> Fact: Bitcoin generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Bitcoin then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
This is one of the most ignorant things Ive ever seen on slashdot. What you are basically arguing against is the concept of money itself.
What you fail to grok is that the economy is not a zero sum game.
> Fact: Gold generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Gold then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
I hope you can start to see how stupid you sound now.
> Fact: The Dollar generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Dollars then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
This one might partly be true... monetary policy does exactly this; however the second clause is still false. You can still be profitable in dollars despite inflation losses.
Going long on something designed to lose value is slightly dumber than just burning your possessions in a great big bonfire. The USD is designed to prevent people from going long on it by punishing that behavior. Keynesian economics values spending so much that it discourages savings.
If its fully open source, including no secret firmware or secret code, then its fine. If we can edit, tweak, fix, compile and see all the bits, DRM all you want, no problem.
But obfuscate and secret away the code? The get out of my operating system.
> Yes, we would have said the same thing two months ago, and we'd STILL be correct.
Uh huh, and 2 months from now you will be "right" again no doubt.
Lol, if you do the opposite of everything slashdot said about bitcoin you'd be rich.
I'm convinced this site is full of techno-geezers who have grown old and are now afraid of anything new. Rather than actually learning what this thing is, they just yell "get off my lawn" from their rocking chairs.
Bitcoin is something new, something most slashdotters have been skeptical of since it was worth pennies. I really though a 10K price tag would wake a few people up, but it seems like that not enough.
Tell me honestly, what would it take for you to realize bitcoin is going to change the world even more than the internet has ? A 100K price tag? Perhaps a serious decline in a major currency, in favor of bitcoinization ?
Slashdot is for retired has-been technies who dont want anything to change.
What they are missing; the thing they dont want to learn is that there is a technological shift happening that is going to change their world. Slashdot has been pooh-pooh ing bitcoin since with was under a dollar, and they will continue to do so as bitcoin or somthing like is assimilates the whole world around them.
I only read bitcoin threads on slashdot to laugh at them. Theyll be even saltier the next 10x price hike.
Thats still weakly typed, just a different kind of weak. Strongly types is when you fail; "a" . 1 would throw an exception and say "i dont know how I can possibly proceed" if it was strongly typed.
Strong typing vs weak is a minor detail anyway; the real meat is dynamic vs static.
> Besides, if your unit tests are not testing things sufficiently to catch any of these, they you're already doing things wrong.
My main take away form this whole thread is that strongly types language people dont write unit tests and spend lots of time debugging.
I use both static and dynamic languages out of necessity, and in my experience the dynamic languages take significantly less time to produce working code.
If you take a look at what monopolies do exist in capitalist areas, you will find they are nearly all created by regulation and not prevented by it. You should reconsider your analysis; perhaps the remaining exploitation can be removed by reducing regulation.
Because physically policing every boat is very expensive and would impede non-embargo traffic.
The bans work mostly via banking; If you cannot receive money for good shipped to NK, then you wont sell them product.
Without the ability to cheaply block the money, what you are left with is old fashioned embargoes; which are expensive and usually part of a lead up to military action.
>Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents.
I agree - they dont really represent our interests very well. They are far too moderate and willing to compromise. We need to eradiacate all gun laws of any kind form the books, and restore the 2A to its original intention, and the NRA just isnt pushing hard enough. This is why we have additional groups such as GOA and the VCDL, because the NRA is too goddamn liberal.
>8) A password is, almost by definition, short enough to memorize or at least write down in a reasonable time. Very few humans could ever >manage to memorize even a 1024-bit key pair; anything much stronger is right out. Calling it "a secret someone has too[sic] know" is >simple idiocy.
I think you are overestimating this a bit; a 1024 bit RSA key is worth about 80 bits of password strength.
an 80 bit password is really not to hard to memorize.
Here is an example: "held boat upon toward fish party long trade"
This is made by generating random bits, then looking up words from a word list to correspond. Assuming the attacker knows the exact algorithm, its ~85 bits of entropy.
A human is much less good at choosing a random password, but memorizing one is pretty easy.
This is really not that hard. Slashdot is full of old geezers apparently.
Dont use services that require you to trust them. Keep a zero balance in any exchange. Dont put lots of money into fairly transparent scams such as flexcoin. Dont give tons of valuable assets to anonymous strangers who you dont know.
Bernie Madoff didnt prove that the dollar was an unworkable idea, neither do these two scams say much about bitcoin itself.
> Maybe this will be an object lesson for the libertarian
I'm sure it will be, but not the lesson you are thinking of.
