Mercury is awesome! Not sure if this is right venue for feedback, but if only you could offer ACH without Plaid (which feels like a huge invasion of privacy), it would be even more awesome. Wire transfers cost 20$ each, depositing by check feels like the 1990s and takes time to clear.
I assume they will support FedNow instant payments as they’re rolled out over the next 18-24 months. Those payments cost the financial services provider 5 cents per transaction up to between $100k and $500k (depending on configuration with the Fed). They settle immediately 24/7/365. Wires via FedWire will be reserved for amounts between $500k and $50M, which doesn’t sound like a $20 fee would be unreasonable for to account for human review of the transfer.
Edit: I didn’t even know Mercury doesn’t charge for sending wires. As a customer, I’m delighted.
To clarify, when rawtxapp said "Wire transfers cost 20$ each", they probably mean wiring _to_ Mercury from their bank costs $20. Mercury doesn't charge for sending wires.
The reason they're mentioning the 3rd party bank fees is they'd prefer to use ACH pull to have Mercury take the money directly from their existing bank account (similar to how your gym or electric company might do). We do offer this, but only if you use a service called Plaid to link your third party bank account.
This involves typing your bank's username/password/2FA into a Plaid iframe on our website, which confirms it with the third party bank. If you've used Venmo, that's using Plaid under the hood to link your bank account.
Ok, all that said, my question for rawtxapp: are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead? I agree it's less privacy invasive, but, definitely pretty slow and 1990s like you said about checks. I'm not sure of the security either.
I'm somewhat hoping it's less of an issue as more banks move to doing OAuth in Plaid, instead of sharing passwords. Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Chase do this now (we should really move to doing it too).
> are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead?
Yes, I'm fine waiting a couple days for the initial setup if it means I don't have to let Plaid see every single transaction coming in and out of my account (and see my password in plaintext and all that). If you'd support USDC deposits, that would be even better (instant settlement with no reversibility, so no risk to you), but I'm guessing that might be a stretch. Regardless, Mercury is a very nice service as is, thank you!
FWIW I always configure my bank to bank transfers with micro deposits - I am very uncomfortable giving plaid my credentials. It takes a couple days which is lame but feels much safer.
So if I manage to catch your ear, can I ask if there are plans to allow earlier ACH (or even better, RTP) in the future? It's a mild annoyance that even scheduled ACH transactions don't go out until the last ACH window of the day - especially when I'm paying myself! :)
It's definitely not a deal breaker, but it's the kind of thing I'd be willing to actually spend a few cents on to cover the transaction costs - earlier settlement means better Fridays for me!
Hey abofh! I lead the engineering team responsible for payments at Mercury. We're definitely looking at adding better and faster payment rails in the future, but I think that your scheduled ACHs should go out in the first ACH window right now. It's possible that your receiving bank isn't posting them until later in the day, but we send those first thing in the morning when pre-scheduled. If you want to email me, I'm happy to double check that for you. jake at mercury dot com
For someone facing issues like this, you can often use another bank as an “intermediary” especially for personal accounts. Pull from your spendy bank using TD Ameritrade and then push it into Mercury.
Maybe I am displaying my ignorance for banking costs for larger business, but I have lived across NZ, AU and multiple EU countries and I never recall having paid for wire transfers neither for private nor small business accounts. Is this common even outside the US or a US only thing? $20 per wire transfer sounds insane to me. How do they justify that cost?
I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1].
Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah I'm an opponent and I feel the same. The talking points have been exhausted half a decade ago. On top of that as cryptocurrencies get more and more mainstream we have to deal with less sophisticated people who make it very hard to have a decent discussion in the first place, because you basically have to start by taking 20 minutes to explain to them what the basics even are.
NFTs are really pushing this situation to the extreme. Between the NFT enthusiast who seem to think the technology is literal magic who can do anything you want it to and "haters" who will say stuff like "NFTs are just URLs of JPEG" which is absurd oversimplification and completely misses the point.
