Of course I taught my child to read and write. Beyond that, I am not forcing them to get up at 7am and memorize what other adults want them to all day every day. My child can learn about whatever interests him. I pay attention to what he is doing and provide advice, guidance, resources.
For example, if tomorrow I learn that my son has taken an interest in playing guitar, I will encourage him to take lessons, and provide what he needs to do that. I may expose him to music theory or other things I think align with his interests.
I will try and encourage him to cultivate skills and interests, but it is up to him what he wants to do.
Ships, planets, space, etc. are scarce and owned by various actors. The Federation is an interplanetary government made of sovereign member states, many of which do trade and use money. Even without the use of trade, there must be systems for determining who controls what.
The incessant snide comments expressing nothing but dislike for Bitcoin really don’t belong on HN. Not liking Bitcoin is fine, but if you don’t have anything to add just don’t comment. Every thread about Bitcoin on HN does not a dozen comments that it’s a waste of time and energy.
If I’m going to stick my savings in a cryptocurrency, I want the network to be stable for the foreseeable future (and be private, but that’s another story).
A timezone can’t be encoded with a Unix time stamp, or a date without a time, or just a time. Unix timestamps ignore leap seconds and treat days as 86400 seconds, so it doesn’t correspond directly to UTC. And they aren’t readable by humans. There are many reasons Unix timestamps aren’t appropriate for encoding a date and time.
Ethereum doesn’t know what it is. The rules are always changing, running a full node is practically impossible, and issuance is always changing. It’s not even clear that the features claimed in this paper will be true one year from now.
Multiple consensus failures (most recently this last month) and constant design changes do not provide a secure foundation for sound money.
My guess is it’s because Unix timestamps aren’t calendar date and times. The same number could mean a different date and time depending on which timezone is used.
Given a Unix timestamp, there’s no way to know which date/time the author intended. The browser can only map a Unix timestamp into the user’s timezone, but it wouldn’t know which timezone the document/page refers to.
Transaction cost isn’t determined by hash rate. The difficulty adjusts to the hash rate such that a block is mined every X minutes. Because the block size is fixed, transaction fees are determined by the market for being included in a block, so the more transactions the higher the fees.
An alternative to Bitcoin’s fixed size is Monero’s adaptive block sizing. Monero blocks expand to fit more transactions, resulting in lower fees and higher throughput.
2009: "Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852>
2010: "if this is a serious virtual currency implementation by people who understand the security implications of such, I'm unable to find strong evidence of that fact. And, so, I worry about dealing with it." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144>
2010: "at the current exchange rate they'll be worth about $12.50 USD. That's very little value for a year's worth of computation, and they're still quite rare. As more are created the exchange rate is going to drop unless they become very widely accepted, but there probably won't be enough of them to support a large economy." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144>