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Please remove mitsuhiko/*

github.com

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Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#291

Post by aaronmusk »

ubernostrum wrote: post #145
randallsquared wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there be taxation consequences unless you act to set up a bitcoin address and accept the offered tip? If you've done all that, I think it's clear you know what you're doing. If you don't do that, then the money (apparently?) returns to the project you committed to, from whence it came. The only way there could be tax is if you receive the money, and that can only happen by you deliberately becoming involved.

To take some examples: * In some countries it is illegal to opt someone into services they didn't ask for. * In some countries it is illegal to send unsolicited emails about services. * In some countries it is illegal to accept or solicit donations without registering first with tax authorities. * In some countries it is illegal to suggest a financial relationship between yourself and another person/entity when no su…

you are taking life too seriously

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#292

Post by jasonpbecker »

Ologn wrote: post #231
jordanpg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Bitcoin's own FAQ [1]: "One could argue that gold isn't backed by anything either. Bitcoins have properties resulting from the system's design that allows them to be subjectively valued by individuals. This valuation is demonstrated when individuals freely exchange for or with bitcoins. Please refer to the Subjective Theory of Value." Like it or not, Bitcoin has a PR problem. It needs be liked and trusted in add…

Bitcoins are worthless precisely because the Subjective Theory of Value is wrong. Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith and all the early economists thought the Subjective Theory of Value was wrong. Because it is wrong. Bitcoin is a little scam which justifies itself against the backdrop of a much bigger scam. Gold is valuable because it takes effort to find, mine and refine. People want to exchange other valuable things for…

Except that gold's value is not evenly remotely tied to its use value. If it were, gold would be worth a small fraction of its current price.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#293

Post by GhotiFish »

hayd wrote: post #280

"each new commit receives 1% of available balance" So if you put a dollar in the account, even after 100 commits there's still 36 cents leftover (assuming every commit is "claimed"). Which is to say, by construction most of this money is going to remained unclaimed.

that's true, seems like there should be a way for funds to be exhausted at some point, and it could lead to a bit of spam.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#294

Post by wyager »

art2 wrote: post #194

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoi…

Or maybe it's just a cool hackathon project using Bitcoin and the Github APIs...

Seriously, what is the big deal with this? The developers are more than able to simply ignore the donations. Anyone who wasted time complaining in that Github thread could have clicked "mark as spam" in a fraction of the time and been done with it.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#295

Post by mpyne »

jnbiche wrote: post #119

These kinds of episodes are making me increasingly depressed. On one hand, I'm incredibly disappointed in the ethics and morality of some of the people who have latched on to Bitcoin. And sadly, I'd have to include tip4commit in that group, particularly since they are "opt-out" and yet have been spamming people after each commit [ubernostrum points out below that they aren't even "opt-out", since they're not honoring…

Bitcoin is a scheme designed to create a deflationary store of value by wasting electrical energy, co-opted by a vast amount of people who really did look at it like "tulips" and who continue to operate today as if it's a pump-and-dump. You are certainly right to point out that there are a lot of Bitcoin developers and users who are not assholes and have good intentions, but Bitcoin is not the vehicle that's going to work for things like banking in undeveloped countries.

I'm honestly a bit surprised you brought that up, as even with the mining fees needed to pay off the Bitcoin network being subsidized by inflation of the money supply (which is apparently good when it's happening now in accordance with an algorithm that was certainly not determined by a centrali party, but won't be good in 20 years because ???), Bitcoin currently requires about $18 per transaction (https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction). And the price is only that low because the value of Bitcoin in USD has been dropping steadily for months. If Bitcoin ever became as popular as its proponents hope then the per/tranx price will go up as well (until the entire network is burning through so much electrical power that more miners can't be brought online to compete in the Mine-a-Block lottery at the new, higher Bitcoin price).

Increasing the number of transactions will help, sure, but it's currently limited to ~7 per second, and although there are technical means of increasing that someday, the Bitcoin lead developer has indicated they probably wouldn't do that anyways (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/10/blocksize-economics/) since then how will the poor miners make money?

