A fine idea, but for the rare breed among us Slashdot readers who have sex, the penis is not the best place. I propose that the anal area is much better for most males - that way, only the TSA will see your passwords!
There are a number of benefits to litecoin, particularly the faster transaction time."
Transaction times are the same as for Bitcoin - practically instant. The confirmations are faster, but I don't see why that's a benefit. Bitcoin could have a faster confirmation time, too. If you cut confirmation time in, say, half each confirmation would only provide half the security of the longer time since a confirmation would be twice as easy to get into the blockchain, all other things being equal.
Now, you do get that first confirmation faster if the confirmation time target is lower, but if you're accepting Litecoins with only a few confirmations, you're probably dealing with small amounts and might as well accept 0-confirmation Bitcoin transactions.
I'd be happy to hear why a shorter confirmation time is a real benefit, but AFAIK it's not.
Some times miners do solve the next block more or less simultaneously. The block chain then splits for a moment, until one of the chains started is definitively longer than the other. The shorter chain then gets discarded, its blocks becoming 'orphaned'. This happens regularly and is expected.
As for your example, per this behaviour your own blockchain would have to be longer than the one everyne else was on, or it would never be accpeted as valid. This would require some very serious computing power for you to have any appreciable chance of pulling your attack off.
As for the hidden ways Bitcoin can be influenced... can you name some examples?
One of the least uncertain aspects of Bitcoin is the number of BTC awarded per block mined. That is dictated by the protocol. The code is open source so you can check if you're willing and able.
Basically, though, the block reward gets halved every 210,000 blocks. That's happened once so far, and no-one pulled any switch to do it. Everyone running a Bitcoin node or miner simply runs code that has the same requirements to accept a block as valid. Some miner could have modified their software to produce 50-coin blocks even after block 210,000, but that would be pointless if other peers in the network weren't running software with the same modification.
You also stated block creation must be faster than one per 10 minutes on average now. It's possible that's temporarily true, but the network retargets the difficulty of finding a block to maintain the balance at 10 minutes per block. This is done by comparing the time it took to calculate the previous 2016 blocks, starting from the previous difficulty retarget, to the expected time of two weeks. If it's less, or more, the difficulty required for a block to be valid is adjusted to compensate, making it harder or easier to find a block. All the information needed to do this retargeting is publicly available. You may want to have a look at: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
In brief, there are no mystery hands behind the curtains pulling strings to make things happen. You're right that many of the basic choices were arbitrary - the maximum of just short of 21,000,000 BTC and the block creation time being obvious examples. The rules are, however, transparent, and in order to change any of them you'd have to modify the core software and convince people to start using your modified version. That wouldn't be very easy, since it would create a competing currency forking off the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone holding Bitcoins would likely be pretty wary of such modifications, because the effects on the value of BTC could be deleterious.
They *might* be worth more tomorrow. There's no guarantee of that. You will, however, definitely need to eat regularly. Usually spending money is involved in that.
Look at it this way, computers get better all the time. If you wait a while, you can get better value for your money. Somehow, people still buy computers all the time.
No-one can say what a bitcoin is worth. All they can say is what it's been traded for. As for why "miners" get money, that serves a dual purpose.
Bitcoin is a solution to the problem of creating digital cash without a central authority to prevent double spending. "Miners" act as notaries. When Alice sends Bob some BTC, "miners" witness this and if they manage to create a new block on the blockchain, they note this transaction down in the distributed ledger. Without this ledger, Alice could simply send the BTC she sent Bob to Charlie, but since the notaries have noted Alice's transaction with Bob, Alice can't scam Charlie or Bob by double spending.
This is a service "miners" provide, and they are paid for it. Finding a block, and therefore being able to note down the transactions a miner has seen into the blockchain is a computationally expensive task. It has to be to make it unattractive to try to falsify the record. Currently the majority of the reward for these notaries comes from the new coins created with each block. This is the second purpose of mining - creating the Bitcoin money base in a manner that distributes the coins to many people over time. As you probably know, the amount of new coins being created will taper off over time, and transaction fees are expected to pay the notaries enough to bother with it. If they do not, fewer people will bother with using their electricity on "mining" and it will get correspondingly easier to find a new block until things even out.
You can send money across the globe almost instantly, with low fees and no-one to stop you from donating to your favourite politically unpopular charity using cash or a real bank?
Yes, they're screwed. They trusted a third party with their coins, which is simply a bad idea. Now, deposit insurance is great for bank accounts, as most people don't really have any other choice than to give a bank their money to hold for them. That's not true with Bitcoin. You can be your own "bank", and it is, in fact much safer than using a third party as one.
