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Blockchain's Once-Feared 51% Attack Is Now Becoming Regular (telegra.ph)
Monacoin, bitcoin gold, zencash, verge and now, litecoin cash. At least five cryptocurrencies have recently been hit with an attack that used to be more theoretical than actual, all in the last month. From a report: In each case, attackers have been able to amass enough computing power to compromise these smaller networks, rearrange their transactions and abscond with millions of dollars in an effort that's perhaps the crypto equivalent of a bank heist. More surprising, though, may be that so-called 51% attacks are a well-known and dangerous cryptocurrency attack vector. While there have been some instances of such attacks working successfully in the past, they haven't exactly been all that common. They've been so rare, some technologists have gone as far as to argue miners on certain larger blockchains would never fall victim to one.
The age-old (in crypto time) argument? It's too costly and they wouldn't get all that much money out of it. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. NYU computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau released research last year featuring estimates of how much money it would cost to execute these attacks on top blockchains by simply renting power, rather than buying all the equipment. One conclusion he drew? These attacks were likely to increase. And, it turns out he was right. "Generally, the community thought this was a distant threat. I thought it was much less distant and have been trying to warn of the risk," he told CoinDesk, adding: "Even I didn't think it would start happening this soon."
The age-old (in crypto time) argument? It's too costly and they wouldn't get all that much money out of it. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. NYU computer science researcher Joseph Bonneau released research last year featuring estimates of how much money it would cost to execute these attacks on top blockchains by simply renting power, rather than buying all the equipment. One conclusion he drew? These attacks were likely to increase. And, it turns out he was right. "Generally, the community thought this was a distant threat. I thought it was much less distant and have been trying to warn of the risk," he told CoinDesk, adding: "Even I didn't think it would start happening this soon."
Blockchain+
Bigger, better, blockier. Just try us.
Obligatory
Crypto is so goddamn stupid, and this is coming from someone who made a quick five figure sum on it from November to January. Worthless "coins" that you have to find someone else to trick into buying them from you.
For every motherfucker out there with a computer, there's another motherfucker out there with a computer.
The strategy for hacking blockchain is no different from hacking anything else: Learn the theory then apply the theory.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The entirety of the Netherlands is growing tulips instead of food. People are prostituting them selves for chucky cheese tokens entire coal power stations being built just for funbux.
I hope the 51%ers wreck as many cryptocurrencies as possible to crash the market so the environment can be saved, graphics cards go back to making graphics and people go back to investing into stocks of real companies that provide real services.
greed fear ego based digit hoarding is useless to us spiritually bankrupt hostages to imaginary prosperity.. as we hang on to our hemispheres... in the moms we trust..
....as you can extrapolate from the history of cryptography. Many cryptographic methods of the past have been successfully attacked, and there is no good reason to believe this will change in the future. All you can do is build in larger safety margins, but common cryptographic primitives have fairly low safety margins. (The most common ones aren't even properly secured against quantum computers.)
If there is a theoretically feasible attack, it will be put into practice at one point or another, and usually sooner than most people thought. (Enigma, DES, Russian 'typewriter' OTPs, RC4, MD5, ...)
OK it's a bug if you want "no single person" to control a blockchain, but it's a feature for "captive" blockchains like bank- or governmetn-backed digital tokens.
If the US Federal Reserve wants to issue tokens with a fixed value of, say, 1 United States Dollar, they will want to "control" the blockchain, perhaps only allowing banks and other licensed entities to process transactions.
The same goes for a business that uses transferable tokens as gift certificates - they or their agent will want to control the blockchain associated with those "e-gift certificates."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So there is this old adage. Goes something like this.
If you build it they will work around it.
Maybe that is just my cynical take on things which has been learned over years and years of systems development and implementations.
Bottom line.
Never say never.
If it is, someone will find a way to benefit from it and/or work around it, legal or not.
On that note. I like my finances to be on paper.
I like my money to have a trail.
I like that my money is insured and backed.
I don't worry that my money is going to disappear (minus the wife on a shopping spree of course)
This, this right here is a problem that unfortunately cant be fixed. Sure it will get pushed, pulled, tilted, shifted and otherwise moved about, but this problem is never going to go away. (yes, I said never and I stand by it). Anonymous finances will lead to anonymous losses.
