> Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems
I do not think this is true. What happens with my e-mail address when someone else signs up to Facebook and shares their contact list (with my e-mail address in it)?
How did Facebook know who my friends are the very moment I signed in, without sharing my address list?
They already have collected information on my social graph, without my own explicit permission, but with implicit permission from less tech-savy friends.
And that's nothing to say about people tagging me in Facebook pictures to train their giant DeepFace algorithm.
In both scenario's I am not accessing or interacting with a Facebook system, while my information is still being abused.
I am in this Kafka-esque situation where I try to get an account deleted that is not even mine. I don't have and want a Facebook account, but Facebook does not agree.
I few years back I started receiving mail for an account that I never created. The name is not close to mine, but a silly sexual pun.
I have mailed security and account support multiple times, asking for the account to be deleted, or decoupled from my email address, because I keep getting login attempt notifications and even friend suggestions.
Just checking, and coincidentally the very last email is one for the Facebook account. "Hey, it seems you are having trouble logging in! Click here to sign in.". Yes, Facebook, someone, for whatever reason, is trying to log in to a Facebook account for 4 years now, and won't take no for an answer... "If this wasn't you, please let us know by clicking here". Ok, Facebook, this is not me, and it was not me the last 10 times I clicked that button.
(I now assume, that this account is somehow being used to mine my social connections. Something like a public ghost account.)
Timeline:
2013: Hi Fuck, you got more friends on Facebook than you realize! List of 6 people I know IRL.
2013: Hi Fuck, you have 1 friendship request. Log in to accept.
2013: Do you know [3 people I know]?
2013: Hi Fuck, Fuck placed something on your timeline and is waiting to see it.
2013: Do you know [9 people I know]?
2014: We've updated our Terms of Service
2015: Someone asked a new password for your account.
2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.
2017: Hey Fuck, it seems someone tried logging into your account from a new location.
2017: Hey Fuck, we received your request to reset your account password. XXXXX is your reset code.
2017: Fuck, go back to Facebook in just one click.
2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.
I have the same thing, but with PayPal. My full namesake has created another account, and used my email there - so I guess he is not getting any notifications. I am afraid to contact PayPal support, since they might just go ahead and block the wrong account, or both of them, so I just ignore these emails from parallel universe.
I was able to shut down a couple of Instagram accounts that were using my email though. Instagram does not verify emails, but fully trusts them to reset your password.
Scientists from fields that rely on data, like physics, often do well as data scientists.
I myself like Information Science more than Data Science, but I do not care that much for semantics. There was a need to specify a role of someone who makes sense out of data, gathers insights, using the tools from mathematics, computer science, statistics, and information theory. It's also a different type of science, data-driven science, as opposed to theoretical/metaphysical, empirical, or computational science.
There was an old joke that AI stood for Advanced Informatics. I think the commercialization of the term "AI" is a bit harmful and obfuscating. Companies tumble over one another to market their professionals as Applied AI or their products as AI. AI is the automation of human thought. It includes philosophy and cognitive science, both fields seem completely missing for applied AI.
I know many AI researchers already switched to calling themselves ML researchers a few years back. This, because the field of AI became muddied with futurist adherents of the Singularity. Did not help that the public perception of AI is somewhere between "Skynet is coming!" and "AI will take my job". Nowadays, ML is also heavily saturated and hyped beyond repair. Meanwhile the field of AI has not even solved the common sense problem.
But that's putting the cart before the horse. You need the ICO to get enough investment to build out your platform, when you have a fully functioning platform, who still needs investment?
And if a platform is a prerequisite: Just build the barest possible platform MVP, much like a pre-launch landing page.
When you have $250,000,000 with no clear nor enforceable legal obligation to the people who gave it to you, who still needs a fully functioning platform?
Hopefully ethics will prompt most founders to make a good-faith attempt to deliver value for money, but in case anyone is tempted otherwise, bear in mind that the legal obligation may turn out to look much more clear and enforceable in court than it does on HN.
The idea of electronic money is old. What this describes is a Chaum blind-signature style centrally-cleared coin, which dates back to his 1983 paper. There is no protection against double-spends in this scheme (without the clearing agency taking an active role), and no protection against the central agency creating unlimited amounts of coin.
