And the Oscar for the most cryptic hyperlink on Hacker News goes to...
Oh. Another fascinating article about Bitcoin, the internet phenomenon that is to cryptography what Ayn Rand is to philosophy.
I'd happily pay for an option to display Hacker News without any articles that reference Bitcoin. I figure I'd get through the feed in half the time...
Jesus christ, is it so hard to not pay attention to things that you don't care about? 90% of what shows up on HN isn't up my alley but I don't post some overly dramatic bullshit in the comments of every one.
If you'd pay for it, why not pay someone to make it, if you're too lazy to make it yourself? Ultimately, who cares?
I don't really mind bitcoin drama but this "submission" is terrible. No context, no nothing, no analysis.
It's not a submission aimed at the HN community, it's a submission aimed at the bitcoin community because it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to the rest of us who aren't very familiar with the protocol.
This submission is obviously not meant for me, it seems fair that I would ask for the possibility of not seeing it, don't you think?
Do you really expect the context and analysis to appear in the headline? Look over the last 10 days of HN front pages and observe how few headlines fit your requirements. Columns whose punchy titles explain little, or simple names of projects (with a version number afterwards, useless for someone who hasn't followed the project), or of course the endless tools and libraries that are totally inapplicable to the area of expertise one reader happens to inhabit. Oh, mobile-first CSS? Obviously not meant for me. Vim-related? Obviously not meant for me. Bomber for sale? Obviously not meant for me. B2B? Obviously not meant for me.
You want a subHN special for you? That's not what this website is about, never has been, but you've been an active member for a dog's age right? But now you want to hide a story because you don't like the framing? Tut!
Nothing fair or unfair about what you're asking for, when you're perfectly aware of the way this site works. You are your own filter. This is not a place for pony requests.
The headline? You mean the hash thing? Of course not. But even after opening the webpage I have no idea what that's about. It's an inside thing for the bitcoin community.
Everyday on HN I see posts about subject I know nothing about. Things about technologies I never used, people I've never met and places I've never been. That's why I come here, to discover new things.
This post is not like that however, it's the equivalent of me submitting a link to an obscure commit to some lesser known subsystem of the linux kernel without any context.
Of course you always expect a certain amount of shared knowledge among a comunity. For HN it would be a certain computer literacy and basic knowledge of computer languages I suppose. Also, startup stuff. This post goes well beyond that and assumes familiarity with bitcoin, the implementation of its protocol and all the context leading up to that.
And no, I don't want a subHN, I was no-so-subtly hinting that I don't this this submission is good and has its place on the frontpage. It does not gratify my intelectual curiosity, to paraphrase the guidelines.
I saw it, and I knew what it was, so I clicked it. Other things, that confuse me, sometimes I click them to find out what they are, sometimes I ignore them. Without being a bitch about it.
All I can see here is people moaning because this isn't what they have come to expect from HN. It isn't a startup? Not a new Node library? Omg, this isn't some hip news? It shouldn't be in hacker news!
Someone just transferred ~100 million dollars across the net without a bank being involved. Even without knowing anything about why or who, just the fact that this occurred is interesting. Money is one of the earliest information technologies and bitcoin, whether or not you think it will be successful in the long run, is something that anyone who professes an interest in technologies should be watching very closely.
Don't give me that bullshit. It's not hard at all. It's not even close to hard. It would be an understatement to call it easy. Anyone complaining about this is so steeped in entitlement that if they told me such a thing in real life I'm afraid I would become animal-like. Such complaints are worse than pointless and I hope OP or whatever refers to the guy I responded to originally, and to some extent you, get some fucking perspective. It's embarrassing.
But, what if you became "animal-like" IRL and the guy just completely kicked your ass in response? I mean, that would be a distinct possibility, right?
Just hypothesizing on where that scenario would leave things.
Man, I'm just tired of people crying about how hard their life online is. If someone were complaining to you in real life about how they had to not pay attention to a single line of text — so much so that they had to call it out at the time — I think I would have to just tell them how shitty I think they are. I've seen too many people doing it to pretend it's not a pervasive problem among the tech-literate. Someone needs to tell them their objections are so trivial that they ought not be aired at all. It's a strange paradox!
The title is a bit opaque but with the domain displayed next to it I don't think it's that hard to infer hash+blocksomething=bitcoin.
For what it's worth I don't like all the Bitcoin stories on the front page but sometimes they're interesting (the slow motion train crash that is MtGox) and other times, when they'd not interesting, they're not hard to ignore.
The problem isnt just the title - this whole submission is pointless.
I saw the long hash and assumed it had something to do with bitcoin. I clicked through onto the link, but I still have no idea what's going on. I'm guessing that someone sent and recieved lots of bitcoins in one transaction, but I don't know the significance of that.
