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I flagged this for an awful clickbait headline - the article spends 3/4 of its length explaining how iterative improvements to technology work, and the final 1/

I flagged this for an awful clickbait headline - the article spends 3/4 of its length explaining how iterative improvements to technology work, and the final 1/4 explaining that, yes, BTC isn't perfect, has some weaknesses, and some other cryptocurrencies do certain things better. In other news, water is wet, the sun rises in the morning, and the "death of bitcoin" has been greatly exaggerated.

dang 11y ago
Ok, we changed the title to try to make it more accurate and neutral. We also turned off flagging on this post. The article might be wrong, but it's substantive, and doesn't deserve the death penalty just for its title.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  (HN meta, unrelated to the article.) What's the rough timeline for the user-assisted unflagging plan?
  - dang 11y ago
    Soon! We're working on it. There turn out to be some technical subtleties that we want to get right before deploying.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Awesome. Any plans to write about those technical subtleties at some point?
      - dang 11y ago
        Not really, but only because any time I have for writing is better spent writing code—i.e. better for the community, plus I like writing software more than writing about writing software. To assuage your curiosity, though, the subtleties have to do with trying to make sure the design is consistent with itself and with other parts of HN. There is more than one way to generalize flagging, and some of the ways we tried led either to unwanted behaviors or unwanted complexity. For example: if you vouch (that's the word we're using for anti-flagging, i.e. you vouch for a post if you think it shouldn't have been flagged) for an item and then un-vouch for it, it should go back to its previous state. Posts that were killed by software vs. by user flags have slightly different properties, and the vouch feature needs to preserve those. The way that flagging affects story rank is different from how it affects the life cycle (dead-or-aliveness) of a story, and vouching needs to be consistent with both. When we release this, we'll have a thread about it and can discuss it more if people want to.
nosuchthing 11y ago
It seems like the point was that cryptocoins and BTC in particular are heavily influenced by speculation of their "value" and are subject to faith of those who believe in the network. As soon as the market notices a cryptocoin protocol which makes the bitcoin network obsolete, than BTC will evaporate as everyone jumps ship to the next cryptocoin protocol/algorithm/network.
- wmf 11y ago
  Or maybe the opposite will happen, where people with a vested interest in Bitcoin/BTC will do everything they can to prevent the market from realizing that something better exists. I see people who would rather add trust to Bitcoin than switch to a more efficient system that was designed to take advantage of trust from the beginning.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Of course, this already happens. "Bitcoin is limited, 21 million only!" "Altcoins." "You don't need altcoins, we have sidechains! They let you do all that stuff inside Bitcoin!" "Except sidechains don't exist yet." "They will, it'll be fantastic! Sidechains!" (This is leaving aside that altcoins have somehow managed the amazing feat of being even scammier than bitcoins.)

dang 11y ago

Ok, we changed the title to try to make it more accurate and neutral. We also turned off flagging on this post. The article might be wrong, but it's substantive, and doesn't deserve the death penalty just for its title.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
(HN meta, unrelated to the article.) What's the rough timeline for the user-assisted unflagging plan?
- dang 11y ago
  Soon! We're working on it. There turn out to be some technical subtleties that we want to get right before deploying.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Awesome. Any plans to write about those technical subtleties at some point?
    - dang 11y ago
      Not really, but only because any time I have for writing is better spent writing code—i.e. better for the community, plus I like writing software more than writing about writing software. To assuage your curiosity, though, the subtleties have to do with trying to make sure the design is consistent with itself and with other parts of HN. There is more than one way to generalize flagging, and some of the ways we tried led either to unwanted behaviors or unwanted complexity. For example: if you vouch (that's the word we're using for anti-flagging, i.e. you vouch for a post if you think it shouldn't have been flagged) for an item and then un-vouch for it, it should go back to its previous state. Posts that were killed by software vs. by user flags have slightly different properties, and the vouch feature needs to preserve those. The way that flagging affects story rank is different from how it affects the life cycle (dead-or-aliveness) of a story, and vouching needs to be consistent with both. When we release this, we'll have a thread about it and can discuss it more if people want to.

nosuchthing 11y ago

It seems like the point was that cryptocoins and BTC in particular are heavily influenced by speculation of their "value" and are subject to faith of those who believe in the network. As soon as the market notices a cryptocoin protocol which makes the bitcoin network obsolete, than BTC will evaporate as everyone jumps ship to the next cryptocoin protocol/algorithm/network.

wmf 11y ago
Or maybe the opposite will happen, where people with a vested interest in Bitcoin/BTC will do everything they can to prevent the market from realizing that something better exists. I see people who would rather add trust to Bitcoin than switch to a more efficient system that was designed to take advantage of trust from the beginning.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Of course, this already happens. "Bitcoin is limited, 21 million only!" "Altcoins." "You don't need altcoins, we have sidechains! They let you do all that stuff inside Bitcoin!" "Except sidechains don't exist yet." "They will, it'll be fantastic! Sidechains!" (This is leaving aside that altcoins have somehow managed the amazing feat of being even scammier than bitcoins.)