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I'm sure the principals of Mt. Gox felt the same way.

At least before it got hacked.

All it takes is one slip-up.


Mtgox was done in by a pattern of criminal stupidity spanning years not some one off black swan event. Coinbase in contrast is a gold standard of professionalism.


> Coinbase in contrast is a gold standard of professionalism.

I hope you're joking.


Mt. Gox was orders of magnitude smaller than Coinbase is today.


Which is precisely why it would be foolish to store anything there.


Edit: I was able to login after several minutes of downtime.

I would urge others to buy a hardware wallet and not store your coins with Coinbase.


Junk food isn't bad once in a while.

But if you eat junk food all the time, it's pretty obvious that one of the immediate consequences of eating junk food every day is the general decline of your health.

So it goes for social media. Social networks are the junk food of socializing. And don't get me started on what that does to someone's sense of self, well-being, norms, ethics, morality etc.

Maybe this picture will be illuminating to you[1]. It succinctly summarizes what I'm trying to say.

I should probably mention the image might be NSFW.

[1] http://artfucksme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/controversi...


Completely agree. It's what Prof. Susskind states in one of his lectures on QM explaining quantum fields. Eventually pictures and mental abstractions break down, and it's better to not visualize.

At some point, one's limited biological brain will be unable to fully perceive or visualize some mathematical object. That's where intuition comes in.


You can still reason by analogy with something you can visualise. You can't visualise 3+1 = 4 spacetime dimensions, but you can pretend that space has 2 dimensions so that you can visualise it as 2+1 dimensions. Blind algebra rarely works. I think that many have an optimistic view of blind algebra because proofs are often stated as algebra without geometric intuition, even when the author of the theorem almost certainly used geometric intuition to come up with it. This can give a false impression. I've seen people struggle tremendously with simple proofs in Hilbert spaces, when the corresponding proof in 2 dimensions is easy by drawing a picture and translating that into algebra that works just as well in the more general setting. For example, let S be a closed subspace of Hilbert space H and x in H. Prove |x-y| is minimised over y in S iff x-y is orthogonal to S.


Analogies break down as easily as they are helpful. On average, they help mathematical intuition less than expected. (Check Bose-Einstein thought experiments and the mathematics they spawned for an example.)

QM went into blind math side way past any analogies. Yet it is currently matching observations which is as good as it gets with true.


QM did not go into blind math mode. The way physicists usually do QM is by glossing over a lot of the subtleties of Hilbert spaces and act as if the results from finite dimensional linear algebra work. Concepts physicists have been using for a long time, such as the Dirac delta function and path integrals, only got formalised much later. Many revolutions in QM, such as Feynman diagrams, are very much based on intuition. You can transfer all of that back into formal math, as Dyson did, but Dyson could not have done so without Feynman having invented them first.

Especially in mathematics it is fashionable to write proofs in a style that completely erases the reasoning that lead to the proof. I think that's a pity. So much unwritten knowledge gets lost that way when the originators die. Differential forms, for example, have a beautiful geometric interpretation, but the way they're taught nowadays obscures that completely and makes it seem like they're a formal algebraic tool only. In fact, we're now several generations later, so even some of the instructors may be unaware of that, because their own instructors failed to transfer the original geometric intuition!


> Launching a crypto to compete against Euro sounds bizarre

When did they specifically say Estcoin was to be used as a currency? An ICO just requires you to issue a token[1].

[1] https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard


> Much of the criticism of estcoin was based on the fact that Estonia simply can’t start its own cryptocurrency even if it wanted to. Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership, which we are proud to have. No one here is interested in changing that.

If you read the first news about estcoin they used the term 'cryptocurrency', now the use 'crypto token'.


So they took feedback, made logical changes to their plan based on that feedback... and we should fault them for this?


When the change is more or less just the name, yes.


The feedback was literally about the name. How else do you change the name without... changing it?


When the feedback is "hey you can't make a currency", that is not feedback about the name, and changing the name is a questionable fix at best.


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