If you're going to fetch important quantitative data using a client-side Ajax query, then you really shouldn't default that value to "0". That results in a delay of several seconds or more when the page displays "0" even if the actual value is say, "12". It would be much better to default to either the empty string, or "-", or "fetching..." or something like that.
In my case, there was a "0" on the page as the main value for at least 5-10 seconds (probably due to HN load) before the correct value was displayed ("12").
One of the core life lessons of crypto is that when you combine anonymity (or at least the illusion of it) with someone else owning the private keys to your wallet, there's nothing stopping that "someone else" from taking your coins without any way to prove who took them.
When you want to be personally responsible for your money, you have to accept that you're personally responsible for its security as well. Banks and financial regulators literally exist to push that responsibility onto someone else in the traditional systems, with the well-known tradeoffs.
That's exactly it. We take it for granted that in simpler human-run ledgers accountability is easier to do. Accounting has all these checks and balances designed to place blame on a single individual. Corporations obscure some of that blame but it still works in theory. A complex distributed system means that it can be almost impossible to determine what went wrong and that has some hugely dystopian outcomes.
Coding a bitcoin exchange is not a trivial task. I think it was a mistake . Even overstock had a major vulnerability that was caused by confusing Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin
It’s not trivial but this is a basic skill which even the most basic industry research would make you aware. It’s like thinking you’re qualified to try surgery because you were pretty good at Operation as a kid.
I don't understand why people make these Hanlon's razor comments. This doesn't put forth any argument or new information, it just mentions the name Hanlon. As if the fact a pithy saying exists gives it authority in itself. Maybe we should start reminding people to consider Nolnah's razor as well.
Your perception of people repeating this line is very weird to me.
Hanlon's razor is not something you "invoke" to end a discussion. It is not a constitunional law. It is not a physical law. It is not even an informal guideline to guide arguments in the internet.
It is just a clever line you quote to represent your opinion. It is just like to say "occams razor", or "red herring", or any other expression that means something.
I think you take internet debate too serious and give way, but waaaaay too much importance to the words some random person chose to express their opinion.
I read the original sentence with exact same meaning of "i think it was incompetence, not theft".
Why to use this expression then? Because maybe they thought it was a shorter way to express the whole opinion.
The difference is when you call something a "red herring" you also point out why. Or if you invoke "occam's razor" you simultaneously propose a simpler explanation. Whereas Hanlon's razor comments like the one above literally do nothing except say "Hanlon."
Anyway, I don't think me and GP are alone in being irrationally annoyed by this cliche.
This is correct. It's my site and I'm not trying to track you. I don't care.
If anyone has a better idea of how to make things work so that people with tracking protection don't run into problems feel free to submit a pull request.
Stellar already has a decentralized exchange built in, I've used it a bit and it's really a change to be able to use it directly from wallet, instead of sending coins to an exchange and basically giving them to it, hoping it will allow withdrawal.
But please note it's not a complete fix either. You still have third parties you must trust (presuming others decentralized exchanges are built like stellar's one). Instead of having one third party for all markets, you have one third party per asset.
When you buy xrp for xlm, for example, you don't actually own xrp, you own credits for the xrp anchor, with the promise you can withdraw them. So it's exactly like current exchanges, except if one anchor gets hacked, it does not affects all assets, just the one it manages. That's still better than current situation, and decentralized markets have many other advantages.
I certainly hope we DO see DEXs take off in the near future, but right now, every single one suffers from a severe lack of liquidity, which distorts prices and can make trades difficult verging on impossible if there's nobody with a suitable counter-trade offer.
Liquidity is the number one reason traders love the Forex markets, and the reason so many Forex traders will trade only in the major currency pairs. Hell, I've even known a couple of traders who will only trade GBPUSD or EURUSD for that precise reason: If the market is sufficiently liquid, there is pretty-much ALWAYS someone who wants to trade at your price.