Proof-of-work schemes like hashcash and bitgold are much closer to hitting on the central ideas that led to Bitcoin. It's like crediting Democritus with atomic theory -- yes, he's talking about the same thing, but in such a way that the final realization is so different as to be unrecognizable.
Now compare total market capitalization of equity markets to Bitcoin. I doubt you could liquidate millions of dollars of bitcoin in a day and not make the market plummet. You can do that in the last 30 minutes of the stock trading day with no very little price fluctuation.
There are equities that are up triple digits, including Nvidia...who is realistically the biggest winner in crypto mining.
That's a very very small amount, real currency markets do trillions a day, bitcoin is the size of a large company. He's totally right, that's a small liquid market when compared to the real markets. If you tried to dump 10 million in bitcoin all at once, there's a good chance you're going to crash the market; 10 million wouldn't even move the price in the EURUSD.
«That's a very very small amount, real currency markets do trillions a day»
It is. But that's not what partiallypro and I were discussing. We argued about whether selling "millions" would crash BTC or not.
«He's totally right»
Did you even read the link I posted? Even if you look at only the BTC/USD pair, $10M represents merely ~1% of the volume sold DAILY on the top 6 exchanges (~$800M). You would probably need to sell an order of magnitude more, so $100M, in a single day, to start affecting the markets significantly.
I think you're confusing daily volume with volume available at any one time. Read what I said, dump 10 mil at once. Just because you can trade 10 million in a day doesn't mean the market can handle a 10 million dollar order in one shot without massive slippage due to lack of liquidity. You could drop a 50 million dollar order on the EURUSD and you might maybe move the market 1 point, but a mere 10 million would instantly cause a large swing of perhaps 10% in the bitcoin market, that's why it's so volatile, it's a small market.
It's so small you have individual holders the community now calls whales who can individually manipulate the price with buy and sell walls; no individual can do anything remotely like that in the FX market. One because they don't have enough money, and two because such market manipulation is illegal.
You'd need to spread your purchase or sale out over the day to avoid massive slippage for an order that big because there just isn't enough liquidity to absorb it without the moving the price. 10 mill is about 2500 coins, go look at the order book on any exchange, a purchase that large is going to massively move the price, looks to be possibly 300-400 dollars you'd move the market with that one order. 50 million would certainly crash/bubble the market.
I make a living trading BTC. I know the difference.
The OP mentioned selling in a day, not at once: «I doubt you could liquidate millions of dollars of bitcoin IN A DAY...» This is what I commented on.
You changed the topic and started talking about selling all at once, which would of course eat a bunch of bids. However even doing this wouldn't "crash the market." The order books are deeper than you think. It's hard to find examples, because it's plain dumb to market-sell this much in one order. But I found a ~1150 BTC sell on Bitstamp around 3pm on September 13 and it barely moved the price: https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg5zig1-minzczs...
It would eat even lower bids on exchanges with less volume/thinner books, but still wouldn't crash the market. For example some idiot sold 1200 BTC in two market-sells of 600 BTC each, 30min apart yesterday on Gemini; and although it ate all the bids from $4100 to $3400, twice!, it didn't "crash the market". Other exchanges didn't react. Subsequent trades resumed exactly where the price was before ($4100).
OK, little more liquid than I expected, I just glanced at the order books on bitcoinwisdom. What happened on Gemini looks more what I'd expect, a deep and fast crash as all the liquidity was eaten.
If you dump ten million bucks worth of shares in a $10B company, it doesn't matter how many other $10B companies there are. All that matters is the liquidity of that particular company.
That's irrelevant, those aren't single transactions. If you can trade $15 Million in a single transaction in bitcoin without effecting the price, I'll say it's becoming liquid.
Eh, I don't really know where to start to explain how wrong this is.
The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.
> The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.
so I do not see how my post was wrong. These are the numbers. With such numbers, it would be foolish to discard the crypto market as "too volatile" and stick with stocks.
There are crypto coins that did way better than Strat, but there was not enough volume to make a decent profit. Even Doge did 260%. The only "loser" is STEEM with a 80% ROI.
No, these numbers do in fact suggest the crypto market is extremely volatile. Many, many people who invest regularly in stocks should not invest in cryptocurrency because it is too volatile.
People/companies that are able to understand and accept the risk that comes from speculating on cryptocurrencies should consider doing so, because it is possible to make a profit, perhaps a significant one.
