vanzard

Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters.

(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)

  "adding cloudflare would work much more reliably"

This can't work. The author requirement was to have self-hosted comments without javascript. So his html pages change every few minutes, and cloudflare is just not designed for this.

To be fair we shouldn't look at Bitcoin as "just" computing hashes. Its impact is already wider than that. The OP pointed out:

> the bottom line is that investing a hundred+ megawatt in a system that creates thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste

Yes Google is just showing ads. They collect data about you to target their ads well, but that's basically all they do. They don't send your info to the NSA, they don't send you SPAM, they don't sell your info to private investigators. Their end goal is just to show you targeted ads. That's it.

This counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employer was buying about one /48 per week. What does this mean? We alone exhausted 2^80 ip addresses per week, or 2e18 addresses per second (that's 2 quintillion!). So this counter showing 2 addresses exhausted per second is wrong by an order of 1 quintillion.

In fact, with the proper paperwork you can still relatively easily buy an entire /40 or maybe even /32. With these practices, IPv6 WILL run out of addresses within the next 100 years. Well, to be pedantic, it will run out of allocatable subnets, but the vast majority of their addresses will remain unused.

You call growing from zero to tens of millions of MAU in 4 years "very weak"?! Ridiculous. You are wrong, nobody seriously outright rejected Twitter was growing. The worst critics said was "Twitter is not growing as fast as they claim, but they ARE growing" or "growth has slowed down, but there are still growing".

I can use any other example to prove that not releasing MAU doesn't mean something needs to be hidden. I quoted Gmail earlier because this is a good case of a growing product whose MAU needed to be kept secret due to competitive reasons.

Yet Twitter experienced phenomenal growth, going from zero to tens of millions of MAU in their first 4 years, proving your logic wrong (paraphrasing you, you said "if growth was so great surely a company would release MAU"). So if you apply the same criticism you make against Coinbase to Twitter, you would have said in these first 4 years "Twitter's metric are all vanity metrics" and you would have rejected Twitter's claims of growth. Well you would have been misguided, as we now know for certain Twitter WAS growing during these first 4 years.

This is why you look stupid to reject exchanges' claim of growth. Yes we know MAU is less than number_of_wallets. It's mathematical. But still, it's silly for you to reject their claims of growth as you have no basis for it. Not releasing MAU doesn't mean you are not growing, as Twitter demonstrated.

> For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.

Doesn't matter. This one addresses alone represents hundreds of thousands of customers of Bitstamp that you are completely ignoring in your math in your previous posts. I am just pointing out to you that AT LEAST some of these big addresses are bound to represent other exchanges/online wallets.

> So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.

It is simplistic for you too to assume that these 2.8 million BTC are all owned by a few individuals.

If you want my estimate, since we don't have much data to rely on, I think that roughly 30-70% of this 2.8 million BTC is owned by individuals and the other 70-30% represents exchange/online wallet customer funds. It's realistic to think that even the smaller portion (30%) of 2.8 million BTC could still represent at least 1 million users. And the ~2 million addresses with smaller funds could represent another ~1 million users (as you yourself estimated, well you said 0.75 million which is close enough). So that's ~2 million users total.

So if Twitter took 4 years to release MAU, would you have accused them for 4 years that they have "something to hide"? Now you get my point. It's sensitive. Sometimes you wait years before feeling comfortable releasing this number.

It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.

If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.

They don't release their MAU numbers not because they want to hide things, but because it really is a sensitive business metric.