My problem with these kinds of libraries is it’s not at all obvious how it behaves in edge cases, and they’re so simple I’d rather just implement it myself. Maybe I want it to throw an error, maybe I just want it to return false. Even the documentation doesn’t tell you what happens for non-integer values, you have to look at the source, at which point you may as well copy it into your own source tree.
It's very easy to flippantly go "why would you ever use that???", but I'm honestly wondering what is the actual justification for the use of such a package. I see it does some initial checking (which will take more lines in your own code to deal with), but I can't figure out why someone would actually use that.
This one year old reddit discussion [1] seems to indicate that the package was used in another, pretty popular and more complex, package by the same author. The dependency doesn't look current anymore but it might be downloads of previous versions.
As for justification and usage I couldn't tell you, apparently it was only used once in that whole codebase anyway (also according to that thread).
Even worse: it is only used one time in the entire code-base, and that one time was to check whether or not a value returned by the string length function was odd.
What.... why.... the only concievable point of a package like this is that at least it does the kind of type-checking needed to compensate for JavaScripts weak typing system, but why do you need to check the type of String.length?! Do you really think it's going to start spitting anything other than a positive integer? Fucking hell....
is-odd's behavior is also extremely odd. It depends on "is-number" (why would this need a dependency to begin with?), which checks in the most bizarre way imaginable if the input number or string(??) is finite. is-number, and by extension is-odd, also doesn't support BigInts.
These projects seem to have been created and promoted just to boost the author's "npm score" / package count. These micro-modules must cause more problems than they solve.
To be fair, it is actually far from trivial to determine whether a value is a numeric value in JavaScript, and most all-in-one utility libraries (jQuery, Lodash, etc.) java something of similar functionality. If there is one function that needs its own NPM entry, this probably is.
I tried to buy a cup of coffee recently at a bitcoin only cafe. Though I didn’t end up paying with bitcoin because it took a day for the bitcoin atm deposit to clear. So I asked a friend who worked in the building to spot me a cup of coffee, and he paid... by making a line on a piece of paper they used to do bookkeeping denoted in fiat because no-one wanted to go through the hassle of bitcoin transfers and no one had enough trust in the currency to keep prices in bitcoins, so they just tracked the costs in fiat. All of this in a “bitcoin only” cafe.
Bitcoin as a penny-stock investment opportunity still seems successful, but as a viable currency it seems to have failed. And now cue the people saying that bitcoin was never actually intended to be used like a digital coin...
So you have bitcoin, visit bitcoin only cafes, and yet you or the business cant figure out how to pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin...
It’s hard to tell if this is a joke, trolling, manifestation of dystopia/idiocracy.
All that’s really needed now is an underlying story of how the cafe couldn’t figure out how to accept payment, but due to being “bitcoin only” they received wild media attention and became an influencer, got SV capital investment, pivoted to a freemium model just giving away their bitcoin only coffee for free, gained market share over Starbucks thanks to SV Venture capital subsidizing our coffees and then they go public and the VCs/bitcoin coffee founders make billions unloading onto the public.
I’m so sold I was going to register both bitcoincoffee.com and bitcoincafe.com, looks like some savvy founders already beat me to the punch.
From what I can tell the only way to obtain bitcoin without providing personal information is to find someone on Craigslist willing to transfer you some coin... for a 15% markup.
12 cents is a lot, since it is static regardless of the transaction size. Small transactions at 12 cents fee are ridiculously expensive. You need low fee + 0-conf for small transactions (e.g. BCH). 12 cents is negligible for large transactions, hence why people call it a store of value. And since bitcoin doesn't scale, transaction costs will skyrocket again to crazy transaction fees of 50-100$ easily if it starts being used.
I'm curious how people still consider BCH a viable currency after the 51% attack done "in good faith" by a major mining pools BTC.top and BTC.com [1]. What's to stop them from doing it again the next time it's convenient?
I mean, its Bitcoin, the worst from all the cryptos. In the meantime I am using Ethereum to get electricity to my home (via lition.io), use it to take a collaterized debt position (via MakerDAO) and spending crypto daily in seconds with the Coinbase debit card. Just days ago I paid for my NordVPN directly with Ether, the transaction cleared in under 30 seconds. Bitcoin was the experiment, Ethereum is the working, usable product (which will only get better in the future).
