Excellent point. The coinmarketcap.com site lists 3882 cryptocurrencies. That makes the "Bitcoin's limited supply means permanent value" talking point ridiculous. They list 91 things with "Bitcoin" in the title, 6 of which are in the top 100 by monetary supply, and all 6 notionally have at least $100m in circulation.
So long as everybody knows what the "real" Bitcoin is, it doesn't present a problem, anymore so than existence of the Liberian dollar renders USD unusable.
Not at all. From a market perspective, Bitcoin is not scarce in the same sense that gold or diamonds are scarce. If people want to buy into cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is far from their only option. As this whole discussion around Ethereum makes clear, other cryptocurrencies are viable. As I mentioned earlier, other Bitcoins are clearly viable.
Yes, the number of Bitcoins in a given fork has a limit, assuming whoever controls that for keeps it that way. But that doesn't matter much if market demand is such that other forks or entirely new coins become viable.
it's like saying gold isn't scarce because there are other metal compounds. you're not making sense at all. if you want to interpret scarcity this way - feel free, but be informed that pretty much everyone else will look at you weird.
No, it's like saying gold isn't scarce because anybody with a bee in their bonnet can launch "Gold 2.0" and create their own supply. Which is definitely not true for gold, but is demonstrably true for cryptocurrencies.
I grant that crypocurrency fans will look at me weird, which I'm fine with. But economists (and most others) won't, because they understand that substitutability [1] affects scarcity.
Again, from a marketing perspective, it's not clear that matters. For a great number of cryptocurrency "investors", they're just buying magic beans. A fine piece of evidence comes from CNN today that digital currencies are effectively substitutable: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/investing/bitcoin-ethereum-xr...
As Bitcoin itself proved, plenty of people will buy into a commodity because it's new and hot, and not because of any fundamental analysis of its value. In that sense, Bitcoin is not in any way scarce.
How many more years of clear correlation between value and chain difficulty must pass for you to recognize that there’s something in there?
Also, bitcoin is scarce because it’s hard to get more of it, what the hell is your definition of scarcity? It seems to change from one comment to another.
Bitcoin has not proven market value beyond a speculative instrument and a vehicle for financial crime. In particular, it has failed in its original goal to be peer-to-peer electronic cash. I hope real value emerges someday, but after a decade's track record, I don't expect it.
My definition of scarcity is when the people in the market to buy cannot easily get more of the thing that they want. For people just wanting to speculate, other cryptocurrencies are substitutable. And given how easy it is to start a cryptocurrency, the supply is effectively infinite.
And just to be clear, it's not Bitcoin in specific I'm concerned about. I think the same thing about all the cryptocurrencies, although I have more hope for other ones to eventually evolve toward delivering value.
> Bitcoin has not proven market value beyond a speculative instrument and a vehicle for financial crime. In particular, it has failed in its original goal to be peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Very much has. Wild speculation moved on from bitcoin to altcoins circa 2015, from altcoins to ico in 2017 and from ico to defi in 2019. Bitcoin is old and boring.
Vehicle for financial crime - that’s just ridiculous, not even bothering to respond. Go google what fines banks paid in recent decade for financial crimes before claiming this bs.
And bitcoin is p2p cash for all intents and purposes. Ticks all the boxes for me.
> people in the market to buy cannot easily get more of the thing that they want
Yeah, you can’t get more bitcoin, it’s scarce.
> For people just wanting to speculate, other cryptocurrencies are substitutable.
Well that’s a dumb definition of scarcity, unless you also think gold isn’t scarce because there are tons of substitute metals for purposes of speculation on the market.
Nah. Bitcoin speculation is still popular, as any popular press search for "Bitcoin" will show you. People are buying in because they hope the price will go up.
I appreciate you not responding on crime, as that saves me some time.
I can believe Bitcoin "ticks the boxes" for ardent Bitcoin fans, but that doesn't say much about the rest of the world. Bitcoin did not end up being cash in the common sense of the term. E.g.: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
For speculation, yes, some metals are substitutable. Silver is a popular alternative to gold. To a lesser extent, platinum, palladium, and rhodium. If you don't believe me, just go look at some of the sites and vendors that cater to gold bugs. And I'll note that Bitcoin has often been called "digital gold" and has drawn plenty of interest from the same kinds of people who speculate in gold, so Bitcoin can also be a substitute.
I think the point was a financially successful company not contributing to an open source project even after making a bunch of money just seems un-ethical? Maybe I'm old-school but I still think we should be supporting each other in this type of situation especially if one of us strikes it big? Sure - move away from Nginx but maybe throw some $ their way for the service they provided even if you don't legally have to ...
I did not infer that from the OP’s comment, but in any case, I don’t know the specifics of their arrangement or whether they had been a commercial customer or not. Last time I checked Nginx had been doing fine selling itself for half a billion.
But more abstractly, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. I see more of a responsibility to give back in the form of patches and collaboration than throwing $ at the problem. I see the nginx approach of open source simply as a business tactic no different from Windows Home/Pro customer segmentation except Home is free for tactical reasons to kill off other competition. It is a calculated business move; if your business model sucks-—which it obviously did not in nginx case—-does not imply others are acting less than ethically or they should pay you out of pity. (That said it might be strategically important for them to keep your head above water and survive for their own benefit as their vendor, but that’d be a different angle.)
