1) Bitcoin needs time to transfer. How did you approve the transaction? Instantly in hoping it will go through or had the costumer to wait?
2) The problem with new Stellar addresses is, that they need to be "funded". Your sending wallet has to recognize if this address is empty to run the right function (it's not a normal transaction). Most of the wallets can't do that. They wouldn't be able to transfer any funds. Have you had problems with that?
1 - I ran a bitcoin node, and I had a script which would poll the node every few seconds to get the status of the addresses which I knew had open orders. Any that had received a payment would get marked accordingly so I could show on the order status page. But I didn't mark the order as paid until there were 2 confs.
2 - I pre-funded each Stellar address before providing it to the buyer. Periodically later if orders never got completed I would sweep the old addresses. But it wasn't much as Stellar was only about $0.2 USD at the time.
Regarding this, to clear up a common misconception, regular debit/checking takes at least one day to clear (US ACH), usually 2-3 business days, while Bitcoin transactions are validated within 1-2 hours, regardless of standard regional business hours.
This would be a web3 solution. Most of the people are far away of using a wallet extension. I looked into it, the programming is much more challenging.
Imprint wasn't a html link when I accessed the site, it was actually just a confusing bit of text down the bottom of the page. I did click through to index previously.
I did this in my first project. As I said, UTXO blockchains are intended to work like that. But with every address you create your daemon has to look for changes there. Your wallet file can grow like crazy if you don't built some spam protection in your system.
For blockchains with the balance model you actually use only one address. There are solutions for Stellar to provide an unique address but this is not implemented yet.
The memo tag/field is the way to go. But as I said, it isn't widely implemented.
Ehh how does Coinbase deal with this? They gave me a unique deposit address for Etherium which is account based (not UTXO) and IIRC they’ve never asked me to fill out a memo field for any currency.
If you do use the memo field, how do you deal with user error when they copy-paste the wrong number? Banks have humans guessing and correcting wire transfer instructions. Both you and the user will burn a transaction fee each way if you automatically refund unknown transactions.
It’s been a long time since I’ve messed with wallet APIs, but I’m pretty sure you’re using the wrong API. There should be some way to consume a stream of (row_id, transaction) tuples. That way you’re never polling every address. Instead you deal with relevant events that affect any of your addresses as they happen (which is not very often. A whole blockchain might do 15 transactions/second and you see ~0% of that)
It depends on the exchange provider. I use Kraken and they provide an unique address for every costumer. But I read some Exchanges require the memo field especially for Stellar addresses.
If you use a memo field and there is an error the order won't be found in the system. In this case, you can write a script which sends the funds back to the address - fees. In this case you don't lose money and you don't need humans to interact. A more difficult problem would be if sb. sends a wrong amount. Then you have to interact with the costumer.
Yes, you're right. Polling is bad but the easiest solution. The best one would be to listen to incoming transactions and take action if a new one comes in. I'm going to use this solution if I continue the project.
As I understood it you have an initial address when you create a wallet for example on a Litecoin core node.
All addresses you create after this initial address are deterministic depending on their position. It's like you add just a number to the first address. But they are all unique otherwise sb. would see these addresses belong to one wallet.
And because they are unique your daemon has to watch or compare incoming transactions with every address you created to monitor payments. I might be wrong, but otherwise how does it work?
> But with every address you create your daemon has to look for changes there.
On a Mimblewimble blockchain both sender and receiver need to sign for a transaction. So you could interact with the payer to construct a transaction which you as receiver sign last and then you can publish it yourself.
The random number is just a temporarily solution. The ideal one would be to use the memo field with an unique random string which contains all kind of characters. With this option you would have infinite payments.
The number solution can be improved if you search in the database for "free" numbers. I set the maximum payment time to 12 minutes. In this case, you can offer 100 payments per 12 minutes. I should update the article with this information.
The best "comparison" I can make is this:
- I buy random shit online every now and then, also from Amazon. That one souvenir I got for me and a friend was about 40 dollars worth, and I paid with crypto that time.