It doesn't matter what it was intended for, which it very well may have failed at. What matters is the value people see in it now. The claim is it represents digital gold bars.
Bitcoin is more like "gold coin" currency, regarding its volatility at least. Its use cases as everyday currency are more or less limited to illegal drugs.
Conception. It’s pitched as a replacement for government backed, fiat currency. But I’ve never heard or seen a convincing, coherent explanation that makes it clear this is a currency. For one, a currency can’t be reliant on an internet connection for validity. My 1$ bill in my wallet absolutely does not rely on that. In fact, there’s an entire country validating that dollars usefulness. A gold coin essentially answers the usual doubts in fiat currency.
> But I’ve never heard or seen a convincing, coherent explanation that makes it clear this is a currency
Cryptocurrencies is a better type of money for a few reasons:
* More acceptable than other digital money (banks and payment processors might say no)
* More easily divisible than for example gold coins and gold bars
* It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)
* Much more portable. You can send any amount to anyone in the world, as long as they have internet.
To be clear, cryptocurrencies are like cash but in digital form. It's a great medium exchange, but it suffers from low adoption meaning it's a bad store of value (but so is fiat) and a bad unit of account (but so is gold).
> For one, a currency can’t be reliant on an internet connection for validity. My 1$ bill in my wallet absolutely does not rely on that
So you don't consider digital fiat currencies then?
Me not having internet for a period of time doesn't invalidate my cryptocurrency holdings. I just need internet to spend it (a fair constraint for digital money).
> A gold coin essentially answers the usual doubts in fiat currency.
Except for the fact that you can't send gold coins digitally.
Also, it's much more difficult to check for gold coins. And difficult to transport. It's easy with cryptocurrencies.
>It's a great medium exchange, but it suffers from low adoption meaning it's a bad store of value (but so is fiat) and a bad unit of account (but so is gold).
So it unites the drawbacks of both fiat and gold without any of the advantages.
>* It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)
Yeah they can, it's called a hard fork in cryptocurrency.
In fiat it's called "printing play money", but the goal is essentially the same.
>Except for the fact that you can't send gold coins digitally.
Actually you can, though in this case you exchange ownership contracts of the gold, which you can swap for the gold you own at your bank.
Plus I don't need to wait an hour to do that, I can do it even offline if I wish, where all parties can verify the transfer without a computer at all.
>Also, it's much more difficult to check for gold coins. And difficult to transport. It's easy with cryptocurrencies.
Until the tax office knocks at your door and wants to know where all that money went. Then the ease of transport is suddenly a problem.
>It's a great medium exchange,
In my experience, no. It's not a medium of exchange at the moment any more than beer tops and a ballpoint pen are. Bitcoin and Friends are at the moment a speculative asset that people hoard in case it gets more valuable or use as an unregulated stock exchange.
The average customer can't even get refunds if they get scammed, how am I supposed to take it seriously as a digital currency?
> So it unites the drawbacks of both fiat and gold without any of the advantages.
Well, if you conveniently ignore the advantages...
> Yeah they can, it's called a hard fork in cryptocurrency.
That's similar to me printing "Doge dollars" and claiming it increases the supply of US dollar.
> Actually you can, though in this case you exchange ownership contracts of the gold, which you can swap for the gold you own at your bank.
Yes... If we ignore the fact that you're not actually sending gold.
> Until the tax office knocks at your door and wants to know where all that money went. Then the ease of transport is suddenly a problem.
That's not an argument. Taxes are applied in the same way as cash is taxed, with benefit of you having a ledger you can reference.
> It's not a medium of exchange at the moment any more than beer tops and a ballpoint pen are.
Except them being instantly verifiable, have a constrained supply, are easier to transfer, are divisible, are fungible & uniform... Just the properties that money actually needs and make for a good medium of exchange.
> The average customer can't even get refunds if they get scammed, how am I supposed to take it seriously as a digital currency?
I guess the same way you take physical cash seriously?
> Except them being instantly verifiable, have a constrained supply, are easier to transfer, are divisible, are fungible & uniform... Just the properties that money actually needs and make for a good medium of exchange.