Make 'merka Greedy Again.
1849. Relive the dream.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Now we can go back to the old ways of buying drugs: Cash and sex.
If I were into that kind of thing, I'd use a botnet to do it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
... only for PoW alt-coins which are barely used. Bitcoin and Ethereum are safe. This kind of attack will be impossible against these two currencies unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare.
PoS coins are not affected but they are vulnerable to another type of attack (network cloning) - no one has carried such an attack yet though.
What an load of a shit bitcoin is. Utter shite.
Now we can go back to the old ways of buying sex: Cash and drugs.
is https://www.crypto51.app/ saying that $630K would make me solely authoritative for the bitcoin BC for a couple hours or so ?
Now we can go back to the old ways of buying cash: Drugs and sex.
"Blockchain's"
Because there's only one blockchain?
What is this, Highlander?
Or just clickbait journalism?
That's not an attack vector, that's using the rules to your advantage. The designers expressly adopted a design rule that says that "51% of the current computing power dictates reality." The designer may not have intended for any one group to amass 51% of the current computing power, but intending that nothing "bad" will ever happen is not sufficient in engineering, contracts, law, or any other aspect of human endeavor that has evolved to survive contact with the real world.
A bunch of people who want to make money using blockchain technology are become quite ticked off that a group of other people who want to make money using blockchain technology are using that blockchain technology as expressly designed to take their money.
Thankfully the article seems to be focused on improving the designs rather than demands that governments intervene in these "government not welcome" currency projects.
Should say "crypto currency's use of blockchain"
nothing to see here - move along
The main potential gains from a 51% attack are (1) trashing of a blockchain, primarily reducing its credibility, or (2) double (triple?) spending.
Basic theory assumes that the financial advantage of playing nice and mining is greater than can be achieved from the above.
I would like to see the math on that. Because, in theory, I could get a loan of a bunch coin, rent enough computing power for a 51% attack with that coin, short the coin, double (triple?) spend the coin, and then buy the coin I need at a reduced price after the market responds to the shock. Bitcoin itself may be too big to attack in this manner at this moment in time, but...
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
The new world may utterly crush those assumptions because: (1) there is a large and growing ecosystem of efficient blockchain mining machines that will happily and quickly work on another blockchain for the right fee, (2) that ecosystem is rapidly growing and well beyond the scope of any one blockchain, (3) the ability to simply rent one thousand servers for an hour is getting easier and easier, and cheaper and cheaper.
*sigh*
Words have multiple meanings. Most words do. This word, "blockchain", here refers to the technology. Of which there is only one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"...abscond with millions of dollars in an effort that's perhaps the crypto equivalent of a bank heist."
Millions of dollars or millions of (now) worthless crypto coins? When dealing in currencies why value the currency in a different currency unless one has no REAL value.
This is more akin to a run on a currency than a bank heist. George Soros did the same to the GBP and the GBP is one of the biggest currencies in the world. Any small country's currency is vulnerable to a similar attack. They protect against it by holding USD reserves. This gives the US way too much control as any country the US wants to f*ck with US can put sanctions so that they cant use US banks and without using US banks its very difficult to hold USD reserves (Iran and North Korea come to mind as being F*cked over by the US).
Crypto currency holders of smaller currencies will have to take a similar strategy by holding Bitcoin reserves. Whenever a currency is coming under attack holders should immediately withdraw into Bitcoin and then the schmucks doing the 51% attack will be left with a large farm of machines setup to mine something with zero value. At least with Bitcoin there is no central authority which can put economic sanctions on you for idealogical reasons.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Same fallacy that libertarians delude themselves with: Some entity will amass enough resources to control "the system" and manipulate conditions in a way that shuts-out 99% of the small-time participants.
this will be solved by corewarscoin ! =D
The goal of the 10 cent coke bottle deposit is NOT to make coke bottles into a hobo currency. The goal is to have distributed recycling (back when we reused bottles). To do that you needed an incentive.