But if you're looking at the past and saying "wow, I should buy BTC because it made 1000% last year - it can't lose!" then you're ignoring a quite serious risk that volatile growth could change into volatile collapse in the future.
They're volatile, but they have low correlation with other asset classes. You can put a small portion of your assets in crypto and lower the overall risk of your portfolio.
They also have very high Sharpe ratios (the ratio between returns and volatility), though given crypto's short history we shouldn't trust that too much.
I always read these posts as all or nothing, so forgive me if that's not what you mean. Why not take a smaller chunk of a portfolio, say 2%, and invest in crypto?
That way you can get potentially huge gains with little at risk.
Agreed, and there probably will be a year where nearly all coins tank. It would be foolish to invest all your profits back into the market, year after year.
But should this stop you (or any investment firm) to seriously look at the profit potential here? What do you get for correctly calling the bubble in 3 years? Nothing.
A slot machine is known to give a 200% ROI and allow a single pull each day. You play this slot machine every day for 500 days, until you notice it stops rewarding you.
Then someone says: "Look I told you so, I've been telling everyone for 2000 days now: This slot machine will crash one day!". And you say: "Ok. You were right. Guess the party couldn't last forever. Thanks for the warning!". Out of habit you play for 30 more days, but the rewards stay gone, so you exit with some nice profit.
Meanwhile, the other person knew of the existence of a highly profitable slot machine, while it was still profitable, but never actually played it, because they feared that one day it may not be profitable anymore.
This isn't quite right. To stick with the casino example, a large number of Bitcoin speculators are "letting it ride." They've won a bunch of times, and they continue to bet more and more money.
Your example only works if you are regularly selling BTC as its worth increases. If you're just holding onto it, your gains are never realized.
Yup. Few people realize Bitcoin has been literally the best performing investment in human history. One dollar invested in March 2010 is worth $1+ million today. 1,000,000× returns.
But the downside of performing so well is that it is too easy to get distracted by the price and disregard the radical improvements that Bitcoin brings over legacy financial systems...
Nice quip. To stick with analogy: Some people in this thread are in the 70s, telling record companies to ignore the disco genre entirely, because it is a fad that can't last more than a decade. Instead, telling them to stick with what they know: 50s rock and roll.
There is no direct business value in banning users from your platform. In fact, doing so is a short-term net negative.
This is also why Twitter was so slow to ban bots: you gain a fraction of satisfaction for your users that interact with annoying bots, at the cost of dwindling user numbers.
> suspending accounts that are politically opposing to their worldview
Because highly visible users of their platform (verified celebrities) started DMing the CEO and threatened to leave if bullies were not dealt with. Creating a safe space for the social elite is very much adding business value to Twitter and makes investors happy.
I think Twitter just awaited the US government reaction, and took as long as the law / future business prospects allowed them. That Twitter propaganda has become a major problem for the intelligence agencies and anti-terrorism units is evident. It takes a long time to properly deal with these problems, just like Twitter will probably take years to combat astro-turfing bots meddling with a foreign election (which seems to me, the logical next step in the evolution of mass automatic banning of problematic accounts).
Because highly visible users of their platform (verified celebrities) started DMing the CEO and threatened to leave if bullies were not dealt with. Creating a safe space for the social elite is very much adding business value to Twitter and makes investors happy.
Really? I wish more people would have just come out and said that. Special treatment for the whales explains everything so much better.
But I guess that doesn't sell well to the have-nots, and it needed to be recast as harassment problem at all levels. Which subjugated all of us to years of commentary and squabbling over how we're going to use computers to fix undesirable-but-totally-natural aspects of human behavior. Also explains why the highly-visible people seemed so cool with instituting a privately-controlled nanny state every step of the way.
> #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."
Minutes after:
> Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.
Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.
I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.
I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.
So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].
I do not think this is true. What happens with my e-mail address when someone else signs up to Facebook and shares their contact list (with my e-mail address in it)?
How did Facebook know who my friends are the very moment I signed in, without sharing my address list?
They already have collected information on my social graph, without my own explicit permission, but with implicit permission from less tech-savy friends.
And that's nothing to say about people tagging me in Facebook pictures to train their giant DeepFace algorithm.
In both scenario's I am not accessing or interacting with a Facebook system, while my information is still being abused.