Money also needs to have stable value within some margin and small but steady inflation. If the value rises then it is a bad idea to spend it because it becomes an investment. If the value fluctuates nothing can have a nominal price. A MacBook costs $1400, but in a day it could be anything between 0.2 and 1 bitcoin. Like in the cafe story in one of the GP comments, this makes it impossible to use for any transaction.
The only thing preventing me from using bitcoin regularly is the need to account for the capital gains (losses) on every individual transaction relative to USD. One year's worth of itemized accounting for trivial transactions was enough.
Barring that, I'd be actively using BTC (or other cryptocurrencies) in the same mode as many people use Venmo.
What if it costs twice as less? Think of it as cashing in a small part of some stock/investment to use it to buy something. If you're really that concerned about crypto price changing, you can just top it back up that evening.
That is a good analogy. One would not cash in a part of investment for a banal purchase but might do so when buying a house. In that case I would definitely wait for a right moment to sell.
Back in the early 00's there were companies "egold" and "goldmoney" that did effectively a centralized, infinitely divisible currency denoted in gold and exchangeable for gold.
egold got shut down for facilitating money laundering. I think IIRC goldmoney retired from being a currency and became a non-exchangeable gold vault. Governments really didn't like them.
Can I expect bitcoin to hold any semblance of a stable value, like an actual 1st-world currency or standard, quality investment product no?
So if it's not useful as a currency and not useful as a store of value, what is Bitcoin? I really want to trust in the brave new world, but I just can't.
But Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency without boarders. If it can't make it in a country with the level of tech-adoption like the USA for the above simple tasks, please help me understand the use case.
Seems you haven't looked up the history of "1st world currencies" and how they don't in fact retain value over time. Even the almighty US dollar has lost 97% of its value over the past century and it's the reserve currency.
Who cares? No one stores their wealth in USD. You simply buy treasury inflation protected bonds. Problem solved. You only keep in USD your working capital.
This isn't about deflationary vs inflationary money, because you can encode any type of currency policy.
Instead it's about no single entity can suddenly decide "let's issue trillions of dollars to repay our debt!", which erodes any savings you have and can in the worst case collapse the economy (see hyperinflation).
What I guess you're after is having the ability to respond to the economic climate by stimulating the economy? Then let me introduce you to the concept of sound money and what Austrian economists have to say about it.[1]
The basic point is it's impossible for a single actor to predict the market behavior, it's why a planned economy doesn't work, because the market consists of actors who only act in their own best interest and don't have perfect knowledge.
That decision at the Fed has been historically taken after consultation of (if needed) the entire financial industry and academics and political leaders (to some extent).
> Are there any real world success stories of Austrian economics? It's like the libertarian version of communism's "works perfectly in theory".
It is exactly that. There is no example of pure austrian economics just as there has never been a 'true' communist state since human nature will never allow the extremes they need to work.
> How do civilians escape a depression with no money in an Austrian economy?
The entire point of 'sound money' is not actually to help the general population survive or prosper, it is specifically to limit the power of government. From the link above "It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments."
Of course you might have a depression, but that should be cleared up quickly since the free market allows the fit businesses to buy up weak competitors (since there is no anti-trust in austrian land). If you are unemployed during this time you can always find some labor job to do so will never be truly unemployed (since there is no minimum wage or restrictions to work).
> The entire point of 'sound money' is not actually to help the general population survive or prosper, it is specifically to limit the power of government
Isn't the point of limiting the power of government to actually help the general population to survive and prosper though?
> Isn't the point of limiting the power of government to actually help the general population to survive and prosper though?
It might be a lovely side benefit, but no, I don't think it is the point or outright goal in austrian economics and libertarianism. The freedom itself is the goal, which does carry the potential to succeed and prosper but also the potential of complete and utter failure and misery with it. You are allowed to be a failure completely if you so choose here. I might be wrong on the philosophy here though as I have only really skimmed the surface of mises, hayek, rothbard, etc, but that is my understanding.
>More acceptable than other digital money (banks and payment processors might say no)
>More easily divisible than for example gold coins and gold bars
These are true.
