| I normally enjoy reading your posts here but this one I have to say I find a bit gleefully FUD-tastic. Given that you describe BitCoin as "magic Internet money" [0] I can't help but feel you simply rejoice in BitCoin failures as vindication of your belief that crytocurrency will never work. There seem to be two prevailing extremes of opinion which appear a lot on Hacker News and many other places, as extremes are wont to do while those in the middle don't feel strongly enough to contribute. Those are 1) BitCoin will replace government control of money and fix freedom, dude! and 2) What fucking morons, can't wait until you crash and burn. I love this whole thing. It's fascinating, it's an interesting solution to a problem, and watching DogeCoin take off is fun to watch. In my opinion, BitCoin is kind of like when a naïve programmer decides to rewrite an existing library themselves, and comes up against the brutal reality that led the original developers to the compromises and apparently necessary hacks to get the thing working. The analogy here being regulation, insurance, all that jazz. It's educational, and I haven't been this interested in a technology for a while. I'm picking on your reply here because it is one of many that exemplifies a "haha told you so" rather than really digging into the interesting technical and sociological aspects. * Message IDs from one API do not equate to IDs from the other, so your example is a bit flawed; there's no way to check with Twilio except the ID. * Is "ID" even the term used? I don't know for sure, but "Tx Hash" seems to be more widely spread. [Edit: patio11 edited his comment while I was typing mine; I withdraw this point!] * "It's on our wiki noob" - someone running the 3rd largest exchange should hardly be a "noob" * "O(n) scan of all transactions globally" - that's not particularly hard, nor is it necessary (why scan all transactions from all time?), nor is it unexpected (the entire thing requires everyone to have the complete ledger, so you have the data anyway) There are valid points to be made that the BitCoin protocol needs improvements, and these are even acknowledged by the core devs. This whole situation is a bit ludicrous. But I wish we were talking about "what have we learned", not "told you so". When it comes to BitCoin, the conversation seems to be full of radicals and optimists when success happens, and gloaters when it doesn't. I don't feel either add to the conversation, we could be talking about how to improve this as a currency or (as I believe the long term actual application to be) how this can influence distributed trust, especially important in the current climate. [0] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/431347845031940096 |
People often deploy the word FUD to describe arguments about technology which have no basis in technical fact. Can you identify statements which I've made about Bitcoin which have no basis in technical fact?