koancone's comments

This "new" technology is 10 years old. Why is it catching on now?

Hello,

Thanks for the welcome. Really the contribution was satire not bullshit. Sometimes satire will give valuable insights about societal phenomena, e.g. possible irrational exuberance in the SV start up set. That said I get the message and will be careful to only post straightforward, serious contributions going forward.

How correlated is Bitcoin price to the stock market rise and low Federal Reserve rates?

That's a pretty lazy answer. Why not last year, or the years before? Bitcoin is nearly 10 years old and monetary policy has been "easy" that whole time (in the US and Europe). Why is it taking off this year in particular? What is the deal with the slew of ICOs? I am not sure what you mean by compound interest. Are you trying to make a pun, e.g. compound hype or referring to financial interest rates?

Coinbase seems to piss me off. They have obscure ID / KYC verification requirements that change with the level (monetary value) of your transaction. After I opened my coinbase account I sent them an email asking what specifically I needed to submit have my account fully authorized for an arbitrary value transaction. I resent being requested a different document everyday. They never replied to the email so consequently I never used the account.

Who will buy the goods and services the robot workers produce?

Maybe people should like build houses / apartments and tax speculator owned vacant units.

Google is increasingly returning irrelevant results in the effort to deliver the targeted content their advertisers want. I predict a future for a subscription funded search engine that just delivers lexically relevant results without all the bullshit. I for one would gladly pay to use something better than Google. The advertising monetization model is broken.

So why was it written, what is the motivation of the author?

The problem is the advertising model for content monetization. This is the same reason TV is mostly crap.

I don't know what you mean. My comments are not newsworthy. I am not practising arbitrage. I am commenting on HN because that gives me some recreational utility. What is inconsistent?

It is also possible that Satoshi Nakamoto was an alias for an NSA project. I have no special knowledge either way on this matter.

The internet and modern computers are the result of Government and University funding (e.g. DARPA, UC Berkeley BSD) and corporate R & D projects like Xerox Alto / Start at PARC and Bell Labs Unix, C, etc.

Free Open source volunteers merely imitated (Linux vs. Unix) or extended institutional or corporate sponsored projects or ideas. Without robust government and corporate funding of basic research in the later 20th century we would not have the well developed information technology industry we have today. People founding vanity projects, ICOs, and forking is not moving the industry forward. What truly revolutionary innovations have originated from open source software vs. just imitation or variation?

Blockchain is revolutionary but the developers did monetize their work in that case (literally). In this society you need to earn money to live. It is mysterious that so many people in software want to practice their trade for free. I guess they love what they do but I think the quality of their work would increase if it was monetized. Monetization need not imply centralization or appropriation c.f. bitcoin.

It just means assigning value and ownership to the results of socially valuable work. What is so evil about that? I think, from an evolutionary psych view why people think contributing to OSS is prosocial is because of something like a genetic tendency to share new technology with the tribe. In the ancestral environment it would have been uncool for one shaman to have monopolized a new flint knapping technique. But with the rise of trade and property right people can develop and protect their competitive advantage / economic niche and monetize their work for benefit of the whole of society why collecting a reward from their innovations. Free Open Source fanatics like the GNU people are stuck in the stone age and do the profession of software development a disservice.

My experience, from shopping in Walmart quite frequently, is that they are highly disorganized and un-nimble. I guess this affords the opportunity for persistent arbitrages. For example, my local Walmart supercenter routinely runs out of certain products (not usually the same products). Sometimes it feels like GUM (An iconic USSR department store in Moscow). I gone shopping and found them missing any kind nutcracker ( a basic utensil), grapefruit juice, landscaping mulch, etc (many more examples). At the beginning of August the garden center had already moved out all its mulch for the year and filled the shelves with de-icing salt lol. The people who run the place do not seem to understand opportunity costs: they lost a sale in me and I am pretty sure nearly no-one is buying de-icing salt at the beginning of August. This is a northern USA store but where I live the weather is in the 60-70 through October: grass still grows, gardens still can be mulched. The stores are overstaffed with floor people (seemingly wandering around Lord of the Flies style) but not only 3-4 of 20 checkout lanes are open at a given time. Nearly every single canned good is dented or has a dirty lid. Their self checkout POS run on Windows 7 (lol) and update firmware automatically when they reboot which is hardly ever but for a power outage. If there are intermittent power outages in a storm a POS could reboot on the first outage and be bricked on the second one while updating firmware. There are so many opportunities for improvement with Walmart but the capital cost of a competitor entering the industry is so high. I am not sure if Amazon can be a real competitor (I think they largely serve different sets of customers).

I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original ideas on show HN or waste their time contributing to open source. I guess everyone is wired differently. If I had been practising the sort of arbitrage the guy in the article was doing I would have been highly motivated to keep it secret, to minimize the number of new entrants (competitors), etc.

Not everyone has a smart phone. I don't. Believe it or not you are not required to have a smart phone function in the word. At best it is a pointless waste or time and money gadget at worst it is a tracking device and profile builder.

Is $999 an competitive price for a cash register? Just curious.