Perhaps the OP could have linked to an article discussing or describing it? Or even have made the submission a text submission and commented on it himself?
This is the largest "bitcoin days destroyed" since ever. It's also most likely Mt. Gox's bitcoins that are moving as well. This transaction can be traced back to an arbitrary transaction Mark Karpeles made to prove he still had keys to his address some time ago.
Cool facts:
- where else does $180million move without any fees, in the blink of an eye?
- some transactions after this diverted some money into Satoshi Dice, so it's most likely not the Feds who control this, and they're potentially interested in laundering potential.
And if this is ordinary way in which I communicate? Am I typing in all caps? Am I misspelling things, or threatening people, or invoking fallacies? I feel strongly about this kind of thing. If I appear to be less than calm to you, you might do well to consider how very little you have to go on in this evaluation of my demeanor.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
I'm going to have to recommend everyone ITT take a deep breath and let it go.
Yes, it is harder to find content that is pushed out by excessive bitcoin coverage. Yes, it is hard to ignore bitcoin content when it makes up so much of the front page and of /new.
Man quit upvoting my dumb angry response to his idiotic, entitled garbage and vote up the informative and consequential stuff below. If a year from now we look back and this nonsense is the top comment, what claim will HN have to being a community where meaningful discourse is valued?
Yeah pay someone to add a filter. I'm thinking simply grab the html from each HN link, perform some search against a Bitcoin word/phrase dictionary, if it's a match then hide that link.
For a laymen like myself, why is this particular transaction posted here? Is this recently stolen coin or something, or just a curiosity because it's such a ridiculously large amount?
These coins haven't (on average) been moved in the last 2.17 years.
An extremely early Bitcoin player is moving coins around, and it just happens to be on the same day 'Satoshi Nakamoto' was doxxed. Coincidences are usually ignored, but now we're talking about $118 million dollars worth of coincidences.
I remember reading someone's analysis that suggested satoshi has never touched the vast majority of bitcoins he mined (based on the block's nonce you can figure out who the miner was in the early days)
Furthermore, for those of us who aren't quite sure how the blocks and ownership work at this level, what about the other transactions of the 289321 block? What does 289321 signify, and what about the 29,999 BTC transaction listed here?
Just that it was the 289321th block to be mined on the mainline of the blockchain.
> what about the other transactions of the 289321 block?
These are just transactions that happened within approximately 10 minutes before the block was mined (precisely, those that reached the miner between 06:22:28 and 06:34:54 today -- times in UTC I guess).
So this is a 2-year-old block, and ~$15 million (just estimating at ~500/btc) being shifted around in that set isn't abormal? (Not sure how recycling of big amounts works, I'm not being facetious)
Block is just a set of transactions. New block happens every 10 minutes and contains all the transactions that all the bitcoin users sent during that period.
So, this one transaction is interesting because it involves an old address. Other transactions in this block are probably unrelated.
Inside the bubble of the bitcoin soap opera this is a big deal. In financial terms, this is the construction cost of a US middle school or 8 miles of Kentucky Interstate Highway [in non-mountainous terrain].
That's of course assuming that someone would take that many bitcoin in lieu of cash and that the availability of that many additional bitcoin would not lower market exchange rates.
Sure it's interesting to speculate as to the who and why, and if you're a blackhat it might be profitable to try to figure out the where in hope of a bonanza attack. But it's not much in terms of how much other people's money there is in the world.
This is something I don't understand about the "bitcoin days destroyed" metric. Yes, it filters out rapid back-and-forth moves of small amounts over a short time frame, but it also over-empasizes transactions such as this. Seems to me, based on the age, that this is likely just someone moving coins between wallets or consolidating their stash for cold storage.
It's also worth noting that, based on the age of these coins, the actual invested dollar amount this represents is only $900,000.
118M USD and no transaction fee paid! Is this likely Satoshi moving his coins now he has been identified? I really hope he is ok and being out does not lead to any harm or distress for the man.
That's interesting! You made me read more about Bitcoin transaction fees (I found this http://bitcoinfees.com/ offering an explanation, although I can't appreciate its quality in this regard). I found this disturbing:
"If any of the outputs (including any change) of your transaction are less than 0.01 XBT, then a fee of 0.0001 XBT is required."
Bitcoin is fungible up to a "Satoshi" fraction, yet the low-amount transactions are discouraged. Actually I'm not sure how it would be even possible to operate with amounts of 0.0001 Bitcoin or lower in the current condition (and that's one US Dollar at 10k USD/Bitcoin)!
