Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters.
(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)
That's not relevant to the OPs point. The point is that even SMS clients were capable of merging multiple messages together, yet Twitter has still failed to do so. So whether or not they were SMS doesn't matter.
This can't work. The author requirement was to have self-hosted comments without javascript. So his html pages change every few minutes, and cloudflare is just not designed for this.
Yes Google is just showing ads. They collect data about you to target their ads well, but that's basically all they do. They don't send your info to the NSA, they don't send you SPAM, they don't sell your info to private investigators. Their end goal is just to show you targeted ads. That's it.
You're kidding--right? I imagine the NSA has complete control over Google's head honchos? ("Give me the data, or we will audit every stock trade, every dime that you put into a bank? Every aspect of your private life will be scrutinized, if you don't go along with our polite requests?"). Hell--I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has a pipeline directly attached to Google servers?
In my world, SPAM is any ad, including targeted ads? I actually miss the phalus enlargement ads?
They don't sell your information to Investigators(government, private, etc.), I imagine they give it away, if their lives, money will be affected?
I do feel their end goal is to sell you products, and services, but just the amount of information they have on us is staggering? Why do I feel they can predict the future? I wouldn't be surprised if they know right now who will become the final two, or three presidential candidates?
I have no evidence for these outlandish claims. I'm just a guy who doesn't believe in what these companies are telling us? Conspiracy theory nut--maybe I am? Or, maybe I watched Three Days of the Condor too many times? I just think they do a lot with that data? I think the government does a lot with that data?
I'm in no mood for a debate, I need to remove seven rivets in order to change my ball joints(horrid manufacturing/engineering), and the neighbors don't like noise. Need to complete the job before 7:00 p.m., or I might get a visit from the Blue boys? Love my kind neighbors?
Your whole post is just nonsense. First you say they just show ads, then in the second sentence you say yourself that they do much more then that. Then comes the strawman that they don't send spam and sell the info.
This counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employer was buying about one /48 per week. What does this mean? We alone exhausted 2^80 ip addresses per week, or 2e18 addresses per second (that's 2 quintillion!). So this counter showing 2 addresses exhausted per second is wrong by an order of 1 quintillion.
In fact, with the proper paperwork you can still relatively easily buy an entire /40 or maybe even /32. With these practices, IPv6 WILL run out of addresses within the next 100 years. Well, to be pedantic, it will run out of allocatable subnets, but the vast majority of their addresses will remain unused.
On the one hand, it seems cheap to give me one-four-billionth of the relative amount of space as the one IPv4 address they give me.
On the other hand, I can't possibly imagine which consumer home network needs four billion times more IP addresses than all of IPv4 combined. (EUI-64 notwithstanding.)
It would seem like /112 would be way more than enough for home use (131,072 unique IPs), even for complex setups with lots of subnetting, and /96 for small business use.
I understand that giving out /64s will still take 4 billion times longer to exhaust all IPs than IPv4, but ... it still feels like they're being overly generous. 64-bit IPs would have more than enough to outlast our sun going supernova if we were smarter about allocating them.
This is part of the design of IPv6. There are (amost) never networks other than /64. This allows the possibility of generating addresses based on a mac address, and frequently changing addresses for privacy reasons.
Most devices will not work on a network with a mask longer than 64. The only common exception is point to point links between routers, which may be a /127.
Removing variable length subnet masks from end networks makes routing and configuration a lot simpler.
You say that but in a few years we'll probably be fighting neighbour discovery DoS attacks. /64 prefixes seem to be the worst thought out idea of IPv6.
IIRC (and I may not RC), ND traffic is supposed to be constrained to a local link.
If this is true, then it would be totally safe to drop ND traffic that didn't originate on your network, and drop ND traffic that occurs on networks that you manage that have manually configured addresses.
So, how would you DoS anything other than your upstream router [0], or the nodes on your own LAN?
[0] Even this DoS seems trivially preventable by dropping ND requests that happen too frequently. If you assume that there is one router on each end of a link, then the rate of ND messages would have to be very low in the ordinary course of operation, no?
Honest question, how does privacy come into play here? If you're given a /64, even if you change the last 64 bits, isn't it trivial for someone to assume everything from the first 64 is you?
