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Patio11 goes on a tweet storm here where he is wrong so many times. >"..Most advantages of Bitcoin which matter are captured by, and improved upon by, a LAMP a

• kang 12y ago
  Downvotes coz I call out patio11? explanation please?
  • vinceguidry 12y ago
    Not so much the calling out as the tone, which is unwarranted for pretty much any discussion on HN.
    • kang 12y ago
      Please care to explain the tone. Is the word fuck banned on here? I wrote 'fuck bitcoin, blockchain is the thing' where I got just a little passionate and really meant 'forget bitcoin and see blockchain'. Even then, my comment wasn't rude in anyway.
      • vinceguidry 12y ago
        Well, your comment starts off by calling him 'wrong'. That immediately sets a combative tone for the rest of the comment, which would have been perfectly reasonable otherwise. A lot of times if your tone is unintentionally off you'll get a few initial downvotes but other people will see your intentions and bring you up out of the grey, which is what happened here. You're continuing to get downvoted on other comments because they're contributing to a discussion nobody wants to see, the discussion about the discussion. It's best to just stick to the topic, and treat downvotes and the score in general as the ultimately meaningless internet points that they are. HN prizes the generally high signal-to-noise ratio of the comments. Also Bitcoin is a political topic, one that will draw lots of people who will downvote you just because they don't agree with you.
        • vinceguidry 12y ago
          This post seems to be getting more than usual upvotes for a comment deep in thread, and I can't edit it anymore, so let me add that I typically will consider deleting the first sentence of every email and comment I unleash on the world. It is often detritus that just doesn't belong there.
        • anonbanker 12y ago
          Remember, kids: you will be downvoted for saying someone is wrong on HN.
  • waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Bitcoin is a topic that brings out a lot of irrational arguments and pejorative name calling ("boiler rooms", for example) in the HN community. There's some truly transformative tech at the core of Bitcoin, which is why it's been as successful as it has been (and will be) as a technology. On the other hand, there really is a contingent of supporters that primarily has a profit motive. I've come to see it like politics. People pick a side and then become extreme about it, to no one's real benefit. People are weird about money, in several directions at once. Bitcoin is money. Therefore people are weird about Bitcoin. That's my theory, anyway.
    • moe 12y ago
      That's my theory, anyway. Which the HN community helpfully confirms by downvoting your perfectly reasonable comment. I think Bitcoin tickles a rather deep-rooted fear in many people. Money is fundamental to everyone's existence and has always been exclusively issued and controlled by "the authority". Seeing a completely different system appear out of nowhere, and seeing it actually work (on a small scale), triggers a strong enough anxiety-reflex in enough people for every debate about Bitcoin to immediately derail into discussing BTC as if its definite purpose was to replace "real money", starting tomorrow, completely and entirely, and to devalue my pension fund in the process.
      • vectorpush 12y ago
        Ugh. This kind of arrogance is a significant contributing factor to the contentiousness of bitcoin discussion. Nobody is fearful of bitcoin, especially not with regard to the idea that bitcoin will somehow replace fiat money and "devalue my pension fund". It's intellectually insulting and it goads skeptics into sarcastic and unproductive debate. When enthusiastic bitcoin supporters parade around this kind of nonsense while simultaneously heaping on volumes of nebulous praise like "transformative", "revolutionary", "world-changing", likening bitcoin to the early internet, claiming it will stop wars, stop corruption, free the people and all the rest, it really puts up red flags for a lot of people.
        • moe 12y ago
  • geofft 12y ago
    HN pro tips: 1. Resist complaining about downvotes. It makes boring reading (and hence gets downvoted). This is literally one of the guidelines. 2. If you find yourself saying "Downvoted because I <position in an argument>, really?", the answer is always, no, downvoted because you expressed <position in an argument> in a non-constructive manner that nobody wanted to read. If you had expressed <opposite position> in the same way, you'd have been downvoted too. This might be that you were overly aggressive, this might be that you were insufficiently clear in making your point, this might be because both <position> and <opposite position> are dead horses, etc. But the answer is always no.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • kang 12y ago
    "..they are pretty happy with a centralized system" And the centralised system is happy printing money calling inflation a necessary evil. If you understand blockchain and the current financial system you will realize then inflation is necessary to facilitate loans so that the economy can grow, but that loans are not required at all. So if I can't take a loan how do I raise the capital for a business? The IPO model. And blockchain is the programmed IPO model. There is a reason why people haven't figured out an algorithm to trustless-ly loan bitcoins. They never will.
