quantdev

6 ms·

31.
by quantdev 9y ago
"Even as bitcoin flirts with $8,000, the price required for mining to be marginally profitable stands at a jaw-dropping $300,000 to $1.5 million by 2022 based on current growth trends and electricity use, according to Christopher Chapm
32.
by quantdev 9y ago
Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is highly hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.
33.
by quantdev 9y ago
The looking 10 or even just 5 moves ahead thing is overstated and this is not actually how it works most of the time. Most GMs only calculate that far in the endgame. Before that, often looking 2 or 3 moves ahead is sufficient based on st
34.
by quantdev 9y ago
Thinking 'blockchain', which is just a linked-list with hashes, is going to solve anything is silly. It's even sillier than thinking internal intranets or TCP/IP would create huge value, when really the Internet, somethi
35.
by quantdev 9y ago
I'm pretty sure this guy was just making a joke about how slow computations on HE data is and you all are taking him seriously about generalized AI.
36.
by quantdev 9y ago
I suppose, though it would be very strange and disingenuous to leave off the most important implication.
37.
by quantdev 9y ago
I don't understand what you're trying to say. How would his abstract be different if he wasn't trying to get as many people to look at it? Many results in math establish a famous theorem by proving something more abstract th
38.
by quantdev 9y ago
For a fixed confidence level, it looks computationally light weight: a dozen or so multiplications and divisions plus one square root, which could be approximated if needed. There is no inverse normal needed at run time.
39.
by quantdev 9y ago
Fair, but I doubt the probability of the exchange getting hacked in 5 weeks is meaningful. I agree that you should never leave your coins long term on any exchange, just to be clear, but there is a reasonable amount of risk you can take.
40.
by quantdev 9y ago
Standard momentum strategy, sure, but there's no way you can claim this outperforms buy-and-hold for certain.
41.
by quantdev 9y ago
You're somewhat missing something. Take the Exchange Gemini: I send USD to Gemini and then I purchase BTC on Gemini and am charged a 0.25% fee on my purchase. So far I haven't paid any transaction mining fees and it's becau
42.
by quantdev 9y ago
Yes, you're correct -- my mistake. Bittrex's fees are 0.25% of each trade. My point about doing 30 trades every week manually is a lot still stands though. Maybe I'll try scripting this with Bittrex's API. It would be
43.
by quantdev 9y ago
Manually? So every week you do 30 separate trades on Bittrex? Seems like a lot of work and also you have 30 transaction fees (including the spread cost) for only $100. I like this idea, but only if it's scripted and for more than $10
44.
by quantdev 9y ago
Not very much, but only because those are byproducts of a cryptocurrency hack. If they didn't control centralized private keys and thus implicitly have one of the biggest bug bounties, I would be less worried about people hacking my S
45.
by quantdev 9y ago
I don't see how this is a valid argument. So what if Mt.Gox was worse? The point is there are many better exchanges than both Mt.Gox and Coinbase nowadays from a fees, customer-support, and reliability perspective. Coinbase has three
46.
by quantdev 9y ago
I, too, have had terrible past experiences with Coinbase and I no longer use them. I now buy on Gemini for fiat -> BTC and use other exchanges for altcoins. That said, I no longer keep any crypto on any exchange, including Gemini. T
47.
by quantdev 9y ago
Are you kidding me? Do you have any proof for this claim or do you think 3 million people illegally voted because Trump's ego tweeted it one day?
48.
by quantdev 9y ago
The fact that USD is "backed by the full faith and credit of the US government" is not the reason for its value. There is nothing the US government can do if everyone decides GBP or milk is worth 10,000 more relative to 1 USD. T
49.
by quantdev 9y ago
Trying to understand risk by looking at historic data alone is wrong when you're talking about catastrophic ruin and uncertain tiny probabilities. Add the word weapon in the headline quote to see what I mean, "Contrary to popular
50.
by quantdev 9y ago
This was very interesting. As a mathematician with no comp-sci type knowledge, my only understanding of inheritance is the "is a" rule. Using this, I realized that a subtype of the set of functions from Dog to Dog must be a set o
51.
by quantdev 9y ago
It's more complicated than this, unfortunately. Imagine an int variable x and two expressions f(x) and g(x) of x. Now imagine an if statement with condition f(x) < g(x). Precisely because incrementing the largest int is undefined
52.
by quantdev 9y ago
As someone who believes in cryptocurrencies, let me just say, wow, this ICO is just absurd. From that purchase agreement, “EOS TOKENS HAVE NO RIGHTS, USES OR ATTRIBUTES. The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, func
53.
by quantdev 9y ago
If marking the blockchain (ledger) is not the same thing as transferring bitcoin, then there is no such thing as transferring bitcoin, because there are no actual 'coins' stored anywhere (digital or otherwise).
54.
by quantdev 9y ago
"The embrace of Bitcoin is largely driven by dissatisfaction with the modern banking system but the designers and proponents of Bitcoin have made the fundamental and fatal mistake of believing that the problem with modern banking is th
55.
by quantdev 9y ago
I agree with the advice to read your standard library, because I think there's huge value to your general understanding of lower-level concepts and to knowing the available functionality of your language, but I disagree that it is the
56.
by quantdev 9y ago
From that article, "Some use bitcoins to buy Amazon gift cards, then order goods and food on the online store in the US and other countries, which can then be delivered by courier to Venezuela – where supermarket shelves are frequently
57.
by quantdev 9y ago
First, I never said 'financial regulations.' Of course it's hard for the average person to buy cryptocurrencies, but it will become easier, and that doesn't mean there isn't a small subset of people that are curren
58.
by quantdev 9y ago
localbitcoins They trade it person-to-person. Sure, it's hard and maybe risky, but it's also risky to keep your wealth in Bolivars when inflation is double or triple-digit percentages. "Some use bitcoins to buy Amazon gift c
59.
by quantdev 9y ago
I appreciate this article for its smart and cordial criticism, but as I've pointed out before, the decentralization of currency enables the separation of state from wealth, which will, for example, allow people in Venezuela or India to
60.
by quantdev 9y ago
With regards to cryptocurrencies, which the standard HN anti-crypto groupthink is bashing in full swing, let me just point out that most bashings I've seen on here are US-consumer-centric and don't consider the needs of countries

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