Timothy Lee on Bitcoin Privacy

Timothy Lee for Forbes

In other words, Bitcoin’s alleged privacy benefits mostly reflect the fact that the government isn’t really trying to spy on Bitcoin users. It hasn’t built the kind of surveillance infrastructure the government has for tracking dollar-denominated transactions. And to be clear, I would rather that infrastructure not exist. But if Bitcoin becomes popular, the government will build precisely the same infrastructure for spying on the Bitcoin network. And when they do, it will become clear that for ordinary users, Bitcoin is, if anything, less surveillance-resistent than traditional cash.

And that concludes our hopes for Bitcoins.

Maybe Bitcoins Aren't That Stupid

What is Bitcoin?

Though having been around for a while, worth linking to in light of the Eurozone fiasco.

If Italy Goes Bust

The Economist:

Consider the stakes. Italy has the biggest sovereign-debt market in Europe and the third-biggest in the world. It has €1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) of sovereign debt outstanding, 120% of its GDP, three times as much as Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined—and far more than the €250 billion or so left in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the currency club’s rescue kitty. Default would have calamitous consequences for the euro and the world economy.

Disturbing and shockingly imminent.

The Home Button Issue

Lukas Mathis cogently demonstrates one of the iPhone’s worst shortcomings:

If an iPhone user gets confused about what’s going on, it’s never quite clear how to get the phone back into its default state. If you’ve just opened a folder, the home button will close it. If you’re in Springboard, but no folders are open, the home button will move you to the first screen. If you’re on the first screen, it’ll move you to the Search screen. And so on. The home button does different things, depending on the current state of your iPhone.

He also linked to this process map of how the home button works, and followed up:

It’s not clear to me why Apple does this at all. If I launch an app from the fifth home screen, is it highly likely that the next app I want to launch is also on that home screen? If I launch an app from inside a folder, is it highly likely that the next app I want to launch is also inside that folder? Probably not. So why not just send me to the first home screen when I hit home? That way, I always know where I end up when I hit «home».

Excellent stuff. This is just one example, in my opinion, of how much innovation is yet to come in mobile OS design. This competition hasn’t even got started yet.

The Save Icon

John Gruber, in March 2010:

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

David Friedman, last week:

Not only don’t people use floppy disks anymore, but the options for saving are even more varied now than simple disk format. You might save to your own computer, or a drive on a server somewhere off in the cloud. You might even be using a program that autosaves in certain intervals without you needing to think about it.

Marco Arment, yesterday:

With the sophistication we have in modern hardware and software, there’s no reason anyone should ever lose any work to crashes or power outages because they forgot to hit Save for a while.

Here’s the case in favour of a save button: I do some web publishing for an organization at my university. We provide “normal” students with the ability to update club sites on their own. In this scenario, I have encountered countless examples where people inadvertently saved & published content to their website. In Web publishing, versioning is a big deal. In fact, often the publishing process jumps between many people, and if you’d have to navigate automated versions of every text on a website, mayhem would ensue. There is value in manual saving, or versioning.