Yeah. It is a trivial assumption. In my experience with Comcast Residential internet, one's IPv6 prefix remains the same for as long as one's IPv4 address, which is to say that they remain the same forever.
Comcast hands out allocations as wide as /60, but even this doesn't help much with privacy; if you're being unusually proactive with your network renumbering, that's only four bits of entropy that you're adding to your identifiers. :)
1. The /64 is the same for your whole local network. Granted that at home that is usually not many devices, but it's almost certainly more than one.
2. The /64 changes when you change networks, and unless you have a static IP address it will change for your home network too. On the other hand, if the low 64 bits is derived from your MAC address, it never changes (unless you replace your NIC of course.)
> The /64 is the same for your whole local network.
This means that -at best- IPv6 "Privacy Extensions" give advertisers no more information than they get today with non-Carrier-Grade IPv4 NATs. That's not a big win, in my book. :/
I get that EUI-64 uses your 48-bit MAC address plus 16-bit "ff:fe" token. But I don't really understand why this matters.
First, why does your home office need globally unique identifiers for its devices? 48-bits seems really excessive. A CRC16 hash of the MAC should cover far more before a conflict arises than any home networking devices could handle anyway. (you're really unlucky if you hit a 1:65,536 conflict. But make it CRC32 if you're really worried about that.)
Second, how does having the MAC address make routing simpler? When a packet comes into the router, it has to have a table to say MAC A == LAN port B. So instead, you'd just have it be: IP A == LAN port B. In the reverse direction, the PC already has to ask the router "what is my IP prefix?", so why is that harder than it just asking "what is my IP?" and getting a full address from it?
Third, wouldn't temporary (privacy) addresses undermine this entire EUI-64 setup's efficiency improvements? Now you're back to randomized data in the low 64-bits, so the router and PC need to have some kind of negotiation to know the IP addresses just like before anyway.
Lastly, I do think it's a valid privacy concern. Now when you do something the government doesn't like and they show up, that IP address with your MAC in it lets them say "yep, this is the exact computer that was used." Before, there was the argument that it could have been a Wifi guest. Even worse, it could follow you between dynamic IP reassignments from your ISP, and even from switching to different ISPs.
So all that said ... it doesn't seem like we really need 18 quintillion addresses to do decent routing and subnetting. Just drop EUI-64 as a bad idea, and have 16-bits of randomized values for the home network. And when you go a small business, increase it to 24-bits. Fortune 500, 32-bits.
And now to make the whole system even better ... make most of the IPv6 values used by ISPs 0000, so you can collapse 80% of the address to ::
> First, why does your home office need globally unique identifiers for its devices?
For the same reason that the original plans for the Internet ensured that every connected machine was a peer of every other: a network of peers easily allows for new and novel services on the network.
> Second, how does having the MAC address make routing simpler?
That's not the point. The point of this setup is to provide a way for SLAAC to easily create a stable IPv6 address to make DNS forward and reverse mapping on the LAN easy to manage. There's also an alternative method for stable address creation that doesn't use the system's MAC address.
> Now you're back to randomized data in the low 64-bits, so the router and PC need to have some kind of negotiation to know the IP addresses just like before anyway.
You really need to read how SLAAC works [0]. In particular, pay attention to the Duplicate Address Detection section, and note how DHCPv4 uses a similar method for determining whether or not an IP in a pool is safe to hand out.
After you've read about SLAAC and DAD, read about Neighbor Discovery [1]. This stuff is more well thought out and less complicated than you seem to think that it is.
The simplest way to allocate addresses on a LAN is something called SLAAC. To use SLAAC, an IPv6 router advertises a /64 on a LAN and connected machines automatically select addresses from that /64. So, -by design- the smallest general-purpose network will always be a /64.
The IETF recommends that ISPs hand out /52's to their customers. Why? IIRC, there are no specific examples in the RFC, but I've cooked up a likely scenario:
First, remember that traffic amongst machines in the same subnet never [0] touches a router. This means that traffic within a subnet can only be filtered by endpoints.
