EG: You had nobody qualified to make such a decision, and consequently, nobody qualified to produce what you claim to be building. The only reason to talk about node is because it's "hot". Ruby is "hot" too. Erlang, boring, but it actually does what you're trying to do.
Well, I guess if your business model is replicating OTP, then you need to choose a platform without OTP so your engineers have something to do, right?
This slide deck really should be embarassing, because it screams "we aren't very good at this engineering thing."
So, you spent 15 minutes and picked the choice that seemed "coolest" to your team, eh? And your team had never heard of Erlang, it wasn't even in the running, eh? And you started out using ruby, for a Cloud platform? Three strikes, right there.
It's possible to make the case that go is a better choice than erlang. While go doesn't handle concurrency as well, and is a few years, rather than a few decades old, it does have an easier syntax if you're staffed with Jr engineers.
But seriously, how can we take you seriously as a company if reliability is not a consideration? If the fact that erlang, the only language which has been doing concurrency right for 20 years, with a stellar record, is never considered?
This just reinforces the impression that bay area companies are a bunch of lightweights who are not capable of solid engineering, but who succeed because a bunch of VCs put a bunch of money into them, and their biz dev guys make enough noise that it looks like traction and then they get bought by a bigger company that needs to "get in on this new technology".
Picking go is ok. Calling yourself a next-generation cloud platform without having any concern about the key factors that a responsible business needs to offer to their customers, makes you look like clowns.
It is black hat because they were charging developers for their service, which amounted to gaming the top-download charts.
This is also, against Apple's terms, and Apple has been going after companies that do this for over 18 months...which means they shouldn't be surprised that eventually Apple pulled them from the store.
Apple cares about the integrity of its charts, and will not abide people manipulating them dishonestly.
A bitcoin faq would give you more details, but the short answer is that bitcoin is built on cryptography. Every transaction in the system is stored in a chain of blocks. These blocks are created whenever someone discovers the answer to a very hard mathematical problem. When they do this, the new block is created, and that block contains all the transactions that were done since the last block was created. To make the next block, you have to have the previous block, so the entire chain of blocks can be authenticated, thus the entire history of transactions can be authenticated.
As a reward for securing the system in this way, that is, providing a secure distributed transaction history, the miners are rewarded with some bitcoins whenever they discover a new answer and create a new block.
Thus they are providing the security of the system and as a reward are given bitcoins. To keep the rate of new blocks contstant, the difficulty of the mathematical problem is adjusted up and down. Over time, the number of bitcoins you get for finding a new solution will diminish to zero.
To keep miners finding new answers, even after the reward in BTC hits zero (in the year 2140) the system has transaction fees. These are an incentive to keep finding blocks, and the person who finds the next block gets the fees for the transactions that go into that block.
Since blocks are discovered once every 10 minutes, you'd get 10 minutes worth of fees for the whole system-- which could be quite a bit in the future.
Prove it. Also, using the word "mainstream" is equivocation, you'll just say anyone who doesn't agree with this position isn't "mainstream".
Further, in support of your claim that he's not being partisan, you name a partisan spectrum of "economists". Both democrats and republicans are partisans.
It is being used as a currency, and any metric on this far exceeds where people thought it would be a few years ago. It's also having massive adoption from a wide number of people. The reason the price is moving is not "speculation" as people seem to assume, but adoption.
MtGox said they were getting 20,000 new accounts a day recently. By definition, new accounts are not "speculators" putting in trades to manipulate the price, they are people putting in trades to acquire their first bitcoins.
People rushing into a currency, right after the EU forced bank depositors to lose %40-%60 of their money in a state run bank (which was only insolvent because they were forced to buy greek debt by the very same EU) is not "speculation" -- it is seeking a safe haven.
A lot of people hope bitcoin will be a safe haven away from these increasingly manipulated and untrustworthy national currencies.
That's a huge level of success, given the limited expectations for bitcoin only a few years ago.
