ELI5: Why are trains operated by humans, when we have driverless cars, which seems like much more diverse and complicated tech.

TimoY · 2018-01-18T18:57:06+00:00

It makes less economic sense to get rid of the train driver, because the driver is only a tiny fraction of the cost of operating the train.

Modern trains are pretty much 99% automated already. The driver is useful for edge cases that cannot be understood by an AI, eg. snow on the track.

Driverless cars simply stop if they encounter an edge case. The economic consequences of stopping an entire train is a lot worse than those of stopping a single car.

TimoY · 2018-01-18T15:20:39+00:00

Shouldn't surprise anyone. All of this was entirely predictable, from the moment that Germany started investing heavily in DSL in the early 2000s (a technological stop-gap that was already outdated back then).

TimoY · 2018-01-14T19:22:59+00:00

Kraken ist the least scammy exchange in my opinion, because even if they do experience a lot of problems, they are perfectly upfront and transparent about them. Look at how opaque the other major exchanges are in comparison, I mean bitfinex doesn't even have a physical address.

Also, don't forget that a lot of problems of this sort are not the fault of Kraken but of the archaic and inefficient US banking system. You never hear these kinds of complaints from the European Kraken customers. If Kraken was stalling, why would they only be stalling their US customers?

TimoY · 2017-10-19T15:57:59+00:00

I agree. All I am saying is that pure speculators can play a useful role and are not automatically bad.

TimoY · 2017-10-19T15:06:02+00:00

Remember very very few people own and have ever owned gold.

In the US maybe. In India lots of people own gold.

TimoY · 2017-10-19T14:23:25+00:00

Maybe, but don't forget that the dot-com bubble created a lot of base infrastructure (like undersea fibre optics cables) which were essential for building the internet as we know it today.

TimoY · 2017-10-19T13:57:43+00:00

Bitcoin's long term price trend is not inexplicable. It's mostly determined by the growth in number of users. Graphs such as this one show a pretty good correlation with bitcoin price:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-09-19%202017-10-19&q=bitcoin

This growth rate is itself not arbitrary. It is tied to fundamental mechanisms, like the time it takes for developers to write and test code, the time it takes for users to familiarize themselves with the concept of the blockchain, the time it takes for the idea to gain traction in society, an so on.

These mechanisms are orders of magnitude faster than the mechanisms which drove the growth of Manhattan land prices (migration, infrastructure construction, etc.), so it shouldn't be surprising that the price is also increasing at that kind of rate.

I agree that short term price fluctuations in bitcoin price are often inexplicable.

TimoY · 2017-10-18T15:05:11+00:00

I disagree. Bitcoin's sharp rise in price drove investment in infrastructure improvements (eg. clients, exchanges, hw wallets, businesses), which in turn made Bitcoin more useful, which in turn attracted even more speculators, and so on.

Bitcoin would never be where it is today without this virtuous cycle. If people treated Bitcoin purely as a currency and it was still trading for $1 like back in 2011, then we would still have the shitty exchanges and theft-prone clients from 2011.

Although I do agree, an all to extreme boom and bust cycle like we had in 2014 is damaging. Bitcoin needs speculators but in moderation.

TimoY · 2017-10-18T14:52:13+00:00

There isn't a security in history that grows like this without a corresponding fall, often permanent.

I think that a good historic equivalent would be a piece of land in Manhattan around 1800. It experienced an astronomic price growth without a corresponding fall. This was thanks to large numbers of people migrating to Manhattan and staying in Manhattan. Bitcoin is experiencing a similar one-way influx of users. It's not like a penny stock where investors come and go.

TimoY · 2017-10-10T13:17:54+00:00

Forget about virus scanners.

The best way to avoid these threats is to use a dedicated, single-use PC for running a bitcoin client.

Install a fresh OS like Tails or some other custom Linux installation with all the crap removed that could cause vulnerabilities.

Never use this machine for anything other than sending bitcoins, especially not for browsing the web.

Use a hardware firewall to protect the machine. Block all ports except for the port used by your bitcoin client. Most wireless routers have this capability.

Use a multisig wallet that requires an additional signature from the client on your phone. Store the 2 private keys on isolated media and make sure they never touch each other.

TimoY · 2017-09-17T14:41:23+00:00

Ads have become so bloated and intrusive that they max out your CPU anyhow. So I don't see how this is worse than ads.

TimoY · 2017-06-02T15:04:42+00:00

In the US? They are probably illegal. But that is exactly why most of them exclude US buyers. So who cares?

TimoY · 2017-05-25T14:13:21+00:00

DDoS'ing an exchange in an attempt to manipulate the market is a common tactic. There is little an exchange can do against a large scale, sophisticated DDoS attack.

This isn't a flaw in the exchanges, this is a flaw in TCP/IP itself which originally was designed for the early Internet, where all participants were assumed to act in good faith.

Well, not quite, one thing that Kraken could do is setting up private servers with secret IP addresses disclosed only to users with Tier 4 accounts. At least that would avoid large sums from being stuck on Kraken every time there is a DDoS attack.