- I buy steam games maybe one every 3 months? So buying that one game with crypto is a small percentage, yes, but also probably the next game I'll get will also be with crypto payment, so it will increase the percentage slowly?
- For the service, I have paid maybe 15 dollars for similar services in my life. That one that accepts crypto is also the best one I have found yet, and to that I have paid about 80 dollars so far. So for that, the percentage is up there, and I'll continue paying them that way!
There was a HN post a year or so ago from a guy running an e-commerce site who said they get orders of magnitude more requests for paying in cryptocurrency than they actually got as sales with it.
His experience was that basically nobody who asks for it are asking because they are potential customers, but because more sites showing the bitcoin logo means their Bitcoin portfolio goes up because people start believing it's real.
Asking for cryptocurrency options is basically market manipulation, not an actual request.
Yes. I am proud to be one of the few that have used crypto to buy something "regular". To use that thing in the way it is promised to be, and not as gambling or scams. So yes, I'm proud to have done that.
That’s what everyone was doing in the early days. Hell, I paid a small fortune for a pizza in 2012. It still would never cross my mind to be proud to use any form of payment that’s just preposterous.
Agree to disagree, I guess. I'm glad you did use it for pizza back then, and I hope more of us use it for pizza in the near future. You are one of the few that don't just gamble and buy nfts.
So Stripe is harming their reputation for offering crypto payment services? Same with Moneygram? I don't think so.
They waited long enough for regulatory clarity on crypto (and still are waiting for other rules to go through) and they have already deployed their offerings today.
So there is no 'big problem' and those companies are choosing the cryptocurrencies that will survive regulations.
Some unprepared wannabe who got himself killed because of how unprepared he was is your hero? Weird choice.
Also, as the great Dr Henry Jones jr. said, “it belongs in a museum!” That thing was responsible for many deaths over the years, and would be better suited as a safe attraction to visit by all the white suburbanites sick of how fake their existence is. Maybe with a plaque stating how many rescue missions had to be sent out because of novices not knowing what they’re doing.
He survived for 113 days in the wilderness, not too bad. He was unprepared, yes, but it also seems he knew that what he was doing was risky, and he seems to have been ok taking that risk. I'm not quite sure - why judge him negatively?
A lot of people judge him negatively because of what happened post his death: a non-fiction book about him, a feature film, hundreds of imitators, a cult of "hard survival". This lead to people dying, getting malnourished, government funds being spent on rescuing them.
However, he never knew and never will know any of that happened. All he cared about is the journey, how is he possibly responsible for inspiring unprepared people to go into the woods? It's not like he's a still-living lifestyle blogger who goads people into doing this. He's not a hero but he's not deserving of all the flack he gets.
> He survived for 113 days in the wilderness, not too bad.
That's one way to frame it. The other way is simply to say that it took him 113 days to starve to death. Lest anyone have the wrong impressions from the book/movie, he didn't die because he ate poisonous berries that messed up his digestive system. He simply burned more calories than he consumed.
I'm not one of those who think negatively of him. He himself wrote something to the effect of not having regrets and being grateful he went on this journey when he knew he was probably going to starve to death. Who am I to criticize him for it? He lived the way he wanted to, and when it was clear it was leading to his death, he was at peace with that.
surviving 113 days in the wilderness isn't that great of a feat. if you were prepared, and had done a bare minimum of research and planning beforehand, you could manage not to die.
it wasn't that what he did was risky, it's that what he did was unnecessarily risky. if he wasn't so stupid about it, it would have been a lot less risky. taking on a challenge is admirable, but taking it on without any respect for the difficulty of the thing you're attempting is dumb.
This is just internet forum backseat driving. I'm sure the average hard-boiled HNer could've outlasted him with their innate wilderness intuitions -- probably have even watched a few survival videos on Youtube --, but Chris' story is also about a guy who wanted to march away from the trappings of society. I wouldn't be surprised if he died at day 113 even if he was 2x or 4x as prepared. He would have just went deeper quicker.
But pearl clutching about the risks someone else decided to take is incredibly petty. And odds are, as a fellow HN jockey who posts every day like myself, you aren't taking nearly enough.
