Analogue's Blog

Just a quick reminder why Bitcoin was invented in the first place

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is an awesome summary of the vision of Bitcoin, I wanted to keep this around and archive it for the days of doubts I’m having… every few years.

People used to pay each other in gold and silver. Difficult to transport. Difficult to divide.

Paper money was invented. A claim to gold in a bank vault. Easier to transport and divide.

Banks gave out more paper money than they had gold in the vault. They ran “fractional reserves”. A real money maker. But every now and then, banks collapsed because of runs on the bank.

Central banking was invented. Central banks would be lenders of last resort. Runs on the bank were thus mitigated by banks guaranteeing each other’s deposits through a central bank. The risk of a bank run was not lowered. Its frequency was diminished and its impact was increased. After all, banks remained basically insolvent in this fractional reserve scheme.

Banks would still get in trouble. But now, if one bank got in sufficient trouble, they would all be in trouble at the same time. Governments would have to step in to save them.

All ties between the financial system and gold were severed in 1971 when Nixon decided that the USD would no longer be exchangeable for a fixed amount of gold. This exacerbated the problem, because there was now effectively no limit anymore on the amount of paper money that banks could create.

From this moment on, all money was created as credit. Money ceased to be supported by an asset. When you take out a loan, money is created and lent to you. Banks expect this freshly minted money to be returned to them with interest. Sure, banks need to keep adequate reserves. But these reserves basically consist of the same credit-based money. And reserves are much lower than the loans they make.

This led to an explosion in the money supply. The Federal Reserve stopped reporting M3 in 2006. But the ECB currently reports a yearly increase in the supply of the euro of about 5%.

This leads to a yearly increase in prices. The price increase is somewhat lower than the increase in the money supply. This is because of increased productivity. Society gets better at producing stuff cheaper all the time. So, in absence of money creation you would expect prices to drop every year. That they don’t is the effect of money creation.

What remains is an inflation rate in the 2% range.

Banks have discovered that they can siphon off all the productivity increase + 2% every year, without people complaining too much. They accomplish this currently by increasing the money supply by 5% per year, getting this money returned to them at an interest.

Apart from this insidious tax on society, banks take society hostage every couple of years. In case of a financial crisis, banks need bailouts or the system will collapse.

Apart from these problems, banks and governments are now striving to do away with cash. This would mean that no two free men would be able to exchange money without intermediation by a bank. If you believe that to transact with others is a fundamental right, this should scare you.

The absence of sound money was at the root of the problem. We were force-fed paper money because there were no good alternatives. Gold and silver remain difficult to use.

When it was tried to launch a private currency backed by precious metals (Liberty dollar), this initiative was shut down because it undermined the U.S. currency system. Apparently, a currency alternative could only thrive if “nobody” launched it and if they was no central point of failure.

What was needed was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. This was what Satoshi Nakamoto described in 2009. It was a response to all the problems described above. That is why he labeled the genesis block with the text: “03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”. Bitcoin was meant to be an alternative to our current financial system.

So, if you find yourself religiously checking some cryptocurrency’s price, or bogged down in discussions about the “one true bitcoin”, or constantly asking what currency to buy, please at least remember that we have bigger fish to fry. We are here to fix the financial system.

Source: Reddit

Continuous Deployment with Google App Engine and CircleCI

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I love CircleCI for its speed and parallelization of containers, allowing us to split our test suite in as many containers as we want, effectively reducing our test suite runtime, and I love Google App Engine for its low cost and high constraints, making it ideal to host little tools for our team.

The problem is that they don’t like each other that much, especially if you are a fan of Continuous Deployement. The only official way to do CD to GAE on CCI is to put your Google user login and password. Perfect if you want your teammates to be able to check your emails. No, seriously, this solution is insane.

As I could not find any working satisfactory solution, I made my own, and I hope it will help others in their quest to automate everything.

Here’s a working circle.yml that you can use to enable CD on CCI and GAE:

machine:
  python:
    version: 2.7
  environment:
    # Set to your App Engine project name
    GCLOUD_PROJECT: "qa-history"

    # Create a service account in the credentials page of your App Engine
    # project and save the given key pair json file as .gcloud-key-file.json
    GCLOUD_KEY_FILE: ".gcloud-key-file.json"

    # Set it to the version of the application that is running in production
    GCLOUD_VERSION: "stable"

dependencies:
  cache_directories:
    - ~/google-cloud-sdk
  pre:
    - if [ ! -d ~/google-cloud-sdk ]; then curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash; fi:
        environment:
          CLOUDSDK_CORE_DISABLE_PROMPTS: 1
    - ~/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud --quiet components update app
    - ~/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file $GCLOUD_KEY_FILE
    - ~/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud config set project $GCLOUD_PROJECT
    - pip install flake8

test:
  override:
    - flake8:
        files:
          - "**/*.py"

deployment:
  production:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - ~/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud --quiet preview app deploy app.yaml --version $GCLOUD_VERSION --promote

The actual tests under the test section are just checking the syntax of some python files, for the sake of putting something easy to understand (and useful ;) ).