>It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)
You'll have to explain why the inability to increase the money supply is a benefit? Sure, money printing can be abused, but a growing money supply is also beneficial in a growing economy (output + population). Second, how do the current holders selling the currency to people without any Bitcoin not count as "increasing supply". If they don't sell, supply is zero, after all. What is the value of Bitcoin as a currency in that case? Nothing.
>Much more portable. You can send any amount to anyone in the world, as long as they have internet.
That provisio at the end is a big one, considering internet is susceptible to going down via both natural disasters and government whims.
I wouldn't say it's failed, but I don't see it succeeding, either. Is Bitcoin more or less mainstream than it was 2 years ago? Are transactions faster? Is it used at more retailers?
I don't see any of that. It seems like it's only a tool for speculation.
Of all the bizarre phenomenons in the world, I think the Bitcoin-as-an-investment takes the cake.
People spend a ton of energy (that could otherwise to actual useful things) on shifting around bits that they then claim are very valuable.
You could make a similar claim about fiat money except that actually makes commerce easier. Bitcoin is not a good way to transfer value since like you said it's too volatile for a currency.
So it's built on nothing, it does nothing and underpins nothing, it wastes huge amounts of otherwise useful energy and that makes it a good investment?
You know, I too really dislike the investment focus of most people. If it's not usable, it's just a bigger-fools-game. And price volatility is a definite concern.
Yet many do use it as a currency, volatility isn't a showstopper. Just look at the use in darknet markets, most serious VPNs and VPS services offer it and you can buy all sorts of stuff on for example Webhallen or Inet (two of the biggest Swedish online computer stores).
> So it's built on nothing, it does nothing and underpins nothing
And this is wrong. It's secured by cryptography and game theory.
The big thing it does is fairly simple: It enables digital payments without a trusted third party. It's relevant for businesses who cannot accept credit cards and there are thousands of stories where startups gets their accounts frozen, for arbitrary reasons, which may tank their business.
> it wastes huge amounts of otherwise useful energy
Actually most of the energy comes from renewable sources, which would be wasted otherwise. The Bitcoin mining industry is so competitive, it wouldn't be profitable otherwise.
I don't want to wave away the concerns as nothing, because it is a valid concern, but there are tons of other things we waste much more energy on.
I guess you are right that it's useful for black-market commerce and I suspect that's probably the only reason it has value.
Regarding this:
>Actually most of the energy comes from renewable sources, which would be wasted otherwise. The Bitcoin mining industry is so competitive, it wouldn't be profitable otherwise.
Geothermal energy isn't renewable unless it's used sparingly. Hydro-power requires huge sacrifices of land, usually fertile valleys, in the reservoir lakes. Windmills are loud, huge and ugly. Power lines require sacrifices of land. And everything needs to be produced, with the environmental impact that brings.
I'm not saying renewables are bad, they're not, but they are not so pristine that using them for bitcoins isn't a sad thing.
It's not only black-market commerce though. Porn, legal marijuana, gambling, auctions are for example considered off limits by most payment processors and in some cases even banks. PayPal even froze Minecraft's account (but it was quickly reinstated due to it's popularity, many others have not been so lucky).
Yeah, but no one is flooding valleys to power mining operations. They use already existing hydro power plants like those China built in the middle of nowhere and didn't have use for because of poor planning. You can also turn on the miners only for periods of lower demand (e.g. at night).
His point is some of the cheapest energy in the world is renewable (like hydroelectric energy in China), which is what Bitcoin is using. Bitcoin mining can take place virtually anywhere in the world so it can be done where energy is already abundant.
Value and it's underpinnings act in very bizzare ways, and people might assign value to something just because other people do as well. Regarding Bitcoin, one of the reasons people assign value to it is because it offeres a way to keep track of value in a way that is almost impossible to manipulate. Cyclical reasoning right there. That property is not unlike gold, but besides gold also offeres some extra advantages (and disadvantages) like being able to transfer it across the world in 10 minutes or pass it across borders without any hassle.
People spend a ton of energy, that could otherwise have been put to better use, to extracting small fragments of yellowish metal from beneath the ground, cleaning it up only to put it in another cave behind bars and locks. Then they go around loudly proclaiming how valuable it is.