That being said I would argue that the fact that the discussion is not advancing and that we're left with "monkey jpegs" is to be blamed entirely on the cryptopeople who clearly fail entirely to deliver anything new. The killer "crypto app" has been a couple of years away since 2015 at least. The tech keeps getting more complicated as an attempt to address the fundamentals shortcomings of the blockchain, but it still fails entirely at being anything more than a vehicle for wild speculation.
The fundamental reality is that basically nobody would be using any of this if they didn't think it was going to make them rich. That was true five years ago, it's true now and I think it's going to remain true for the foreseeable future.
I'll try to engage without pulling us into familiar debates.
I have found, in a year of intensive use and research around the Ethereum ecosystem, here are a few things I like that wouldn't really work without an underlying immutable distributed ledger:
1) Creating limited editions of generative art.
2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.
3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.
Also, the more I learn about the zk-rollup space (STARKs and SNARKs) the more curious I get about the possibilities there. You can, for example, have digital treasure hunts where whoever finds the treasure can generate a proof without revealing the location. So far this is just cool without having an obvious killer app, but more than anything else in the crypto space I think there will be killer apps emerging from this technology.
By volume, I agree with critics that it's mostly bubble-chasing, gambling, and scams. It might be healthier for everyone if the tech & art experimentation were walled off from investments. At the very least, we probably shouldn't have crypto exchanges advertising -- really nothing interesting comes from luring Main Street to buy and store Doge on a centralized exchange.
I don't know what the third one entails, or whether a distributed ledger actually enables it without also having a centralized legal entity, but the other two seem like they already exist without a distributed ledger.
The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.
For 2) forever art already existed without any ledger. People store copies of pictures they like because they feel like it. Not being on a ledger doesn't mean Nyan cat will disappear. The ledger might attempt to guarantee that unpopular works stay available, but I don't think you can guarantee that any particular ledger will continue to be active "forever".
They could do a hard fork that prunes out the unpopular art to save on space, and migrate everyone to that one, leaving the old one unhosted. Long term, you're not going to force people to keep spending resources to maintain stuff that nobody cares about
>The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what happens when a collection is created through a platform like Art Blocks. The generative code is frozen on chain, every minted image has a verifiably random initial seed, and each image is generated from the composition of these two elements. The number of random seeds which can occupy an "official" slot is preconfigured and cannot be later increased.
I promise you that this has significant impact on the feeling of working on generative art and what you think of as the final outcome of an art project. It cannot be replicated through some kind of ad-hoc receipt system that lacks algorithmic guarantees and is subject to modification or increase at any later point.
I personally think that it's not really an interesting feature. Creating
scarcity out of something that ought not to be scarce is just a way to
infiltrate capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Hacker culture historically
went completely against that (phreaking, breaking DRM etc...) but I concede that
it's more of a philosophical/political argument than a technical one. I still
find it utterly depressing.
I would also argue that there's usually a significant difference between
ownership of a token on the blockchain and what the local IP laws says. IP law
is messy and sometimes subjective, putting things on a blockchain can make
things messier rather than simpler.
>2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.
So that one is interesting, but I would argue that it's only true if you
consider that the blockchain is "forever". In order for that to be true it means
that you have to believe that your blockchain of choice will be considered
significant enough by a number of people across... well eternity really. This
could be true for the "big" ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, although I'd say
the scene is way too young to be sure of that. It's as good a bet as any I
suppose.
But here's the thing. We already have "forever" digital "art": the source code
of the Linux kernel. There are countless copies of it across the globe, and
it'll remain archived for the foreseeable future.
My point here is that if something is significant enough it won't be difficult
to convince a bunch of people across time and space to archive it. People do
that for old videogames, music albums, usenet posts etc... And unlike the
blockchain you can actually curate it, you don't have to archive the neighbor's
sandwich picture collection. I'd argue that this curation power is a feature,
and the fact that the blockchain just stores everything forever is a bug. It
actually means that the bigger the blockchain grows, the less likely it is that
people will want to store personal backups of it.
So I don't think the blockchain does anything novel here, and I don't think it
does it better. Forcing arbitrary people to store arbitrary data forever
regardless of value or interest is just wasteful.
>3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.