A forum account linked to Satoshi posted today for the first time in several years to say that his identity was not that of Dorian Nakamoto. Plenty of people countered that the account could have been hacked, controlled by a site admin, etc. and have asked for further proof in the form of movement of some of the true Satoshi's stash of bitcoin. This could be that proof (or something else entirely).
Or, consistently with the persona in the article, it’s actually Satoshi claiming not to be Satoshi.
(Mind you, as much as a bitcoin-hater as I am, I find doxxing him distasteful. And I’m not even a total anti-doxxer, I just don’t see any justification for exposing his persona).
"Bitcoin days destroyed for any given transaction is calculated by taking the number of Bitcoins in a transaction and multiplying it by the number of days it has been since those coins were last spent."
The transaction displays "Coin days destroyed", which is an indication of past transaction activity. When you haven't spent 20 BTC for a day and 5 BTC for a week, there are 20 * 1 + 5 * 7 = 55 coin days destroyed. This particular transaction has 143,132,916 (!) coin days destroyed; at least some of 180,000 BTC spent today haven't been spent for past 143,132,916 / 180,000 ~= 795 days, just over two years, as per the pigeonhole principle.
I clicked on the question mark next to bitcoin days destroyed, which explained a bit more about why his is interesting other than the volume -- looks like these are coins that haven't been touched in a couple years.
I was thinking it's perhaps promo for blockr.io ? But, it is interesting because it's a transfer of coin worth over 110 million dollars USD (with today's conversion rate anyway).
Having been someone who hasn't really had the money, time or interest to invest in bitcoins, this submission doesn't make a great deal of sense to me; despite one particular angry sweary guy shouting at everyone claiming it 'should be obvious'. But I'm not angry that I don't understand it, or am not interested in it, we're spoilt for choice with great content on hacker news, so this doesn't mean much to me personally, who cares? I'll read something else, or maybe it might inspire me to give a little more time to look in to BitCoin. I can see that already that's a large amount of money being processed, that in an of itself sparks some sense of curiosity.
Following the destination addresses involved in the subject transaction reveals that the BTC is now being split repeatedly among newly created (or newly used) destination addresses.
The general consensus on MtGox heist (and most others happening recently) is that they were stolen bit small chunk, and hidden keeping them separated: whomever is behind it is has taken the habit to avoid detection, making that transaction an unlikely candidate (but it’s not absurd to think counter-psychology would…)
In addition to being a large amount, this appears to have been immobile for a more than two years. With the events of the past two years, it’s hard to believe anyone with that large sum has not handled them in any way. A likely explanation after yesterday supposed revelation on BitCoin’s presumed pseudonymous inventor, is that it is one of his personal wallets. Mining coins started as much easier computationally, and it appears one actor did a large chunk of that early on, earning him or her the largest stash of BitCoins.
I personally doubt it would be an under-assuming personality, and would rather consider some of the project more vocal early proponent, too happy to have a name with a discrete personality to match that could be used for a mysterious founder myth, and shed away the attention.
Of course that's just my gut reaction to human nature, but MtGox has looked more like panicked people who tucked up and were trying to double down than reacting to the shock of robbery. In particular the delusional documents that surfaced after the collapse look like the product of someone whose been riding the tiger not the resplane to a recent catastrophe.
Indeed. Hence my main point on HN for the last week: for a system that presumably requires no trust and has fully public transactions, BitCoin is surprisingly rife with spectacular heists, misinformations and contradictory speculations.
It is not ready for primetime at a structural level. Advocates need to stop trying to convince those who are already converts, and address problems and fears of non-participants.
For those asking about the transaction being processed without transaction fee, it was possible because it satisfies three conditions: tx size < 1000 bytes, outputs are more than 0.01 btc and priority is high enough.
It's been a while since I've looked at the protocol but I believe it's because other network members have to verify your transaction, so you have to pay for that compute time otherwise you could flood/ddos the network with fake transactions
Fees are there to prevent micro-transaction spam. If there were no fees, anyone could flood the network with very small transactions and it would suck.
For big transactions like this one, involving old coins, no fee is needed and miners will accept it immediately.
Hopefully someone can expand on this answer but broadly it's so that there's an incentive for transactions to be recorded. (And apparently transaction fees can be adjusted up and down, across the entire system, to ensure this happens.)
Is it just me or have some people been watching too many movies these days? Are there ANY examples of this having happened in the US, with BitCoin, ever?
So someone can approach any ex secret military contractor in USA and get anything he/she wants just as simple as that? Isn't it like a security breach?
Oh. Another fascinating article about Bitcoin, the internet phenomenon that is to cryptography what Ayn Rand is to philosophy.
I'd happily pay for an option to display Hacker News without any articles that reference Bitcoin. I figure I'd get through the feed in half the time...