In a similar fashion, recycling (as opposed to re-use) in general was spawned as a PR move to solve a problem for the nascent alumumin can industry, and not because its somehow the ethical thing to do. Steel cans rust (or at least thy used to ) so they naturally biodegrade. Same with paper and cloth packaging. But rise of plastic in the 50s creates a non-biodegradable trash problem that people in the 60s really felt was a moral insult to mother earth. The aluminum can people saw the problem with introducing a product to replace steel cans that wasn't re-usable like glass and would not biodegrade like all other packaging and was even more resource intensive to manufacture. So they solved two problems at the same time: Promote recycling. By paying for aluminum cans they got people to see them as better for the earth. And they also got back their expensive materials to reprocess.
So the point of paying for alumium was not to turn aluminum cans into Hobo currency either. It was to enable everything else. The fact that it induced the neccessary behaviours was the reason to pay pennies for cans.
I perceive that people misunderstand the purpose of crytocurrency. The goal is not to have a currency. It's to have a distributed ledger but in order to have that a currency is neccessary for two reasonss.
first, in order to vanquish the doule-spend problem it's essential to a crytpocurrency that it be very expensive to bless a ledger entry and because computing power grows the cost must increase with time.
Second, since the whole point is that the block chain is a distributed ledger there has to be a way to pay the people who pick up the cans and bottles. Namely, you include a payment into the ledger too. So it has to be a currency.
But the currency isn't the reason for it. it's the necessary glue to make it work
SO the two problems with crytpo currencies that are intrinsic are not the currency part or the speculative bubble part. (afterall we could use cans and bottles as currncy if we really wanted to-- whether or not people accept something is a different matter than it's intrinsic value.)
specifically: if the expansion rate of the cost isn't managed right it becomes an energy consuming nightmare. but if you undershoot the expansion rate then the double-spend problem isn't fixed.
Getting that right is probably not yet solved by any existing crypto currency. But that doesn't mean it can't be gotten right. We just don't know either way right now.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Regular on shitcoins perhaps which only attract the FOMOs and the pump 'n' dumpers.
It is a an attack vector, and it threatens far more than cryptocurrencies... What if 51% of voters decide, for example, that a tiny minority of the population ought to be enslaved again? Or that an even tinier minority have "too much" money?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Thank you sir. Probably the simplest explanation of bitcoin ever and a fresh history lesson.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
Value/validity/authorization of US dollar is provided/guaranteed by US Government (and in-turn whole US Public)!
Also, not to mention, US Dollars in any US Bank is insured by US Government!
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin? Nothing!
Sorry but that is the end of discussion then!
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He is just someone does not like media/fan attention?
Or, could it be really because Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies followed it) are actually Ponzi Schemes?
(So he knew very well that law enforcement would come after him sooner or later?!)
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Could it really be because, all cryptocurrencies themselves are scams, and that is why they attract all kinds of criminals/criminal activity?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Because the price of Bitcoin proved to be extremely unstable to use as a currency?
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Aren't all work the same way?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really money; isn't people issuing their own money, illegal already, in all countries?
If so then, why they are still not banned in all countries?
Or, they are not actually virtual currency but virtual investment?
But, if they are actually investment, why we need/want them?
What would happen to world economy, if people invested in virtual investments, instead of real investments?
Or, all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually just a modified (made decentralized and paying variable interest) Ponzi Schemes?
(Price of cryptocurrencies would keep increasing in the long term (by their design), so it is equivalent of paying variable interest to all long term investors.)
Also, since all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually financial scams (Ponzi Schemes), that means, they cannot be the solution for any of existing financial problems of our world!
As more and more people invest in cryptocurrencies, it will become harder and harder to ban their trading everywhere (because people invested in cryptocurrencies, would try to stop anyone trying to ban cryptocurrencies)!
All cryptocurrencies need to be banned globally before it is too late!
The problem with the distributed ledger is outside of crypto coins is a solution in search of a problem, and almost every single use I've seen the follow up question "but who asked for this? And what's the use case that can't be solved by good old fashion public key exchange signing or just putting the quicken backups in a safe like worked perfectly well for the past century or three
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Recycling is a conspiracy to get people to accept aluminum and plastic containers?
And you want us to believe anything you say about bitcoin and treat you like a rational person?
Ok.
Why do we want a distributed ledger?
In related news, "Battering Rams are a known attack vectors for doors". yeah. sure.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hey cool - and at the same time we get to use enormous amounts of energy to create something with zero lasting. Using so much power that we've overstressed some cheap grids here in the states. That sounds like a great idea. Have computers chugging away to produce nothing of value. Wooooo environment!
