Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#81

Post by exelius » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:14 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75

exelius wrote: post #73

I was initially not a Bitcoin fan. But I saw Fred Ehrsam (one of the founders of Coinbase) speak at SXSW, and it's clear that he gets it: he said one of the biggest things harming perception of Bitcoin is that the media keeps calling it a "currency", which it clearly is not. He seems to view it as a better transaction process that's more efficient than credit cards (the justification being that a credit card transact…

> Ehrsam was also pretty adamant that Bitcoin isn't a way around existing laws. The first generation of Bitcoin firms were run by amateurs; the second gen (...) are run by people who have spent their lives working in banking and securities. (...) As always, the guys making the big money in a gold rush aren't the gold miners, it's the guys selling the shovels... This. Anarchists (crypto- and not) developed Bitcoin env…

I think that's just a truth about the world: government and banking will always exist because the vast majority of the population believe the benefits of central banking outweigh the tiny bit of "sovereignty" you have to give up to achieve it.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#82

Post by jasondc » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #80

buro9 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple entry into the field is to imagine that instead of storing a row in which you have a single balance, you would instead have an append-only table in which you store all transactions including their timestamp and auditing info. The balance would then be calculated as the sum of transactions, and you could modify the query to view a balance in the past by only including transactions before a certain point in ti…

I've seen the before-and-after at a company that didn't use this sort of modelling and then added it. It was like night and day - suddenly we stopped making embarrassing errors with people's money. Even without really optimizing it for speed, and just using MySQL, and without changing any of the other data model, it works .

Interesting, could you describe how the errors occurred?

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#83

Post by jes5199 » Fri, Mar 21, 2014, 4:26 AM UTC

jasondc wrote: post #82

jes5199 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the before-and-after at a company that didn't use this sort of modelling and then added it. It was like night and day - suddenly we stopped making embarrassing errors with people's money. Even without really optimizing it for speed, and just using MySQL, and without changing any of the other data model, it works .

Interesting, could you describe how the errors occurred?

not in detail, but imagine: you have code that walks a complex object graph every day to figure out how much money to move. The business rules interact in complicated ways. Do you trust that you'll always get the same value out of that system? Versus "select sum(value)" as a single query...