On the flipside, where liquidity is too thin there's no market, no matter how many bells and whistles the "exchange" has, and no matter how attractive the notion of pure p2p exchange might be.
I thought so too until I actually used one. The experience is worse than I ever imagined possible (sure there is room for improvement). Additionally the two you mentioned only support ERC20 tokens.
40 of the top 100 crypto assets (coins and tokens) by market cap are ERC20 tokens. Exchanges involving fiat are necessarily centralized since fiat requires a centralized custodian.
There are some dollar-pegged ERC20 tokens like Tether (backed by dollars) and DAI (a stable coin) that could allow what is effectively fiat-value <-> token decentralized exchange, but to acquire actual fiat, that can be used in the rest of the financial system, requires interaction with a centralized exchange that has a banking relationship.
All this bubble speculations, inadequacy of current platforms, taking risks to not miss the trend...
I had been all in favor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies for a decentralized approach to local applications, closed markets. To be fair, I never believed blockchain could reach global scalability and there are still concerns on that part.
We all saw the future value and possibilities before everybody started branding their deficient products with blockchain. I hope the bad taste surrounding this technology will wither in a short amount of time.
Currency exchanges existed long before cryptocurrencies. As far as I know they are heavily regulated, more or less reliable and trustworthy. Hasn't the Forex added cryptocurrencies to its listing by now? Is the cryptomarket still the far west these days and if so, why?
Many of the Forex exchanges HAVE added crypto-assets to their offerings. It tends to be limited to BTC and maybe a FEW more, though -- some people might view that as a problem.
Can you list any specific examples? I'm aware of products that track the BTC price and futures, but not really any existing players which would allow you to buy actual btc so that you can hold it in your own wallet.
This is a good point -- many are simply letting you trade CFDs against crypto-currency volatility, which is fine if all you're interested in is speculating in crypto prices.
IIRC Swissquote does do actual BTC, ETH and a few others, though, and istr seeing one or two others, but I'm not a collector and hoarder of Forex exchanges. Pretty sure I've seen a bank or two dipping their toes into the water, too. After all, if there's money to be made out of it, they'll hardly be likely to stay away.
Trust and reliability build up with time. Regulation is coming to crypto. The existing regulated companies won't be eager to touch it unless regulation has developed and/or they see lots of potential profits.
While cryptocurrency might look like it's a big deal, it's still pretty much peanuts for many existing players.
It's hard to do well, especially in a currency where settlement can be an irreversible disaster if there is any kind of bug. But the customers are drawn to the cheapest exchanges - which are cheaper because they make their money in non-obvious ways which would be illegal on a real exchange.
It looks like it could do with some more data rather than just
Days Since A Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100 Million:
</div>
<div style="text-align:center;font-size:100px">
<span id='counter'>0</span>
It stood stuck at 0 for a while for me as well, before eventually updating. It's pretty crazy to see the amount of resources needed to load what is effectively a static page. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on a joke website but it's a bit symptomatic of the current state of the web these days.
There is a TODO in there to calculate the timestamp based on the tweet id rather than digging through the tweet iframe after it loads. If someone wants to submit a pull request for that it should speed things up tremendously. Bitwise manipulations in JS are annoying though so I haven't bothered.
I don't think the Nano hack counts because when they were stolen it was worth a lot less and the exchange tried to hide the loss for awhile. The exchange was hacked in Nov. I think, when Nano was worth pennies. Rai Blocks was unique in that is went up so much, so that's why the figure is so big.
BitGrail lost $170 million worth of Nano XRB tokens because... the checks for whether you had a sufficient balance to withdraw were only implemented as client-side JavaScript
That was just one bug and was not the cause of all the losses. Other users reported issues with withdrawals and deposits , especially pertaining to litecoin and etherem over-credits. I think there was a bug that caused people to get too much.
It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money? I think we can all agree that useful code that powers much of today's enterprise - entirely gratis, too! - is actually worth a lot more than some imaginary string of bits that gets traded back and forth for arbitrary sums of money.
> It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money?