Well I sort of agree. I keep seeing these cases where some company proposes to have records stored in block chain and to use a central administration to bless the ledger. Huh?? that makes zero sense. If it's not distributed or it's something that can be easily centralized then centralize it. Adding block chain makes no sense. On the other hand there's lots of things one might want to timestamp that need a trustworthy public proof. For example a laboratory notebook showing proof of an invention could be hashed and then block chained publicly. Then the company is freed of a keeping a chain of custody. This might also solve so trade secret issues for companies. If they patent they have to disclose. But if they fear disclosing and someone else patents they have to have so proof later that they had always been using the patent process before it was patented.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
indeed that is a question isn't it.
It seems to me that if the expansion were done right then it should stay at exactly the same cost and only grow in proportion to the transaction's value. That is as computers make computation cheaper, raise the cost to the same constant cost. However, that doesn't solve the problem until the the cost is about 1/2 the transaction size.
That being said the amount of energy spent on bitcoin is orders of magnitude less than the cost spent on Mastercard when you include all the costs. By all the costs I mean, mastercard is full of people (customer service... point of sale terminal installers, mail processing and mail delivery all are people neccessary to mastercard.) All those people have to eat and buy clothing. So there's a measurable slice of people needed for master card to exist. If you didnt need those people at all and could replace them all with "just" a low manpower nuclear power plant, the level of human labor freed up for other productive uses would be staggering.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If you know your history then, surprisingly, the answer is yes. I lived through that period.
Solution in search of a problem?
What about micropayments? When the fees on credit card transactions are ten or a hundred times the amount people would pay for a micro-transaction, then the credit card is not an option.
#DeleteFacebook
The problem of micropayments and the problem of byzantine fault tolerance have little to do with each other. Byzantine fault tolerance is so expensive to get, it would be very strange if it turned out to just accidentally be good for something different to.
So we should not have been surprised that bitcoin stopped being good for micropayments long ago.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It would be nice if the hash calculation were also solving some other problem of lasting value. As an example, let people submit NP hard problems they actually need solved. Like say planning an airline's schedule of matching pilots and planes under varied weather scenarios. I think ethereium might have this in mind. You could also use the heat to heat something you were going to heat anyhow, like your house or for drying water out of biofuels. The latter is one of the big energy costs for ethanol based fuels.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Because blockchain!
This is exactly the issue. Nobody knows why we want it. Somebody came up with a cool new technology, but just because the technology exists, doesn't mean there is any actual use for it. People keep trying to kludge a purpose on to it, but so far every one of those purposes is better served with existing tools.
I'm not going to say that blockchain technology is useless. But I will say that nobody has yet come up with a good use for it.
But we know what value mastercard provides. We don't know what value blockchain provides.
Comparing the power use of the two is therefore somewhat irrelevant.
Mastercard allows me to shop both in person and online with certainty. I present my card, and within a couple of seconds we have certainty that my transaction is approved and will go through. I know that even if the merchant finds a way to double bill me, mastercard will indemnify me for it, and I know what the transaction will cost me in relation to the amount of money I have, and in relation to every other transaction I make, because they all use the same currency.
Blockchain transactions on the other hand have none of the certainty, none of the speed, and none of the security. They also aren't tied to the currency used for everything else, so the wild price swings can, and will, affect you. Also by your own admission, blockchain isn't even supposed to be for payment, just as a distributed ledger. Something that nobody has ever found a use for that isn't already better served by other existing tools.
I'm not saying the technology is completely useless. But I can confidently say that nobody has found a practical use for it yet other than to try to find the "greater fool" willing to pay more for it than it cost the original person.
But rise of plastic in the 50s creates a non-biodegradable trash problem that people in the 60s really felt was a moral insult to mother earth.
Yeah and given that there is a garbage patch covering ~10% of the pacific ocean, a 50% reduction in sperm count (probably) and a significant processed plastic content in nearly all matter within a mile of the earth's surface they appear to have been correct.
At the moment you are right, with the exception of it extreme uses in international money laundering, evasion of laws odious to Libertarians, and a refuge for people with domineering central banks (zimbawe and china for instance).
on the otherhand the internet was pretty useless when there were only two connections. And why would you want to text people before there was a blackberry when you could just call them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There was no such thing as county scale recycling until Aluminum came along.
