Used to use a SoYouStart E5-1650v2 for the 6 Core/12 Hyper-Threads. I moved when I got a sweet server auction deal with two Xeon's but recently moved to Hetzner because the price for their AX50 Ryzen 1700X + 32GB of RAM is hard to beat.
>But can you patch the ridiculous "find next" shortcut key to ctrl + f/enter from ctrl + f/ctrl + g?
Yes this is one of the things that I am really annoyed with gedit. All searches (to my knowledge) in browsers and IDE's work by pressing enter to get to the new search entry.
The only exception which comes to my mind is vim which has 'n' to go to the next search entry(also completely different to gedit). But in comparison vim, excepts the user to learn a lot of new commands, gedit on the other hand should imo follow the simplicity of other GNOME apps.
To search a keyboard shortcut in the manual and then memorize it for such a simple editor is just tedious and irritating.
All the definitions I heard are able to be manipulated easily:
-The/r/bitcoin consensus? Is mainly in existence because of censorship
-User wallets online? Can be easily created with AWS instances
-Bitcoin core? Who decides these bunch of people are in charge to represent all users and not a bunch of other developers?
One obvious alternative is to let Bitcoin follow economic incentives: Bitcoin miners gain Bitcoin, so they have a vested interest that their income is and stays valuable. Thus why not let the miners decide. This is also the only place where you can't influence/manipulate Bitcoin easily.
User support is really easily measured in the event of a split and really hard to measure before the split.
Quite simply, the coin price indicates support. After the split, there will be two versions of the Bitcoin network with independent prices. A non zero price indicates non-zero support, and as long as it's at least 25% of the original price, it'll probably be okay.
A high price indicates high support.
In the long term, the hashrate follows the price. Miners will mine the coin with the highest price, because they can't afford any other option. Electricity is expensive.
So you say mining of Bitcoin only follows the market value?
Isn't it at least to a large degree the other way round? That market value is following based on what is the most mined chain?
If there's a split and 80% of mining power switches to one branch. Then the 20% branch loses a lot of utility for at least some time. It now has five times slower transactions until difficulty gets adjusted(or you change the proof of work of bitcoin, which itself can be precarious). And now to a minor degree the minority chain has also less safety (less hashing power).
Meanwhile why should anyone buy or send Bitcoins at the point of a split? There's a real chance that one branch will die and then you can lose the coins. The best strategy is probably to wait. So the market at least is in some way inhibited during a split.
On the other hand I'd argue miners of the minority chain have a lot of pressure to change branches. Market is not yet a good indicator only hashing power and they'll lose money if they don't continue to mine on the more profitable chain. Their safest bet is to change chains. Also they know that other miners of the minority chain think probably similarly. That's why imo in Bitcoin history every fork/split was resolved very quickly and a branch "won".
It has, and TextSecure is excellent. But being owned by Facebook, and their previous security record, has massacred WhatsApp's credibility amongst many users I've spoken to it seems.
To the point where friends have been talking to friends on the technical merits of them, and some have chosen to use Telegram, which is… um, not of the same quality of design as TextSecure, I'll say politely. But it's not owned by Facebook, and apparently that counts for a lot because people really do distrust Facebook that much. (Despite saying that on Facebook, I gather. Irony.)
I have the feeling TextSecure/Signal is frustratingly close to perfect. If it gained the ability to do voice and video well, gained a good desktop client (a slim one, without ads!), and could use usernames instead of/as well as phone numbers, it'd be poised to replace most of the common uses of Skype.
Add metadata protection in some form (onion/garlic routing?) and a distributed network (Tox used DHT) and we'd really be onto something. Although metadata protection is a particularly hard set of problems, especially when you want essentially real-time communication and low battery life. Still, we're in interesting times, and we have tools to make a whole new set of interesting design tradeoffs!
But being owned by Facebook, and their previous security record, has massacred WhatsApp's credibility amongst many users I've spoken to it seems.
Which users do you speak to?
I have lots of friends who are not technology-minded and zero of them care that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. Heck most of them don't even know. It doesn't have the FB logo anywhere. I think this is a non-issue.
What's more, my experience has been that most of my friends (on the rare rare occasions when it comes up) trust WhatsApp a lot more than most tech products, because it doesn't have any ads and asks them for money occasionally. Though lots of us don't actually seem to get charged. I keep being given free extensions.
WhatsApp has huge network effects at this point, it's the de-facto standard outside of the USA. So implementing the TextSecure protocol is a huge deal. Not only does it directly help lots of people but it sets a precedent that PFS is not only for nerds and geek products but can be integrated into consumer products too. It raises the bar for everyone else.
Obviously different users! I'm aware of the network effect, and I massively commend them for such a bold, privacy-oriented approach, particularly given their previous track record. (Well done, Moxie! How'd you talk them into that?)
Everyone I know who was aware WhatsApp was Facebook-owned brought it up as a strong, overriding negative; others who heard that followed suit.