Suddenly it's actually considered a viable store of value for some segment of the population. Sure, it's a small percentage, but still, it's massive.
Having a thick skin isn't sufficient. Simply patiently explaining your position to people who are being hostile (eg: my previous experience on HN) doesn't do anything more than make them form up into mobs and start pursuing you and harassing you. (Seriously, everything from blatant name calling, to finding personal revelations in past comments and then posting them publicly to be mocked... ok I'm a minority, I should feel bad about that? Mocking me for being a minority was massively upvoted, while me asking why this was tolerated here was downvoted.)
Eventually, I find this site to be too much to waste time on, and simply left. (I doubt this account will last more than a day anyway.)
This site has a narrow minded and intolerant culture. (And those who are within the range of whats "Acceptable" think that its quite the opposite so they never see it.) This culture knows that it can call people names, attack them personally, dig up private information and harass them and get away with it because there will be no punishment-- since they all vote each other up in their game of "smear the queer".
This is, of course, why they do it. Hounding those who are different into leaving until you have an ideologically pure little "community".
Meanwhile the moderators of this site hellban people for the "crime" of linking to a scientific paper that disagrees with global warming (since this is a leftist site, obviously, if you disagree with global warming you're not part of the realm of people where "tolerance" applies.)
And so the people who are different leave, the "community" sits around and congratulates itself on how tolerant it is, never recognizing how completely homogenous it is.
Your quote is relevant, but it's a shame he doesn't address the implied claim that bitcoin doesn't "facilitate transactions". And while it is relatively small in that use now, he really needs to make a compelling argument to why it won't work that way in the future.
Further, it's worth pointing out that Krugman endorses a monetary system that makes people poor, via inflating the money supply by printing funds to underwrite policies that benefit, primarily, politicians.
A currency whose supply is fixed, or whose inflation rate is constant and predictable (like bitcoin) is better for facilitating transactions.
When you have a variable (and often high these days- in the US money supply is up over %50 in recent years) rate of inflation, it wrecks havoc with prices and other signals causing malinvestment and worsening the economy.
Something that Krugman, to my knowledge, has never answered for.
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Since I am not allowed to reply to the person below me:
It's quite silly to to say that a limited supply of a currency is bad for it. There is little incentive to hang onto bitcoins. A simple example will prove this to you: The amount of computer you can get for a given amount of money improves dramatically every three years. You could just hold onto your money and buy a much better computer. Thus, relative to computers, the dollar is deflationary.... yet people still buy computers.
This is the kind of argument Krugman gives because he wants to excuse the inflation that has destroyed the dollar, and the economy.... but it is nonsensical. People still buy computers.
In his defense, it was Krugman who identified in 2003, that we really needed to have a housing bubble, and advocated that we create one, because it would stimulate the economy.
And he was right- it did! Until it popped.
At the end of the day, Krugman is more a spokesperson for liberal politics than an economist. The liberals want to believe that unlimited spending is not bad, and so they put forth this narrative that it is actually good. They look to Keynes for support, but have to be very selective when they do.
Bitcoin is a currency that is not inflationary. Since unlimited spending is enabled with inflation, they see it as a threat.
What's kinda surprising, and amusing, is just how vocal and vociferous the objections to bitcoin have become in the last couple weeks.
This is not because economists recognize it will be a failure- after all, if it were to fail, they could just let it fail, no need to comment on it.
All of these stories, including this one, are indicators that the establishment economists feel threatened by bitcoin.
The reason is one they will never mention publicly - they can't control bitcoin, and they can't stop its adoption, short of draconian measures, and so it threatens their monetary regime.
Ironically if it wasn't for the mismanagement of the dollar, there wouldn't be much need for bitcoin anyway.
PS - Whenever you see someone pointing out that bitcoin dropped %XX in one day, remember the dollar has already failed twice in US history (eg: gone to zero!) and even the latest incarnation is down %98!
Well, I guess if your business model is replicating OTP, then you need to choose a platform without OTP so your engineers have something to do, right?