I think the oracle problem is really going to make "DeFi" a tough sell. There
is, in fact, a lot of trust in our financial system, and being able to use a
central authority (the justice system) to settle issues makes things a whole lot
simpler and efficient.
In general I firmly believe that trust is usually a good thing that makes
systems more efficient and this obstination of cryptopeople to get rid of it is
more based on political ideology than pragmatism. Trust, but verify. But
trust.
With respect to point 1, I'm sympathetic to your response, but I don't see things quite as bleakly for a few reasons:
- NFTs create a scarcity of ownership, but they don't create a scarcity of enjoyment or experience. In fact, the entire NFT generative art community is based around the idea of viewing and enjoying pieces that you don't personally own.
- I don't think scarcity of ownership is necessarily a bad thing. Having put some skin in the game for that specific piece, the owner sort of becomes that piece's biggest advocate. And this allows many collectors to form a much stronger relationship to the piece than they would have if they saved a copy of an image they found on instagram.
- A generative algorithm can theoretically produce an infinite number of outputs, and I think there are valid artistic reasons to want to limit the set to a specific size. For example, maybe the algorithm no longer produces unique results after 500 or so iterations, and the artist wants to cap the collection at that size to allow people to become familiar with that amount of outputs. Managing this with NFTs allows the artist to create a canonical collection limited to the desired size along with the proof that they all derive from the same algorithm.
- Blockchains are still fairly new as an artistic medium, and I think many artists will find ways to create interesting projects without leaning as much on scarcity. Some projects do open editions, which we may see more of in the future. Scarcity is simply a tool at the artist's disposal.
(Disclaimer: I'm an artist who makes a lot of generative NFTs, so I'm heavily biased)
if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.
im unclear that this scarcity is different from making a wordpress site with n posts, each one being a picture generated with the different parameters.
i think the website version is better, even, since you as the artist can pick out the best individual items when producing the single art work that is "n pieces generated by this algorithm"
i dont think it really unlocks anything new. Whats different is having tooling that makes it easy to do
Again, I think the act of "owning" it creates a much different relationship between the collector and that art than simply looking at it. They have skin in the game because they either spent money on the piece, or were able to mint it by being in the right place at the right time.
To be sure, a lot of the "advocacy" is exactly what you describe, where people are just trying to push their bags. But the advocacy I'm talking about is more about the social element of discussing the art with other people in the community.
The website is certainly a valid way to display a limited generative art collection, but it's a different experience. It means that the artist _can_ curate the collection and hide some of the rough edges of the algorithm... but then it loses some of its magic. NFTs have sort of enabled a new sub genre of generative art [1].
> if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.
There's an emotional state associated with having paid money, sometimes a lot of money, for something which makes you want to get something in return. That something can be as simple as collective discussion of the art you bought, or propagation of its image into the real world through murals and commissioned derivatives.
It doesn't have to be a speculative interest in re-selling, though I agree that most people entering the space are exclusively interested in the latter.
Re: #3, there isn't really a meaningful oracle problem now that there are reliable oracles.
You can make synthetic assets which track prices of e.g. stocks. There are a few different protocols in this space, such as https://synthetix.io/. The biggest hurdle, I think, is regulatory -- is it legal to make and trade derivatives of $synthIBM and trade it like derivatives of $IBM?
Re: limited editions, I'm not talking about monetization. As someone currently working on a big generative art collaboration, I think knowing that the output will have a finite set that is considered canonical is an essential artistic constraint.
I would consider myself an informed skeptic that is selectively pro-crypto.
I would first clear the air by saying this: yes, making money is an important use case of the current crypto industry, if not THE use case. I find it puzzling how people frown upon that. Making money (or at least getting paid) is the number one activity the average person spends a lifetime doing. Many in bullshit jobs that add no value.
You can have all kinds of opinions on how this money is made (speculative), but the crypto community doesn't care. It's their money, not yours. I would personally not touch 95% of crypto with my money, but take no issue with people that go all-in. Live and let live.
As for NFTs, it's funny how you say some discussion participants simplify it too much (just right-click) and then come to sweeping simplistic conclusions yourself: bored apes and crypto people failing to deliver anything new.
