You're thinking of client certificates. You're able to remove them just like you can remove cookies, though getting a client certificate requires agreeing and clicking through a dialog, so they're strictly worse than cookies for tracking people who don't want to be tracked.
They've already been using their ranking system to encourage HTTP and HTML. Think of all the poor BBSs and gopher servers they've been discriminating against!
(And I'm not a fan of Maven or CocoaPods or other external dependency resolution tools anyway, as in part it presumes the external libraries we link against that are hosted outside of our source kits will honor their public interface contracts as minor revisions roll out, something which isn't always true.)
If perfect forward secrecy is used in the connections (which most HTTPS sites seem to do last I checked), then knowing the private keys doesn't even help them decrypt a connection, *unless* they're actively man-in-the-middling the connection from the start (which I'm sure they do often against interesting people, but probably not anywhere near 100% of everything).
If all it takes is one relay to be compromised to remove the entire point of using Tor,
That's not at all what the article is saying. A relay injecting content into your connection does not de-anonymize you. Tor works to guarantee anonymity. It doesn't guarantee that the exit relay isn't watching what's going through it or modifying the connection. That's why it's important to use HTTPS.
If you set your browser to remember your passwords, then anyone that uses your browser (including a virus) can get your passwords. That's exactly how the feature is supposed to work.
I think Bitcoin is extremely cool technology, but if I had a company I would not bet the company on the stability of its price right now. I would sell off most of the bitcoins I received as payment for dollars pretty quickly, or just pay a company a small amount to do that for me. Maybe in the future when Bitcoin is accepted in more places then its price will stabilize and that will be an extra step. Bitcoin has to go through a phase where most businesses exchange it immediately to ever get near enough adoption to stabilize.
The transaction fees already exist. It's not like the designers never thought about what will happen after all bitcoins are minted.
And even before all the coins are mined, has anyone calculated yet what is the ceiling for BTC? That'd be the value over which some country's national labs or universities turn on their supercomputers and mine almost everything (publications might bring revenue, but mining apparently does), preventing individuals from getting any return from their hardware, thus discouraging them from participating?
A) The maximum number of bitcoins was publicly predetermined from the start. It's 21 million.
B) Bitcoin mining requires specialized hardware to be profitable to mine, so this isn't something that anyone with a supercomputer can just decide to mine effectively on a whim any more.
C) Why would it be bad that most individuals couldn't mine? Bitcoin mining isn't supposed to be an egalitarian "everyone gets free money" system. It's a reward for using your computational power to help secure the system. If a hundred groups with supercomputers / mining machines can mine more than 100,000 people using desktop machines, then the former group pushing out the latter from the market is the way things should be. (However there is a problem if any group colluding gets more than 50% of mining power together.)
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
No, if mining stops, then Bitcoin stops. Mining is necessary to confirm transactions. Miners will still collect transaction fees after all bitcoins are minted.
There are a ton of "me too" bitcoin-clone currencies out there already. None of them substantially improve the bitcoin protocol. I don't see why any specific one would reach critical mass and overtake bitcoin. All of the bitcoin-clones split the vote between the people who want to jump from Bitcoin.
Those first two paragraphs are at least an amusing take on libertarians, but I don't see how they work as an actual criticism of the third paragraph's description of bitcoin. Money that doesn't have a third party veto still sounds like a pretty good thing.
There are issues with what the proof-of-work system can be. The proof-of-work computation has to take long to finish, but be quick to verify. (I don't believe Folding@Home or most BOINC projects fit this model. I believe most of them manually verify many results by having multiple computers process each work chunk, and checking that the answers match.) Also, there's a major issue if the work jobs are created and managed by a single group: the group managing it would have a huge incentive to create fake work jobs that they already know the answer to, and then instant-mine them for profits. It would devalue the currency and de-legitimize the science project's results.
So the proof-of-work system can't rely on a central group to update it regularly with new work jobs, and the work solutions have to be easier to verify than to make. Primecoin is the closest thing to having a useful proof-of-work system currently.
Yeah, I'm skimming the patent, and I don't see how this is like Bitcoin. It's not a decentralized currency. It's just a different interface for using existing bank accounts they control. It's only anonymous to the users. The whole system runs on trusted servers they control and can see what's happening on.
The stuff that made Bitcoin revolutionary isn't that it works over the internet, or has receive-only addresses. The revolutionary part was that it was decentralized. It didn't rely on any trusted or privileged groups or servers. All nodes that people run are equal. There is no central minting group who can secretly mint more or change the minting rules. The currency itself is limited. This proposal does not involve any of that.
The presence of centralization means that eMunie isn't in the same category as Bitcoin. There are already other centralized digital currencies, including very mature anonymous Chaumian systems. Solving the anonymity problem by adding centralization is already a proven solution others have done.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of client certificates. You're able to remove them just like you can remove cookies, though getting a client certificate requires agreeing and clicking through a dialog, so they're strictly worse than cookies for tracking people who don't want to be tracked.
They've already been using their ranking system to encourage HTTP and HTML. Think of all the poor BBSs and gopher servers they've been discriminating against!
What exactly do you think most hacks are?