Rule of thumb: do not use web wallets. If you must use one, only store small amounts for short periods of time there.
Quick, simple answer: The backups don't contain bitcoins. They contain encryption keys that can be used to transfer the bitcoins to another key. The Bitcoin client used checks how many bitcoins the keys it is given still control.
How do you arrest someone when you don't know who they are? I seem to have missed the part where the FBI learned DPR's identity before september or so this year.
From my reading of the news coming out, there's no proof of a murder being committed. In 2012, DPR tried to have an employee who had been arrested killed, but as it happens, the "service provider" here was a law enforcement agent. Later, DPR was contacted by FriendlyChemist in a blackmail attempt, and he similarly arranged to have him killed, as well, with photo proof provided. Canadian authorities say no-one matching the name and address of FriendlyChemist found in Silk Road chat logs exists, nor is there any sign of a murder fitting the description taking place.
One explanation would be that LE were behind FriendlyChemist as well, perhaps thanks to information gained from the not-killed-at-all employee they'd arrested in the first place. In any case, there's no indication LE were able to identify DPR until quite recently, making the point of them believing he might order another hit rather moot.
Certainly it's volatile, there's no known way to bootstrap a stable currency without a powerful, stable entity behind it AFAIK. Bitcoin takes a different path, and volatility is unavoidable, initially. It's whether that will reduce with increased adoption that's the interesting question. So far, the last big crash has been much smaller than the 2011 one, but obviously it's going to take a long time still before much can be said about how volatile bitcoin is in the long term.
Well, the point I was trying to make is, controlling human access to specific data isn't the issue. It's the automated collection, retention and potential analysis of data that is most worrying.
It seems when they say the NSA doesn't look into what Americans do, they mean no human has access without proper authorization. From TFA, a quote from an NSA spokeswoman: “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period."
Now, that's nice. Let's assume for a moment that's true - that's not saying anything about automatic collection of data, about computer analysis of such data, about how long data can be kept etc. "No-one is listening to your calls" is a complete red herring. It would be better if their methodology were based on purely human-conducted surveillance. That kind of work is expensive, and therefore must have a limited scope. What is apparently being built now is much worse than having some person listening to people's calls.
Everything we're being told is going on now just reeks of the Total Information Awareness programs which were, to some extent, supposedly discontinued. The goal seems to be the same - make it cheap enough to have total surveillance capability of everything anyone does. You can't do that with humans, but if you manage to build a computer system broad and smart enough, you can do a whole lot more. Humans aren't being phased out of the process because they present a larger risk to the population being monitored - they're just too expensive.
Fortunately, automated intel data analysis is still a very tough problem, but it seems clear a lot of work is being done to "improve" things in that field. That's not good news, it's bad news. Less human involvement in this context means less legal oversight and greater overall capabilities. You can't jail a computer system.
The only plausible scenario seems to me to be the one where a leak took place well in advance of the news release. For a few milliseconds to make any difference, someone would have to have a bot capable of unambiguously parsing the Fed news release in order to make the correct trading choice. Unless such announcements are made in some highly structured, machine-readable format, a human had to have made the call on how to trade, and humans don't act that fast.
That would be a guess. All LE, or anyone without inside access to Silk Road, could see is the funds going to the Silk Road wallet. Beyond that, there's no way to tell AFAIK. If the sender buys something, they could do it immediately, or not. They could wait months, with the coins there on their SR account. They might not even buy anything, they might just be using SR as a mixer service and withdraw to a different address to break the connection between themselves and their bitcoins.
All the researcher discovered was that the writer had sent funds to Silk Road. The article specifically points out they couldn't tell what, if anything, the bitcoins were used to buy. The headline is sensationalist, to say the least.
"Additionally, the government would not authorize us to separate NSLs from other government data requests or to express the NSLs that we have received, if any, as a range from 0 to 1,000"
Did Yahoo just circumspectly say they have received between 0 and 1,000 National Security Letters?
So... Another made-in-china Android device that you're supposed to trust with your personal data?
Where's a privacy-oriented smartphone maker when you need one? Why didn't Ubuntu's marketing for their phone focus on that?
Slashdot Mirror
A fine idea, but for the rare breed among us Slashdot readers who have sex, the penis is not the best place. I propose that the anal area is much better for most males - that way, only the TSA will see your passwords!
There are a number of benefits to litecoin, particularly the faster transaction time."