I hunt and tramp (hike) and there's inherent risk, and risk that can be removed or minimised, and the risks he took that killed him were unnecessary ones.
Yes, he took "unnecessary" risks. I understand his goal was not to "minimize unnecessary risks". If that's your goal, fine. It's mine, too. It wasn't his goal.
Yes, but he didn't exist in a vacuum - someone had to find his decomposing body, someone had to remove it, someone had to clean the public shelter he died in.
Filmmakers dramatize and re-interpret events all the time.
There is no 'real-life story' other than a moron who went into the deep wilderness without even a map. And were he to have taken even basic precautions, would be alive and well.
I'll try it from a different angle. Included in the things he took with him were 5kg of rice and a gun with 400 rounds - that's some level of planning. Now, he didn't have a plan so he didn't take a map. Why would he take a map? He had a vague idea of what he wanted to do, and part of it was seeing if he could survive off the land. He couldn't; so be it. He could've been more prepared and increased his chances of survival, but the point that resonates with some people was that he tried. He got off his arse. He wasn't beholden to the expectations of his parents or his money or the usual life. I have a friend who loves the idea of going on adventures and makes endless technical lists and buys gear, then barely goes anywhere. He has lots of maps...
When Alex Honnold free-soloed El Capitan, the exact point was that he didn't have a rope. He had a desperate urge to challenge himself with bigger and more difficult tasks.
This is like asking why a parachuter would need to bother to pack their shoot correctly before going on a jump.
Or why a race car driver would bother to wear a seat belt.
'Having a map' might be the #1 thing he could do to ensure his survival, as he probably would have been able to walk out were he to have done this.
He apparently was not suicidal, and probably didn't intend on dying. His 'preparations' were not really 'preparations' so much as they were the actions of a stupid, glib or over-confident fool thinking that he was prepared.
He literally turned down the offer of 'reasonable gear' from someone thinking that he wanted to have a more 'natural experience'.
"Hey maybe you ought to wear a seatbelt of you're going to go for the land speed record"
"No thanks, I'm good, I want it to be more 'natural'"
This is the framing point of stupidity: mountain climbers, BASE jumpers, race car drivers take risks of course, but they're not stupid about it. The risks make sense in the context of what they are doing.
This is not the story of a man seeking enlightenment, it's about an otherwise entitled moron (not many kids have big college funds to 'give away') who stupidly and unnecessarily died.
"Let's give away money and go play on the highway" is what the book should have been called.
You said it wasn't a story worth telling. History says it was told by published article, book, and then a movie. And it's obviously of note enough that people from around the world make a pilgrimage there, that they've removed the bus, that the bus removal is international news and that people will still visit the site where the bus was!
It obviously resonates with some people and not with others. Some get it, they understand the motivation, it means something to them. It's OK to not be one of those people.
It 'proves' that narratives can be created out of anything.
It 'proves' that an idiot, thinking he was taking 'basic precautions', but really was taking none at all, walked blindly to his own death, can be twisted by authors and narrative makes into some kind of 'insightful' story.
It 'proves' that populism is for fools who can't take the time to just see what is in front of them.
"A man decided to fly an airplane without any training or knowledge whatsoever and died on takeoff - here is the story of his enlightening journey"
> surviving 113 days in the wilderness isn't that great of a feat. if you were prepared, and had done a bare minimum of research and planning beforehand, you could manage not to die.
Sorry but this just isn't true. There's too many variables to account for, the season, terrain, availability of large game, availability and proximity of water. Even in the best circumstances, outdoor survival isn't easy. There is one particular show (forgot the name) where contestants are put into an area on their own and tasked to survive as long as possible. The areas are specifically chosen for their viability. Even then very few people, even those with experience, make it past 90 days.
Successful survival is a conglomeration of many skills, hunting, navigation, sheltering, foraging, cooking, weather adaptation, emotional regulation, food preparation and preservation, shooting, injury prevention and care, etc. Of course preparation is an important factor, but your statement suggesting that just about anyone can do it given some basic research is a huge stretch.