This suggests you're keeping track. If so, can you tell me about recent trading volume? The top 10 projects? Which celebrities, artists, musicians and sport teams released popular ones? On which platform? Which are hot upcoming releases? Out of the many issues with NFTs (no infinite storage, copyright acknowledgement, mint duping, etc), which teams are working to address these issues, and what are the solutions? Do you know which non-JPEG NFTs got traction, like unique physical access and lifelong memberships? Which gaming companies are experimenting with NFTs, and I'm talking AAA titles?
I could make that list a whole lot longer. I suspect you don't know the answers, but that's not a personal attack. The point is that the space is vast and extremely fast. This idea that nothing has happened in crypto in 10 years is because you're not looking.
The discussion is not advancing because people don't spent a second learning about crypto or keeping track.
{
Id: some unique namespaced string (aka, the part that is a non fungible token)
Owner: reference to who currently owns it
Payload: data that defines the content of the NFT
}
You can put this in a database if you want, or use a block chain as your data storage. I expect many of those teams you mentioned are solving their NFT issues by moving their NFTs from block chains onto postgres tables, or putting them in databases from the start. The listed problems have somewhat straightforward solutions by doing so, and many companies have offered NFT marketplaces based on databases for years and years like the Steam marketplace for gaming. They work fine at scale, too. I expect that most popular digital ownership systems do not use a block chain as their back end, though I do not know what the top 10 are {apple, amazon, google, the us government?}. The most advanced team solving the listed problems is without doubt YouTube though.
What block chain NFTs have over database NFTs is hype. There's a lot of wealthy people with money tied up in crypto investments that want to be able to.
The other feature is that the audit history of changes to the Owner field is guaranteed to be public instead of optionally public, and that guarantee is what of questionable value when "crypto people don't deliver anything new" is mentioned.
----
If somebody's managed to make solve identity using a block chain that's quite interesting re: "unique physical access".
I'd expect the block chain to be uniquely incapable of guaranteeing unique access to anything, since access is based on knowing a password, and it's easy to make copies of a password. At best id expect a blockchain to guarantee limited access to people who know one at least one of a set of possible passwords, and a bouncer controls unique access by doing a separate identity checks.
Is this some facial scan? Dna +epigenetics check? Is it trivial to link all your accounts together? What kinds of attacks has it been tested against? Can your twin get in if he knows the right password and borrows your id? Can your spouse get in if you're in the hospital? Next of kin when you die?
Is there a non-blockchain equivalent of gated access to resources based on ownership of a token? People do this a lot in the NFT space (access to certain chat channels based on owning an NFT), is anything like that happening (rather than theoretically possible) outside of crypto?
None function with anonymity by default and you can't sell or even transfer most of these memberships.
I wonder if part of the divide on the "utility" of NFTs involves "internet native" culture (assuming the reality of pseudonyms without need to pierce the veil and use a real name).
Over the past few years, my personal experience/perception is there's been less and less people with a technical grounding in crypto/blockchain who bother to engage on HN (on CT, it's often dismissively referenced as "the orange site") because not only is there such a strong anti-crypto attitude, but usually it's based on pretty shallow or often wrong comprehension of the tech/mechanisms.
I agree that it's pretty pointless to argue though. Even when blatant misinformation gets cleared up, or clear examples of how the tech is actually being used are outlined, most of the conversations then end up at "well, I don't see the value of it so it still must be useless." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The biggest sources of skeptism were around logistics and value as a currency:
Is there a cryptocoin that has successfully solved logistics without disastrously failing as a currency?
Even if you ignore the environmental aspect... has any coin that has achieved scale not experienced deflation that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup?
To me the skepticism has always been "you can't have a functional decentralized currency". Some people take that at face value and proudly proclaim "people will accept your BTC/ETH/etc."
But most people mean it in the sense we think of currencies belonging to non-failed states: aka being a somewhat stable store of value. More widely used for payment of productive economic output than fraud and speculation...
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I see crypto as I see Tesla, maybe there way a point but it's long buried under the mania.