Transaction times are the same as for Bitcoin - practically instant. The confirmations are faster, but I don't see why that's a benefit. Bitcoin could have a faster confirmation time, too. If you cut confirmation time in, say, half each confirmation would only provide half the security of the longer time since a confirmation would be twice as easy to get into the blockchain, all other things being equal.
Now, you do get that first confirmation faster if the confirmation time target is lower, but if you're accepting Litecoins with only a few confirmations, you're probably dealing with small amounts and might as well accept 0-confirmation Bitcoin transactions.
I'd be happy to hear why a shorter confirmation time is a real benefit, but AFAIK it's not.
Some times miners do solve the next block more or less simultaneously. The block chain then splits for a moment, until one of the chains started is definitively longer than the other. The shorter chain then gets discarded, its blocks becoming 'orphaned'. This happens regularly and is expected. As for your example, per this behaviour your own blockchain would have to be longer than the one everyne else was on, or it would never be accpeted as valid. This would require some very serious computing power for you to have any appreciable chance of pulling your attack off. As for the hidden ways Bitcoin can be influenced... can you name some examples?
One of the least uncertain aspects of Bitcoin is the number of BTC awarded per block mined. That is dictated by the protocol. The code is open source so you can check if you're willing and able.
Basically, though, the block reward gets halved every 210,000 blocks. That's happened once so far, and no-one pulled any switch to do it. Everyone running a Bitcoin node or miner simply runs code that has the same requirements to accept a block as valid. Some miner could have modified their software to produce 50-coin blocks even after block 210,000, but that would be pointless if other peers in the network weren't running software with the same modification.
You also stated block creation must be faster than one per 10 minutes on average now. It's possible that's temporarily true, but the network retargets the difficulty of finding a block to maintain the balance at 10 minutes per block. This is done by comparing the time it took to calculate the previous 2016 blocks, starting from the previous difficulty retarget, to the expected time of two weeks. If it's less, or more, the difficulty required for a block to be valid is adjusted to compensate, making it harder or easier to find a block. All the information needed to do this retargeting is publicly available.
You may want to have a look at: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
In brief, there are no mystery hands behind the curtains pulling strings to make things happen. You're right that many of the basic choices were arbitrary - the maximum of just short of 21,000,000 BTC and the block creation time being obvious examples. The rules are, however, transparent, and in order to change any of them you'd have to modify the core software and convince people to start using your modified version. That wouldn't be very easy, since it would create a competing currency forking off the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone holding Bitcoins would likely be pretty wary of such modifications, because the effects on the value of BTC could be deleterious.
They *might* be worth more tomorrow. There's no guarantee of that. You will, however, definitely need to eat regularly. Usually spending money is involved in that.
Look at it this way, computers get better all the time. If you wait a while, you can get better value for your money. Somehow, people still buy computers all the time.
It's not impossible at all. You could escrow some bitcoins with a reputable escrow operator, for instance...
The fake debt collection agency from across the ocean is going to have their legal department get an ex parte ruling against their victim?
No-one can say what a bitcoin is worth. All they can say is what it's been traded for. As for why "miners" get money, that serves a dual purpose.
Bitcoin is a solution to the problem of creating digital cash without a central authority to prevent double spending. "Miners" act as notaries. When Alice sends Bob some BTC, "miners" witness this and if they manage to create a new block on the blockchain, they note this transaction down in the distributed ledger. Without this ledger, Alice could simply send the BTC she sent Bob to Charlie, but since the notaries have noted Alice's transaction with Bob, Alice can't scam Charlie or Bob by double spending.
This is a service "miners" provide, and they are paid for it. Finding a block, and therefore being able to note down the transactions a miner has seen into the blockchain is a computationally expensive task. It has to be to make it unattractive to try to falsify the record. Currently the majority of the reward for these notaries comes from the new coins created with each block. This is the second purpose of mining - creating the Bitcoin money base in a manner that distributes the coins to many people over time. As you probably know, the amount of new coins being created will taper off over time, and transaction fees are expected to pay the notaries enough to bother with it. If they do not, fewer people will bother with using their electricity on "mining" and it will get correspondingly easier to find a new block until things even out.
You can send money across the globe almost instantly, with low fees and no-one to stop you from donating to your favourite politically unpopular charity using cash or a real bank?
Yes, they're screwed. They trusted a third party with their coins, which is simply a bad idea. Now, deposit insurance is great for bank accounts, as most people don't really have any other choice than to give a bank their money to hold for them. That's not true with Bitcoin. You can be your own "bank", and it is, in fact much safer than using a third party as one. Rule of thumb: do not use web wallets. If you must use one, only store small amounts for short periods of time there.
