shanecoin's comments

It has been the goal since day one.

The Ethereum protocol was designed with PoS in mind and has a built-in difficulty bomb[1] to prove it. In short, this difficulty bomb makes it exponentially harder to mine ETH over time. The goal of this feature was to encourage all participants of the ecosystem to transition to PoS as quickly as possible.

Given that, the implementation has not worked out totally as expected, as the difficulty bomb has been pushed back a few times over the years. However, to answer your question, the reason they did not move faster is because this transition is hard and plays in some uncharted territory.

[1] https://medium.com/fullstacked/the-ice-age-is-coming-ee5ad5f...

I hear this argument a lot and have a genuine question.

How does Bitcoin electricity usage compare to something that achieves a similar goal?

A good example is gold—many people compare Bitcoin to gold. What are the relative electricity costs of the two, and does that justify the cost of either asset? This would take into account the electricity costs of mining, labor, supply chain, storage, etc.

> cryptocurrency has a finite volume of transferrable currency

This is true of Bitcoin. Others, such as Ethereum, have a known inflation schedule, which would help alleviate the issue you mentioned as being a currency of the future. Furthermore, it is looking like the "currency of the future" may (at least in the short term), look more like a cryptocurrency that is worth $1 and is 1:1 backed by a dollar in a bank account. These are known as stablecoins and are an in-demand topic right now for central banks around the world.

Bitcoin has a property of having a known, fixed supply. This allows it to serve as a store of value. It can and is used for day-to-day transactions, but there may need to be more advancements to make these types of transactions viable long-term (such as the lightning network).

> Telegram supports end-to-end encryption ("secret chats") with no logging -- as far as I know there is no proof that these chats are untrustworthy.

The argument I've heard is that Telegram uses their own encryption protocol. The rule of thumb in cryptography is "don't roll your own crypto".

The reason why that statement exists is because there are _countless_ examples of teams coming up with their own, new cryptographic mechanisms that either break (intentionally or not) or were written with a backdoor. People get incredibly clever when it comes to breaking encryption.

AFAIK the only way to be on the right side of this argument is to use a time-tested encryption protocol. However, there are even instances where some protocols have been live and in production for x years before discovering that a backdoor has been in the code since day one.

This seems like a great way for newcomers to learn the basics of `git` though GitHub. A great move by GitHub to try to capture this market of users who may not yet be comfortable with subversion control.

RegExr [0] does a great job of showing individual highlights even when they are in a sequential string. You can try to implement this if you want instead of showing a callout with a note to let the reader know that they highlights should be on individual characters.

[0] https://regexr.com/

One of my favorite things about htop are some of the projects that have been created that are modeled after htop but focus on information other than system resources.

Cointop [0] is one of these projects that comes to mind.

[0] https://github.com/miguelmota/cointop

The best part of this repository is that the authors and the commit dates reflect the true date of the event:

  James Ashley authored and JesseKPhillips committed on Dec 6, 1986

  8th Congress authored and JesseKPhillips committed on Jun 15, 1980

To take advantage of the ICO hype. Telegram could never have raised $1.7B in different, more traditional medium.

As a non-designer, I am finding it easier and easier to get something professional looking up. Couple this with Material-UI and a solid looking template and you could have a beautiful, custom landing page up a day.

There are obviously UX and other issues that I struggle to excel at, but from a simple, consumer-facing perspective, I see UI getting more and more manageable.

Atlanta

Chicago

Washington D.C.

San Francisco

San Diego

Boston

I would argue that this is not just banks but a number of different services. This entire Github repository [1] and this Twitter account [2] are dedicated to sites with dumb password rules. Passwords are not meant for humans.

Here is a link to a hackernews thread discussing the worst of the requirements in the repository is here [3].

[1] https://github.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb-password-rules

[2] https://twitter.com/dumb_pw_rules

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890381

Google Fi is the only provider that I know of to best protect against SIM swapping due to the fact that there is no human interface. An attacker would have to get control of you Google account in order to attack you—if this happens it is likely you have bigger issues than SIM swapping.

Given Jack Dorsey's recent Sim swapping experience coupled with countless cryptocurrency SIM swapping horror stories, it feels like Google Fi is necessary. The only negative thing I have heard about Google Fi is the requirement to pay per GB. This point is now moot.

Interesting read.

As an FYI, Table 1 (Strengths and Weaknesses of Payload Delivery Ratings) is unreadable on mobile.

True. During the Libra hearing, one of the senators basically turned to his peers and said (paraphrasing) "Why are we worrying about this now? We have a million other issues of much greater importance to worry about."

I would argue that Libra is competing directly with the US dollar.

It is a new form of currency for a user to obtain and use within the Libra ecosystem. I would imagine that the ideal world for Libra is for a user to onboard into the ecosystem and transact solely in that ecosystem. It would obviously require Libra to be ubiquitous for this to happen, but it may be the ultimate goal.

In this case, an American user would transact solely in Libra and not US dollar. I am not an economist, but I would imagine this is similar to Americans selling US dollars for foreign currencies, which I imagine weakens the dollar if done at a large enough scale.

Additionally, Libra is incorporated in Switzerland. I can only guess that this was done with foresight that the US might fight back against this new currency that competes against the dollar. With this incorporation location, it would be harder for the US to shut down this new monetary system.

What time period? In the US? In communist countries? I would imagine what you said has been the case in many time periods in many different countries, but I am sure there are other scenarios. Do you have anything specific in mind?

What other times in history have private corporations taken on government entities and succeeded? Have any of these attempts been on this scale and against an entity of this power (i.e. proposing a new monetary policy against the US Federal Reserve)?