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Bitcoin Capitalist Opens Bounty For New Block Cipher
An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin capitalist Mircea Popescu has opened a contest to find a new block cipher and is offering a 10 Bitcoin reward for a winning submission. The eccentric Popescu was previously featured on Slashdot for saving OpenBSD from their electric bill in their time of need.
he's just some random narcissist/megalomaniac who got lucky as an early adopter, runs a shady "unregistered corporation" and hides behind unenforceable legalese in his "corporate" governance docs to deny personal liability when the illegal sites he runs eventually turn any meaningful profit and garners the attention of taxing authorities. He also routinely claims to have singlehandedly saved bitcoin from imploding on itself by creating markets... that nobody actually uses. Now that he's effectively been shown to have been completely irrelevant in any measureable way in the bitcoin world, he's trying to create something new so he can claim to be its inventor...even though he has made no attempt to do anything himself on the matter (because he has very little in the way of actual coding skill, despite his claims to the contrary).
Oh, and saying any of this to his face will make him turn purple and scream and cry like a little girl (can't find the video offhand, but nobody like him in his home town and there is a video of him getting reamed by an older gentleman for being a little prick to everyone around him in some town hall meeting, and the twat just starts crying. It's painful to watch, really) - or, instead of crying, depending on which side of the manic/depressive bed he woke up on, he may just ignore the objector and insult them on multi-page rants about how the little people should stop talking so the betters can speak...something along those lines, I know I've seen "betters" bandied around a lot in places he tries to insert himself into, although I've seen very little of him recently since he's slipped down far enough into obscurity because the relevant people have learned to ignore him like the funny cousin nobody wants to invite to the family reunion. (And not funny "ha-ha", funny as in "hide the alcohol, he might have snorted his meds again, and someone predial the police, this may get ugly".) Sycophants hope he just pisses himself enough to want to pay even more for buying his "friends", in addition to the hookers he regularly trots out.
All you need to know if that there is no way for all the machines on the bitcoin network to know when one event happens before another. This is important for financial transactions. The block cipher is a proof of work function which takes some effort to compute. Since this takes a predictable amount of time to compute it can be used to establish a sense of global time and order events. It doesn't always work right away, but eventually if someone tries to double spend a bitcoin one transaction will win out. This establish the trust necessary for bitcoin to work.
The problem is bitcoin can potentially be manipulated if you get a little bit less than 1/2 of the total network computational capacity.
I have been looking at the proof of work functions that are memory hard proof of work functions because they are more expensive financially to compute. There are tons of ASICs computing those hashes right now used in bitcoin which are far cheaper than any PC, but memory in an ASIC is always expensive. You get less of an advantage.
I think momentum proof of work function has potential, but I haven't seen any crypto-currencies use it yet. Let me know if you find one.
There definitely is a potential for safer currencies than bitcoin
Not quite accurate. Pretend rich guy is trying to stay pretend rich by rebuilding the pretend value of what makes him pretend rich. All marketing, reward is in pretend currency which will prove problematic but the pretend rich guy can hardly offer a reward in a real currency, kinda brings down the illusion of their pretend wealth, if they acknowledge the pretend currency will attract competitors. Like all ponzi schemes, they eventually inevitably implode and with them the pretend wealth.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It is pretend rich if you can't liquidate without tanking your commodity. If you had a ten thousand dollars of manure you could probably move that to dollars by selling it as fertilizer. If you haf ten million dollars of it, good luck finding a buyer without tanking the market.
Like that except with a non-thing without the inherent value of shit.