If we called it "code currency" and touted the ability to use open source to buy and sell things then I think people WOULD compare it to preexisting currencies. Instead, open source code is touted as a replacement for proprietary code, and we often hear people making comparisons such as "Gimp vs Photoshop" or "Linux vs MacOS".
The dollar-value for cryptocurrencies is because they are CURRENCIES.
The dollar value for cryptocurrency is because they can be owned in a meaningful sense (having private keys) and people are willing to give you money if you transfer ownership to them. There's no equivalent sense of ownership for open source software.
I don't understand people who constantly make fun of new technologies that we're only recently about to figure out how to make right. Like people obsessed with making fun of IoT (I don't own any IoT besides a smartphone) or cryptocurrencies (I own a bit). Isn't it normal for new techs to be failing at the beginning? Do we really need to ridicule these nascent techs just because they're not perfect for now?
It's like people making fun of first airplanes 150 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI). First attempts to fly were full of huge failure, many leading to deaths. Many people ridiculed the very idea we would one day do mass travel by plane.
I thought of anyone, we should know better than making fun of new tech having some failures, this is how tech works. Because one day, one of these techs may take off like these planes eventually did and you will be the one looking like a fool then.
It’s more making fun of the hype where people who don’t understand either the technology or economics make huge predictions based on what would be personally advantageous for themselves.
Air travel had immediate, obvious advantages. There were many technical challenges but getting somewhere fast no matter the terrain was an obvious win. In contrast, the first decade of crypto currency hype has basically been “you should use your money to make me rich and in return you’ll get to do what you could already do except it’ll cost more and won’t have fraud protection”. A hype cycle like that always gets mockery and the way to deal with it is to drop it, be honest about what went wrong, and do something which useful.
IoT is a good example of both outcomes: bad products get mocked but millions of useful devices are selling because they do something ordinary people want.
Bitcoin is like faster than air travel for money. Send money to whoever you want no matter the political terrain in between or time of day. Seems like an obvious win. It has fraud protection from the people who claim to give you fraud protection in the old system but then sometimes take your money against your intent.
I can send money using a credit card, Square/Venmo, Apple/Google Pay, etc. faster with smaller fees and fraud protection. What incentive to I have to switch?
Your last sentence doesn’t make any sense unless you live in a place with a tyrannical government, and they’ll take your bitcoin like anything else – in fact it’s easier since you have to leave a public history which cannot be repudiated.
And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous. In hindsight, the advantages of a successful technology are always obvious.
> In contrast, the first decade of crypto currency hype has basically been “you should use your money to make me rich and in return you’ll get to do what you could already do except it’ll cost more and won’t have fraud protection”.
That is not how it was introduced to the world, crypto currency was introduced as a trustless decentralized cash currency no tyrant could ever manipulate to the detriment of the people, the ability to send cash near instantly to anyone across the world without a central authority. If bitcoin becomes successful (not saying it will) at fighting currency manipulation and banking the poor, people like you will say "Crypto currency had immediate, obvious advantages. There were many technical challenges but sending money fast across the world with no intermediary and making currency manipulation by tyrants impossible was an obvious win.".
> And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous
Sources? Almost immediately after the invention of flight, WWI started putting them to use [1]. (There was ridicule about the possibility of heavier-than-air flight prior to its invention. But that’s not comparable to the matter at hand.)
> And yet, the amount of FUD and ridicule people got for trying to fly was enormous.
Was that for trying to fly or because the proposed mechanism was obviously unworkable? It’s not like people are saying there isn’t room to improve on the credit card system, only that you have to deliver something which is actually an improvement.
Similarly, your defense of bitcoin is a great example of that problem: nobody is arguing that the marketing points you repeated weren’t widely made, only that the system on offer falls far short.
(E.g. “send cash instantly” versus a substantial fee and time delay compared to a credit card. Similarly, talking about currency manipulation is reasonable but it’s laughable in the context of something which fluctuates so much more than almost all currencies)
Do you really think that giving control of your money to a bunch of Chinese crypto miners is better than having government protection on your account (up to a certain limit obviously)?