The only things you need to modify are the top environment variables, along with the service account key file which you can generate in your cloud console.

You still need to store your service account key file in your git repository, but you could also set an env var and dump it into a file when CI happens. I find it more cryptic and cumbersome, and not more secure as someone with repo access can create a branch to dump the env var anyway.

The service account is way less problematic to share than my Google username and password, as it only has access to the application it was generated for.

Hope it helps someone!

Mackup: Keep your Mac application settings in sync

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I had a talk with Zach Zaro, complaining about the pain it is to reconfigure our Macbook each time we get a new one or install from scratch. That’s a talk we already had months ago.

I change my workstation every X months. Each time I either loose the configuration of all the apps I use, or I just waste a bunch of hours getting setup like I was on my old box. I also spent a lot of time reconfiguring the same stuff again on all my workstations (home, work)

Boring…

Some people tried to solve the problem on the application layer, like Github’s Boxen, but I feel like it solves a non problem: I don’t really spend time installing stuff, mostly downloading: I spend time configuring it.

For years, I’ve used a personnal shell script that was copying known config files into Subversion, Git or Dropbox, and linked them into my home. But, I felt a lot of us had the same problem: Making a more generic tool could help others and I could get help from others to support more apps.

So here comes Mackup, the little tool that will sync all your application configs to Dropbox.

It’s GPL of course.

How to connect to FlowDock via IRC with LimeChat

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to connect to FlowDock via IRC with LimeChat

FlowDock provides a simple IRC gateway to connect to the flows you've subscribed to.

To connect to those flows, you only need to set those values in your IRC client:

Server hostname: irc.flowdock.com
Server port: 6697
Use SSL: yes
nickname: imclueless
Commands performed on connection: "/msg NickServ identify your@email.com YourPassword"

That's it, it should connect and join the channels representing the flows you follow automatically.

This configuration under LimeChat looks like this:

I hope it helped !

Comments

What is Curation? By Percolate

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What is Curation? By Percolate

What is Curation?
By Percolate

This is the first in a series of videos explaining the shifts we're seeing in the world of content creation. Curation has exploded with the growth of Twitter, Tumblr and now Pinterest. In this video, we wanted to try to get into the heads of some of our favorite curators to understand what makes them tick.

Comments

How to cleanly cancel spot requests on AWS

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to cleanly cancel spot requests on AWS

Just found this explanation from an AWS employee about how to cleanly stop spot requests:

In case of one-time spot requests, termination of the instances will lead to the request moving to a closed state. So this will achieve what you are trying to do. On the other hand, canceling the request will not automatically terminate your instances.

The behavior is different for persistent requests where termination of an instance moves a request to an open state and it is again eligible for fulfillment, so cancellation there means that you don't require the request to spin more instances but at the same time you don't want to terminate the current instance either.

Just wanted to keep a note of it ;)

Comments

A Year In New York

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A Year In New York

Comments

analogue

Oui toujours, et pas de retour prévu pour l'instant =)
Je prends des nouvelles via Facebook même si je comment pas toujours! Je suis trés heureux que tout se passe bien pour toi ;)
Pense a lui changer le parfum quand il aura l'âge de faire la cour, je suis pas sûr que celui-là soit adapte!
Bises!

Poppins

toujours là bas ?? tu dois rentrer? bientôt ? ou pas ?
Bisoux de Quentin qui dit tout les matins qu'il met son parfum : celui de Laurent ^___^
Poppins

How to disable Resume in Preview

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

How to disable Resume in Preview

A new feature of Mac OS X Lion is to resume any previously opened document when you launch an application.

For example, open a picture in Preview, quit Preview, open another picture and Preview will try to load the 1st picture you opened before.

This is especially annoying when the previous picture is not available anymore and launching Preview is taking seconds...

Here's how to disable the Resume feature in Lion's Preview:

Paste the following command in your Terminal application (in one line):

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Comments

jaylen watkins

Thanks for this stuff. It is quite informative.

Cv Examples

Python import from import usage

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Python import from import usage

Here's a quick note to understand how works the Python module importing engine.

Suppose you have a package with the following hierarchy:

package/subpackage/module.py

Each package and subpackage has an empty __init__.py file to define it as a package, and the module.py has a small function defined:

def function():
print "Works!"

If you are running a script at the same level as the main package, here's what you can do:

import package.subpackage.module
package.subpackage.module.function()

from package.subpackage import module
module.function()

from package.subpackage.module import function
function()

And what you cannot do:

import package.subpackage
package.subpackage.module.function()

import package.subpackage.module.function
package.subpackage.module.function()

I hope it helps!

Comments

Fourchette et sac à dos à New York

Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Fourchette et sac à dos à New York

L'intégrale de l'émission culinaire Fourchette et sac à dos a New York en 3 parties de 25 minutes