The "user mini-profiles" on the left-hand column force every response to consume ~2 inches of screen space, even if it is just one line long.


Yes, it seems that that Swiss school had quite an impact on the web.  

As I wrote, most sidebars out there are read and used by readers only once every solar eclipse.  Displaying that information all the time is distracting and inefficient.  Most sidebars could be made into pull-down menus or separate pages, freeing screen estate for the information that readers are actually looking for.  The list of  "other languages" in Wikipedia is a good example.


You are right about animated gifs, my mistake (There is an "online now" green dot on the avatars that does some silly anmation when the mouse wanders over it; but that is tolerable.)

As for grey on grey, I was being too terse.  The general problem is using low-contrast font-background pairs, like white on yellow or gray on tan; there are several examples of that on that forum.  

The human eyebrain uses only the brigtness ("black and white") color channel to recognize outlines of things; it ignores hue and saturation.  So, when choosing fg/bg colors for text, one must be aware of their brightness.  

Besides the first 16 digits of Pi and the name of that New Zealand town, people should also memorize this table:

White 1.0
Yellow 0.9
Cyan 0.7
Green 0.6
Magenta 0.4
Red 0.3
Blue 0.1
Black 0.0

The brightness of other colors is complicated a bit because of a thing called "display gamma", but, to a very rough approximation, mixing or adding colors has the same effect on their brightness.

When choosing a text fg/bg combination, one should try to maximize the difference between their brightnesses.  (Relative difference is more important than absolute, but reflection of ambient light on the screen raises all values so that absolute matters too.)  

From that table one can see why blue/black is a terrible choice, and white/yellow is worse still.   Even green/white is bad.  Good choices are black/white, blue/white, blue/yellow, black/yellow, etc..  Red/white and magenta/white are still OK. If other colors are to be used, one should mix enough white or black to ensure a large brigtness contrast.

Some combinations (like red text on the right shade of dark green background) can be totally unreadable, even though the colors are quite distinct.  Looking at such text is a bizarre experience: you can tell that there is text written there, but you cannot make out a single letter.

(You may notice that eye clinics have a fondness for blue lighted displays.  Besides blue/black being harder to read, blue is also the color channel that gets the least "localized" by the brain; that makes such signs look maximally blurry.)

The flaws too are well-known, such as: lack of inflation causes hoarding, speculative overpricing, and price volatility; that and fixed mining reward leads to concentration of mining; no ways to reward relay nodes; no way to fix fees; no way to reverse fraudulent or criminal attacks; and more...

Bitcoin was a great advance towards the solution of the old problem of designing a decentralized payment system; but it is not the solution yet.  We must wait for another Satoshi or two to invent the parts that are still missing...

BitcoinXT challenges BitcoinCore's supremacy -- no change in the BTC price

BitPay reveals loss of 6 months worth of revenue -- no change.

Major banks ditch Bitcoin and go for permissioned blockchains -- no change

BitcoinXT loses its initial support -- no change

21co releases their bitcoin-enabled RPi -- no change

BlockStream open for a 2 MB block size limit -- no change

Banks force most bitcoin firms in Australia to close -- no change

Gemini gets a BitLicense and announces opening -- no change

Malleability attack by a bored Russian causes general havoc -- no change

Jack Liu of OKCoin on Bloomberg TV -- price jumps by 8 USD in minutes.

Welcome to the world of 比特币...

I do have a half-written tech report detailing how a cartel of miners could force a change in the rules; but that has become common (if still denied) knowledge by now, so it would probably be rejected for that (if not for ideologocal reasons).

I wrote a few other reports and analyses here on bitcointalk, but nothing deep enough to be worth submitting to a journal, unfortunately.

Bitcoin is not a good topic for scientific research, because results become obsolete very quickly, the object of study is a fundamentally flawed protocol, and there is almost complete lack of information about the bitcoin economy.  Even the most basic data -- like the number of users and the volume of e-payments -- has to be guessed, and the guesses vary by two orders of magnitude or more...

And I still prefer to use emacs and Makefile instead of IDEs, C instead of C++ and Java, TeX instead of Word. And I write HTML directly with emacs instead of using a WYSYWIG editor.  Oh, and use function parameters instead of OOP.

(The thing I liked most about Java is that it gave me a good excuse to not learn C++: "why, it is obsolete already".  I am glad about that every time I have to read C++ (or even Java) code that my best students wrote...)


It would seem so... 

I read somewhere that in Switzerland there is a famous Product Design Hochschule that has given mankind such great advances as the black-on-black appliance control panel and the knee-busting car glovebox. 

I gather that they now have a new course where the best website designers of the world can learn advanced reader irritation techniques, like maximizing the amount of wasted screen space, writing with gray text on gray background, permanently displaying sidebars and menus that get used only once every solar eclipse, marking irrelevant information with animated gifs, and so on. 

On Tuesday they may put up a silly rocket animation with a countdown, ending with a Mars landing.  Then there may be another short-lived rally, like there was before the Coinbase launch.  And a quick crash when it actually opens, and people realize that it is just yet another exchange.

Do you mean that Litecoin does not have the mealleability bug?

Does that have anything to do with the fact that the volcano on the North part of Easter Island is the Westernmost mountain of South America?

OKCoin's volume looks weirder and weirder: huge "wash trades" that don't move the price, and now zero volume for several minutes in a row.  What is going on?

(Huobi's and BTCChina's, on the other hand, still look relatively "normal"  to me.)

Is that a leg or an arm?

OOPS, thanks for the correction.  I was confused by this announcement.

Who owns/moderates the bitco.in forum?

AFAIK that forum is owned and run by Roger Ver. 
Frankly, ...

Indeed.  Did those events start recently, or have they always happened, and I just did not notice them?

Could they be some money laundering trick? (One would expect money launderers to be smarter at hiding their doings...)

Perhaps the Chinese exchanges read about Tera's wash trades, and thought "bummer, those guys cannot do that because they are regulated, but we are not -- why aren't we doing wash trades ourselves?"


I have read rumors that China is about to devalue the yuan.  Traders who had yuan in their accounts may be buying BTC as a way to ride over the devaluation with a profit.  In other words, the price in China ir not really higher than in the US: it merely has the expected devaluation of the yuan already  priced in.  Maybe?

If that is the reason, the rise in price in China may be limited to the expected devaluation of the Yuan.  That is, if they expect a 10% devaluation of they yuan, and expect the USD price to remain about the same, the price in Chine should not rise by more than 10%.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3lxrkg/all_the_comedy_gold_youll_need_to_know_about_from/

After months of suspense, the company finally revealed what market they were after:
Integrated Devices for the Internet of Things (IDIoTs).

It may be sacrilege to compare the two, but I cannot avoid thinking of that time when Apple fired Steve Jobs.

Bitcoin expert on Bloomberg:  Increasing the block size limit will increase the supply of bitcoins and cause the price to fall, by the law of supply and demand. 

Oh, and in matters of bitcoin should trust only the opinion of people with Ph. D. 

Well, I can agree with that part. 

No, I don't trade.  I did not even know what bids and asks and spreads were, two years ago....

I happened to notice a single 12'000 BTC trade on OKCoin.  And the price dropped by 0.10 yuan.  Weird.