I suppose the difference between free software vs open source is also relevant to this discussion, and I could relate to your sentiment when facing the former much more than the latter.
Patches and contributions take a non-negligible amount of time and resources to review, test and integrate, as well as adding to the ongoing maintenance burden. They might be welcome, but they are absolutely not cost-free and I wouldn't consider them a "form of bill paying", the benefit (if any) is far too indirect and it doesn't directly help the bottom-line in any way.
Something should pay for the bills and if the oss project creates lots of real value then I would prefer to live in a world where some of that value goes to pay the bills. The alternative world simply discourages oss since devs would have to work other jobs. There is qualitative difference when you have a dedicated core team vs just everyone contributing patches.
Could it be that OSS is simply not a sustainable business model for the long haul and it was simply successful in a period of history when vast money was made quickly by landgrab expansion of technology to consolidate/provide many basic services and the code itself wasn’t the competitive differentiator? I don’t know but that’s a possibility too. I question why one would be concerned in keeping OSS alive, as a business, assuming it cannot survive on its own feet. There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live. It’s already changing its character via AGPL and Mongo license-style things in the face of AWS cloud simply deploying and milking cash.
(The above is assuming the concern that it is funding that’s a problem today; I don’t quite see it that way [for instance, I strongly suspect Nginx to have made more money than DBX so far, so who are we to say who’s been more successful; market cap ain’t everything], but that’s a hypothetical to think about.)
Moreover, supporting a project does not equate supporting its existing maintainers. It could mean taking some partial ownership including the review side and having some developers on your own payroll. Seems like that’s how the big project are done most of the time. The Open Core model we are focusing on is a niche and arguably more akin to fremium products than free software as a thing with communal ownership.
OSS is not a business model, but more closely matches charity and non-profits, and run on donations and altruism of their users.
i find it annoying that people here keep saying that a company _should_ pay for their open source software usage just because they have money to do so. They don't have an obligation. They could donate - and some do - but it is in no way required of them, regardless of how much value they derive from using said OSS.
Open-core projects, which has a somewhat useless core and a paid for 'enterprise' version is not, under my eyes, a proper OSS project, but instead is a way to market their proprietary product.
The serendipity was GPL getting uptake thanks to Linux and GCC.
Linux via the ongoing lawsuit with BSD back then, and GCC because UNIX vendors started charging for their compilers, with GCC being the only alternative available.
However everyone needs to pay their bills, therefore the push for non-copyleft licenses, thus in a couple of years GPL based software will either be gone, or under dual licenses.
You already see this happening with BSD/MIT based alternatives to Linux on the IoT space, NuttX, RTOS, Azure RTOS, Zephyr, Google's Fuchsia, ARM's mbed, Arduino, ...
>> "There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live"
What on earth does this tirade even mean? Every business lives 'forcefully' and fights for survival. Sometimes it comes with values, i.e. we dont use child labour in DRK to mine thallium, fairtrade, organic, etc. OSS is one of those values.
For what’s it worth, many companies have a hard time justifying “unnecessary” expenses to their boards or shareholders. Depending on company structure, their hands may be somewhat tied.
Not all companies, of course; and to be clear, I think such a company structure is a problem itself and agree with you.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a board or shareholders who think 'support contract for essential component of our infrastructure' is 'unnecessary'.
Exactly my thoughts when I read the article - a hugely successful company not contributing to an open source project which enabled them to succeed in the first place ...
There are different paths companies take. Some buy and it really works for them and their business, since overhead is small and everything just works.
The other set of companies have more sophisticated requirements: when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.
> when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.
I'm a bit confused by this - I work for HAProxy Technologies and we do have an enterprise product. Many of our customers contribute code directly into the community and we backport those features into the latest enterprise stable version. This means they do not have to wait until the next shipping cycle to take advantage of a new feature. There's also a large community & knowledge base around HAProxy.
Your reasoning may be right when dealing with "closed source enterprise software" but it doesn't line up when we start talking about open source/open core.
Shipping cycle is one of the reasons mentioned. And as you can imaging, unfortunately, contributing to Nginx open source is not an easy thing (but they have a great product for sure). If HAProxy is different in terms of contributions - it is great!
What stops them buying commercial licenses for Nginx and then using the OSS version? They're not obligated to, certainly, but I hardly think Nginx would say "you must use only the commercial version".
This is exactly how I work - albeit on my own projects - vanilla html/css Go and Postgres for all server side operations with a few modular web components here and there for the interactivity you mentioned. No frameworks, build tools or config files ...
IMO React and it's ilk are amazing in some applications but the problem is trying to make 'everything' a React/Angular/Vue app without considering scaling or how it would benefit a user. I have been tasked with building complex UX'x which would've been far simpler and performant as a multi-page type app with some plain JS sugar.I agree with wrnr - I too am leaning more towards WebComponents where some dynamic functionality is required. It provides us the ability to not only keep the tech stack small and also avoid all the dependency and version pitfalls.
The ratio of people who think about the implications vs the general public who consume rather than question is weighted in favour of big name companies.
There should simply be more coursework on privacy, classroom discussion on information monopoly, corporatocracy, ect... To level the field, it takes Education. (and I'm not saying the router is evil)