Perhaps that says more about Facebook's perception amongst that demographic than WhatsApp. (The plural of anecdotes is not data, I hasten to add.)
If there's a lesson from this, perhaps it's: something new and better needs to come from, if not trusted people, then at least not mistrusted people.
I'm still wondering where xmpp and otr failed. Because it apparently has - nobody uses or implements them. I have a perfectly fine xmpp client here that supports OTR, but nobody I know can or will use these services, despite them having most of what I would consider important - video chat, file transfer, persistence, logging, emoticons, and my client even downloads linked images and videos and displays them inline.
I use XMPP+OTR where possible, and it can be quite painful.
Support for multiple active endpoints isn't solved, at least for the clients I use, so I have to hope that whoever writes me picks the endpoint I'm actually at or I have to go through a bit of unencrypted back and forth to make them connect to the right one (I think XMPP actually has extensions for mechanisms that could solve this, syncing messages between endpoints, but I've never seen them implemented).
At least some mobile clients only maintain the OTR session while in foreground, leading to massive notification spam on the other end/delays while the session is recreated.
No encrypted offline messages. (Yes, I know, not possible while maintaining the full guarantees of OTR, but it adds complications to the workflow)
All these don't really make for great UX, and many people are not willing to put up with it.
Viber is also huge in the Philippines as a telecom there offers free Facebook + Viber without needing prepaid credit/wifi. They could roll a textsecure layer too
WhatsApp is also owned by facebook, so.. i doubt they cut of ways to get to the communications. I think it might use textsecures encryption but they will also have key.
Sorry but my experience is the opposite. Here in France most mobile phone contracts give you unlimited sms + mms. I never felt the need for whatsapp personally, neither do I know anyone using it. (but Viber over wifi is often used by people traveling/working abroad)
No need to be sorry, data > anecdotes. I use Whatsapp with a group of 20 friends to organize nights out and basically use it as a long-running IRC room. We also have different groups for movies, board games, etc. It's the group functionality that makes it better than SMS.
It's very popular in Europe, even more so (as far as I've heard) in South America, where it's used mainly instead of SMS. Heck, even my father use WhatsApp and I can't make him stop clicking on "You have 1 new message" ads. Though I deleted my WhatsApp as soon as it was acquired by Facebook.
I think fees on the exchanges, different currencies(fee for trading to the corresponding currency) and time(it can take weeks until you can start to trade on a site) are the major obstacles.
> But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system.
No they risked their money with a speculation that had almost 0% chance of getting any return in the future. They took a huge risk, without this, bitcoin would not exist. And that's why they are rewarded: Taking a risk that almost no one would have taken to create something big.
> Basically if everyone started selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change & I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they can unload most of their stack.
Bitcoin had already 2 big crashes (one time from $30 to $1-2 and one time from 200+$ to under 100$) and still recovered afterwards because there's people like me who see the potential in bitcoin.
And please tell me what your "real value" exactly is, because in my opinion their is only a perceived value for everything in the world.
Isn't bitcoin easily manipulated? Let's say I have 1% of all bitcoins. I sell half of them, wait for the price to fall, and buy back to have 1.1% of all bitcoins.
Repeat each few weeks, and let's say there's 20 people that realized this and have enough bitcoins for this to be feasible.
End result = currency that's mostly owned by a few people. And when everybody realize this - bubble collapses.
At least that was my train of thought when I first learnt about bitcoin and now I hate myself for being too risk averse :)
You might working with an oversimplified model of the market. If you have 1% of all bitcoins, you're not going to be able to sell them all at the highest standing offer-to-buy (OTB).
If the highest standing offer to buy is at $700, it's not going to be an offer to buy all 120,000 of your BTC. It might be an offer to buy 100BTC. So you sell 30BTC at $700 and then move on to the next lowest OTB, which might be 20BTC@$699.95. You walk down a line of highest OTBs and the new market price is the highest OTB that you didn't manage to exhaust. The price is lowering as you sell out.
Similarly, you're not going to be able to buy in with your entire pot at the lowest standing offer-to-sell (market price). You'll exhaust the lowest offer-to-sell, then move on to the next highest offer-to-sell, etc. The price is rising as you buy in.
Assuming that the market is efficient, the decrease in price as you sell out and the increase in price as you buy in will be perfectly balanced against each other, and any extraneous gain or loss will reflect changes in market information that occurred while you were executing. Of course the market is not in practice perfectly efficient, but that applies to any other traded commodity.
Ok, this was a weird segue. I thought we were talking about market capitalization and whether or not people use it outside of bitcoins, which they all do for basically everything.
However, non-voting common stock equities that do not grant dividends basically have no "intrinsic value" either I guess. It is just a proxy for the public opinion of the net worth of the underlying asset, similar to bitcoins.
I think this kind of "intrinsic value" line of reasoning isn't a very strong argument in general though because mostly the value of commodities is essentially based on the value people assign it via free market and psychological principles.