Some attributes of this problem:
* The currency itself is not affiliated with the crashing "bank". so you have seen exchange rates dip somewhat, there is no fundamental crash for the cryptocurrency
* Numerous exchanges and other pseudo-exchanges have stayed open and operational for this whole saga, allowing liquididty in and out of the cryptocurrency
* Use/Exchange of cryptocurrency does not require blind trust in the fundamental sense, so those who kept their balances in trust exchanges minimal to nil, lost nothing
* This "crash" was not sudden or mysterious. Those with the slightest modicum of common sense got out long ago. Other's with a taste for danger kept in or bought in up to the last minute. But just like playing with penny stocks, the risk was very high.
* MtGOX itself was a form of ponzi scheme. You could also have a ponzi scheme based on chicken eggs, or bottle caps. This does not mean that eggs themselves are a ponzi scheme, and neither are bitcoins.
On the other side of the coin, any form for exchange is backed with trust. So long as people continue to trust in the cryptographic and stability of the network itself. Those appear to remain strong, and merchants accepting the currency semi-directly continue to operate.
The lesson learned: crypto currency can sustain major scandals denominated in itself and not be fundamentally broken. Also, its possible for exchanges and reserve banks to prove solvency cryptographically, and doing so will become the "FDIC" equivalent for the crypto currency world.
>You can't hide the transaction history of a given coin, because that's how BitCoin works
That is true, but insignificant. A coin ceases to exist in the first transaction that spends it. so each's coins history is at most one transaction.
You may be able to track the flows of value across different coins and transactions, but tumbling can obfuscate the trail, sufficiently to hide the history of the origins of the value held in any given unspent coin.
> If Italian products are being advertised to Italians, then the service tax on the adds should be paid to the Italian government
A contemporary, but yet outmoded thought, in my opinion. The internet really shows exactly how old fashioned this line of thinking is.
What is italy ? The idea that a patch of land and history forms a magical entity which give a small group of people the right to tax and control the people living therein seems entirely arbitrary to me. People both within, and without italy, can access servers both within and without of italy's current ground boundaries. The goods and services and even idle chatter moving over the internet can be in any language, sold in any currency or other unit of account, or even be given away for free.
Why should the italian government have any special purview over what is bought and sold over the internet ? Who's to say whether a specific ad targets italians or not, the language ? What if the ad is in english, would it still be considered to target italians? What is the advertized product is not sold in Euro's, would it still be taxable and subject to these regulations ?
How about a product, made in china, sold to an italian speaking community living in london, hosted by a server which physically resides in sweden, and has a.info domain name; how many of these variables
have to change to make it subject to these new rules?
The "NRA mentality" is all that separates us from an authoritarian totalitarian regime.
For all we rail against the NSA's overreaching surveillance, and the ridiculousness of the patent and copyright system, there are simply so many here on slashdot who cry and beg to give up fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the constitutional origins of the united states...
The level of cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Its not about your penis.
Its not about whether or not more or fewer people are killed.
Its about fundamental liberties, and the role of government in our lives.
So you trust dollars implicitly and are leery of bitcoins, thats a perfectly understandable and reasonable position.
If you feel like taking part in the trendy thing, you can still sign your store up to accept bitcoins but instantly convert into dollars, and set your prices in dollars as well, so that your payment processor takes on any currency exchange risk for you.
If it gets to the point where you are leery of dollars and can buy **** anything **** with btc, then you can always change it up and start accepting btc directly.
True, and insightful, however there is one difference: due to the nature of transactions, coins are effectively melted down and recast each time they are moved. Even with only a tiny percentage of coins having been directly stolen or used for nefarious purposes, they would very quickly spread a taint through the whole body of moving coins.
> if the wallet file is lost or destroyed, the coins within it are effectively gone, correct?
If all copies everywhere are lost, and the wallet is a pure random one, yes. Many types of wallets can be recovered with just a passphrase.
>If so, then at some point there's an expected loss over time Absolutely correct. At some point, 8 decimal places wont be enough, and the currency will need to be divided down into smaller fractions.
The interesting part, in my opinion, will be determining a fair way to prune ancient unspents, so the blockchain ETXO doesnt grow endlessly.
We had the same baseless naysaying when it spiked to $200, and the same smug "told ya so's" when it crashed back down to $100
There is something bitcoin has that diamond and tulip bulbs don't, and even if crypto isnt your bag, I' expected more insight from such and otherwise smart crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
> Fact: Bitcoin generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Bitcoin then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
This is one of the most ignorant things Ive ever seen on slashdot. What you are basically arguing against is the concept of money itself.
What you fail to grok is that the economy is not a zero sum game.
> Fact: Gold generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Gold then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
I hope you can start to see how stupid you sound now.
> Fact: The Dollar generates nothing out of thin air; If you earned something with Dollars then somebody else lost that exact same amount (plus transaction fees).