(And I'm not a fan of Maven or CocoaPods or other external dependency resolution tools anyway, as in part it presumes the external libraries we link against that are hosted outside of our source kits will honor their public interface contracts as minor revisions roll out, something which isn't always true.)
That's why you depend on a specific version.
Windows 8.1 is no longer supported, so users must update to Windows 8.1?
Read overruns causing occasional crashes isn't much of an issue for the attacker if the server is auto-restarting.
Should we legislate for people's eyes to cast bright lights too while they're seeing?
If perfect forward secrecy is used in the connections (which most HTTPS sites seem to do last I checked), then knowing the private keys doesn't even help them decrypt a connection, *unless* they're actively man-in-the-middling the connection from the start (which I'm sure they do often against interesting people, but probably not anywhere near 100% of everything).
Nice try, NSA.
Yeah, if RSA didn't take a bribe, then they're just grossly incompetent and should still be villified anyway.
If all it takes is one relay to be compromised to remove the entire point of using Tor,
That's not at all what the article is saying. A relay injecting content into your connection does not de-anonymize you. Tor works to guarantee anonymity. It doesn't guarantee that the exit relay isn't watching what's going through it or modifying the connection. That's why it's important to use HTTPS.
Anyone can use any of the exit relays. That's the point of the relays.
If you set your browser to remember your passwords, then anyone that uses your browser (including a virus) can get your passwords. That's exactly how the feature is supposed to work.
I think Bitcoin is extremely cool technology, but if I had a company I would not bet the company on the stability of its price right now. I would sell off most of the bitcoins I received as payment for dollars pretty quickly, or just pay a company a small amount to do that for me. Maybe in the future when Bitcoin is accepted in more places then its price will stabilize and that will be an extra step. Bitcoin has to go through a phase where most businesses exchange it immediately to ever get near enough adoption to stabilize.
They pay someone else to run the exchange in their own office. Coinbase.
As a customer, you don't have to sign up for a Coinbase account.
The transaction fees already exist. It's not like the designers never thought about what will happen after all bitcoins are minted.
And even before all the coins are mined, has anyone calculated yet what is the ceiling for BTC? That'd be the value over which some country's national labs or universities turn on their supercomputers and mine almost everything (publications might bring revenue, but mining apparently does), preventing individuals from getting any return from their hardware, thus discouraging them from participating?
A) The maximum number of bitcoins was publicly predetermined from the start. It's 21 million.
B) Bitcoin mining requires specialized hardware to be profitable to mine, so this isn't something that anyone with a supercomputer can just decide to mine effectively on a whim any more.
C) Why would it be bad that most individuals couldn't mine? Bitcoin mining isn't supposed to be an egalitarian "everyone gets free money" system. It's a reward for using your computational power to help secure the system. If a hundred groups with supercomputers / mining machines can mine more than 100,000 people using desktop machines, then the former group pushing out the latter from the market is the way things should be. (However there is a problem if any group colluding gets more than 50% of mining power together.)
Which CPU architecture do we decide that the web relies on?
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
Miners will still collect transaction fees from transactions after all minting is done; Bitcoin wasn't designed to implode when the 21M cap is hit.
No, if mining stops, then Bitcoin stops. Mining is necessary to confirm transactions. Miners will still collect transaction fees after all bitcoins are minted.
There are a ton of "me too" bitcoin-clone currencies out there already. None of them substantially improve the bitcoin protocol. I don't see why any specific one would reach critical mass and overtake bitcoin. All of the bitcoin-clones split the vote between the people who want to jump from Bitcoin.
Those first two paragraphs are at least an amusing take on libertarians, but I don't see how they work as an actual criticism of the third paragraph's description of bitcoin. Money that doesn't have a third party veto still sounds like a pretty good thing.
(copied from an older post of mine)
There are issues with what the proof-of-work system can be. The proof-of-work computation has to take long to finish, but be quick to verify. (I don't believe Folding@Home or most BOINC projects fit this model. I believe most of them manually verify many results by having multiple computers process each work chunk, and checking that the answers match.) Also, there's a major issue if the work jobs are created and managed by a single group: the group managing it would have a huge incentive to create fake work jobs that they already know the answer to, and then instant-mine them for profits. It would devalue the currency and de-legitimize the science project's results.
So the proof-of-work system can't rely on a central group to update it regularly with new work jobs, and the work solutions have to be easier to verify than to make. Primecoin is the closest thing to having a useful proof-of-work system currently.
Yeah, I'm skimming the patent, and I don't see how this is like Bitcoin. It's not a decentralized currency. It's just a different interface for using existing bank accounts they control. It's only anonymous to the users. The whole system runs on trusted servers they control and can see what's happening on.
The stuff that made Bitcoin revolutionary isn't that it works over the internet, or has receive-only addresses. The revolutionary part was that it was decentralized. It didn't rely on any trusted or privileged groups or servers. All nodes that people run are equal. There is no central minting group who can secretly mint more or change the minting rules. The currency itself is limited. This proposal does not involve any of that.
It's not so much that I don't trust him.
The presence of centralization means that eMunie isn't in the same category as Bitcoin. There are already other centralized digital currencies, including very mature anonymous Chaumian systems. Solving the anonymity problem by adding centralization is already a proven solution others have done.