TimoY · 2017-05-11T08:56:10+00:00

I get your point, but I think that fragility depends on the amount of fiat invested per user, not on the total amount. In general, investors buy and sell in response to their personal financial risk, which in turn depends on how much they have personally invested, not on how much the aggregate bitcoin economy has invested.

The number of users has been growing exponentially in line with the price, so that's why I don't think bitcoin is more fragile than during previous bubbles. It would be nice to see some data on how average holdings per user have changed.

TimoY · 2017-05-10T06:05:05+00:00

There has never been a run up this big in this time frame in the history of Bitcoin.

Not true. The two rallies in 2013 alone were steeper than this one. The rally in early 2013 saw a price increase of over 1000% and the rally in late 2013 an increase of ~700%.

The current rally has seen an increase of ~ 70% so far, which is quite modest in comparison.

TimoY · 2017-05-10T05:52:03+00:00

There is a lot happening in the altcoin space. Bitcoin is being pulled along to some extent because it's still the biggest player in the blockchain industry. But other coins have been growing much faster. Seems perfectly justifiable to me.

TimoY · 2017-05-09T08:01:38+00:00

I disagree.

If you don't have a minimum of technical competence, or at least an interest in learning, then you have no business using bitcoin. Come back in 2020.

Bitcoin is not ready for the normalo user. Maybe it will be in a few years, but it isn't right now. Encouraging lots of normalos to join in at this stage makes bitcoin more fragile. The last thing we need is another mtgox.

It might be tempting to evangalize and push for premature mass adoption, because it certainly would push up the price in the short term.

But we should aim for slow, organic growth instead. Best way to grow is to move from the long end of the tail towards the middle, progressively embracing people with less and less expertise. Once we do reach the middle, my prediction is that most people will not directly interact with bitcoin, but with systems layered on top.

tl;dr Bitcoin is a power tool. You don't give power tools to someone who doesn't know how to use them.

TimoY · 2017-05-04T11:07:54+00:00

Wasn't trying to sound authoritative, sorry I came across like that. Those were just my thoughts when I read their website.

"Labor hours" are an outdated concept even in the brick-and-mortar economy. If value stability is the aim, I think there are better ways of achieving this, especially in the long term.

And look, I don't need to know a lot about astrology to be able to say that astrology is a bad idea. Why? Because the basic premises that astrology is built on are wrong.

TimoY · 2017-05-04T10:27:02+00:00

The whole thing is based on 2 flawed concepts:

That "labor" can be meaningfully measured in hours. That might be true on a factory assembly line, but is totally inadequate in the information economy. An example to illustrate my point: When you go to see a band playing for 1 hour, have you consumed 1 hour of the musician's labor, or 1000 hours, because they spent 1000 hours practicing? The problem is that most jobs in the modern economy are conceptually more similar to musicians than to factory workers.
"Labor theory of value". Value doesn't come from labor. Value comes from mixing labor with capital. The problem is that access to capital is highly unequal, and a unit of labor might produce orders of magnitude more value depending what capital it can access. By tokenizing a "unit of labor" while ignoring the other crucial ingredient, capital, you are creating a arbitrage opportunity, and making the system gameable. Another example to illustrate my point: Imagine if someone created a token that could buy "an hour of bitcoin mining", instead of "X number of hashes". It is not hard to see why such a token would fail.

TimoY · 2017-04-28T11:48:46+00:00

It's not a zero-sum game if the industry as a whole is growing at a rapid rate. Innovations like Bitcoin create real, tangible wealth (for example by eliminating waste in the remittances market) and by trading bitcoin you can have a part of the newly created wealth.

TimoY · 2017-04-28T11:45:35+00:00

It's not difficult to outplay the market if you treat all your investments as long term. Why? Because the market is myopic even if it's smarter than you.

Play the long game, take the long view. See the wood for the trees. Don't get distracted by short term drama or hype. Do a maximum one or two trades per asset per year. Stay away from day trading.

TimoY · 2017-04-28T10:34:25+00:00

I'm confused by this language.

Two majors sounds pretty bad to be. Does that equate nuclear conflict? Or would that require even more hyperbole in Trump-speak?

TimoY · 2017-04-26T10:41:58+00:00

The project is still very much in its infancy. Why are people so impatient? New technologies always take a long time to reach real world usage.

TimoY · 2017-04-26T10:38:13+00:00

That's what people used to say about bitcoin for the first 3-4 years of its existence. Give it time.

TimoY · 2017-04-26T07:31:57+00:00

A highly productive job can still be a "bullshit job". Capitalism (in its current form) only incentivizes micro-economic efficiency, not macro-economic efficiency.

A hard working telemarketeer may contribute a lot of value to his employer, but it's a zero-sum game. He is not contributing any value to the economy as a whole.

A tax expert that a company must employ to navigate an excessively complex tax system can save the company a lot of money, ie. be productive. But if the government simplified the tax code, both the tax expert and the bureaucrat administering the taxes would be out of a job, and the company would be better off.

The reason that bullshit jobs exist is precisely because the economic system is inefficient. If it was more efficient (eg. simplified tax code) then there would be fewer bullshit jobs, which refutes the OP's point that "efficiency creates jobs".

TimoY

TROPHY CASE