I hope the next congress or next administration shuts crypto down. We do not need or want it in the US economy.

It’s perfectly ok if you don’t need it, but why do you want to deny others something if they find it useful?

That's begging the question.

It's been nearly 20 years, what are cryptocoins useful for? And not personally, I mean what have the cryptocoins done to improve the USA?

If it's useless to the country, then they should be banned. That way, our investors can spend money on actually useful investments that help our citizens.

When bitcoin first arrived, in the UK it took 3+ days to send funds from one domestic account to another. Now I’m not saying that crypto catalyzed the arrival of faster payments, but it’s always good to have a fallback of “well if this tech can do it, why can’t the regular banking system?”

Bitcoin is energy inefficient. Its processing rate (blocks per sec) is a joke. Anonymous? Not that much if push comes to shove.

Then there's the fraud. If the underside of society or the get rich quick types thought for a femtosecond they COULD NOT convert crypto nonsense into actual useful currency (usd, Euro, etc.) --- which is what they really want anyway --- their interest in crypto would die the same day. Ditto for miners and exchanges.

Crypto is used primarily to evade regulation, bilk the stupid people, or wash ill gotten gains.

None of that is remotely close to value add to the economy.

Crypto has feasibility issues quarter to quarter of not being hacked with no serious regulation (based in law with enforceable judgements based on finding of fact) to counter fraud.

You got a one off transaction that your bank doesnt handle? Use PayPal, stripe, amex.

You don’t get it because you are too integrated and too deeply trust the machine. The machine protects you and is always on your side. “Use PayPal.” They said the same thing a decade ago too. It comes down to trust in humans. You speak of “enforceable judgements” like human judgement is never wrong or unjust, or even simply biased. Math is never unjust.

Cryptography is highly resistant to fraud, maintaining high integrity by merit of things like hash functions and digital signatures. Humans fall for scams and we can’t blame the math for their ignorance.

Maybe you might get the point of this next decade, but I do sincerely hope that you have a simple life of PayPal mediated transactions.

> It's been nearly 20 years, what are cryptocoins useful for? And not personally, I mean what have the cryptocoins done to improve the USA?

I guess for the USA as a whole it can be difficult to identify purely good effects, although the same can be said of things like social media. For individual holders, cryptocurrencies (not shitcoins mind you) have been a pretty decent way to hedge against a rapidly devaluing US dollar. Gold would be the same I guess, but gold is either risky to hold physically (and difficult to transport) or you are at the mercy of a custodian beholden to one or more governments.

I like this comment. Try something that's smaller (yet still minimal and complete) or stick with the devil we know, sudo. Not ideological; practical.

When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.

Absolutely agree. It's all awesome until it happens to oneself, then it gets real.

It's done its job? How tone deaf can you be?

Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And without dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.

Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.

Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.

I don't get the controversy over explicit allocators. C++ containers accept optional allocators since way back ... programmers making std like compatible containers have to deal with this aspect anyway.

I've spent quite a bit of time with zig after which I abandoned to rust despite starting with severe rust dislike. The switch was mainly due to:

- far better documented std lib. For example zig http stuff has bugs; and I could never find a public unzip inflate call despite the appearance of an impressive zig/unzip api.

- better library support esp for protocol. The zig stuff i found was few and had memory leaks.

- the fact struct fields are private by default (in zig all fields are public if you can get access to the struct). In complicated stuff the implementation has got to stay private

- the borrow checker was not a motivator, and rust compile times are nowhere annoying as I feared

- the zig i/o api i found too darn complicated and annoying

Things I still miss from zig:

- c/c++ ffi is solid. Gluing curl, zlib into zig was painless and worked day one. Rust takes more work.

- zig build and the ability to import a configuration as code is awesome.

- allocator story is good. It's darn simple to add custom allocators where performance matters

- Zig still has a couple of linker problems, or cross compliation bugs I immediately encountered when using it. One was fixed. One is still open.

Excuse me? The long history of success for nasa with and without the esa is staggering to the good.

I got more stories that jd salinger I (nasa) hold the title, and you're (spacex) just the challenger (paraphrase of beastie boy song shadrach et al)

More seriously, nasa has purposely focused on satellites and robots for scientific research on purpose for a multitude of reasons including cost.

I hate to agree the Chinese government is competent in foreign affairs, but it's true.

Fundamentally China isn't Russia or USA which both have a proclivity to become entangled in foreign problems. For the US (I'm american) the civil side has four strategic risks:

- weak to no show congress which has ceded war making to the executive branch

- civilian leadership who think bomb it and declare success which is naive

- the inability to stop being suckered in by our own hurbris when others say but we can't get it done without US involvement

- an economy post WWII built on cheap oil, which has tentacles into the mideast

Meanwhile after having pissed away 50 years of culture wars particularly since newt gingrich and the tea party, the US fiscal situation is deplorable.

Most maddening? We did this to ourselves. Blaming immigrants isn't the flex people think it is

When i read paragraphs of stuff about corporate culture from engineers --- thanks captain obvious for pointing out 180 employees isn't the same as 180,000 or that software has some of the same challenges in both environments --- I figure:

- this is sales and advertisement

- person has nothing serious going on

- can't be serious because people who care about company culture in a serious way are board members or senior managers at small companies not engineers giving anecdotes about what they think. Managers are accountable for decisions taken.