Hacker News: miguelmota

New comment by miguelmota in "Police are getting DNA data from people who think they opted out"

miguelmota — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:33:59 +0000

Social stratification, genetic elitism, genetic profiling, bio-surveillance, etc. are all very real concerns. Brave New World will become non-fiction.

New comment by miguelmota in "FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M"

miguelmota — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 17:11:22 +0000

If someone sends physical cash to a person across the world, is there an undo button?

New comment by miguelmota in "FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M"

miguelmota — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 17:08:24 +0000

The money supply managed by an on-chain protocol where it’s fully open, trustless, and predictable is 100% times better then a small group of people at the treasury deciding to print money and inflate peoples savings always.

New comment by miguelmota in "FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M"

miguelmota — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 17:03:47 +0000

Then what is the future? Certainly not the government going haywire with the printer. It’s impossible to trustlessly verify the exact number of US dollars in circulation, but it’s trivial to do with cryptocurrencies.

New comment by miguelmota in "FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M"

miguelmota — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 07:19:06 +0000

> Is there any crypto out there without humans ?

What OP is referring to is that you don't need to trust people if the dex is on-chain and verifiable. FTX was a non-transparent and insolvent centralized exchange which wouldn't be possible if it was on-chain because anyone can see the funds that are available and the protocol would not allow leverage backed by non-existing collateral.

> Is there an undo button to reverse the transaction?

No there isn't. This is a double edge sword.

> All financial systems involve humans

To a degree, but centralized exchanges have more knobs controlled by humans while an on-chain dex and just be deployed once and require no human intervention. A dex can be audited fully on-chain and anyone can see if the contract has any master holder keys. The FTX fiasco is because they own all your crypto because they have the master keys. The future of finance is people being in charge of their own money and where no unexpected entity can arbitrarily inflate the supply, which is only possible with crypto.

New comment by miguelmota in "The Ethereum merge is done"

miguelmota — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:06:20 +0000

It's a reality to the people of Latin America who use stablecoins on Ethereum to hedge against their own country's inflation.

New comment by miguelmota in "The Ethereum merge is done"

miguelmota — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 07:56:38 +0000

For something that millions of people across the world rely on, with million+ transactions daily, it's definitely worth celebrating. It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or Netflix [1] If YouTube had a similar decrease in energy, Hacker News would be all over it.

https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/#proof-of-stake-e...

New comment by miguelmota in "The Ethereum merge is done"

miguelmota — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 07:29:30 +0000

> I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain

Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.

New comment by miguelmota in "The Ethereum merge is done"

miguelmota — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 07:24:52 +0000

Stablecoins are mostly what people use for payments. ETH is what's staked on the beacon chain.

New comment by miguelmota in "The Ethereum merge is done"

miguelmota — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 06:50:22 +0000

Yes, it did work. No missed slots and high participation rate. Exceeded expectations. Congrats to all the devs!

New comment by miguelmota in "Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash"

miguelmota — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 18:35:32 +0000

Why do you use a pseudonym on here instead of your real name? Oh right because you care about privacy. Same reason tornado cash exists. Playing the ML card is like saying Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet to facilitate digital crime.

New comment by miguelmota in "ConstitutionDAO"

miguelmota — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 22:02:42 +0000

This is an interesting experiment that I'm excited about. The fact that a financial flash mob is possible is incredible. Anybody from anywhere can participate and have voting power by joining the DAO. Regardless of the outcome, it's good to see the convergence of DAOs into meatspace.

New comment by miguelmota in "The Problem with Ethereum"

miguelmota — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 06:42:58 +0000

If something is hard in theory, it's 10x harder in implementation. Complex systems have a lot of 'unknown unknowns' that can't be forecasted. Ethereum is $300B+ live network so every small change takes time to research, test, and implement. Migrating from PoW to PoS is like swapping out the engine of an airplane in mid-air.

New comment by miguelmota in "Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork"

miguelmota — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 20:13:42 +0000

Stakers in a PoS system are incentivized to do what's best for the network. It wouldn't make sense for them to stake large amounts of funds and do something that could make Ethereum less valuable. The current marketcap of Ethereum is $325B, so a 51% attack in a PoS system means the attacker would need $165B. Even if a really bad attack occurred, the majority of validators can decide to fork (eg DAO fork). The social layer of Ethereum is a hidden force and I believe the majority are honest actors that would support any Ethereum improvement proposals that make the network more fair and decentralized.

New comment by miguelmota in "America has a drinking problem"

miguelmota — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:00:35 +0000

We wake up and look at the small rectangle.

Go to work and stare at the medium rectangle.

Come home and watch the big rectangle.

New comment by miguelmota in "Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate"

miguelmota — Mon, 17 May 2021 19:05:02 +0000

It might reduce attacks but no operating system is bulletproof and attackers devote more resources to the operating system with more market share. If all infrastructure running on windows changed to linux, then linux would be the new target.

New comment by miguelmota in "Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?"

miguelmota — Wed, 12 May 2021 17:12:00 +0000

Another way to put it is that as you get older you start prioritizing things better that are of value to you as your time in existence is being depleted. Less time means more focus, which results in less fucks.

New comment by miguelmota in "California population declines for first time in more than a century"

miguelmota — Sat, 08 May 2021 04:53:18 +0000

Most people I know that grew up in Southern California want to live long-term in California.

Most people I know that grew up in a different state and tried living in Southern California, end up hating it and leaving.

If you’re used to Southern California you’re probably more likely to put up with it’s many problems because it’s home, there’s great food, plenty of things to do, and of course the amazing weather. If you’re an outsider, I can see why living in California seems absurd if you’re not used to the heavy traffic and high prices.

New comment by miguelmota in "Use Alacritty instead of Termite"

miguelmota — Sat, 08 May 2021 04:22:43 +0000

I’ve tried xterm, terminator, termite, urxvt, st, kitty, and gnome-terminal but Alacritty is my go to because of it’s speed and simplicity. Alacritty has no menus, no tabs, no scroll bars, and configuration is done via a single config file. I pair it with tmux. The only minor thing I wished Alacritty would support is font ligatures.

New comment by miguelmota in "LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online"

miguelmota — Thu, 06 May 2021 05:05:52 +0000

Anyone remember rotten.com? It was a treasure trove for morbid curiosity. You can probably still visit some of the pages on the wayback machine if you're curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com