Disclaimer: Due to that mania I keep some as hedge, but again, imagine saying I keep dollars under my pillow as a hedge that next year they might have 10x'd in value...
Bitcoin is bigger than ever before. It's far more valuable, it has far more users, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions moving billions of dollars worth of value every day on-chain alone, has very healthy L2 layer growth (1ml.com), has hundreds of exchanges worldwide, it ticks every 10 minutes and will keep ticking for the foreseeable future. We have a small country that adopted it as a legal tender with more countries coming on the Bitcoin standard potentially this year.
People only see the fiat currencies and forget that we've run on gold standard for thousands of years and fiat currencies are barely 50 years old and riddled with financial crises left and right. Bitcoin is digital gold, strictly better than gold. But anyways, we'll see what happens in the future.
Bitcoin's volatility is not because of the fixed supply. If nothing else, new Bitcoins are still being issued. It is of course true that inflation encourages spending etc., but the difference between -2% and 2% does not cause 50% daily price movements.
Bitcoin cannot be stable relative to other currencies as long as 90% of its forex volume is speculation. If there are businesses having long-term obligations and trade denominated in Bitcoin, providing for a large base of regular demand and supply that outweighs the speculation, it will stabilise.
This is obviously really really though to achieve, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tech" (which is essentially a spreadsheet). This makes the debate around the volatility and whether its qualifies as a "currency" rather boring. It will happen, or it won't, and we can try to predict the future, but it is not really about Bitcoin at all, just marketplace behavior.
Where did I say Bitcoin's volatility is because of fixed supply.
Or even remotely imply it.
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Once again the reply doesn't actually answer the basic question, because the answer is inconvenient.
I'd love one honest reply to the point grounded in any crypto, not even Bitcoin, being a "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"
Relatively stable being defined extremely generously in this context might I add! I won't hit you with a "gotcha!" because your coin of choice is widely used to pay for goods rather than fraud and speculation but it happened to fluctuate 10% or something, USD does that too...
Exactly this, it's a very adversarial environment with huge stakes for those that can exploit it. Even projects that have been around for months, years can get exploited which is why I'd recommend waiting a long time before putting non-trivial amounts into any smart contract or crypto related projects.
That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains like eth, it's as secure as it gets.
> That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains
I’ve always understood this on a basic level, but reading an entire exploit debrief with intricate technical details really hammered this point home for me.
Are the stakes that huge for potential exploiters? It seems that exploits can write off a bunch of value from the exploited but, at least for big and quickly noticed exploits, it is hard to launder the gains into the ‘legitimate’ part of the ecosystem with big exchanges and suchlike.
I think last year alone had more than a billion dollars worth of crypto hacked on defi, there's some trackers out there [1]. On one hand, you have amateurs that leave their private keys on cloud services and try to cash out while living in a place like NYC, on the other hand, you have people who know what they are doing or perhaps live in places that actively encourage those activities [2].
It's L2, but you can have different types of L2s. With lightning network, you're opening and closing channels with a counterparty using on-chain transactions, so each channel can be tied back to an on-chain transaction.
Before someone points out that it would require tons of on-chain transactions to onboard everyone onto it, you can batch thousands of channel open/closes into a single transaction with new protocol upgrades.
That's not even the most fundamental issue with LN though, it's not a fully thought out system. As LN node count increases the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has. The internet solves this with some degree of human intervention to tip the scales to particular routes, which is something that the LN inherently can't (and shouldn't) do. There is some amount of optimization that could take place using common graph routing algorithms like OLSR or others but those represent foundational changes to the protocol which historically LN is allergic to for whatever reason and wouldn't entirely solve the problem in any case.
Simply put - it can't scale to that kind of throughput for a combination of cultural and technical reasons.
Sigh. Quick, go tell UPS and DHL and others that they must file for bankruptcy because traveling salesman problem or whatever is hard to solve.
This is just nonsense because, for instance, each LN hub can configure how much processing it wants to take on by focusing on most profitable subgraph.
In the end, LN will be processing more and more payments and you will keep ignoring that fact and claiming that it can’t scale. This has been happening for years already.
