miscellaneous

Thank you for the detailed and interesting comment. I wish I could maintain my productivity for extended periods of time like you do. Unfortunately I find that my cognitive abilities drop-off very quickly when become tired.

Also you talk of an 'intelligence switch'. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Or perhaps these people simply aren't hedonists that orientate their lives around momentary pleasures. Instead, they derive pleasure from achievement and building things.

Recreational drugs, on the other hand, have ruined millions of people lives. You are being disengenuous to suggest that they have a positive effect to most people.

Finally, no one "intended" drugs to be anything. They are simply tools that humans have discovered. It is ludicrous to suggest that they have specific intention.

If I was interested in such a discount, how would I contact you? (Also, how much is a "large amount"?)

> a link to the white paper. no idea what this does/use case

From the white paper:

"Velocity is an automated system for hedging risk on asset prices. It allows anyone to establish and participate in a marketplace on publicly accessible price feeds. The platform enables hedgers and speculators to take part in a market that reduces the threat of systemic risk."

Hedging against exposure to fluctuations in asset prices is very useful and necessary to many businesses.

> The community that already understands it isn't doing a very good job making it so that others can reach it

Where I disagree is that I don't believe that all ideas/concepts can be made "easy to understand" to a general audience. Many concepts - especially those technical in nature - simply require a large amount of background knowledge to understand.

You can be the best mathematics teacher in the world, but you won't be able to (and no one expects you to) make the Riemann hypothesis widely understood to the general public. It's just not feasible. And I posit that Bitcoin (whilst maybe not as technical as the Riemann hypothesis) similarly requires a large amount of background knowledge and is not an "easy" concept to understand in 30 minutes.

The good news is that there are millions of things that people use every day that they don't understand - cars, computers, TVs - in fact, due to the specialization of knowledge, most things people encounter they do not fully understand. I don't think this is a big deal.

Noun, 1. money laundering: Concealing the source of illegally gotten money.

Do you have any evidence that suggests that all users of mixers obtained their Bitcoin illegally?

This HN post is a criticism of the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. Mixers can improve the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. I don't see how your comment adds to this discussion, unless you think financial privacy is a crime - in which case your statement applies equally to cash transactions.

Well if you don't want to be connected to the Ethereum blockchain then you probably should just use a webserver. The advantage of using a blockchain like Ethereum is that it is very secure and very reliable compared to a webserver - also it is perhaps less work maintaining a DAO than a webserver.

So if you want to issue tokens for your hackspace, it would be nice if they existed on a public blockchain so that users could trade then and see their balance at any time - no need to worry about server uptime or vulnerabilities.

I find it amusing that you spend so much time commenting on every Ethereum post on hacker news. For someone who is so dismissive of Ethereum as a technology, you sure spend a lot of time criticizing it.

But more directly to you post: forking an altcoin would be a terrible idea for this person's usecase. Do so not only requires more work (creating and deploying clients) but also is completely insecure as such an altcoin would have no mining power behind it.

Creating a token on an existing blockchain, like Ethereum, would be a much better idea since the clients would already exist and the network would be much more secure. Moreover tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are light-client friendly and have access to smart-contract functinality.

I noticed last year that ubuntu.com - despite being the source from which most people download Ubuntu .isos - has no HTTPS capability and doesn't offer any checksums or gpg signatures on their download page. I believe you can find gpg signatures if you scratch around on their ftp server, but it is ridiculous to assume users will do this (especially when Ubuntu is trying to be a user-friendly distro).

Anyway, as a result I ended up emailing their webmaster asking why Ubuntu.com has no SSL cert. and I haven't heard anything back yet. I think it is pretty poor that a company like Canonical can have such a flagrant disregard for basic security practices, especially when it likes to market Ubuntu as a 'secure' OS.

Encryption enforces privacy. In a world with no privacy vulnerable people are easily abused by people in positions of authority. Also note that the legal system is not a perfect mapping to human morality - things that are are legal are not always moral and things that are moral are not always legal. Hence it is dangerous to have a world where right and wrong is determined only by an all-powerful legal system.

In my opinion it is important for society to maintain the privacy that humans have experienced for thousands of years. Remember that mass surveillance of every conversation that you have ever had is new thing. Before the internet society had much more privacy. Encryption is a way to ensure privacy in the internet era.

> There is NOTHING that ethereum can do that you can't do with bitcoin.

That is factually incorrect. Bitcoin is not turing complete, Ethereum is. Eg: You can't do loops in Bitcoin, you can in Ethereum.

Perhaps you are speculating about the potential capabilities of sidechains, but they isn't a reality at the present.

Thank you for the detailed post - very helpful for me. If I may ask, what were some of the factors that you used to determine the demand for a property in a given area?

Yeah so you just agreed with the above comment - you want control on where your money goes. So does Zuckerberg.

I don't think that would be the case. If a couple of western Governments "ban encryption" it would probably just mean that they weaken the crypto (e.g. backdoor). The traffic of weakened crypto still looks the same as the traffic of strong crypto - I don't think it would make strong crypto any more noticeable.

Also remember that crypto would still be legal in the rest of the world (China is not going to backdoor their crypto for the NSA's benefit) so you would still have heaps of encrypted traffic moving across the internet. I doubt that such a measure would do anything but make mass surveillance of western populations easier.

>Taxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with

Ah, we have found the key contention. An interesting thought is to consider a world of fully mobile people - who will move and who will stay in a country with universal basic income and high taxes?