Here's one from my local area - the climbers shouldn't have been up there, the incoming weather was predictable, they thought they could beat it, they didn't, and as a result, a rescuer was killed by an avalanche trying to save them - but they were all killed by avalanches also.
> Because he was a 24 year old putz who’s grand life philosophy was basically the same as every 24 year old suburban white dude: the world sucks, I should run away to a simpler time.
As a white dude who grew up in suburbia and was recently 24, where are you getting this because I nor any of my suburban white friends think that?
That's a common meme of the last 40.000 years. Olders love criticizing younger generations. Don't worry it happens in urban areas, in the jungle and at kings court.
Human nature, my elders criticized my 30 years ago, and now I do the same.
I'm quite sure Phillip II also complained about the foolines of his son Alexander, even when he was tutored by Aristotle.
In brief, elders complains of youngers, but the truth is the world progress with each generation. Try to left a better world than the one you have encountered, it still has some nasty bugs to resolve.
If old people have been criticizing young people for acting dumb for thousands of years, maybe that means old people are always wrong, or maybe it means young people always tend to act dumb.
I think a lot of old people look back on their youth, realize they were dumb, then look at the contemporary youth and see that they're dumb too. Those youth eventually mature, see that they were once dumb, and see that contemporary youth are still dumb. This hypothesis doesn't preclude a general trend of progress; rather it says something about the biological development of human brains. Despite what our modern laws might say, 18 year olds typically still have a lot of growing up to do. There's plenty of evidence that suggests brain development continues well into one's mid 20s.
> It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet. The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.
McCandless died when he was 24. Notice that a lot of people in this thread, sympathetic or critical of him, are referring to him as a 'kid'. There's probably some real truth in that characterization.
Alaska has the most missing people per capital of any US state, a few times higher than the natural average. Not all of that is attributable to the wilderness, but much of it is. Nature isn't like a Disney movie, but many people don't seem to appreciate that.
Makes me sad and happy to see that, cause of changing a tragic story but also good to protect people. It's a 9 hour hike from Healy and the bus location is on Google maps.
The sad thing is that the States aren't interested in this technology or why does it take so long to get it done there? It would be great to use waste material to get more energy out before burying it again. I'm from Germany, sadly thou, most of the people are to uneducated and scared to push atomic power station to the next level. Great documentation btw.
The US is bifurcated between people who see no problem with current nuclear plants and those who see any nuclear plant as an abomination in need of removal.
It’s hard to have a reasonable debate about this issue when the sides are so diametrically opposed due to their dogmatic beliefs.
This completely discounts the gas, coil and oil industry incentives to oppose nuclear power. Those are huge lobbies in the US. Much larger than Green Peace types being used as a smoke screen.
The question is do we need nuclear and the risks? Can renewables like wind, hydro, and solar provide what we need cheaper and without the dangers associated with nuclear? If so, then why even mess with it?
The answer is yes, we need nuclear because there's no chance we'll get to 100% renewable energy in time to make a difference, nuclear could fill the niche we need to make wind and solar generation feasible.
It makes enormous sense to have some diversity in the electrical generation system, along with the essentially guaranteed & dependable output of nuclear. It's an excellent backbone. The US could very easily get to 30% renewables (17-18% now), 30% nuclear (19%-20% now), 40% natural gas (35%-36% now), from where the figures are at today. That ends coal. Then push forward on reducing the natural gas share thereafter. 30%-40% nuclear and 60%-70% renewables long-term, would perhaps be ideal.
We could trivially float ~$200 billion to build new nuclear plants and rapidly wipe out all the remaining coal power along with a modest increase in renewables and natural gas, rather than following the gradual coal decline route.
60 nuclear plants are giving us 19-20% of our power base now. It'd cost ~$200-$250 billion to take that up to 30%, assuming $7 billion each. Even if the cost were $10b each ($300b total), it'd be fine. The nuclear plants buy us many decades to keep pushing renewables higher. It's an irrelevant dollar price to pay, shouldered over decades (low yield debt), for the benefits. And it keeps our generation diversity intact.