> the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has
I assume you are using “exponentially” in its informal meaning of “somewhat quickly” ? At least I am not aware of any routing issues that scale exponentially with the size of the graph.
To the contrary, if you can pick the graph structure then routing is not very difficult at all.
Most end-users won't be acting as payment gateways, they'll all have private channels, so they won't appear in the routing graphs. The number of routing nodes would be many magnitude smaller than total number of LN users. It's working fine for now with growing adoption (1ml.com) and I believe it'll only get better with time.
Sure, but in order to accommodate more users you need more routing nodes. Exponential scaling is a funny thing- systems work perfectly right up until they catastrophically fail. That's why it's important to understand these kinds of problems ahead of time, which LN is determined not to do.
Look at it this way, if x = number of total users, routing nodes will grow O(log x), not O(c^x). The users can grow exponentially, the routing nodes won't because the marginal cost of processing an extra transaction from an end-user is very close to 0.
I thought the routing node was putting up some amount of Bitcoin per channel. Each channel would therefore have a non-zero cost (and each user requires a channel).
I would need to go back and refresh my understand as it's been quite a while since I read the LN whitepaper, much less kept abreast of developments in that space.
When you fund a channel, the Bitcoin is still yours, you're not giving it away.
With batched channel open/closes, it'll be super cheap to open and close channels. The only cost you'd pay is the opportunity cost if your counterparty isn't sending transactions, so you're not collecting routing fees. If that's the case, you can just close the channel if you need to fund another channel and don't have spare Bitcoin for it, but that's about it.
You've just outlined how the marginal cost that you originaly stated was near zero, is in fact quite a lot larger than zero (you can't open channels without locking up your node's Bitcoin). Also, each channel opening costs a Bitcoin L1 transaction fee (which is a lot larger than $0.01 and can only really grow from here).
Unless things have changed recently the big issue with LN is that it's fundamentally a centralizing force. The idea that everybody is going to open a million channels with every single counterparty (locking coins in the process) is ridiculous. Instead people would just open a couple of channels with big, centralized nodes but that's just Visa with cryptobabble on top.
Even if everyone had channels with the same, single central node it would have more guarantees than Visa does. The single central node could not just decide to keep everyone's money, as participants have the option to create an L1 transaction to withdraw funds if node they have a channel with misbehaves.
The main issue with LN is even more fundamental than that. Their argument against other scaling solutions was basically "if we scale on chain the hardware requirements will be hard for regular people to keep up and decentralization will suffer". So instead they went about and created a system where only the wealthy have the capital to commit to open enough channels and route payments. LN is almost totally antithetical to crypto in that it enables the creation of the very thing crypto sought to destroy; gatekeeping payment processors. Bitcoin was co-opted by Blockstream and co. who wanted to become Visa/Mastercard-like rent seeking middlemen.
Opinion part: Monero is technically superior to Bitcoin in basically every way.
>Monero is technically superior to Bitcoin in basically every way
I see how this is true from a privacy perspective, but how does monero solve the issue of the blockchain eventually becoming too large for an ordinary person to run a node on their pc? the bitcoin blockchain is already several hundred gigabytes
As I said, that's just my opinion really. But Monero uses a dynamic block size. The hardware requirements will increase of course. But hardware becomes cheaper over time so the monetary cost of participation does not increase as quickly as LN where the cost of participation is capital directly.
Good question, I don't have an answer for you unfortunately. I have seen people talk about this in the Monero community though so at least they're aware of the issue.
Monero is what everyone used to think bitcoin was.
Now that people are starting to realize what bitcoin actually is, and all the lies and misinformation are falling away, the world is gearing up to pounce on it and fully integrate it into society. People are rapidly realizing that it really is the internet of money.
Monero will still have it's place, but only as the dark money network.
I've actually become increasingly worried that Monero is at pretty significant risk of a nation state 51% mining attack, since it mines with generic CPUs. A government could rent out an AWS fleet to attack the network and if not kill it, at least add a lot of friction via this kind of DDOSing that temporarily blocks people and breaks interest, like they do with Tor services today.