A lot of work was spent moving it only to never use it. Value is a strange thing, I guess. One would think they could skip that massively expensive and somewhat dangerous unnecessary part and just count large numbers instead, or something.
That's a valid point, but the removal of the physical step only serves to make the whole process even more absurd.
With gold bars at the very least you have in your hands a concentrated lump of actual material that will survive a power outage or a lost password or something.
But of course that whole process is as absurd as you point out today because gold holds residual value from when it actually was a convenient universally recognized store of value.
> So it's built on nothing, it does nothing and underpins nothing, it wastes huge amounts of otherwise useful energy and that makes it a good investment?
Just an armchair hypothesis, but perhaps given it's lack of underlying utility (vs gold for example) Bitcoins "value" is mostly just a measurement of the level of distrust in fiat currencies and the institutions and governments that back them.
There are a subset of people who by nature will never trust fiat currencies, or govts and institutions that back them, and the "floor" of Bitcoin is defined by their participation, as well as those with a vested interest (i.e. a large early stake) in Bitcoin. As the distrusting population expands and contracts, Bitcoin will vary in value.
I do wonder whether rising energy costs will take a bite out of the value proposition for it, though.
The carbon price of cryptocurrency damns it enough. If it weren’t for the lucky happenstance of fossil fuels we probably wouldn’t have had the energy Infrastructure around to develop computers to crunch numbers for this sort of moonshot.
You're very welcome to add me to the dumb club too.
In addition I'm a smidgeon confused about how the bitcoin exchange rate is determined. It seems to be whatever exchanges say it is. There must be some metrics to determine that, but overall the market seems so illiquid and some of those exchanges seem a bit like easily hacked two bit shysters with some PHP scripts and a snazzy whitepaper.
I suspect that volatility may be a feature to money launders - not as ransomware transmissions or anything like that but justifying balance transfers. Not saying that was even an intention as opposed to ideology but to paraphrase cyberpunk the street finds its own uses. The fact there are innocent users is what makes the conspiratorial useful.
This is all read and theoretical - I certainly don't have any practical experience with either combatting or committing money laundering.
Anyway fine art and wines are infamous as pretextual transfer vehicles because the values are often so subjective - bitcoin swinginess serves the same purpose, especially if the hypothetical enterprises control enough to manipulate the market. Big assumptions of course that such a thing exists but it highlights who it could be useful to (intelligence agencies and organized crime - which are arguably largely the same thing to the host country - both break the law in pursuit of their agenda).
Anyway that form of laundering involves buy something at a lower/normal price and selling high. The selling high can be from having a contact buy it for higher with your dirty money. Of course open sales would be preferrable - not only because deals only between connections are obvious but some bonus profit. If someone not involved outbids or provides enough of a margin to be worth backing off all the better - you can move the dirty money another day.
If one needs to funnel clean into dirty do it in reverse order essentially.
The exchanges aren't market makers, they're exchanges. Totally separate concept. The NYSE isn't a market maker for stocks, for example.
Your confusion seems to be that the exchanges are coming up with the prices, which is not at all how it works. Again, the price is set exactly the same way as it is on the NYSE, by matching bids and asks.
BTC failed to be a currency that could be used for practical purposes. There's really nowhere to spend BTC today that matters.
If Amazon, Costco and AirBnB etc. allowed BTC, well, others might join, and we'd possibly see real circulation. For whatever reason, it was never meant to be.
The better question is "Why does Facebook think that being based in Switzerland will protect them?
It's been a while since Swiss banks were last immune to U.S. government pressure. Or even pressure from other countries. I can't bother to find the links now, but there were a couple of stories during Obama's time, about the US government arresting people based on their financial transactions in Switzerland.
As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
Honestly so am I, this sounds like a privacy nightmare. Sending all traffic through their servers specifically for the purpose of tracking what you're doing.
Isn't this one of the things Apple was upset at Facebook over (including the fact that they went around the App Store) since they don't allow this sort of tracking?
So maybe them building the feature is not the only reason they removed your app?
It's Screen Time and you can find it under Settings > Screen Time. It doesn't really track social network activity as much as iOS app usage by app categories (it can't tell if you were writing a post, browsing images, etc.).