    • danbruc 12y ago
      Sorry for the deleted comment, I just decided shortly after writing it that I don't really have the time today to argue on the internet. My comment stated that there is no value for user in all the decentralized verification process and just storing transactions in a trusted central database is good enough for most of them. Your response is more or less completely ignoring this and attacks the current financial system and what not, it does at no point explain why you can not centralize Bitcoin. What prevents doing the exact same thing as the Bitcoin network but with a central server for verification and storage instead of doing it in a distributed way?
      • kang 12y ago
        No. You got me wrong here. I totally agree that an end user has no value either way, but if the user chooses the centralized way, it gives someone the license to print money, wherein lies the problem.
        • aboutus 12y ago
          I agree with you. Inflation is due to political maneuvers, and is not purely economical. In other words, without bad politicians, inflation wouldn't exist.
• patio11 12y ago
  Mining and proof-of-work are not advantages of Bitcoin. They're strategies to distribute costs of its feature set. (Well, plus mining is Bitcoin's key marketing advantage -- it sets up incentive-compatible self-organizing distributed boiler rooms.) Being able to check that a ledger is accurate is a feature. It can be captured by a PHP app which uses MySQL transactions. This is, in fact, the most popular way to ensure ledger integrity even in the Bitcoin community (on exchanges, where transactions happen "off chain" because Bitcoin is wholly unsuitable for processing the type of transaction that mosts interests the Bitcoin community). The cost of verifying transactional integrity with MySQL transactions is, generally speaking, less than $900,000 per day, which is the present cost of verifying transactional integrity on the Bitcoin blockchain. I will respectfully decline to respond to the rest of your comment as it includes no statements which can be true or untrue about Bitcoin as a technical artifact.
  • kang 12y ago
    That is what I have trying to explain. Mining and proof-of-work are not just strategies but necessary requirement. Blockchain is not just ledger. I'll try to explain. The banks have a ledger of all the notes in circulation maintaining a record of the number printed on the note. Now when I give you a note, and its fake, you can figure it out by checking the unique factors. But lets say that my 3D printer is advnced and printed it so accurate that it is same as a real dollar. Now the way to catch this note would be to check if the number on this note also exists on some other note. So basically proof-of-work is you checking for unique factors(not counterfeit) and then somehow check all the notes in the world that none of them have the same number(unique). Both of these are in addition to the use of mining as a way of distribution of wealth. Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? Also, I mostly meant that you are paying too much attention to what the media is throwing at us, in the form of bitcoin and exchanges. As a thinker, forget bitcoin and its code and just think about blockchain. Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact.
    • patio11 12y ago
      Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? I find this part of the conversation to be uninteresting, primarily because it attempts to make a distinction between "Bitcoin" and "the blockchain" (despite the fact that the Bitcoin consensus blockchain as annointed by the Bitcoin Core client at this moment in time is the only one of the infinite number of possible blockchains which is cared about) but can't make a distinction between "algorithm" and "protocol". This leaves me in a position where I say "Some people call IE6 a protocol. While one could rigorously examine the entire possible space of inputs and outputs associated with IE6 and attempt to describe some set-of-rules which would resemble a protocol, this is not what we mean when we say 'protocol' and it is, importantly, not the source of the benefits which IE6 fans say when they claim that IE6 is a protocol." To which "Why don't you think IE6 is an algorithm?" is rather non-responsive. (IE6 is, vacuously, an algorithm. Whee.) Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact. I find it difficult to extract any signal about the reality which I live in from this statement. When I say "technical artifact" I usually want to imply something about the reality I live in. For example, calc.exe is a technical artifact: it actually exists, on yonder computer, and I can right now walk over to it and calculate 6+5 with a reasonable degree of confidence that this will enlighten me. I would also say the HTTP specs are a technical artifact: I, or anybody with modest technical capability, can read the specs, open up telnet, fire it at www.google.com on port 80, and then type in a predictable series of letters which results in search results presented in the middle of a lot of HTML. I do not know of any comparable fashion in which "the blockchain" actually exists as distinct from "the data structure embedded in the much-more-complicated series of operations that is Bitcoin Core."
• jordigh 12y ago
  Hey guys. We just have new rules. Avoid excessive negativity. There's a bit too many "fucks" in your post. Maybe you could edit your post to reduce the "fuck" count to 1 or 0?
  • kang 12y ago
    Replaced 'fuck' with 'forget'. It was never used in any negative sense.
