Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think they aren't? Mining is a multi billion dollar industry.
The term "industry" suggests they produce something, which in the case of bitcoin mining is questionable.
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Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
151–160 of 222 posts
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the job I have to constantly shoot down big data / data mining / intelligent nn analysis crapware showeled to my bosses, and 99% of the time the answer is “you got NO data to speak of” One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac mini…
Take a step back and look at your work conditions. Maybe you should become the consultant in that story.
No thanks will not be able to sleep at night doing that line of work (not consultancy in general, just the overselling and running with the money bit)
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#153> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities. Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.
I got removed from a project because I was raining on everyone's blockchain fantasy. Later they begrudgingly admitted that blockchain wasn't going to solve the hard interoperability problem we were facing (bog standard need to pull & analyze data from multiple incompatible data stores held by multiple independent parties). I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech g…
Nah, those bad uses won't kill the tech, but the bubble will burst. But yes, I also notice a lot of companies that are riding the blockchain train in scenarios where a central server would be fine, and all they'll end up with is a needlessly complicated solution to their problem.
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#154I like that the post mentions she's mined 200,000 Satoshis. Is this some kind of Bitcoin Shibboleth? I had to google it. It's about $8.
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.
One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte).
The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.
One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte). The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.
Well, you can send zero fee transactions, they'll just take a while to get through, depending on the current size of the mempool. And you can also always send transactions from multiple addresses, meaning you can add up these small amounts to something more meaningful
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got removed from a project because I was raining on everyone's blockchain fantasy. Later they begrudgingly admitted that blockchain wasn't going to solve the hard interoperability problem we were facing (bog standard need to pull & analyze data from multiple incompatible data stores held by multiple independent parties). I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech g…
The sceptics in the shipping industry are plenty as well, though. And it has been awfully quite around that pilot. Many wonder if the real challenge is really trust or not just incompatible data formats and plenty of non-digitized data...
> incompatible data formats and plenty of non-digitized data
This is exactly what many with a cursory knowledge seem to think a blockchain will solve. Unfortunately, these are generally challenges people have to talk about and resolve via mutual agreement and compromise; you can't simply throw code at the issue.
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Gartner, blockchain has just passed the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". Next phase is "Trough of Disillusionnment". http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in-the-...
This one is funny. While cryptocurrency gets most of the brickbats around here on HN, I think Deep Learning is also in the same boat. Executives want to apply Deep Learning to everything and anything they can get their hands on. The results most of the time are underwhelming and could be had with a much simpler set of tools. Just wondering how long before Deep Learning goes into trough of disillusionment.
brick·bat
ˈbrikˌbat
noun
plural noun: brickbats
a piece of brick, typically when used as a weapon.
a remark or comment which is highly critical and typically insulting.
"the plaudits were beginning to outnumber the brickbats"
My WotD
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots. As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.
>it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!
Yes REST tends to mean "web API you don't hate" or "web API written less than 5 years ago" and is heading towards just meaning "web API".
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots. As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.
>it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!
And here I thought I was the lone voice in the wilderness. From Roy Fielding's original paper:
The client-stateless-server style derives from client-server with the additional constraint that no session state is allowed on the server component. Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is kept entirely on the client
I've heard enough verbal gymnastics to fill a book trying to excuse how modern web apps aren't violating this condition.
Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one is funny. While cryptocurrency gets most of the brickbats around here on HN, I think Deep Learning is also in the same boat. Executives want to apply Deep Learning to everything and anything they can get their hands on. The results most of the time are underwhelming and could be had with a much simpler set of tools. Just wondering how long before Deep Learning goes into trough of disillusionment.
On the job I have to constantly shoot down big data / data mining / intelligent nn analysis crapware showeled to my bosses, and 99% of the time the answer is “you got NO data to speak of” One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac mini…
> One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac minis.
Six figures? Oh sweet summer child. :)
First you'll need to burn seven figures to have a Big 3 advise your leadership that you need this tech. Then you burn the six figures implementing it with a lower tier firm.