I could not disagree more. Neo4j has got to be the most intuitive, simplistic database structure on earth. The php client is amazingly optimized, even for super small datasets, it murders sql. The graph visiualizer is beautiful and extremely helpful. I might even argue that it has better documentation than SQL because it's all in one place with instructional videos and tutorials. If you live in silicon valley, you can go to their office for "office hours" and they give you pizza and beer and teach you how to use it. It so simple and easy to use a child could do it.
Simple and easy is not really what I'm looking for in a database. I mean sure those are nice, but they are orthogonal to the important issues, which I'll loosely classify as power. A lot of people flocked to MongoDB based on the promise of ease-of-use plus scalability, but then realized there's no free lunch, and actually learning SQL was a small price to pay for the power of modern RDBMSes. They partied hard with their schema-less designs, pushing code faster than anyone ever thought possible, right up until they learned the purpose and value of data integrity.
This is not to say that Neo4j is just an overhyped fad DB, but saying that the structure is "intuitive [and] simplistic" is not confidence inspiring.
Last time I used Neo4j in production with NodeJS we had only a few thousand nodes, and our heaviest query, which equated to a 2-table-join sql query, took up to 3 seconds to complete. We abandoned it and went with postgres...
yes my friend, you are misunderstanding the exchange rate. There are currently ~40 million "dogecoins" floating around the internet. All the dogecoins combined are presently worth $55 million USD. Therefore each dogecoin is worth $.0014 USD.
Before this announcement, there were only ever going to be 100 billion dogecoin in existence. Now they just decided that they want a 5 billion doge inflation rate per annum, Thereby decreasing the the value of each dogecoin.
Its somewhat similar to the way that the federal reserve pumps money into the market to increase the flow of capital, the dogecoin foundation wants to increase the flow of dogecoin by increasing the supply and access and decreasing the incentive to hoard.
edit the code was already written to be inflationary. The plan was to implement a 100 billion cap in some future version. They scrapped that plan.
It's not so bad in theory, at least it counters the deflationary-currencies-are-evil-and-stupid argument. The real worry is that now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency, and that the entity may violate that trust by later deciding to further inflate the currency.
Does anyone have a good explanation as to why this is supposed to be hard to achieve? What incentive do miners in the distant future have against inflating a cryptocurrency?
For example, take Bitcoin after the cap has been reached and mining bitcoins only gives fees. If 50% of miners cooperate to make blocks worth real bitcoins again, they will suddenly start raking in more profit. They will be devaluing everyone's stores of bitcoins to do it, but people who hold bitcoins have no say in it, only computing power does. If we assume that miners will be the main owners of bitcoins for all eternity then they will probably never agree to this, but if there are a lot of miners with very little in reserve then why wouldn't they accept devaluing bitcoins a little bit to get more per block mined?
Exchanges and other prominent users would probably also have to agree to the change. Things might get bad if there was a split between miners and everyone else because the miners could perform 51% attacks on the other fork, though.
The Jamaican bobsled team are going to the Olympics based on donations from a cryptocurrency based on a set of jokes centered around a picture of a dog from a blog.
There is a reason William Gibson stopped doing straight sci-fi.
Many people. I personally threw $100 in because why not? Its a small amount of cash to lose. I am willing to bet more then 300 people have spent more then $100.
The inflation rate over time will actually tend to zero, since each additional 5bn coins represents a smaller proportion of the total amount. A constant quantity over time translates into a decreasing rate of inflation.
This is important - anything that a majority of a cryptocurrencies userbase doesn't like won't get implemented because they wouldn't upgrade the protocol, they would fork it.
"you see this nobel prize? yeah bitch. I AM the muthafuckin' economy. Now worship this bitcoin opinion piece that highlights my lack of technological understanding. I am your God."
Every article, huh? Krugman has much insight to offer about the world of economics, although I know it's hip to rip on him nowadays. Oh well, stay ignorant.
In April, I watched the price of bitcoin every day. When it approached $200 I said "f*ck it," took out a student loan and bought in at $225. The VERY NEXT DAY the price collapsed. I watched bitcoin slide to $50 in a state of complete and utter devastation. I felt so stupid. I decided not to sell, and just considered the loan to be a write-off.
