The real believers will use it amongst themselves. There are 7 billion people. If only 1% believes in bitcoin, that means 70 million people fighting over 21 million coins.
Sometimes I hear this argument at work. There are 7 billion people, if only 1% of them buy into my crazy notion of value, or my bonkers product idea, then I'll make a mint.
What gives you the idea that one percent is a small number? You just pulled that quantity completely out of thin air, the only justification you have for this is that one percent appears small. You may as well try to justify a trade in antique pokemon cards, and this becoming a significant "currency".
As has been mentioned elsewhere, but bears repeating, bitcoin is not scarce. It is possible to create a practically infinite variety of crytocurrencies, even without changing the protocol significantly. Bitcoin can be, and has already been, "forked". This notion doesn't exist with any other commodity, gold is gold and will always be gold. You can't just go out and create a completely new type of gold, with its own self-contained scarcity. If you could, I'd wager that gold would not be used as a store of value in the way in which it currently is.
... assume we're a long way off from having the right permission granularity and the good UIs
The problem is much deeper than that, unfortunately. Android apps are nothing at all like whatever passes for 'apps' in the general world of Linux. Running apt-get can play total havok with your system, due to Linux's obsession with complex dependencies and shared libraries. Android apps, iOS app and Mac OSX apps dispense with this nonsense completely, and imagine apps instead as completely self-contained repositories of code. Apt-get can modify your system's startup process in a way that you can't just "undo". Android app installs cannot.
At some point, the price of Bitcoin will also calm down
I don't think that this will end up being the case. Bitcoin will always require a ludicrously complex and expensive network in order to actually exist. If no-one is willing to spend money on hardware, electricity, storage and bandwidth to actually run the network, then bitcoin will literally cease to exist. Gold, on the other hand, is a physical object that can change hands physically. That this is not how gold is normally traded today is not important - the fact is that if you own gold, you own gold, and you can pick it up and store it in a big (or more likely, small) hole in your back yard. It won't even rust, sitting there in the ground. It'll just be gold forever.
Bitcoin is a bunch of numbers, sitting in a huge chain of hashes, sitting on thousands of hard-disks plugged into computers all around the world. But that hash chain must be modified in order to move the coins around, and that takes CPU power, and we're already seeing the crippling limits that this places on the liquidity of bitcoin itself. Regular fiat currencies, as bitcoin enthusiasts love to point out, are *also* numbers sitting in computers, but they are backed by governments, and more importantly exist for the purpose of controlling economies. Despite the protestations, economic control through the manipulation of fiat currencies is literally the only thing that makes capitalism actually work.
Up to a point, this is true. Bitcoins are already mined by dedicated hashing machines, containing hardware whose express and only purpose is to calculate SHA-256 hashes as fast as possible. Today, the fastest of these machines is capable of 10,000 mega-hashes per joule of power consumed (from this page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Min...).
I'm a little skeptical of this number, since it's an order of magnitude larger than everything else on the same page, and I haven't found any independent sources confirming it, but in any case, once you've put your hashing process into specialised hardware, the only thing that'll make it faster is pretty much a smaller process size on your silicon. I can't see this being done just for the purpose of mining bitcoins.
I couldn't disagree more. Javascript is an excellent language, elegant and simple, and a joy to write code in. Building UIs in HTML and CSS is a bit of a pain, and websites that use excessive javascript where none might be necessary are certainly annoying, but neither of those things are anything to do with the language itself.
It's quite different to C++ obviously, but differences in languages encourage you to think differently about problems, which is normally a good thing. WebAssembly, on the other hand, seems to be re-inventing various things, and re-attacking already solved problems, such as how to build a simple and fast VM (see Lua's VM, for instance).
Except the trackpad. And the logic board is custom-designed, like all laptops are, so sure, it's made of PC parts, but that's because it's an intel-based personal computer, so exactly how else you'd like them to make it is hard to understand.
And the keyboard, which is also custom-built, and so nice that many actual PC laptops copy its design. And the hinge, which actually feels solid, and that magnet-closed lid, which has also been very widely copied, and is perfectly engineered.
Often I hear the complaint that apple parts aren't easily replaceable, which is true on the newer models, and yet here someone's arguing that apple suck because they *do* use commodity standard parts.... so which is it?
