kaleidic (u/kaleidic)

kaleidic commented on Ask HN: When will cryptocurrencies be currency? · Posted by u/RikNieu

kyle-rb · 8 years ago

Money has 3 main uses: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value.

Bitcoin works reasonably well as a medium of exchange, as long as transactions are confirmed relatively quickly.

Bitcoin prices are pretty much always tied to the price in US dollars or some other fiat currency. Online prices can be changed dynamically, so Bitcoin doesn't really need to be its own unit of account.

But it never really works as a store of value, due to its volatility. I have about $20 in Bitcoin today, but I have no idea what that will be worth in a week, so it's risky to keep any large amount of money in Bitcoin. The safest way to buy things in Bitcoin would be to buy it, and then immediately send it to whomever you're buying from.

So I think that Bitcoin will be much more usable when its price stabilizes, and there's much less friction with each purchase.

kaleidic · 8 years ago

Yes - that's right : people mostly shouldn't need to hold such high Bitcoin balances to buy things. What's in the way is the state interfering so you can't change dollars for Bitcoin with your bank and there aren't services that do that which are convenient enough. In time this will change so you can just make Bitcoin payments from your checking account.

kaleidic commented on Ask HN: When will cryptocurrencies be currency? · Posted by u/RikNieu

atmosx · 8 years ago

That's never going to happen. Currencies are enforced and controlled by central, powerful authorities (the state). Institutions like central banks (or the FED) try to control inflation and/or deflation. In a time of prospering, the obvious goal for a central banker should be to have a mildly deflationary currency. That is because central bankers want consumers to spend their money today and not wait for tomorrow (hoarding).

Now bitcoin has built-in a hard limit. Which makes the currency, inherently inflationary. I have no evidence, but I believe that this was a strategic choice by Satoshi. Why would you buy a currency made out of cpu cycles, with no backing if not for it's future value? Without being a state (e.g. selling trust) or having huge amounts of gold to back up a new currency, the only reason someone would wanna buy it, is indeed, the future value that could hold. Hence, Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency can work as an asset but not as a currency given the current design.

Y. Varoufakis, spoke of a centralised digital currency in his solution for the Greek crisis. That could be a digital currency, that anyone can use. But was a fully controlled digital currency issued in the form of IOUs by the state.

NOTE: Talking about adoption of a decentralised currency a-la bitcoin, by a state or group of states to replace entities like the FED or the ECB shows a poor understanding of the most basic principles of the financial systems.

kaleidic · 8 years ago

Money has three functions : unit of account, store if value, medium of exchange. Cryptocurrency isn't great at the first two, but if we presume the scaling problems will be solved then it is pretty good at the latter because it doesn't require you to trust the banking system. So there is an unbundling of the functions of money described by Eugene Fama originally and then tidied up and better articulated by Tyler Cowen and Randall Kroszner in their book on the New Monetary Economics in about 1992.

Its completely irrelevant what the price of Bitcoin is for its usefulness as a medium of exchange.

This medium of exchange aspect is very important because it makes banks no longer special since its possible in time to make payments without a banking system. Thus the role of the state in regulating banks can disappear eventually - no deposit insurance, no bailouts and no too big to fail.

Credit can be provided by funds because the information asymmetry of banks no longer applies when you can port your banking records via API.

kaleidic commented on D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-0... · Posted by u/deng

Ar-Curunir · 9 years ago

Most people I know have not heard of D, but have definitely heard of Go, Swift and (less often, but still frequently) Rust. If in 16 years D has not achieved mass adoption, what is different now, when there are more competitors that offer better features?

kaleidic · 9 years ago

It's a big world out there. Would you ever imagine that D would be taking market share from... Extended Pascal? But there's a naval architect who designs great big ships with a 500k sloc codebase he is exploring porting to D. Web guys get the attention but enterprise users are a much bigger world than just that.

