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Alleged Bitcoin Creator Raided By Australian Authorities (arstechnica.com)
wbr1 writes: As reported yesterday, Wired and Gizmodo think Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright
Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Curiously, a statement from the Australian federal police said that the raids were not related to the recent Bitcoin revelation. "The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." Supposedly not related, but interesting nonetheless.
Reuters adds,"At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment. A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain. Hayres said that Wright had a 'substantial computer system set-up' and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power."
Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Curiously, a statement from the Australian federal police said that the raids were not related to the recent Bitcoin revelation. "The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." Supposedly not related, but interesting nonetheless.
Reuters adds,"At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment. A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain. Hayres said that Wright had a 'substantial computer system set-up' and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power."
Imagine if the IRS suddenly found out you had four hundred million dollars' worth of undeclared capital gains.
Why are the authorities after the creator of Bitcoin?
Summation 2
This is not Satoshi and he was not arrested for bitcoin related tax problems. Until someone wants to sign a message with Satoshi's PGP key or his well known private BTC key, then there's no reason to believe this is anything more than a hoax/prank.
Getting "outed" as Satoshi Nakamoto is the new SWATing, I suggest we call it IRSing and it is much, much worse.
Well either its an ex-employee whose a master hacker... or its a parallel construction thing.
NSA will have grabbed satoshi@vistomail.com emails, the email associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
It hands the emails to the Aussies (remember the illegal spook surveillance of Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload?).
Now how do you explain how the Aussie police have private emails from a server of an unrelated person who has committed no determinable crime? This Satoshi Nakamoto figure?..... you leak the same emails to Gizmodo and Wired anonymously, and claim you received an anonymous tipoff.
It's likely this part (From Gizmodo):
"The hacker also provided a PDF file of what appears to be an unfinished draft of a legal contract between Wright and Kleiman forming a secret Bitcoin trust in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven in the Indian Ocean. The contract shows Dave Kleiman in receipt of 1,100,111 bitcoin, to be repaid to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020. Several reports, including an oft-cited technical analysis by Bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner, estimate Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary Bitcoin fortune at around 1 million BTC — a figure that nearly matches the amount in the Seychelles trust. It also lists five PGP keys — files that are used to establish encrypted lines of communication over email — that will be used to manage the trust. Searching for those keys in a public database reveals that one belongs to Wright, one belongs to Kleiman, and two belong to Satoshi Nakamoto."
Because it make a bunch of early adopters rich. Crypto Mining tends to be a ponzi ish scheme you mine the first realy easy ones then get people to spread the word as it gets harder. It is successful as people have been using it where CC are no longer taken (or they incorrectly think it can not be traced back to them when using a CC to purchase BC) so internet gambling sites, the silk road / it's successors, and the sex trade (advertising) seem to be the primary users.
I made a decent amount from early sites giving out 1 BC for signing up/GPU mining one a card I already hard and when not paying incrementally for power and cashing out when a BC was over 1k. Right now mining your have to have very cheap power and dedicated hardware to hope to make money at it. I know a few people throwing ASIC rigs into section 8 housing since they get power at a flat rate around here in exchange for putting in a big AC unit and paying the AC upcharge to the occupants.
No sir I dont like it.
The US Federal Reserve does not print money, the US Mint (the Treasury Dept) prints money.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Why does *anything* have 'value' ?
It can be either:
- intrinsic (like metals or silicon because of how they can be used)
- extrinsic (because of greed of an artificial market, like diamonds)
The medium is irrelevant -- be it physical or digital. Why do you think some people pay hundreds of dollars for a digital weapon? Because they have more money then time and want it "now."
Never underestimate the price some people put on greed.
--
~2022 The greatest discovery: First Contact
~2024 The greatest tragedy: World War 3
3-phase is a lot more common outside the US than in the US.
When you run 3-phase you have 230-240 V to ground, but about 400V between the phases. If it had been a 2-phase system then it would be almost 500V.
Many residential dwellings in Scandinavia actually runs 3-phase 400V, even 2 and 3 room apartments. And many appliances are available in more variants in 3-phase than in 1-phase.
Another reason for running 3-phase is that you will lower the current through the neutral wire causing less problems with ground currents.
And then we have the Norwegian 3-phase system with 230V between the phases and no neutral. But there's a historical reason for that - Norway have a lot of ground with high resistance where a neutral/ground wire don't work well.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth. A friend made a fortune importing Pokemon cards for sale to retailers even though he (and I) thought they were the stupidest things. They are just a few cents of cardboard with ink printed on them. But arrange that ink in a certain way so a bunch of people (rightly or wrongly) think it's valuable, and suddenly they're worth several dollars.
So even if you think bitcoins are stupid (I do), that doesn't mean they're worthless. They're worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, which is quite a lot.