All the splinter chains are vulnerable to Beowulf-cluster alliance attacks.
Unless you've got 51% of all available blockchain compute over all blockchains held by honest parties, your blockchain is at risk if all the hostile compute coalesces for a quick, selective heist (before going back to its sundry regular programming).
Even worse: all available blockchain compute includes Amazon's instant army (and any other advanced GPU cloud service), though perhaps the ASIC-advantage presently renders this moot (I don't follow this closely enough to know for any specific currency).
Bear in mind: you might only need to rent the instant army for a few minutes to tip the balance of power.
Mathematically, the ideal solution is to only have one blockchain, making the 51% bar is a sizeable fraction of all marginal or repurposable compute available, on a global basis.
Put that in your blockchain ICO and smoke it.
Yeah, yeah, I know—I'm exaggerating for effect—and my claim is barely 51% true, which is hardly true at all, by traditional standards, supposing you still believe in those, when obviously the whole point of your ICO is that you clearly don't.
Goodness knows why I'm replying to an AC, but the inability to reverse transactions is a feature! People get scammed all the time by customers reversing credit card charges once the transaction is complete. You can go ask Steve Wozniak about it.
None of the items you mentioned are really drawbacks. Protecting access to private keys is not that difficult if you're competent with computer security.
you need some kind of enforcement capable of setting things right. Something that can govern, if even just a little bit.
Cryptocurrencies are clearly not for you! If you need a babysitter you can use the traditional money system.
At the moment you are right,
He's actually right forever. The key word in his post is "idemnify."
See, when MasterCard fucks up, you call MasterCard, and they fix it.
When the blockchain fucks up (whether it's the blockchain itself, hackers, or a stupid user error (deleting your own keys, for example)), there's nobody to call. The average user will say "fuck that" and go back to MasterCard.
People don't really want 'decentralized' in their life, they want stuff to work, and someone to blame if it doesn't. The same is true for businesses, who need reliability.
Why do we want a distributed ledger?
Imagine you are Amazon. Now imagine a Git repo with the Windows source code. It sits there on disk and does nothing just waiting for someone to want the data. It costs practically nothing and generates no revenue. Now imagine the same repo with a blockchain. Suddenly every hacker organisation on the planet is trying to run their own cluster to insert backdoors by getting 51% of the compute power for a while. Microsoft is meanwhile desperately trying to stop them and, when they realise that AWS is much bigger than Azure, they start having to rent huge amounts of processor time from Amazon.
In the end, the blockchain guarantees a huge income for the cloud providers without having to do anything really interesting, complicated or useful. Who wouldn't want that (assuming their main business was providing compute resources)?
Blockchain# coming to a github near you
See the last line of my previous comment.
I didn't say it would be useless forever. just that it's useless right now. And it's not a scale thing like the internet or texting. It's a fundamental problem of figuring out a use for it. Right now there is no use case. I can't predict the future, and it's possible that there will be a use case in the future, but right now there's none. I won't write off the technology as a whole, but so far this is a solution in search of a problem. We may yet see this solve some problem, but it hasn't happened yet.
This is why we don't need 600+ altcoins and never did. Blockchains require large groups. These currencies don't have them. Stop inventing new ones thinking you'll get rich, people!
Decentralized isn't necessarily the problem though, The average person doesn't understand the current financial system, nor do they care whether something is "centralized" or "decentralized". People simply look at the pros and cons. People will even accept more risk, if there's a tradeoff that offsets it. (look at IOT for example, people will accept the risk of their door locks being hacked for the convenience of having them accessible from their smartphone). But blockchain solves none of the problems people have with their existing payment solutions, while introducing several new ones. That's why it isn't a useful currency. Here are some of the top concerns people have about their payment methods, and how blockchain addresses them:
- Fees. People complain about paying their banks for transactions, but realistically credit cards don't charge the end user, and the fee they do charge to the merchant is not waived if you don't use one in most cases (I know there are a small handful of businesses that reduce their price for cash purchases, but it's not normal) Meanwhile blockchain does have transaction fees (and sometimes incredibly high ones!), just to different people. Additionally many credit cards offer points of some form, or even cash back. It's cheaper for me to use a credit card than cash, and cash is cheaper than blockchain.