I would also highly recommend i3 + i3-gnome combination [1]. It adds a lot of gnome features out of the box to i3, like sound control, notifications, etc.
I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim.
Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different monitors quickly. Dragging a mouse across that relatively high screen real estate is a huge pita without i3.
I used to love tiling. But then I started to use apps that needed more than half of the screen: web browser, IDE. Now I put my IDE full screen and the browser about the top right 70% of the screen so that the console output in the IDE peeks out below the browser so that I can see what output is generated when I use the app I’m developing in the browser.
Didn't say we should privatize the gains. I just don't think that it's useful to tear down a bunch of infrastructure on principle. I would not have minded just nationalizing as much as would have been needed either. And of course bailing out a bunch of homeowners would be extremely ideal.
Gov't intervention when systems are falling apart are not a bad thing (well, at least when they actually do helpful things).
Most of the commentary about the 2008 bank bailouts presumes all the money was spent or given to banks. Banks paid everything back. A couple billion dollars in opportunity cost because of inflation is definitely worth preventing a collapse of the financial system.
Yes, but you insisted that the loans were profitable, not that they had "a couple billion dollars in opportunity cost". There is a difference between profit and loss.
You’re describing as profitable lending by an entity funding itself by issuing Treasuries and then ignoring the cost of the interest paid on those Treasuries when deciding if the use of the money was profitable.
Inflation is not a direct cost of interest. If we are going to included opportunity costs in the definition of profit and loss, then we should include the opportunity cost of tax revenue plummeting if the financial system collapsed.
It’s not inflation. It’s literal money paid out via the government paying interest on its debt obligations (which were higher as a result of the bailout money than they otherwise would have been).
I agree that they should have done what they did. I do not agree that it was net profitable.
"Guys, we would actually have been richer instead of poorer if six years worth of inflation hadn't happened! Let's celebrate!"
If I can buy n units of goods and services for the money before the investment and n-1 units of goods and services after the investment, I've lost. I don't see how the particular numbers you print on currency enter the equation. How is nominal profit at all interesting?
Not having a central single governance is the whole point of the exercise, it's a trustless system driven by mathematical rules and decentralized consensus. You can't stop a transaction, you can't kick anyone out (good or bad), the rules can only be changed by decentralized consensus and certain rules are pretty much guaranteed to not change (for example, any Bitcoin chain that has more than 21M Bitcoin issued wouldn't be called BTC, it would be treated like a fork, etc).
> It's pretty wild cryptocurrencies are still legal in many parts of the world.
I think there's a few reasons for that, one is, it actually makes money (ex: Coinbase generating billions, tax money generated from all the capital gains, electricity paid for by miners, etc), capitalist systems won't ban money making machines. It's also impossible to ban, you can ban on/off-ramps, you can't ban Bitcoin from running and transacting, by banning on/off-ramps, you'd lose any visibility into what's actually happening on the pseudonymous network. And last but not least, if this ends up being the next big thing, nobody would want to be left behind, so there's some game theory mechanics as well.
That's very "pigeonholey" way of looking at things though, no? Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you can't become good at something else too. If you're super knowledgeable about very technical things, learning other hard sciences is feasible as well given enough time.
At the end of the day, if you create anything that's worthless, it will be worthless independent of whether you're an insider or outsider.
The argument isn't that they couldn't become knowledgeable in finance and economics, if they invested enough time and effort, but that they aren't, because they haven't, because they think that their expertise in one area makes them automatically experts in other areas. This is pretty accurate in my experience.
I think GP’s underlying point (besides paraphrasing a popular YouTube video) is that for good reason, society elevated “computer engineers” because the work they did (e.g., build Google) was very impactful and value-creative.
A bunch of computer engineers are now burning through that good will in a misguided attempt to accumulate personal wealth.
Good will built when building Google (and others from that era) is already burnt by Google (and others ) of today. You rarely here positive stories about tech in general media these days compared to say 00's.
TPUs are amazing, but in my experience, debugging issues with them can be a bit tricky. Since nvidia's gpus are more common place (especially outside gcp), you can find a lot more information when you get stuck, it's also more battle tested, etc.