Point being, you should assess the quality of your investment in years, not hours. And in regards to the Chinese government, allow me to quote Mahatma Gandhi:
> first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
There's a few things weird about this story. Are you really proud you have a leveraged position in bitcoin? Isn't that among the riskiest positions you can take on a very volatile, illiquid, and possibly illegal asset? That's totally a personal choice, but it's certainly not one I would or a typical retail investor should ever take. Your decision to buy-and-hold during a sell off in the Spring is at best an anecdote and certainly should not be used as any evidence on what behavior to do now.
Government intervention is just one of a few significant black swans: blocksize changes, verification (i.e. mining) fragmentation (effectively doubles the money supply for each split), and SHA collision attacks becoming practical. None of this should ever happen, right?
However, this line should be clarified in every context:
> took out a student loan and bought in at $225.
In the US, this is generally _not OK_. To everyone else in the US, do not read this as a positive example. Do not use student loans for bitcoin or any other investment.
What can I use my federal student loan money for?
You may use the money you receive only to pay for education expenses at the school that awarded your loan. Education expenses include such school charges as tuition, room and board, fees, books, supplies, equipment, dependent child care expenses, transportation, and rental or purchase of a personal computer. Talk to someone at the financial aid office at your school if you need more details. [1]
(Of course you may have been one of the small percentage who took out an unregulated private loan, but the principles behind those are generally the same).
It's also illegal in the UK to reinvest your student loan.
Update: I can't find a link to back this statement up and at least one UK Bank (Barclays) seems to encourage it. My evidence is therefore purely anecdotal — I remember it being noted in the terms at the time.
Please spare us the lecture on what an investor should and should not do. What someone does with their money is their choice and the consequences of what happens with that money is their consequence.
i love how you are telling him it was a dumb idea, when you have no idea if he sold enough at $1100 to cover his student loan, or that right now he is still in a position where he has doubled his money in a matter of months regardless of this crash.
Too many people offering investment advice in hindsight round here.
Err isn't ivanplenty doing the opposite of offering hindsight investment advice? He's saying it was stupid despite it ending up being a profitable investment.
Thank you captain obvious. I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that using student loans for unauthorized investments is a violation of the contract. Gee willakers! I better go turn myself in!
Gandhi never said the "first they ignore you" thing. It's been traced back to a speech by a union activist in 1912 or so. Lots of previous discussion about this on HN.
I replied on the matter of investing in currency. Shorting is one investment strategy. Buy and hold is another one. I bet a lot of people would short bitcoin if they could.
Anyway this is ridiculous. People try to analyze an new phenomena with the old terminology. It doesn't work like that. You can't understand the change if you don't change your paradigm.
Wrong question, I think. This thing is barely a currency. It has built-in deflation, which makes it a great long-term store of value (assuming it isn't killed somehow) in a world of depreciating alternative stores of value, but a bad currency. If you want a currency for day-to-day use, USD is what you want. If you want to hedge against USD depreciation, BTC is one option.
Bitcoin aspires to be a currency and is presented as one, at the same time as trying to boost adoption by presenting itself as a cannot fail investment (hence built-in depreciation, mining etc), so I think it's a fair question.
If I declare white pebbles currency, and that there are only 20 pebbles acceptable, and each year I'll throw one into the deep sea, I have an appreciating currency. What is missing in my pebble currency is confidence, an intangible and difficult thing to acquire, and an easy thing to lose.
If you want to hedge against USD depreciation, BTC is one option.
If you want a hedge against USD depreciation, given the huge volatility of Bitcoin, I'd say it's far worse than most other assets, or even most other currencies. A hedge against inflation should not be volatile, it is meant to reduce risk, and ideally it should have an intrinsic value or very predictable demand.
It should also be in a regulated market - I wonder which of these exchanges will go bust because of this crash? If they guarantee a price in USD for bitcoin to users and the price plummets straight afterward, or regulations mean they can't sell the coins, they're going to be in an awkward place. There are no guarantees that anyone who has money in bitcoin will ever be able to convert it out into another currency, because any of these companies could go bust and leave their customers with nothing. That's a very different situation from most other assets.
I think it maps decently well to the concept of a currency. It has no intrinsic value, and the amount of it in circulation is controlled by a central authority.
In the case of the US, the Fed constantly adjusts the dollars in circulation to further their monetary policies (typically low inflation, with economic growth), while in the case of BitCoin, the amount in circulation is set by a mathematical curve that is deflationary in nature.
Analyzing it as a deflationary currency (which many people treat as an "investment", because it increases in value over time) is about right.