If something is growing very quickly then saying it hasn't yet dethroned C, so it won't ever be significant seems to me to be a bit brittle thinking. Compound growth and the passage of time - thats what has been underway for some time now.

http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

kaleidic commented on D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-0... · Posted by u/deng

WalterBright · 9 years ago

So far 2017 has been a banner year for D, with the fully open sourcing of it and now the gcc incorporation!

kaleidic · 9 years ago

Plus betterC and gpu target.

kaleidic commented on D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-0... · Posted by u/deng

Veratyr · 9 years ago

I don't think that's true. Despite their corporate life support and relatively young ages, Go, Rust and Swift are all in the top 25 most active languages on Github (https://gist.github.com/alysonla/e14c01ec7a0d2823e7317f7b58b...) and D is not (and never has been).

The masses have had a long time to adopt D and I wouldn't get my hopes up simply because it's not dead yet.

kaleidic · 9 years ago

Garbage in, garbage out. Github's language detection isn't perfect, and people in the D community simply aren't particularly focused on marketing and popularity contests. See here for example :

http://www.mail-archive.com/digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.co...

Not only is it not quite dead yet, it's growing rapidly : http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

DMD downloads direct from home page only.

kaleidic commented on How to Report a Bug to Microsoft schveiguy.com/blog/2017/0... · Posted by u/janpio

zie · 9 years ago

You can use actual programming languages to beat up excel: http://www.python-excel.org/ (I'm sure other languages can beat up excel too)

I'm not saying it's a fix for this particular use case, but I couldn't imagine having to manually update a bunch of excel sheets regularly.. talk about a nightmare. ack.

kaleidic · 9 years ago

Or indeed https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/excel-d which schweiguy may find more appealing :)

kaleidic commented on The reference D compiler is now open source forum.dlang.org/post/oc8a... · Posted by u/jacques_chirac

zerr · 9 years ago

Anybody worked on performance critical stuff in D? How good is its GC?

kaleidic · 9 years ago

Auburn sounds makes audio plugins in D and share how they avoid using GC in blog posts. Not that bad even for audio. Sociomantic and Weka both do soft real time.

kaleidic commented on The reference D compiler is now open source forum.dlang.org/post/oc8a... · Posted by u/jacques_chirac

osullivj · 9 years ago

That's intriguing. I've done a bunch of XLL coding in C++ and C# (with Excel-DNA) for trading floor Excel over the years. Gotta wonder what you're building in D. Have you got a quant analytics lib in D? Or maybe market data connectivity, or historical data? Anyway, you might want to take a look at this [1], which can serverize XLL spreadsheets with no sheet or code changes. Works with RTD too. Once a pricing or risk sheet is serverized, traders don't have to hit F9 or rekey data anymore...

[1] http://spreadserve.com

kaleidic · 9 years ago

Thanks for sharing.

Friend of mine started a company called Resolver Systems to do that for Python (end result). Nice experiment but bad timing for launch just before the crisis. Have got some algorithmic and infrastructure things in D, though plenty is done in other languages too. I ported Bloomberg API to D - it's open sourced bit currently not yet directly used in production. May start to be in coming months. It's not so hard to turn spreadsheets into code (its rarely the spreadsheet itself that does something complicated) so would rather rewrite that than try to do it automatically because code is easier to read, though I had dinner with a Dutch girl who is a professor who works on spreadsheets as functional languages.

kaleidic commented on The reference D compiler is now open source forum.dlang.org/post/oc8a... · Posted by u/jacques_chirac

bachmeier · 9 years ago

If you want to work with C code, it is an excellent choice. I use it for numerical computing. It's an easy language to learn, no need to worry about memory management if you don't want/need to, generally good syntax, nice compile time features. Overall the best "better C" in my opinion.

kaleidic · 9 years ago

See bachmeier work on D to R integration.

kaleidic commented on The reference D compiler is now open source forum.dlang.org/post/oc8a... · Posted by u/jacques_chirac

mamcx · 9 years ago

How good is D for:

-iOS? -Android? -Windows?

kaleidic · 9 years ago

On Windows it's fine, but same library packaging problems as for C++...