This type of app would have been possible to build without a VPN on any other OS. Apple has chosen to make it difficult for anyone other than themselves to build such apps.
This is an abuse of market position in one market to expand in another, and has a long term negative effect on the health of the industry if only the large players that own the ecosystem can profit from it.
Those are developer tools, so of course they need to do things you would never want Slack to do, for example. Also, Apple themselves ported Dtrace to MacOS. If you want the ultimate computing surveillance tool, Dtrace is a good bet.
I think that's fine. What's not fine is removing the app itself from the app store as it was generating $45k a year, the same week of releasing its competing app.
Either you remove it because it's against the TOS, anytime in the 1.5 years that the app existed, or leave it be. Don't 'coincidentally' remove it the same week you release a competing app. That's just nonsense.
The average user will not understand the implications of the tracking. And even if the tracking is benevolent today, who's to say that won't change when the company is acquired in six months?
well no, but the removal of permissions could come with some warning so that developers have time to adapt and find other ways to solve the problem. if the developers would have known ahead of time they would have been able to invest their efforts into other directions.
It was removed after the feature was announced because that was also when they changed the App Store guidelines. Previously it did not violate the rules.
It depends who you talk to. The only people I know who still use, or don't hold a negative view of, Facebook are my parents, grandparents, and other old people who certainly won't be purchasing Facebook's "cryptocurrency". The vast majority of the young people I talk to, as well as other engineers, have a negative view of Facebook and don't use their services (aside from maybe Instagram). The latter is the group that would potentially be interested in crypto, but they won't be buying it from Facebook. Personally, I hope Facebook fails spectacularly
> Keung Suk-man, one of the parents among the protesters, denounced the opposition camp for calling for a strike by schools and teachers to oppose the extradition amendments. Such blatant incitement went against the school's principle of protecting students and training them to think independently, she added.
"training them to think independently", It really does read like satire
It always amazes me that either 1. they can't see how ridiculous what they are writing is or 2. don't care because it works and they get paid, no matter how deceptive, immoral, and harmful it is.
The world would be so much better if people refused to write this hypocritical drivel.
I've known people like that; I try to stay far away from them.
You know it's funny because you can use Internet freely. Chinese people behind GFW has nothing to fact check with. All the social network platforms require real name, trying to spread something you learned through VPN will result in police knocking on your door real fast.
> Eleven protesters were arrested on suspicion of unlawful assembly, assaulting police, disorderly conduct in a public place, and other riot-related offenses, according to the police.
Also "Eleven protesters were arrested on suspicion" is a pretty low percentage of incidents for a 2 million or so strong protest. That to me sounds like pretty good evidence that it's largely very peaceful.
Cracking down on a massive popular protest against overreach would just be counter productive to Chinese interests. My guess is that these eleven are not just random protesters, but were either identified as leaders or will be used to send a message.
They were arrested for last week's protest of approx. 1m people, not Sunday's. According to some estimates, the police injured 70+ people and arrested 11.
It's pretty shocking for us HKers, as the police used to be trusted and looked upon very favorably. That trust has deteriorated since the Umbrella Revolution.
>Among these social groups was an alliance of more than 30 local political, business and legal dignitaries who support the proposed amendments to the SAR's extradition law.
Why does anyone in HK support the amendments (or is this fake news)?
China Daily is trying to almost completely misrepresent the reason for the protests. The only way they could make it more "opposite day" is by calling the protest a celebration festival for the love of Chinese authority in Hong Kong.
The funny thing about the misrepresentation is that the U.S. isn't really even meddling. We care our trade deficit with China and tariffs than human rights abuses in China.
Well, there's a bipartisan bill that threatens to abolish HK's treatment as separate from mainland China for trade purposes, if HK's autonomy becomes insufficient.
(And, I despise Ted Cruz, but kudos for supporting that bill.)
It might well be that 30 people or so support the amendments, but what China Daily forgot to report is that more than a million people marched to protest against them.
The establishment (somewhat aligned with "pro-Beijing" camp) has more than half seats (43/70) in HK's Legislative Council. Goverment bills require simple majority in the Council to pass. Establishment's support guaranteed that the bill would have passed.
Where exactly do you get this from?