The fact is that apple laptops are simply better built, and better designed, and on average outlast competing PC laptops. And they do this because apple do not bother to compete on price, since the only endgame with price competition is lower and lower quality. Instead they compete on physical hardware quality - cases, hinges, finish, keyboard, trackpad, etc - and also on OSX, which is the real reason that an apple machine is superior to everything else on the market. OSX is just better. It performs better, its APIs are better, its development environment is better. Have you ever written any code for iOS, or for a mac? You should give it a try. Coming from windows and android development, it's an absolute joy.
and that is the memory management of C++ that isn't predictable for use in the kernel.
Bizarre. You can overload new and delete on a per-class basis. There's no C++ in the kernel because Linus is irrationally afraid of it - it's doubly absurd when you go & look at that code, and there's member functions, and virtual methods, and per-class allocation calls, all written in C.
Machines already have taken the job over, it' just that we call those machines "compilers", and they're really dumb so we have to explain to then what we'd like the software to do really, really precisely and clearly.
No, it's a very inexpensive medium that's often used by underground bands to release their recordings on. People are buying these recordings because they want to support their local music scene, and like owning the physical artifacts thereof. I expect that the mixtape might be making a comeback too, since as far as high school gifts go, they're pretty much unbeatable. With a mixtape, being unable to skip tracks is positively an asset. You *want* the recipient to have to listen to every single carefully-chosen track that you recorded for them. Hand it over along with a thrift-store walkman too. Nostalgia for an unlived-through age.
People that buy vinyl, play vinyl. I certainly used to record my records onto cassette, but this was only in order to listen to them on my walkman, not to preserve the vinyl itself. It doesn't degrade very much at all through being played, only through being mishandled, or stored in unpleasant conditions, such as on a rack in direct sunlight...
This is a bizarrely naive comment. Readability is absolutely vital in all programming languages, but perhaps you might understand that better if it were termed 'understandability' instead, even though that appears to not be an actual word. The ugliness of the syntax is only marginally relevant, the extent to which you are able to understand what the code is intended to do, so that you can modify it in the future, is what 'readability' measures - if you only look at code to debug it, you must be in the highly enviable position of never having to modify the functionality of any software you write, which is certainly unusual, to say the least, and maybe explains your otherwise inexplicable position.
That must be because you enjoy writing linked lists. Seriously, stl is the most powerful part of C++, why you'd completely avoid it is totally beyond me.
But, a good, clean, considerate programmer who comments well can write very maintainable and understandable code.
This is true of almost any programming language. The issue is the extent to which the language makes this more or less difficult to do. Perl pretty much makes it as hard as it's possible to make it.
You deliver the court a PC, something nice and powerful, running a brute-force decryption crack attempt on the encrypted payload. Then you give them a reasonable estimate regarding how long they might expect to have to wait until the machine finds the correct key. That this length of time exceeds the lifetime of the universe might be understood to be the plaintiff's problem.
That marvellous rant would have been better if you'd written 'fuck your dog', instead of chickening out and replacing it with 'love'.
This whole anti-social-media nonsense is no more than the anti-rock'n'roll reactionary nonsense of the ninteen-fifties. Social media is perfectly fine, it's only the old farts who think it's destroying the world. Young people deal with it without an issue.
If bitcoin mining is their chosen economic model to support their site, then an "opt out" policy is equivalent to providing their services for free. Paying for a service via a bitcoin mining operation running briefly on your computer is a much more sustainable income stream than advertising - even though bitcoin mining itself might be highly economically questionable, and may very well be little more than a pyramid scheme, it's still better than advertising.
They do need to be upfront, but they don't need to provide an "opt out", and nor should they.
Slashdot Mirror
The real believers will use it amongst themselves. There are 7 billion people. If only 1% believes in bitcoin, that means 70 million people fighting over 21 million coins.
Sometimes I hear this argument at work. There are 7 billion people, if only 1% of them buy into my crazy notion of value, or my bonkers product idea, then I'll make a mint.
What gives you the idea that one percent is a small number? You just pulled that quantity completely out of thin air, the only justification you have for this is that one percent appears small. You may as well try to justify a trade in antique pokemon cards, and this becoming a significant "currency".