- Peer to Peer. People want to be able to send money from one person to another quickly and easily. Most banks make this difficult. Unfortunately, transactions using blockchain aren't quick enough for someone trying to sell something to another person (I don't want to sit around waiting for minutes, hours, or days, to see if I should hand over the item) and also have added fees. Cash still wins this one.
- Theft, people don't want to be on the hook if someone steals their wallet. Cash is gone if someone takes your wallet, but at least you probably don't have all of your money in cash in your pocket, most of it is probably in the bank. Credit cards idemnify you against theft, as does the bank. Blockchain has no protections at all against theft, and there's a high chance that you could have all your eggs in one basket (sure you COULD have multiple wallets and maybe only 1 will be hacked, but will you actually? and even if you do, can you guarantee an attacker won't get more than one?) Credit cards are the safest one here, followed by banks,
Now if they made great progress in the first 2 items compared to the traditional payment methods, then people would probably accept the third one. But when all 3 are worse, they won't adopt it. This means that nobody really uses blockchain currencies as a payment method, they use them to gamble that someone else will pay more for it than they did. And that's all it's really used for.
I had this exact conversation with a guy at a black jack table in Vegas. He was rich from selling iPhone accessories (family business) but, like most rich guys, just hired eggheads to actually do the work. we went back and forth like 10 times where I kept asking if he understood what a ledger was and what "immutable" meant and said that blockchain is great if he needs an immutable global, non-centralized ledger. He responded that he did know what an immutable ledger was but wanted me to tell him how to use it. Like, those aren't very technical concepts. Do you need a fucking ledger or not, guy? I don't run your business. I basically told him to ask the guys that build the shit when he gets back from his trip.
Bitcoin is a technical solution. MasterCard is a business solution. They are not exactly competiting ideas. MasterCard could build their technology based on bitcoin-like technology or not. Theyre profiting a monetary service. It's up to them to make it profitable and efficient. If bitcoin (or similar) is the way to do that, great, but Bitcoin and MasterCard (at least the features you're describing) solve two different parts of the same problem. Likewise a different company could provide those monetary services on top of bitcoin and then compete with MasterCard. Bitcoin, in and of itself, doesn't compete with a payment processor.
Huh? What cryptocurrency has transactions that are cheaper, and faster than credit cards?
Bitcoin ain't cheaper or faster.
Future forks of cryptos may require geographic diversification of mining power using a non-spoofable, terrestrial GPS alternative that supports public key cryptography. http://bit.ly/2xxnDds
Police body cam footage, electronic contracts, copyrights, all can benefit from an always online global notary service.
I had a more detailed comment, but /. ate it.
so fuck slashcode =P
pizza.
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Here, have a wrench... Coca-Cola et. al., can make as many bottle/cans as they want..
Whereas, the premise behind Bitcoin (specifically) is the finite amount; the only way for there to be a change in any of Bitcoin's protocols, would require consensus from the community.
Here, have a Ted Talk video explanation: https://cointhoughts.co/diana-biggs-miraculously-explains-bitcoin/
Everything is a conspiracy these days. If you didn't learn it in 9th grade, it's a conspiracy. Everybody knows. Duh. What are you some kind of science denying idiot? It's called Occam's Razor. You know, logic?
There is nothing that prevents a service like cloud storage or video hosting site or anything else from creating a publicly accessible data storage without exposing an API that allows editing or deleting content. That doesn't exist not because the limit is people not technology.
Most of those agricultural exports from the Netherlands were grown in the interior of Europe. Two of Europe's five largest ports, in terms of tonnage, are in the Netherlands. Netherlands may be number one in European food exports, but certainly not number one in European food prodcution.
because the baseline for crypto currencies is and remains drugs and money laundering. What I'm wondering is if governments will ever crack down on that. If they do expect the value to plummet. Currency is worthless if it can't be exchanged for goods/services, and there's almost nobody taking even bitcoin for anything of actual value, let alone all the other currencies out there.
If I sound harsh it's because I'm a little ticked that a buddy of mine spend a bunch of real money on one of those "Proof of Stake" coins that is basically an unregulated security minus anything of value backing it like a company. He didn't spend a lot of money, but OTOH he doesn't have a lot. I'm sick and tired of seeing folks taken advantage. Studies have shown people make bad decisions when they get desperate, and that makes desperate people ideal marks. But all I hear from anybody is Caveat Emptor.