This one might partly be true... monetary policy does exactly this; however the second clause is still false. You can still be profitable in dollars despite inflation losses.
> I'll be long on USD...
Going long on something designed to lose value is slightly dumber than just burning your possessions in a great big bonfire. The USD is designed to prevent people from going long on it by punishing that behavior. Keynesian economics values spending so much that it discourages savings.
> Pork bellies have an intrinsic value. It's food. You can eat it. That gives it a value. Bitcoins, not so much.
Why do we all have to sound like hungry orcs here? Does the internet have intrinsic value? You cant eat it, can you ?
And why do you think intrinsic value a good thing for money to have ? It turns out bacon does not make a great currency system.
If its fully open source, including no secret firmware or secret code, then its fine. If we can edit, tweak, fix, compile and see all the bits, DRM all you want, no problem.
But obfuscate and secret away the code? The get out of my operating system.
> Yes, we would have said the same thing two months ago, and we'd STILL be correct.
Uh huh, and 2 months from now you will be "right" again no doubt.
Lol, if you do the opposite of everything slashdot said about bitcoin you'd be rich.
I'm convinced this site is full of techno-geezers who have grown old and are now afraid of anything new. Rather than actually learning what this thing is, they just yell "get off my lawn" from their rocking chairs.
Bitcoin is something new, something most slashdotters have been skeptical of since it was worth pennies. I really though a 10K price tag would wake a few people up, but it seems like that not enough.
Tell me honestly, what would it take for you to realize bitcoin is going to change the world even more than the internet has ? A 100K price tag? Perhaps a serious decline in a major currency, in favor of bitcoinization ?
Slashdot is for retired has-been technies who dont want anything to change.
What they are missing; the thing they dont want to learn is that there is a technological shift happening that is going to change their world. Slashdot has been pooh-pooh ing bitcoin since with was under a dollar, and they will continue to do so as bitcoin or somthing like is assimilates the whole world around them.
I only read bitcoin threads on slashdot to laugh at them. Theyll be even saltier the next 10x price hike.
exactly; enough money = live how you like, never work again.
Thats still weakly typed, just a different kind of weak. Strongly types is when you fail; "a" . 1 would throw an exception and say "i dont know how I can possibly proceed" if it was strongly typed.
Strong typing vs weak is a minor detail anyway; the real meat is dynamic vs static.
> Besides, if your unit tests are not testing things sufficiently to catch any of these, they you're already doing things wrong.
My main take away form this whole thread is that strongly types language people dont write unit tests and spend lots of time debugging.
I use both static and dynamic languages out of necessity, and in my experience the dynamic languages take significantly less time to produce working code.
If you take a look at what monopolies do exist in capitalist areas, you will find they are nearly all created by regulation and not prevented by it. You should reconsider your analysis; perhaps the remaining exploitation can be removed by reducing regulation.
Because physically policing every boat is very expensive and would impede non-embargo traffic.
The bans work mostly via banking; If you cannot receive money for good shipped to NK, then you wont sell them product.
Without the ability to cheaply block the money, what you are left with is old fashioned embargoes; which are expensive and usually part of a lead up to military action.
>Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents.
I agree - they dont really represent our interests very well. They are far too moderate and willing to compromise.
We need to eradiacate all gun laws of any kind form the books, and restore the 2A to its original intention, and the NRA
just isnt pushing hard enough. This is why we have additional groups such as GOA and the VCDL, because the NRA
is too goddamn liberal.
In that it still doesnt allow line-item veto of app priveleges.
This should be the most basic feature.
"g}x6I13t-ubO{" worth ~40 bits of entropy
"held boat upon toward fish party long trade" is worth ~85 with a perfect knowledge of the rules and dictionary, ~170 without.
the longer one, i guarantee that.
special chars are pretty useless.
>8) A password is, almost by definition, short enough to memorize or at least write down in a reasonable time. Very few humans could ever
>manage to memorize even a 1024-bit key pair; anything much stronger is right out. Calling it "a secret someone has too[sic] know" is
>simple idiocy.
I think you are overestimating this a bit; a 1024 bit RSA key is worth about 80 bits of password strength.
an 80 bit password is really not to hard to memorize.
Here is an example: "held boat upon toward fish party long trade"
This is made by generating random bits, then looking up words from a word list to correspond. Assuming the attacker knows the exact algorithm, its ~85 bits of entropy.
A human is much less good at choosing a random password, but memorizing one is pretty easy.
This is really not that hard. Slashdot is full of old geezers apparently.
Dont use services that require you to trust them.
Keep a zero balance in any exchange.
Dont put lots of money into fairly transparent scams such as flexcoin.