Honestly the cryptovangelists are looking much more like a scam every day if even someone who has just “a bunch” of criptocurrencies per his admission is so vocal on guaranteeing the future of the entire ecosystem...
One person dying in a aircraft that is being used as a science/engineering trial for a new technology is absolutely not the same thing as a hundred startups bursting on to the scene and amateurishly slapping together some code to try and gain market share, at the cost to the general consumer who has been swindled into getting into the “hot new thing” via YouTube ads.
There is a huge gap between “we genuinely don’t understand the full mechanics of heavier-than-air flight” and “we got an intern to write the front-end and there were no server side checks to verify your balance”. I won’t feel foolish because I do believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain can work, but I’ll happily ridicule those doing it poorly for a quick buck off the nonethewiser general consumer.
Securing and validating transactions is not a new concept, and JavaScript is not a new technology.
What's new here is people with little experience handling billions of dollars in transactions, and their cavalier attitude towards other people's money.
What's also new is the absolutely incredible acceptance of these "hacks"... 150M here 500M there, who cares - the perps will never be found. Nobody is going to jail.
I don't know, @patio11 who's quoted on the link keeps attacking bitcoin all the time. Equally annoying are people who keep praising bitcoin all the time by the way. Bitcoin may or may not succeed but people who keep predicting it will fail are just as tiring as people who keep saying it will save humanity and get rid of all the ills.
> The technology is not being ridiculed
I could find you plenty of people ridiculing cryptocurrencies on twitter everyday. This site is just another example.
In your opinion I’m probably one of the people attacking bitcoin.
And yes, I would like them to completely disappear.
People are just wasting an enormous quantity of energy in an unregulated lottery in which they are almost always guaranteed to lose.
Can you please tell me a good reason why I should not oppose crypto currencies and all the similar “scams”?
Plese don’t answer with Proof of stake or other shenanigans if we want to be evaluating this phenomenon in an honest way.
Unless I missed something proof of stake is translated to “who has more money can print the biggest percentage of new money”, but I didn’t really follow all the variations of this philosophy.
Not sure what you're talking about, Bitcoin is way more energy efficient than any fiat currency:
"Still, it’s important to put things in perspective. A recent report suggests that at current prices, Bitcoin miners will consume an estimated 8.27 terawatt-hours per year. That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually less than an eighth of what U.S. data centers use, and only about 0.21 percent of total U.S. consumption. It also compares favorably to the currencies and commodities that bitcoin could help replace: Global production of cash and coins consumes an estimated 11 terawatt-hours per year, while gold mining burns the equivalent of 132 terawatt-hours. And that doesn’t include armored trucks, bank vaults, security systems and such. So in the right context, bitcoin is positively green."
Bitcoin is only a microscopic fraction of the whole fiat currency that is around, processes an even more abysmal fraction of the total transactions per day and it uses basically the same amount of energy as the whole global currency production as per your post.
Ah, and this energy cost will only go up because of the increase in difficulty.
It’s like saying that 10000 people that for a living are destroying the Amazonian forest are positively green because they do less harm than the whole coal burning that happens in the world.
Honestly I can’t wait for the day when this cancer for the whole humanity will disappear.
I cannot recall people making fun of new tech, mostly complaining about either ignorance, bad business ethics, risky behaviour or flaws that needs to be addressed.
The current state of crypto businesses is quite horrible, too many sell "Get 10000% returns in 1y" crap to naive people. Will be interesting how the this crypto craze will look when looking back at it after it has cooled down.
What other technology has let so many companies embezzle and/or lose $100 million or more within a single year? Crypto currency has a lot of potential; some of that potential is clearly the efficiency with which it can eat investment money.
In my case, there was a "0" on the page as the main value for at least 5-10 seconds (probably due to HN load) before the correct value was displayed ("12").