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Dogecoin and Reddcoin, and probably another hundred or so crypto-currencies.
There's more than just Bitcoin and Litecoin out there.
#DeleteFacebook
Bitcoin is slow. It has been for awhile.
Today, you could probably get Ripple or Stellar to work faster/cheaper than Visa/Mastercard/etc. There are plenty of reasons to not choose either product.
Once they implement sharding, Ethereum + OmiseGO will probably hit the 1 billion transaction/second range. That will be the game-changer. But that assumes OmiseGO had unfettered access to the entire Ethereum blockchain, which would not be the case. The base Ethereum blockchain would need a few more upgrades to realistically get to that point, unless the OMG folks just forked Ethereum for their own use.
With Bitcoin the energy needed to verify blocks of transactions keeps increasing. It had been estimated that the energy spent per transaction is already more than the average US houshold uses in three days, if I remember correctly. I have trouble believing that Mastercard or anything similar manages to reach that level of inefficiency.
APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
(Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any SINGLE solution (99% of threats = hostnames vs. IP address (that most firewalls use)) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less!).
* Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" competitors slowing you, hosts speed you up 2 ways (adblocks + hardcodes u spend most time @) vs. competition loaded w/ bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + their overheads (messagepass ('souled-out' to advertiser addons) + filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploitation.
APK
P.S.=> See subject & "hosts trick to block the Coinhive or Crypto-Loot" - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/a-new-player-joins-coinhive-on-the-browser-cryptojacking-scene/ ... apk
Your software is just fine - well written, functional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine by mmell February 17, 2017
(APK's work), I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon February 11 2016
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg September 25 2015
I like your host file system by Karmashock September 09 2015
I do use APK's host file on all my systems at home by OrangeTide December 01 2017
I personally use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a genius called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
* See subject: Best part is this Linux 64-bit model is faster & more efficient (does 2x the work in 1/2 the time, literally)
APK
P.S.=> Enjoy a faster/safer/more reliable internet... apk
I am clearly one of the few business owners here who understands the serious economic harm from fiat currencies and traditional payment systems. Crypto currency as a tool is much cheaper than traditional credit cards and one of the reasons people are using the technology. Dumb asses here don't have a wit of sense over business or the true costs of our current payment and banking systems. Credit cards cost everyone about 6% in increased prices. 3% from credit card fees to the merchant get passed on to you the consumer and there is another 3% cost from charge backs. Then if we ban cash which some countries are doing you can double that # for many products from small and even large business because certain purchases will end up with higher costs. This doesn't factor in the ability of one to factor in its usefulness of creating liquidity in the market. My company has cut costs of doing business significantly as a result of our use and acceptance of crypto currencies. On top of saving 12% we save another 30ish percent.
So Visa needs to include the cost of roads, mail, people, clothes and showers. But bitcoin doesn't. Well, given the number of hygienically challenged basement (or Mama's second trailer) dwellers hoping to get rich off it at this point, I guess that's fair. The smart money already left.
I am not proud of the fact that I will chuckle at your misery when it crashes still further, but I definitely will chuckle.
See also, how's that Tesla short?
"I know there are a small handful of businesses that reduce their price for cash purchases, but it's not normal"
Unless you're a gas station, at least in southern California. I can name only one single station (in a small mountain town) in SoCal that does not charge around a dime a gallon extra for plastic - and I've seen the same in any other part of the country that I've encountered.
I don't know how many gas stations there are out there compared to other businesses, or how there gross sales compare to others, but I don't think they would be classified as 'a small handful' by any reasonable means.
And as a counter point, I have never seen that practice at any gas station in any of the countries I have ever visited (including yours). So I'd say the sample size is extremely small. Which would stand to reason as it is also against their contract with their card processor to charge different rates for card vs cash so they risk losing their ability to accept cards at all. Which would also kill their ability to sell to any fleet. A risk very few businesses are willing to take.
The major brand Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) used has this as a standing policy: cash discount
The problem is Visa rule prohibit it now.
Arco dumped credit cards at one point. They are now out of bussiness.