Now, imagine that -say- the Open Wireless Router Project [1] gets clever, recognizes that our ISP is allocating a /60 or a /52, automatically splits that into one /64 for each advertised SSID, then sets up firewall rules that create real "guest network" isolation (both from other SSIDs and from machines on the LAN), while still giving every connected machine a globally routeable address.
That would be nice, no? The beauty of it is that an end-user doesn't have to even be aware of IP networking for this to work!
The practice of automatically giving end-user sites the ability to create rather large numbers of subnets will inevitably give rise to consumer networking gear that allows for interesting, secure configurations while still ensuring that all machines on the Internet have a globally-routable IP address.
[0] Let's ignore encapsulation and tunnelling for a moment.
IMO every edge user should be getting a /62 at the smallest, but a /60 seems doable. /64 is the smallest idiomatic subnet. So a /60 would grant 2^4 subnets for SOHO use. Frankly, no one really probably needs more than 3 (internal, DMZ and external) for even SOHO operations.
While others are asking "Why is CompanyA buying a /48 a week?", my question is "Why isn't ISP-A asking CompanyA why they need a /48 a week?"
IPv6 operates in several of these hierarchical subnets. A /64 is the smallest, and is usually for customers and edges. A /48 or /52 is reasonable for a datacenter, as it provides up to 2^12 subnets.
But even then, doing a /48 per DC, there is no reason for not-Huge-Cloud-Provider to be gathering that much IP.
This may actually be a situation the market can take care of: If you're an ISP that is hooking up spammers with a new /48 each week, that starts to reflect poorly on your /40.
Because "email marketing" means "spammers". They were buying new blocks of IP addresses to try to evade blacklists. They are the scum of the internet, dumping their pollution far and wide because nobody is stopping them.
*to be clear, not all email marketers are spammers. But you can be damn sure anyone buying that many IP blocks is. There's literally no legitimate reason for them to need that many IP addresses.
My guess is that their subnets would be periodically marked as spammers in various black lists, so they would need new subnets to continue "email marketing".
At the same time, where I work, at least with ipv4, we like to segment product by ip block. This way if one gets a bad reputation it can't adversely affect the others. This hasn't been an issue in practice, but its just an extra layer of protection we like to have.
I'm not sure if there's the same concern with ipv6 or not.
Were they holding on to a /48 per week? If they were, I'd have to imagine that at some point a single company that's not in the ISP or hosting business would be effectively holding on to a /32 and some questions would be raised.
If it was showing anywhere near as good of numbers as their wallet or user counts you can bet it would be released tomorrow.
For a company that accidentally released something similar look at Bitpay which had staff bragging for the first half of last year about how they were doing $1m a day in processing only to release their 2014 EOY figures showing an average which was less than half of that.
It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.
If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.
MAU was rarely used back then so I wouldn't expect to find it.
Now it's recognized as basically the only useful metric for sites like this. GPlus, Instagram, Whatsapp, Tinder, Snapchat, and Twitter(well 4 years but close enough) all release MAU within that 3 year from launch timeframe.
So if Twitter took 4 years to release MAU, would you have accused them for 4 years that they have "something to hide"? Now you get my point. It's sensitive. Sometimes you wait years before feeling comfortable releasing this number.
Yes actually and I wouldn't be alone. Pretty much everyone was claiming Twitter was hiding numbers during that time to cover for the fact that they had mostly inactive accounts.
Yet Twitter experienced phenomenal growth, going from zero to tens of millions of MAU in their first 4 years, proving your logic wrong (paraphrasing you, you said "if growth was so great surely a company would release MAU"). So if you apply the same criticism you make against Coinbase to Twitter, you would have said in these first 4 years "Twitter's metric are all vanity metrics" and you would have rejected Twitter's claims of growth. Well you would have been misguided, as we now know for certain Twitter WAS growing during these first 4 years.
This is why you look stupid to reject exchanges' claim of growth. Yes we know MAU is less than number_of_wallets. It's mathematical. But still, it's silly for you to reject their claims of growth as you have no basis for it. Not releasing MAU doesn't mean you are not growing, as Twitter demonstrated.
The thing is while they were refusing to release the data there were strong indications that those numbers were very weak. Seriously go read up about it.