And in a future where people actually have to bid their transaction fee high enough to be accepted by benevolent miners just to make it in the blockchain, how are the poor of Africa supposed to compete at all? I'm glad you're worried about them, but don't tie their fate to a network which is designed to be horribly inefficient just so people can say that no trusted third parties were ever utilized in a monetary transaction! Especially in this era of increasing centralization in Bitcoin itself; I don't see how those in Africa were their most-capable computing device is a mobile are supposed to compete with the mining pools and ASIC manufacturer/miners, all you'll have done is traded centralized protocols regulated by the public sector with centralized Bitcoin overseen by the profit-seeking private sector.

I'm not an expert on the wide field of crypto-currency but surely there must be something better out there.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#296

Post by gnud »

grkvlt wrote: post #287

I really don't understand the hate and anger that seems to be being directed at the developer, in particular the constant stream of assertions that the project is a scam, fraudulent, and created with the intent of cashing out with everyone's donations after pretending to be 'hacked'. It seems like this sort of accusation is more likely to be a cause for legal action _by_ @arsenische rather than the flimsy pretexts fo…

The outright refusal to de-list projects makes this seem very suspicious.

It makes it seem like they want to capitalize on well-known oss projects, and more or less trick people into giving money, when there's no clear entity behind the service and no clear rules about what happens with "unclaimed" money.

The two obvious explanations here are "scam" and "thoughtless developers". In either case, I wouldn't want any project I was associated with, listed on their page.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#297

Post by aaronmusk »

lkrubner wrote: post #159

These "funding" schemes keep popping up in different contexts. Journalism attracted a bunch of these schemes 5 to 10 years ago. Consider what Mike Krahulik said about Kachingle: "you can't just start collecting money for me without some kind of deal." http://webcomictweets.com/detail/tweet/138771362931163136 Kachingle was an extreme case, gathering "donations" for sites like Wikipedia, Google News, and also small sit…

who says there is a business model behind this?

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#298

Post by CHY872 »

Here's an interesting one. They only email contributors when they have over 0.005 BTC sitting around. So any contributor who over their lifetime is donated less than 0.005 BTC is never told that the money has been given to them.

So we can reasonably expect that almost all the money put into this service will end up sitting around and not going to the people it's supposed to help.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#299

Post by mpyne »

Ologn wrote: post #231
jordanpg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Bitcoin's own FAQ [1]: "One could argue that gold isn't backed by anything either. Bitcoins have properties resulting from the system's design that allows them to be subjectively valued by individuals. This valuation is demonstrated when individuals freely exchange for or with bitcoins. Please refer to the Subjective Theory of Value." Like it or not, Bitcoin has a PR problem. It needs be liked and trusted in add…

Bitcoins are worthless precisely because the Subjective Theory of Value is wrong. Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith and all the early economists thought the Subjective Theory of Value was wrong. Because it is wrong. Bitcoin is a little scam which justifies itself against the backdrop of a much bigger scam. Gold is valuable because it takes effort to find, mine and refine. People want to exchange other valuable things for…

> Gold is valuable because it takes effort to find, mine and refine.

Other way around, people spend effort to find, mine and refine gold precisely because it's subjectively valuable.

That's always been the ironic thing to me about Bitcoin, is that by establishing that people can attach subjective value to things (like computer bits), it proves that fiat currencies can work too precisely because subjective value exists.

Likewise I doubt Bitcoin would ever fall all the way to $0, simply because there will always been enough believers "holding the bag" and trying to loop people into the "Internet funbux" club to maintain the value at some low (but non-zero) level.

Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*

#300

Post by tokenizerrr »

jchrisa wrote: post #286
art2 wrote: post #194

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoi…

The non-sketchy version of this would only accept tips for repos that had a bitcoin address committed to a well-known location in their repo. And it would send the tips directly to that address. No possibility of scamming, and opt-in by its nature. Is there already something like this?

That seems to go against the idea of tip4commit, the idea is that contributors (through pull requests etc) can be compensated as well automatically. Same if there's multiple contributors to a project the compensation is split between them based on the amount of commits they make.
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