
Tarsnap Support for Bitcoin Ending April First - dsr12
http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-announce/msg00042.html
======
remcob
It's notable that Colin Percival pioneered memory-hard key derivations
functions with Scrypt for tarsnap. Scrypt became the proof-of-work function
for asic-resistant cryptocurrencies suchs as Litecoin and influenced
Ethereum's ethHash. (Besides many other applications).

In this post Colin casually speaks out against proof-of-work, without taking
any credit for his significant indirect influence on it.

~~~
cperciva
I can't exactly take credit for litecoin (and others) using scrypt, given that
they did it without my knowledge, endorsement, or advice. (If they had talked
to me I would have pointed out that limiting scrypt to using 1 MB of RAM
eliminated the entire point of scrypt.)

------
shubhamjain
I wonder how much Colin made from the Bitcoin rise. It seems amazing that one
could have made a little fortune by just deciding to accept Bitcoin as an
experiment few years back.

~~~
thesmallestcat
That makes no sense, businesses that have been accepting Bitcoin generally
charge the USD price at the current exchange rate and convert that back to USD
not long after the transaction, for fear that Bitcoin would turn into funny
money. We're talking business here, not investment.

~~~
yebyen
Yeah, business. So about those transaction fees... you can save money by
grouping your transactions and clearing them in blocks.

Now you're dangerously close to figuring out that you can make more money by
waiting for the best time to clear the block.

Once you've crossed that bridge, if your business has any margin at all, it's
not hard to imagine that keeping some of the exchanged crypto currency back
from each clearing block until the next block, or even longer, during any
bullish run (that we've seen on more than one occasion) can result in a
measurable margin increase with a fairly low (or at worst, quantified) risk
profile.

~~~
dahdum
That would still be investing, business would pay taxes on the Bitcoin value
at the time of purchase as revenue, regardless of conversion to fiat in whole
or part.

~~~
yebyen
I know, so you pay your taxes and now you might as well have been a day trader
for the levels of complexity that adds to your tax accounting burden.

Not sure what my point was really — that's just about exactly how this plays
out.

------
manojlds
Stellar is looking very good for lots of use cases. That's the only one I
follow though. What else is good from tech as well as how the coin has been
performing?

~~~
bradleyjg
One fundamental problem at this point is that coin sponsors and the
enthusiastic coin owner-boosters want massive price growth so they can strike
it rich. But as a medium of exchange price stability is a very nice property.

In terms of price stable crypto-currencies there's tether, which is looking
very much like a scam, and some kind of complicated ethereum contract token
the name of which slips my mind at the moment.

The stellar network is supposed to be able to be used to make payments without
necessarily involving stellars (except to fund the transaction). But the
anchors and trust web needed to do that don't exist (yet?)

~~~
gumbo
You are looking for the « DAI token » maybe?

~~~
bradleyjg
Not sure why this is grayed out, that’s what I couldn’t think of.

------
KasianFranks
Time for other cryptocurrencies to shine. "Starbucks Chairman Says
Cryptocurrency Will Be Big — Just Not Bitcoin" \-
[http://time.com/money/5121644/starbucks-chairman-
bitcoin/](http://time.com/money/5121644/starbucks-chairman-bitcoin/)

~~~
tw1010
Too bad they're not creating their own coin, star _bucks_ would be a pretty
catchy name.

~~~
thesmallestcat
Is there a cryptocurrency equivalent of "buy 10 drinks get one free" yet?

~~~
nokcha
Burger King introduced WhopperCoin in Russia:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/28/burger-king-russia-
cryptocur...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/28/burger-king-russia-
cryptocurrency-whoppercoin.html)

------
kristianp
Possibly the Lightning Network on Bitcoin will help with these kind of
problems, once its up to speed. See discussion on the stripe announcement
thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218056)

------
bastijn
1st of April is a strange date to stop or announce anything. April Fools,
really?

~~~
tzs
April 1st is the first day of the second quarter for businesses whose fiscal
year is the calendar year.

It generally makes sense for changes that affect accounting to start on the
first day of a quarter.