    • swombat 12y ago
      Your post is weaker for it. The word "fuck" was appropriate to express what you wanted to express. The word "forget" is lame and forgettable. I'm sorry to see your post neutered by some kind of sudden appearance of a PC-police on HN, using the excuse of sama's post to try and restrict your way to express your ideas (which are not showing any of the kind of "gratuitous negativity" that sama talks about in his post). For shame.
      • dang 12y ago
        That's correct. Thanks for saying so. If there is any sincere misunderstanding it may be necessary to repeat this a few times, but hopefully it won't last.
    • dang 12y ago
      I didn't see the original version of your comment, but it was probably fine. It's natural for there to be a few glitches while the community works out how to interpret what "gratuitous negativity" means in practice, but as a hint, we're mostly talking about being mean to others and/or being glibly dismissive of their work. We're definitely not talking about bowdlerizing conversation. We'd hate that as much as most HN users would.
  • swombat 12y ago
    What do you mean "we have new rules"?? Where are those rules? Where the fuck can I see them? Who the fuck made them? Edit: Ok, I can see the link on the first page - hadn't seen the announcement. On the announcement: Where does it say anything about reducing the number of fucks in a post? It talks about gratuitous negativity. How does saying "Fuck bitcoin" or "Fuck money" involve gratuitous negativity? It's not directed at anyone. Seriously, if this place becomes some sort of Political Correctness bubble where swearing is discouraged in this way, that's an amazing distortion of the hacker spirit. Sam's article talks about not directing gratuitous negativity at people when you're arguing with them. That has very little correlation with your use of words like "fuck" or "shit". Seriously. The OP wanted to express a point about money and about bitcoin. It was best expressed with the word "fuck". The word "forget" doesn't get it across to me at all. That has nothing to do with the person he was responding to.
• seanwilson 12y ago
  I find Bitcoin fascinating so I'm not knocking it, but about this one: > "..Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things." So say somebody finds a bug in the implementation that lets you do bad things like transfer everyone's balance to an attacker's account...what's the back up plan? Is there an equivalent with US dollars where such a thing could happen that has a back up plan? Putting myself in the shoes of Bitcoin's developers, I can't feel all but terrified that a simple buffer overflow or something similar could wipe out an entire currency. Or is there something I'm not understanding?
• mpyne 12y ago
  > Blockchain enables value-transfer, what is that in plain english? Money. A digitally-signed email enables value-transfer too. Depending on your risk profile you could even go for an authenticated TLS connection that just does a RESTful style POST to enable value-transfer. Value-transfer is not unique to a blockchain, or to Bitcoin's blockchain in particular, any more so than bubble sort is the only possible implementation of a sorting algorithm. CS majors know to avoid bubble sort because it is so inefficient, yet many refuse to apply the same lesson to POW-based systems like Bitcoin.
• geofft 12y ago
  > Bitcoin isn't but blockchain is. It is an algorithm An algorithm is not a protocol. A protocol is something that two people can independently implement and expect to be interoperable. Morse code is a protocol (in addition to an algorithm): you can read the Wikipedia article on Morse code, I can go to the library and read a book on Morse code, and we can reliably communicate. It is impossible to independently implement Bitcoin and reliably interoperate with the standard C++ implementation of Bitcoin at reliability levels sufficient for financial applications (as the 2013 BDB fork, between two versions of the standard C++ implementation, demonstrated). It might be possible to define a blockchain-based protocol that does not have this fault, precisely because blockchain is not a protocol, but is (as you say) an algorithm. To my knowledge, nobody has done so, and Bitcoin has certainly not done so. Why this is important is a different discussion. And yes, perhaps this will be fixed with the second generation of cryptocurrencies, past Bitcoin and its forks/variants, which you seem to favor doing to fix things. But I don't see why that makes patio11's claims wrong, since he was specifically addressing Bitcoin, not any blockchain-based system, or cryptocurrencies in general.
  • kang 12y ago
    "It is impossible to independently implement Bitcoin..at reliability levels sufficient for financial applications" This is the real challenge to us crypto believers. Its hard but definitely not impossible(as demonstrated by the worth ofbitcoin today). Working on it.
    • tptacek 12y ago
      What does the spot price of a Bitcoin have to do with the question of whether Bitcoin can feasibly and safely be standardized to a point where there are many interoperable implementations that don't share any heritage in code? Because that's the question you posed.
      • kang 12y ago
        He said it unreliable for financial transactions as demo'd by the fork. I said I agree but it is worth something even today as evident by the money people store in bitcoin already.