... same reason bitcoin is valuable - scarcity.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, but bears repeating, bitcoin is not scarce. It is possible to create a practically infinite variety of crytocurrencies, even without changing the protocol significantly. Bitcoin can be, and has already been, "forked". This notion doesn't exist with any other commodity, gold is gold and will always be gold. You can't just go out and create a completely new type of gold, with its own self-contained scarcity. If you could, I'd wager that gold would not be used as a store of value in the way in which it currently is.
... assume we're a long way off from having the right permission granularity and the good UIs
The problem is much deeper than that, unfortunately. Android apps are nothing at all like whatever passes for 'apps' in the general world of Linux. Running apt-get can play total havok with your system, due to Linux's obsession with complex dependencies and shared libraries. Android apps, iOS app and Mac OSX apps dispense with this nonsense completely, and imagine apps instead as completely self-contained repositories of code. Apt-get can modify your system's startup process in a way that you can't just "undo". Android app installs cannot.
At some point, the price of Bitcoin will also calm down
I don't think that this will end up being the case. Bitcoin will always require a ludicrously complex and expensive network in order to actually exist. If no-one is willing to spend money on hardware, electricity, storage and bandwidth to actually run the network, then bitcoin will literally cease to exist. Gold, on the other hand, is a physical object that can change hands physically. That this is not how gold is normally traded today is not important - the fact is that if you own gold, you own gold, and you can pick it up and store it in a big (or more likely, small) hole in your back yard. It won't even rust, sitting there in the ground. It'll just be gold forever.
Bitcoin is a bunch of numbers, sitting in a huge chain of hashes, sitting on thousands of hard-disks plugged into computers all around the world. But that hash chain must be modified in order to move the coins around, and that takes CPU power, and we're already seeing the crippling limits that this places on the liquidity of bitcoin itself. Regular fiat currencies, as bitcoin enthusiasts love to point out, are *also* numbers sitting in computers, but they are backed by governments, and more importantly exist for the purpose of controlling economies. Despite the protestations, economic control through the manipulation of fiat currencies is literally the only thing that makes capitalism actually work.
Up to a point, this is true. Bitcoins are already mined by dedicated hashing machines, containing hardware whose express and only purpose is to calculate SHA-256 hashes as fast as possible. Today, the fastest of these machines is capable of 10,000 mega-hashes per joule of power consumed (from this page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Min...).
I'm a little skeptical of this number, since it's an order of magnitude larger than everything else on the same page, and I haven't found any independent sources confirming it, but in any case, once you've put your hashing process into specialised hardware, the only thing that'll make it faster is pretty much a smaller process size on your silicon. I can't see this being done just for the purpose of mining bitcoins.
Clean-burning fireboxes are better. Wood is a renewable, solar powered energy source. They're also great if the power goes out.
I couldn't disagree more. Javascript is an excellent language, elegant and simple, and a joy to write code in. Building UIs in HTML and CSS is a bit of a pain, and websites that use excessive javascript where none might be necessary are certainly annoying, but neither of those things are anything to do with the language itself.
It's quite different to C++ obviously, but differences in languages encourage you to think differently about problems, which is normally a good thing. WebAssembly, on the other hand, seems to be re-inventing various things, and re-attacking already solved problems, such as how to build a simple and fast VM (see Lua's VM, for instance).
iOS is nearly the same as it was back in the original iPhone
It looks a bit similar. It is very, very far from 'nearly the same' in every other respect.
commodity PC hardware
Except the trackpad. And the logic board is custom-designed, like all laptops are, so sure, it's made of PC parts, but that's because it's an intel-based personal computer, so exactly how else you'd like them to make it is hard to understand.
And the keyboard, which is also custom-built, and so nice that many actual PC laptops copy its design. And the hinge, which actually feels solid, and that magnet-closed lid, which has also been very widely copied, and is perfectly engineered.
Often I hear the complaint that apple parts aren't easily replaceable, which is true on the newer models, and yet here someone's arguing that apple suck because they *do* use commodity standard parts.... so which is it?