Currencies have additional characteristics in the real world, that are not part of the dictionary definition:
- I can file a police report if my dollars are stolen, and there is a non-trivial chance I could get them back.
- I can store dollars at an insured institution, with a high degree of confidence in retrieving them again. [1]
- I [get to | have to] pay my taxes in dollars.
In essence, for all of our lifetimes, "currency" has always meant "state currency", with all the good and bad that goes with it. Even when precious metals were the norm, states still tended to get involved (stamping the Emperor's face on certain coins and giving those coins preferential treatment).
While BTC meets the definition for currency in some ways, it's probably more practical in our current financial ecosystem to think of them as a highly fungible (and volatile) asset. (As with the stock market, no one should be putting all their life savings into crypto-coins.) As the ecosystem continues to grow, this may change.
[1] This might be the balancing factor to the deflationary issue, to the extent that it matters: that most people might end up keeping their hoard at an insured, well-secured BTC Bank, and paying a small steady percentage for the assurance that their whole pile doesn't disappear.
My point is that if you measure bitcoin as a currency it's doomed to be a failure. I don't care if its called a crypto currency, it's a crap currency. After one minute of reading about it the major benefit to me was its supply limit. Demand is erratic, supply is limited. It's an option on a black swan-like resource. Its name or what most people think of it as, doesn't change the fundamentals.
I'd agree my usage of the term 'hedge' isn't useful. But it is nice to have something that has appreciated so well over time, where my own currency has sucked.
I don't worry too much whether it succeeds or fails, but I assume if it succeeds it'll have to move through the hysteria and a trough of disillusionment to find some niche.
Inflation and deflation are not solely functions of the supply of money. They are functions of the price of money, which is a function of both supply and demand. The price of goods, which have been reasonably stable in U.S. dollar terms, have fallen in terms of Bitcoin. Thus Bitcoin is presently deflationary, not inflationary.
If you want to protect yourself against USD depreciation, buy Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS). Ultra safe, ultra boring.
But why would you want to? Inflation is bad if you have lots of money but no (prospects of) income. Retirees for instance. Most of you are in the opposite situation.
You can speculate in currency fluctuations in any currency, but to refer to a currency as an investment is a huge red flag for it as a currency, and for investment assets you should prefer slow appreciation over wild fluctuations and speculative moves.
investment and speculation are two sides of the same coin (pardon the pun). all investment has risk. bitcoin speculation is a high risk investment. this may not be good for everyone but its an investment nonetheless.
Speculation is not investment. The difference is that investments pay dividends, and buy and hold is a viable strategy. A speculator is relying on appreciation to make flipping the asset pay off, and is screwed if they eventually need a greater fool and can't find one.
invest. "1. To commit (money or capital) in order to gain a financial return". nothing about dividends or buy and hold here. your definition seems very narrow by comparison.
I wouldn't take a definition seriously that failed to exclude lottery tickets.
Ever since Rich Dad, Poor Dad I've been careful to distinguish assets that bring income, and other forms of property and equity whose price is purely an illusion supported by speculators' predictions about other speculators' whims.
In 08' pension funds got wiped out. They felt so stupid. They decided not to sell, and just considered their loans a write-off. They stayed written off. You should assess the quality of your investment in utility, not years. And in regards to Bitcoin, allow me to quote myself
I'd like to point out that, as an early adopter, it really pains me when I see people using situations like this to argue for the viability of Bitcoin as a currency.
Bitcoin is going to succeed because anecdotally you risked far more than was responsible on a winning gamble?
Prices don't just increase inexhaustibly. Bitcoin isn't going to 'win' if the only value it has is that people can wake up to find their investment multiplied overnight. These are the elements of a ponzi scheme, and you shouldn't argue for its success because of your kitschy miracle story.
FWIW, most "investments" that regular people make in the stock market are also, in fact, speculation. Once the stock has been issued originally, the issuing company receives no proceeds from subsequent sales of that stock. There might be secondary or tertiary effects that eventually lead to real investment, but for the most part, the majority of American's retirement savings are in speculative holdings.
The amount of borrowed money on the stock market as a percentage of GDP recently reached an all time high. And with institutional interest rates as low as they are, money is cheap, and it's flowing into tech. In fact, one could make the case that the entire global economy is being propped up by central banks.
And there's no denying that the price of snapchat is bat shit insane. Plus look at facebook, running out of ideas, losing touch with the youth, desperately trying to buy up burgeoning competition. This is characteristic of the sector as a whole.
Carl Sagan said: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
