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Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

blog.soylent.me

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Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#161

Post by josephpmay »

eru wrote: post #128
josephpmay wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that an attempt at a pun, or a serious comment? I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're saying.

Serious comment. I meant, skipping breakfast in the morning ain't all that hard, if you can endure a few days of hunger in the morning until your body adapts. Fasting in any form is something you get better at with practice.

I get extreme rage/anger and think somewhat suicidal thoughts when I skip a meal, so I don't think this would be such a good idea for me.

Edit: In fact, if I eat an early enough breakfast, I will need a snack before lunch hour to be able to remain focused.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#162

Post by javert »

makomk wrote: post #142
javert wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it wasn't particularly. It was intentionally written in very plain, common English, in a way that refers to concrete things, not big ideological abstractions.

"Freedom" and "the marketplace" are concrete things, not big ideological abstractions?

I was anticipating this objection, and no, they are not big ideological abstractions. They are not quite concretes, but very, very close.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#163

Post by zhemao »

ParadisoShlee wrote: post #151
zhemao wrote: post #47

Every time I see a Soylent article on HN I hope that it's all just a sick joke that will soon be revealed as an elaborate hoax and forgotten about. Why the hell would anyone in their right mind base their entire diet off of some liquid concoction made up by some random guy who is clearly not a nutritionist? Why don't you guys just learn to eat a healthy and balanced diet?

The body is a machine, it takes the good and throws away the bad. That's simple enough... but arguing against something that is aiming to be healthy while eating a bigmac and sucking on a coke isn't a convincing argument to me. He might have something. I wouldn't eat a pure Soylent diet.... but 20% of my diet... maybe?

Why would you assume I eat bigmacs and drink coke? I don't eat fast food unless I'm traveling. My diet consists mostly of rice, vegetables, and lean meat. You're putting up a false dichotomy here, i.e. Soylent vs. Standard North American Diet.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

westicle wrote: post #109
dragonwriter wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior. Actually, yes, selling your stake in the corporation that was the legally-responsible actor does mean that you are no longer at any financial risk for the actions of the corporation prior to you selling it, at least not in the main way that you were prior to selling it (that the consequences imposed on the corporat…

This is partially correct. If you manage to sell the corporate entity to a third party without making any warranties about latent claims, you will not be concerned about the corporation's liability. And the purchaser of that corporation is pretty foolish. However you are still responsible for your own personal liability when you operated the company. Did you breach your directors' duties? Did you commit fraud? Did yo…

I think its completely correct, as I think the issues you enumerate are encompassed within the portion starting "at least...".

However, the enumeration of those other avenues to liability is valuable.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#165

Post by dragonwriter »

ynniv wrote: post #119
pydave wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Soylent sounds like it's made of soy, but the name essentially means cannibalism. I'd expect the former to kill enthusiasm from the energy drink market (where the cannibalism angle makes it sound more extreme) and the latter to put off everyone else.

The literary evocation is far more powerful than the word-part "soy". Even so, given soy's ubiquity I suspect that no one would seriously be turned off by it at this point. The name doesn't "essentially mean cannibalism", it refers to a fictional future company that makes the bulk of the worlds' food in the form of Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow. In the movie Soylent introduced a new product Green that you refer to,…

> Even so, given soy's ubiquity I suspect that no one would seriously be turned off by it at this point.

I actually know many more people that would be turned off by the word part "soy" than by the literary reference.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#166

Post by ParadisoShlee »

zhemao wrote: post #163
ParadisoShlee wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The body is a machine, it takes the good and throws away the bad. That's simple enough... but arguing against something that is aiming to be healthy while eating a bigmac and sucking on a coke isn't a convincing argument to me. He might have something. I wouldn't eat a pure Soylent diet.... but 20% of my diet... maybe?

Why would you assume I eat bigmacs and drink coke? I don't eat fast food unless I'm traveling. My diet consists mostly of rice, vegetables, and lean meat. You're putting up a false dichotomy here, i.e. Soylent vs. Standard North American Diet.