Many people did reject Twitters claims of growth and they were largely proven right when Twitter started releasing MAU.
You call growing from zero to tens of millions of MAU in 4 years "very weak"?! Ridiculous. You are wrong, nobody seriously outright rejected Twitter was growing. The worst critics said was "Twitter is not growing as fast as they claim, but they ARE growing" or "growth has slowed down, but there are still growing".
I can use any other example to prove that not releasing MAU doesn't mean something needs to be hidden. I quoted Gmail earlier because this is a good case of a growing product whose MAU needed to be kept secret due to competitive reasons.
So what you're saying is that Twitter withheld their MAU because the figures were poor?
Why did Gmails MAU need to be kept secret?
As an aside growth at Coinbase in user accounts IS slowing quite dramatically. 350K per month for 2013, 100k per month for 2014, 50K per month for 2014.
If you knew anything about Bitcoin, you would know there are always truckloads of people signing up on exchanges whenever the price is very high. It was above $500 per coin for the first half of 2014 so this pushed user account creation to 90k/month overall for the year. Now we are back to 65k/month which has been quite constant since 2013 with the exception of the bubble craze.
It has been explained many times users tend to leave their coins on exchanges. So 1 exchange address containing 100 BTC could represent 100 bitcoin users each owning 1 BTC. Therefore your upper limit estimate is invalid.
Except there are also the number of users with multiple addresses which given usage trends from people describing their setup accounts for a large number of active users.
The claim that there are uncounted millions of users hiding out on exchanges only doesn't map up well with the reality of the usage in the ecosystem either and is in my mind a weak excuse for weak growth numbers.
Your logic is flawed. It doesn't matter if even 99% of the addresses all belonged to the wallets of a few hundreds early adopters.
As of today (as of block 350,000) there are 102 addresses with 10,000 BTC up to a few 100,000 BTC in each of them. They represent 2.8 million BTC! Most of these addresses belong to exchanges or online wallets and contain their customer's funds, because no one owns that many bitcoins. So these 102 addresses most certainly represent the 2 or 3 million bitcoin users worldwide that exchanges and online wallets claim they have: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-future-consequences-of-the...
So of course this single address at the time represented hundreds of thousands of Bitstamp users. Ditto for the other 10,000+ BTC addresses that belong to other exchanges.
It's not sarcasm. It's pointing out I can't prove your wrong so why argue it? It's a waste of time for both of us.
For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.
As for Bitstamp remember that they covered a 19000 coin loss with no problem. There are a lot of coins in big wallets but there are a lot more individual entities holding large numbers of coins as well that you are completely discounting. Between the major exchanges own holdings, lucky early adopters(I've heard estimates of Ver having a few hundred thousand coins, Winkeltwins have >100,000), gambling sites which seem to be extremely profitable in the Bitcoin world, etc,etc. There are a lot of entities with lots of coins. So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.
> For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.
Doesn't matter. This one addresses alone represents hundreds of thousands of customers of Bitstamp that you are completely ignoring in your math in your previous posts. I am just pointing out to you that AT LEAST some of these big addresses are bound to represent other exchanges/online wallets.
> So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.
It is simplistic for you too to assume that these 2.8 million BTC are all owned by a few individuals.
If you want my estimate, since we don't have much data to rely on, I think that roughly 30-70% of this 2.8 million BTC is owned by individuals and the other 70-30% represents exchange/online wallet customer funds. It's realistic to think that even the smaller portion (30%) of 2.8 million BTC could still represent at least 1 million users. And the ~2 million addresses with smaller funds could represent another ~1 million users (as you yourself estimated, well you said 0.75 million which is close enough). So that's ~2 million users total.
It's obvious "0.05% of the US population" is a valid ballpark estimate that is very conservative: assuming there are 2.5 million global Bitcoin users (your lower estimate) and assuming they all belong to the top half of the richest people of the planet (3.5 billion, which covers all of North America, all of Europe, all of Japan, all of Oceania, most of China & India, and more) then: 2.5 million / 3.5 billion = 0.07% of them would be bitcoin users.
However ForHackernews's idea that Coinbase barely has 4-digit active users is dubious and likely false.
(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)