The fact is that apple laptops are simply better built, and better designed, and on average outlast competing PC laptops. And they do this because apple do not bother to compete on price, since the only endgame with price competition is lower and lower quality. Instead they compete on physical hardware quality - cases, hinges, finish, keyboard, trackpad, etc - and also on OSX, which is the real reason that an apple machine is superior to everything else on the market. OSX is just better. It performs better, its APIs are better, its development environment is better. Have you ever written any code for iOS, or for a mac? You should give it a try. Coming from windows and android development, it's an absolute joy.
Agree 100%, but it's harder to enforce beyond our borders.
Some irony present in this comment, since it's beyond your borders that these notions are more regularly enforced.
Family is the answer.
Not everyone has a family.
and that is the memory management of C++ that isn't predictable for use in the kernel.
Bizarre. You can overload new and delete on a per-class basis. There's no C++ in the kernel because Linus is irrationally afraid of it - it's doubly absurd when you go & look at that code, and there's member functions, and virtual methods, and per-class allocation calls, all written in C.
at least until machines take the job over.
Machines already have taken the job over, it' just that we call those machines "compilers", and they're really dumb so we have to explain to then what we'd like the software to do really, really precisely and clearly.
Python is just fine for 90% of people and problems out there.
Python is borderline useful for small tasks. It's totally unsuitable for software of any significant size.
No, it's a very inexpensive medium that's often used by underground bands to release their recordings on. People are buying these recordings because they want to support their local music scene, and like owning the physical artifacts thereof. I expect that the mixtape might be making a comeback too, since as far as high school gifts go, they're pretty much unbeatable. With a mixtape, being unable to skip tracks is positively an asset. You *want* the recipient to have to listen to every single carefully-chosen track that you recorded for them. Hand it over along with a thrift-store walkman too. Nostalgia for an unlived-through age.
People that buy vinyl, play vinyl. I certainly used to record my records onto cassette, but this was only in order to listen to them on my walkman, not to preserve the vinyl itself. It doesn't degrade very much at all through being played, only through being mishandled, or stored in unpleasant conditions, such as on a rack in direct sunlight...
And, besides, "readability" is overrated;
This is a bizarrely naive comment. Readability is absolutely vital in all programming languages, but perhaps you might understand that better if it were termed 'understandability' instead, even though that appears to not be an actual word. The ugliness of the syntax is only marginally relevant, the extent to which you are able to understand what the code is intended to do, so that you can modify it in the future, is what 'readability' measures - if you only look at code to debug it, you must be in the highly enviable position of never having to modify the functionality of any software you write, which is certainly unusual, to say the least, and maybe explains your otherwise inexplicable position.
The nicest thing I can say about perl is that I hate it slightly less than I hate python.
I whip out C++ *without* STL
That must be because you enjoy writing linked lists. Seriously, stl is the most powerful part of C++, why you'd completely avoid it is totally beyond me.
But, a good, clean, considerate programmer who comments well can write very maintainable and understandable code.
This is true of almost any programming language. The issue is the extent to which the language makes this more or less difficult to do. Perl pretty much makes it as hard as it's possible to make it.
Javascript is an extremely underrated, and generally really great language.
Perl is an abomination.
Why not?
Of course it's not impossible.
You deliver the court a PC, something nice and powerful, running a brute-force decryption crack attempt on the encrypted payload. Then you give them a reasonable estimate regarding how long they might expect to have to wait until the machine finds the correct key. That this length of time exceeds the lifetime of the universe might be understood to be the plaintiff's problem.
That marvellous rant would have been better if you'd written 'fuck your dog', instead of chickening out and replacing it with 'love'.
This whole anti-social-media nonsense is no more than the anti-rock'n'roll reactionary nonsense of the ninteen-fifties. Social media is perfectly fine, it's only the old farts who think it's destroying the world. Young people deal with it without an issue.
and it's less rude.
No it isn't.
If bitcoin mining is their chosen economic model to support their site, then an "opt out" policy is equivalent to providing their services for free. Paying for a service via a bitcoin mining operation running briefly on your computer is a much more sustainable income stream than advertising - even though bitcoin mining itself might be highly economically questionable, and may very well be little more than a pyramid scheme, it's still better than advertising.
They do need to be upfront, but they don't need to provide an "opt out", and nor should they.