become stored mail order viagra.

Interesting you should choose Kotlin over Go. What's your take on it? I'm a big Jetbrains fanboy but haven't played with Kotlin yet.

Dear Government,

We have nothing in common anymore. We're just too different on every level that counts. We've tried to make it work - or rather, I have - but it's no good. You never respond, most of the time you don't even acknowledge me or what I say.

I'm not happy. You're not happy. It's pointless.

I'd leave you if I could, but you won't let me and I don't see that changing. I know you'd harass me, stalk me, spy on me, and treat me like a criminal. Isn't it funny that you'd take notice then. You're nothing but a sociopathic bully, set in your ways, blind to the reality of your actions.

I couldn't leave anyway, there's no where to go - you've seen to that. But I can't keep doing this.

I've begged, pleaded, screamed, and shouted. Nothing works.

As I sit here a perfectly normal, law-abiding, person - wellies on the porch, tea in hand, dog at my feet, plates in the dishwasher - I've come to the only conclusion I can.

People will talk. Most probably won't understand. I'll get tarred with the brush of ignorance and called all sorts of names. As they try to compute the double life I'd led and the lies I'd told they'll only confuse their moral compass further. I'll probably get hurt badly. But it'll all be worth it.

Maybe it's not your fault that you're the way you are but I have no choice now, I have to put me first, I'm sorry.

I going to have to kill you.

________

Disclaimer for security services/LEA/whatnot: this is fiction designed to evoke thought, specifically the dynamics of how extremism comes to be. I am not the character in the above piece, but I am capable of sympathising with him - which is kind of the point. It is categorically not meant with menacing intent or as a threat so you can put your Communications/Terrorism legislation down. Isn't it fucking sad that I have to write that?

Is this actually type safe, or type safe up until you include an untyped gem and the whole thing becomes indeterminate? Does the typing actually improve performance over straight jRuby?

Can it handle method_missing and *_eval?

Also why is it closed source?

edit: sorry I didn't mean to sound aggressive. please interpret the stream of questions as extreme curiosity.

> In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on streets, are about a third of U.S. rates.

Britain here.

This is absolutely false. We uniformly view cyclists as the greatest danger on the streets. No joke, ask around.

I would suggest the reason for our better stats is down to a) a bloody difficult driving test; b) the thing inside a lot of us that makes the nervous/apologetic stereotype actually be true also makes a lot of us quite risk averse and cautious; c) drink driving is a big no-no with very practical consequences near 100% of the time; d) education of how to cross a road starts at a very young age, the result being no jaywalking laws required and watching people cross busy, fast moving roads in cities looks like doing the same in some developing country except we're proper pro at it; e) the speedbump pandemic, an enormous pain in the arse to have them every 3 ft in residential areas but probably highly effective; f) many, many (most?) pedestrian-accessible roads predate almost all vehicles and are twisty, narrow, and generally difficult to navigate; f) motorways/dual carriageways (70mph) were designed in such a way that they are not at all accessible on foot; g) B-roads (60mph usually, narrow) join 2 interesting places through vast expanses of farmland, there's rarely a reason to be on foot near them.

Lots of reasons, none are fear.

Binary blobs running on user boxes can collect direct, identifiable, evidence. Spying an IP address from afar that may or may not be proxied/NAT'd is flimsy circumstantial evidence at best.

I've thought the same myself but reading that post made it clear to me that such thing couldn't really have much in common with what we call Ruby today.

The solution for the performant/distributed/concurrent/data-intensive problems of today and the future seems, to me, to be in the functional space. I know it's trendy to say that but it's the smart people - Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton Jones, etc - who are driving this evolution. A language with a GIL and zero immutable primitives just doesn't seem to have much to contribute. The idea that Twitter was at scale as a Rails app once upon a time is just absurd to me now.

Incidentally I creeped on your bio and saw you created obvious. I read about Obvious a while back and, although I must admit I haven't used it directly, it really had a strong influence on how I think about structuring Rails applications.