In a region that is now home to over 17 million, and in which life goes on. In notable contrast to Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Most of the specific dynamics of the Banqiao disaster were organisational, managerial, and political, rather than technical, which is to say: not specific to hydropower projects, and fully shared with nuclear projects. In fact we've seen precisely the same dynamics across multiple nuclear accidents and incidents.
The scale of the hydropower and nuclear industries is also worth noting. There are over 57,000 large dams worldwide, 40% in China.[1] There are 450 nuclear power plants operating worldwide.[2] Which is to say that the per-plant risk experience is 125 times greater for hydroelectric and hydraulic projects than for nuclear, and yes, there have been notable dam failures and failure modes: Johnstown, Vajont, Sempor, Panshet, Baldwin Hills, St. Francis, Teton. And several near misses: Oroville and Glen Canyon come to mind.
Many of the worst disasters have happened regions, or times, in which resources were low, understanding poor, and understandings of liability and risks deficient. Which if nuclear power expands, is likely to also be the case.
I've written on and submitted items on Banqiao several times at HN. It's an instructive case study, though the lessons may not be immediately apparent:
The risks are completely manageable. Aside from a couple of disasters, nuclear energy has not killed or poisoned very many people at all. There is a cost to all forms of energy production. But because nuclear involves weird stuff with atoms that most people don’t understand, they find it scarier.
At the moment there is a major world-wide threat due to carbon emissions causing climate change. Climate models are complex, but there is some consensus that continuing our emissions will lead to serious detriment to many species, including our own.
The world is 80% powered by fossil fuel today, and we are adding more fossil fuel every day. Alongside each installation of variable renewables is an installation of dispatchable fracked gas. When the sun sets on California, something like 10 GW of fracked gas comes online for the night [1].
Meanwhile nuclear plants are the only 24/7 (often 18 months continuous) near-zero carbon energy source we know of. We have them deployed at scale around the world (take a look at France in previous link, who decarbonized their entire grid with nuclear reactors in about 15 years in the 1970s as a side-effect of building a grid that didn't rely on energy imports).
Beyond being near-zero carbon, nuclear reactors don't emit air pollution during normal operation like combustion does (fossil, biofuel). Air pollution from fossil and bio kills millions per year [2].
Meanwhile, the threats from nuclear are: "what do we do with the waste?" and "what about Chernobyl and Fukushima?"
Because there's so much energy in the atomic nucleus, there is very little volume of highly concentrated waste generated in nuclear reactors (2,000,000x less than in electron-shell waste). So little volume that rather than dumping it out the stack like most power plants do, nuclear reactors store all of their waste from decades of powering cities on site, waiting for final geologic disposition. This waste sits benign in concrete casks that have never and probably will never injure anyone. Here's what they look like [3].
As for accidents, while Chernobyl did kill ~60 and cause up to 4000 early cancer deaths, Fukushima killed up to 1 person. This safety record, considering how much electricity has been pushed around, is actually impeccable and leader-class. By the numbers, nuclear reactors are much safer than baseline generators, and roughly as safe as wind and solar. [5]
Of course this doesn't change people's minds. Facing climate change, the nuclear industry had better figure out how to communicate all this effectively while simultaneously reducing costs and improving safety, for all of our sake. While safety is already leadership class, the industry itself will not survive more Fukushima events due to human perceptions.
The nuclear industry hid under a rock hoping no one would notice it and protest it for decades. Now it has to come back out and explain why it's important and valuable.
For economics, if nuclear reactors benefited from their nearly carbon-free nature, they'd compete today. In France they're 30% cheaper than fracked gas.
In summary, the dangers from nuclear are minuscule compared to the dangers of climate change.
i would say yes. watch the series and see why nuclear as is has issues and what was proposed (ie they were not proposing to build yet another nuclear reactor, they actually designed and build a nuclear reactor that could run on current nuclear waste - and estimated that the current waste that we store could power all of the US for 125 years given the current energy needs).
i don't know if humans will still be a thing in 500 years but I can tell you that if we're still going to be around the history books are not going to be kinds to us in general and to Trump in particular.
Just remove the line numbers, every editor can mark in block mode today. Some snippets won't work without further code anyways.