I didn't mean YOU personally.. I'm currently eating a fatty bigmac, fries and drinking coke made with high-fructose corn syrup... I don't pretend it any more or less healthy than Soylent.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#167

Post by qaruxj »

gruseom wrote: post #58
qaruxj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I don't trust anyone who uses the phrase "Big ______". Your argument isn't even coherent. You're just making a fallacious appeal by putting the scary capital-B "Big" in front of a random noun and acting like that's supposed to mean something. Who makes up "Big Food"? Who controls "Big Food"? Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced…

He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close. Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question. that isn't really an argument To say that Ensure is…

> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.

"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).

> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.

> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#168

Post by betterunix »

jafaku wrote: post #129
betterunix wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go buy your lunch with a lump of gold if you need to be reminded that gold is not used as a currency outside of a few highly niche markets.

I guess the Yen and the Pound Sterling are not currencies either then, since my local restaurant doesn't accept them.

The Yen and the Pound are currencies in certain markets. Lumps of gold are used as currency only in highly niche markets. I did say that gold is a currency in such markets, but it is not generally used as currency in most of the world.

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#169

Post by betterunix »

aryastark wrote: post #98
betterunix wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go buy your lunch with a lump of gold if you need to be reminded that gold is not used as a currency outside of a few highly niche markets.

This line of reasoning is inane, and comes up every time gold or Bitcoin is mentioned. Gold and Bitcoin are merely stores of value. Just like your paper bills with dead presidents on them. Or stocks or bonds. Which has next to nothing to do with how you pay for something. You can easily barter for an item, or pay with credit cards. Some places still do not accept American Express. Some places don't accept any credit…

Currencies are not just stores of value. Real estate is a store of value also, but nobody uses land or buildings as currency.

Once upon a time, gold was used as currency. Merchants would have scales, weights, and other equipment needed to deal in gold. That is not how gold is used in today's world; there are only a few highly niche markets where gold is used as currency, and everywhere else you have either fiat currency or currency that is backed by gold (with fiat currency being vastly more popular these days).

It is also wrong to separate printed money from the rest of the money supply when you are talking about fiat currency. Paper money is just a representation of the currency; the value of a dollar bill is equal to the value of four quarters and equal to the value of a bank account with one dollar in it. Fiat currency is an abstraction created by laws, which is implemented in various ways (paper money, coins, electronic transactions, etc.).

Re: Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

#170

Post by betterunix »

jafaku wrote: post #89
betterunix wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically cryptographers will define a security goal in rigorous terms, then prove that their system meets that goal (at least for "cryptomania" type applications like digital cash). There are good reasons for doing this: 1. It makes proofs of security possible, which make us a lot more confident about cryptosystems. 2. It allows us to be clear about what it means to "break" a system. If we are not clear about this,…

> There are a lot of organizations with the resources needed to perform the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and no compelling reason to think that a faster attack is not possible. I'm aware of that. There are also lots of organizations with the power to kill you, yet you won't lose your sleep, because they have nothing to gain from that, so you are pretty sure that it won't happen. It could be argued that the central banks h…

"Satoshi didn't try to create his own hashing algorithm or anything like that."

No, he tried to create his own digital cash system, and digital cash is a cryptography problem that has been extensively studied by cryptographers (and had been studied for decades prior to Bitcoin). Bitcoin is also a system that involves multiparty computation, and secure multiparty computation has also been studied extensively by cryptographers, also going back decades. It is a mistake to think that the only relevant cryptography in Bitcoin are digital signatures and hash functions.

This is really the crux of the issue here. Bitcoin is not a hash function. It is not a digital signature system. The security of hash functions and digital signatures is not in question here; Bitcoin could be vulnerable to attack even if it is built using secure hash functions and secure signature systems. The point of having a security definition is to be clear about these things. We need to be clear about what the meaning of "security" is in the case of Bitcoin if we want to make any statements about whether or not Bitcoin actually achieves that security goal. It is not hard to see that the definition of security for a hash function or a digital signature system is not what we want for Bitcoin; what is not so clear is what we actually do want.

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