nhaehnle

168 ms·

1291.
by nhaehnle 15y ago
Commodity backed currencies are actually the exception, not the rule. I've written about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2632658
1292.
by nhaehnle 15y ago
"They talk about the past 200 years of central banking and seem to forget the thousands of years of human economy before governmental central banking, when money was actually backed by a scarce resource." Please check your facts. For the ma
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by nhaehnle 15y ago
It depends on what you mean by verifying the transactions. Checking the signature of the transactions, to prove that the transaction was in fact issued by whoever owns the coins being sent, is only a negligible part of the computation. The
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by nhaehnle 15y ago
To anybody curious about how LLVM looks on the inside, I recommend reading their excellent tutorial on building a front-end, which you can find here: http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/
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by nhaehnle 15y ago
Native speaker of German here. "Klatsch" is not "small talk", it's "gossip". "Gerede" is a word that I've only heard in debates to suggest that something is not to be taken seriously, i.e. it has serious negative connotations. Perhaps it us
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by nhaehnle 15y ago
The obvious rhetorical question here is: Who seriously believes that there have been 500,000 inventions worthy of being patented in 2009? The sheer volume makes it clear that the vast majority of patent applications are for trivial stuff. T
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by nhaehnle 15y ago
Your example is misleading, because the same can be said about the game where you roll a dice over and over again, and you win if you get a 6. The probability that the game ends is 1, but it is not guaranteed to end. Yet no reasonable perso
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
Wikipedia defines money as: "Money is any object or record, that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context." This is in line with most actual usage of the wor
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
You could look at it from the point of view of realizing the most of the potential of society. If it is true that women perform better academically but then go on to lower-paying jobs, this might indicate that there is a lot of potential th
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
The market is not some magic fairy, it is a result of how we all interact. Employers have gone around hiring men for more money than women, perhaps because those men have been able to trick them into thinking they were better than the compe
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
Thank you for the data on the Bitcoin market, that is indeed informative. As for China though, I would like to point out that those trades must be seen in relation to the massive net flow of goods from China to the US (and other parts of th
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
That article is not about bridging the gap between economists and programmers. It is about one person's vague ideas for how to hard-code their personal beliefs about how economic policy should behave into the technical design of the monetar
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
It would be interesting to know how much of this 25k/day trade is simply a kind of steady-state speculation, including attempts to exploit arbitrage. If somebody really wanted to change 100k BTC to $, it would likely have a disastrous impac
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
Not right now, but that is simply because the volume isn't large enough to have attracted government attention yet. There was a case some years ago in Germany where something similar happened. A local initiative introduced a local fiat curr
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
I am genuinely curious: What does S&P claim their credit rating reflects? It is obvious that the US government will always be able to pay both interest and principal on treasury bonds, because they are the ones who run the monetary syst
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
While this is a nice illustration, it is actually a bit misleading to talk about where tax dollars go within a monetarily sovereign government. Conceptually, tax dollars don't really go anywhere - they simply disappear (are destroyed). Conv
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
BitCoin is certainly a real currency in the sense that it is traded by people, even in exchange for real goods and services. As for whether it is something to watch depends on where you're coming from. The problem of BitCoin is that of adop
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
Your portrayal of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe is questionable. To understand Zimbabwe, you first have to understand that it suffered from a destruction of supply capacity due to a stupid land reform that had nothing to do with money. The mot
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by nhaehnle 16y ago
I do believe you misunderstood the point. Let me try to clarify from my own understanding. There are legal tender laws, but these are not the point. They are largely irrelevant. The point is that the US government itself accepts dollars a