On a more abstract level, that enough people value bitcoins enough to raise it to its current price does indicate substantial discontent with traditional financial systems. That's a real problem irrespective of whether or not bitcoins make sense.
I think they have value for EXACTLY the reason of your last statement. They solve a real problem, that of who can control your money.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The potential mining aspect doesn't make much sense. Why would you go to great expense to try and mine bitcoins if you already have over a million of them?
If this is true, I doubt he's mining much of anything. The Wired article contains a video which appears to be from a Bitcoin conference in October of this year where Wright appeared via Skype. He mentions that he currently has a computer in Iceland that is the 15th most powerful supercomputer in the world. He's not using that to mine bitcoins, he's using it to model the scalability of bitcoin. So, he's not going through the great expense to try and mine bitcoins, he's going through the great expense to model the system and see what's ahead. Maybe that is a direct result of the recent debate over the size of blocks. The additional power coming to his home could also be used for modeling, or it could be used for additional research or work unrelated to bitcoin. If this is a man with the kind of resources to set up a major supercomputer in Iceland to take advantage of the cheap electricity, I don't see any reason for him to run additional power to his house in Sydney for the purpose of mining bitcoins. That doesn't make sense. If mining was his goal then he would do it in Iceland, not metro Sydney.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Well, that's British, but look at other European countries that actually have modern standards you will see a difference. The UK is some 30 to 40 years behind on building standards where double-glazed windows are an add-on option in many buildings except the newest and many faucets still don't mix hot and cold water.
So why should they have a modern electric system? The British go their own way.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I can't say how it works where you are but in the US money has value because if you don't accept it as payment you'll find yourself in legal trouble. The government swinging its hammer is a persuasive force.
That's not quite true. The US government does not force anyone to accept dollars as payments. If you want to open a barter shop and trade goats as your only form of "payment," you can do so.
What the government does say is the following:
(1) US money (dollars) is "legal tender" for all debts. That means if you already owe something to someone, legally you can repay that debt in dollars, and they must accept it. If you go to a store, you generally don't "owe debt" in advance. If you want to acquire goods from the store, you'll have to agree to the terms of their payment contract, whatever they are. Most contracts are implicitly created by exchange of dollars, but if your store has a contract that says, "I'll give you this slaughtered and processed cow in exchange for five goats," that's perfectly valid. If you don't show up with the goats, and the guy gives you the cow anyway, then you now are "in debt," and legally the guy must accept a dollar valuation of his payment if he sues you in court.
But you can't compel him to give you the cow in the first place just by offering the amount of dollars that "five goats" should be worth.
(2) Taxation laws still apply, though. If you start entering into such contracts on a large scale and making "profits" (even in goats), you'll still owe the government taxes on your gains. And the government generally doesn't accept goats as payment for taxes. So the real reason most businesses are forced to deal in cash is because they ultimately must pay taxes in cash. Even if they wanted to use a barter system to deal with everyday transactions, eventually they need to get their hands on some significant dollars to pay the taxes.
From a practical standpoint, any large-scale business that tried to operate without cash transactions would be flagged for close monitoring by the IRS, and unless you had detailed documentation of the valuation of assets you were trading in lieu of cash, you'd end up with tax penalties or in prison for tax fraud.
That's the real reason most businesses deal in cash in the US. And thus the real reason the US currency has (a certain minimum) value has fundamentally to do with taxation policies.
Both of you are incorrect. The 120v system in the US isn't a 2-phase system, it is a 3 wire split single phase system. The two 120v lines are in phase, not 180 degrees out of phase, otherwise the two 120v lines would cancel each other out and you'd get 0V, not 240V.
Three-phase runs along the HV circuits and is stepped down by the pole-mounted distribution transformers. Each transformer is usually fed by one phase from the three and steps down from 13.8kV to 240V with a center tap, so you actually get 120V-0V-120V. Sometimes the HV side of the transformer is wired phase-to-phase across two of the phases instead of one phase and neutral, but the output is still split single phase.
All the houses fed by a lateral circuit from a single distribution transformer get the same single phase (A). The next transformer along the poles will provide power from B phase, the next one C phase and then back to A phase. If a house was fed by A + B, then you would get major problems as the 120 degree phase angles would interact differently to the in-phase 120V wires in the split-phase system and would produce 180V-200V instead.
Rest-of-world 220V/240V systems use two wire, pure single phase to the house from the distribution transformers. Everything operates on a single voltage, not like the US where low power runs on 120V and higher power on 240V. Makes it simpler to wire and control.
3-phase to a residential premises is very rare and would have to be specially requested from the power utility. You would bring it in only if you are using machinery that requires 3-phase (large machine tools etc) or need more power than a single phase circuit can safely provide. A heavy computer farm would probably have that sort of requirement.
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