You sort of don't seem like you know much about econ/finance so I think it is strange that you are so outspoken about bitcoins.
BTC could still collapse, and it very well may. Even if we put the potential innovative benefits of btc aside though, things like this are more like cults vs religions. A cult is a cult until it has enough followers at which point it becomes a religion.
Cults and religions have a similar scam potential which is what it seems like you are feeling, however at this point I would say btc is reaching or possibly above Scientology levels of belief/followers. In fact the market cap of btc is possibly more than the market cap of Scientology right now. If btc is going to fall apart as a pyramid scheme it will likely be the largest to ever fall.
However btc is more than a pyramid scheme because it does offer some real benefits over the existing financial systems. The online blackmarket does require a currency similar to btc to operate. Right now sending money across borders is difficult and expensive. Right now buying things over the internet basically must be done with credit cards which has a lot of fees attached. Right now there is no real way to quickly send large sums of money to people without similar fees and specific hours of operation. You also have to go to a bank and deal with a lot of bullshit.
Whether btc will be the solution to these problems I am not sure, but it is a very big deal that it already has so many users/followers. That is the hardest part of changing things, getting large scale adoption.
Yeah I hear you pfisch you are definitely one of the more reasonable people I have come across in these arguments. But what I'm saying is this -- I'm certainly not an econ expert it's true but I've analyzed enough of the econ involved in Bitcoin to conclude that it's really not a viable currency and most involved are speculators or black market traders as you point out. And I firmly believe the exchange rates are totally artificial, since BTC are essentially not really transacted the way one would imagine a currency to be used. It makes more sense to say they are "traded". Speculator to speculator or consumer to business straight to 3rd party processor.
It solves a real problem, yes, but not so much so that every Bitcoin should quadruple in value every 6 months, this is a bit ridiculous. After all, one could implement a BTC alternative (Litecoin for example) and achieve the same needs.
So essentially yes I see Bitcoin as a cult of naive investors who think that because of its theoretical underpinnings it will save us all. The truth is, huge stores of it are owned by black market operations and early adopters who had an exponential advantage in the ease of getting these things. Its basically like a free money machine for anyone who had change left in their pocket after spending their first crop of BTC.
If the system were ever to go down via cashout or crash or whatever, these people have as good a shot at grabbing the exit cash as anyone else, plus they can trivially buy a ton of real-world goods now through stores that accept Bitcoin, who themselves essentially send 3rd party processors the bill since presumably the processors are the ones storing Bitcoins while paying out the current exchange rate (or maybe they put them on an exchange soon after). The processors are assuming the risk because they want a foothold in the emerging shadow Wall St landscape. These are people who are putting their blood/sweat/tears into building the infrastructure that is essentially just magnifying the wealth of the founders / online gambling institutions / black market ops.
If instead all the rational people were to abandon the cult & quietly cash out, all that baggage could be left behind. The online casinos could instead foot the bill, and we could begin again with a new more stable cryptocurrency that has more utility as an actual currency. Market volatility adds some lure into the intrigue of the system but it's really just a vehicle for wealth redistribution to those who are prepared to take advantage of a flawed system.
Btw telling me it's gaining traction as a cult is not really endearing me to the ecosystem. I'm just not a big cult-lover. :P
But I guess it wouldn't work because if you sell a lot of bitcoins you couldn't sell all at the same price.
Eg. you want to sell 10k Bitcoins. The price is 750$ and the first 50 Bitcoins you can sell for 750$. Now after that there are not enough limit orders anymore available for that price category. So you would sell a lot of bitcoins for much less than the price was originally when you started selling.
And vice versa if you buy them. So I would doubt that you make a profit (because you can't sell/buy at price x and then afterwards the market price reacts. The market price reacts already while buying/selling in large quantities).
As I see it it's the same principle as if you own a large part of a stock, there you could argue the same.
There are actually common market manipulation trading tricks (will get you busted immediately in the stock market) that people use regularly in Bitcoin.
Read the section in this article titled Enter the tape-painting “Shark Squad”. I've seen a few similar articles that document how simple it is to do market manipulations in Bitcoin that would get you immediately cuffed on Wall St. And it doesn't even take that many parties to pull them off! Because Bitcoin is actually transacted sooooo little.
I can't say for sure though. There are a lot of debates about transactional volume but impossible to tell because some of the big money Bitcoin holders just buy/sell to heighten the perception of its popularity.
yeah but people shouldn't be getting involved with a currency just because it's so scammable.
I commend you for not getting involved. I think Bitcoin speculators are immoral. Someone is going to end up footing the bill and it will ruin many lives.
For me the user interface was always snappier and felt just all around better. Now with webkit they have a faster render engine and feel like a lighter and faster version of Chrome (plus you can install all addons from Chrome with this extension: https://addons.opera.com/de/extensions/details/download-chro... )