So instead of paying 5 EUR for my groceries just now, I paid 500 cents?! That's highway robbery!
Quick, simple answer: The backups don't contain bitcoins. They contain encryption keys that can be used to transfer the bitcoins to another key. The Bitcoin client used checks how many bitcoins the keys it is given still control.
How do you arrest someone when you don't know who they are? I seem to have missed the part where the FBI learned DPR's identity before september or so this year.
From my reading of the news coming out, there's no proof of a murder being committed. In 2012, DPR tried to have an employee who had been arrested killed, but as it happens, the "service provider" here was a law enforcement agent. Later, DPR was contacted by FriendlyChemist in a blackmail attempt, and he similarly arranged to have him killed, as well, with photo proof provided. Canadian authorities say no-one matching the name and address of FriendlyChemist found in Silk Road chat logs exists, nor is there any sign of a murder fitting the description taking place.
One explanation would be that LE were behind FriendlyChemist as well, perhaps thanks to information gained from the not-killed-at-all employee they'd arrested in the first place. In any case, there's no indication LE were able to identify DPR until quite recently, making the point of them believing he might order another hit rather moot.
Certainly it's volatile, there's no known way to bootstrap a stable currency without a powerful, stable entity behind it AFAIK. Bitcoin takes a different path, and volatility is unavoidable, initially. It's whether that will reduce with increased adoption that's the interesting question. So far, the last big crash has been much smaller than the 2011 one, but obviously it's going to take a long time still before much can be said about how volatile bitcoin is in the long term.
You assume banning harmful substances is the most effective way to reduce the associated public health issues. Why?
Well, the point I was trying to make is, controlling human access to specific data isn't the issue. It's the automated collection, retention and potential analysis of data that is most worrying.
It seems when they say the NSA doesn't look into what Americans do, they mean no human has access without proper authorization. From TFA, a quote from an NSA spokeswoman: “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period."
Now, that's nice. Let's assume for a moment that's true - that's not saying anything about automatic collection of data, about computer analysis of such data, about how long data can be kept etc. "No-one is listening to your calls" is a complete red herring. It would be better if their methodology were based on purely human-conducted surveillance. That kind of work is expensive, and therefore must have a limited scope. What is apparently being built now is much worse than having some person listening to people's calls.
Everything we're being told is going on now just reeks of the Total Information Awareness programs which were, to some extent, supposedly discontinued. The goal seems to be the same - make it cheap enough to have total surveillance capability of everything anyone does. You can't do that with humans, but if you manage to build a computer system broad and smart enough, you can do a whole lot more. Humans aren't being phased out of the process because they present a larger risk to the population being monitored - they're just too expensive.
Fortunately, automated intel data analysis is still a very tough problem, but it seems clear a lot of work is being done to "improve" things in that field. That's not good news, it's bad news. Less human involvement in this context means less legal oversight and greater overall capabilities. You can't jail a computer system.
The only plausible scenario seems to me to be the one where a leak took place well in advance of the news release. For a few milliseconds to make any difference, someone would have to have a bot capable of unambiguously parsing the Fed news release in order to make the correct trading choice. Unless such announcements are made in some highly structured, machine-readable format, a human had to have made the call on how to trade, and humans don't act that fast.
Then again, maybe it was Skynet...
That would be a guess. All LE, or anyone without inside access to Silk Road, could see is the funds going to the Silk Road wallet. Beyond that, there's no way to tell AFAIK. If the sender buys something, they could do it immediately, or not. They could wait months, with the coins there on their SR account. They might not even buy anything, they might just be using SR as a mixer service and withdraw to a different address to break the connection between themselves and their bitcoins.
All the researcher discovered was that the writer had sent funds to Silk Road. The article specifically points out they couldn't tell what, if anything, the bitcoins were used to buy. The headline is sensationalist, to say the least.
"Additionally, the government would not authorize us to separate NSLs from other government data requests or to express the NSLs that we have received, if any, as a range from 0 to 1,000" Did Yahoo just circumspectly say they have received between 0 and 1,000 National Security Letters?
Even if you don't think the devs have put a backdoor in yet, can you be sure they won't comply with a secret order to insert one into their system?
So... Another made-in-china Android device that you're supposed to trust with your personal data? Where's a privacy-oriented smartphone maker when you need one? Why didn't Ubuntu's marketing for their phone focus on that?
What's wrong with asking for voluntary donations?