Dont give tons of valuable assets to anonymous strangers who you dont know.
Bernie Madoff didnt prove that the dollar was an unworkable idea, neither do these two scams say much about
bitcoin itself.
> Maybe this will be an object lesson for the libertarian
I'm sure it will be, but not the lesson you are thinking of.
Some attributes of this problem:
* The currency itself is not affiliated with the crashing "bank". so you have seen exchange rates dip somewhat, there is no fundamental crash for the cryptocurrency
* Numerous exchanges and other pseudo-exchanges have stayed open and operational for this whole saga, allowing liquididty in and out of the cryptocurrency
* Use/Exchange of cryptocurrency does not require blind trust in the fundamental sense, so those who kept their balances in trust exchanges minimal to nil, lost nothing
* This "crash" was not sudden or mysterious. Those with the slightest modicum of common sense got out long ago. Other's with a taste for danger kept in or bought in up to the last minute. But just like playing with penny stocks, the risk was very high.
* MtGOX itself was a form of ponzi scheme. You could also have a ponzi scheme based on chicken eggs, or bottle caps. This does not mean that eggs themselves are a ponzi scheme, and neither are bitcoins.
On the other side of the coin, any form for exchange is backed with trust. So long as people continue to trust in the cryptographic and stability of the network itself. Those appear to remain strong, and merchants accepting the currency semi-directly continue to operate.
The lesson learned: crypto currency can sustain major scandals denominated in itself and not be fundamentally broken. Also, its possible for exchanges and reserve banks to prove solvency cryptographically, and doing so will become the "FDIC" equivalent for the crypto currency world.
>You can't hide the transaction history of a given coin, because that's how BitCoin works
That is true, but insignificant. A coin ceases to exist in the first transaction that spends it. so each's
coins history is at most one transaction.
You may be able to track the flows of value across different coins and transactions, but tumbling can obfuscate the trail, sufficiently to hide the history of the origins of the value held in any given unspent coin.
> If Italian products are being advertised to Italians, then the service tax on the adds should be paid to the Italian government
A contemporary, but yet outmoded thought, in my opinion. The internet really shows exactly how old
fashioned this line of thinking is.
What is italy ? The idea that a patch of land and history forms a magical entity which give a small group
of people the right to tax and control the people living therein seems entirely arbitrary to me.
People both within, and without italy, can access servers both within and without of italy's current ground boundaries.
The goods and services and even idle chatter moving over the internet can be in any language, sold in any currency
or other unit of account, or even be given away for free.
Why should the italian government have any special purview over what is bought and sold over the internet ?
Who's to say whether a specific ad targets italians or not, the language ? What if the ad is in english, would it still
be considered to target italians? What is the advertized product is not sold in Euro's, would it still be taxable and
subject to these regulations ?
How about a product, made in china, sold to an italian speaking community living in london, hosted by a server .info domain name; how many of these variables
which physically resides in sweden, and has a
have to change to make it subject to these new rules?
The "NRA mentality" is all that separates us from an authoritarian totalitarian regime.
For all we rail against the NSA's overreaching surveillance, and the ridiculousness of the patent and copyright system, there
are simply so many here on slashdot who cry and beg to give up fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the
constitutional origins of the united states...
The level of cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Its not about your penis.
Its not about whether or not more or fewer people are killed.
Its about fundamental liberties, and the role of government in our lives.
Its about being a citizen, and not a subject.
So you trust dollars implicitly and are leery of bitcoins, thats a perfectly understandable and reasonable position.
If you feel like taking part in the trendy thing, you can still sign your store up to accept bitcoins but instantly convert into dollars, and set your prices in dollars as well, so that your payment processor takes on any currency exchange risk for you.
If it gets to the point where you are leery of dollars and can buy **** anything **** with btc, then you can always
change it up and start accepting btc directly.
True, and insightful, however there is one difference: due to the nature of transactions,
coins are effectively melted down and recast each time they are moved. Even with
only a tiny percentage of coins having been directly stolen or used for nefarious purposes,
they would very quickly spread a taint through the whole body of moving coins.
> if the wallet file is lost or destroyed, the coins within it are effectively gone, correct?
If all copies everywhere are lost, and the wallet is a pure random one, yes.
Many types of wallets can be recovered with just a passphrase.
>If so, then at some point there's an expected loss over time
Absolutely correct.
At some point, 8 decimal places wont be enough, and the currency will need to be divided down into smaller fractions.
The interesting part, in my opinion, will be determining a fair way to prune ancient unspents, so the blockchain ETXO doesnt
grow endlessly.
True to form, slashdot is sceptical as ever.
We had the same baseless naysaying when it spiked to $200, and the same smug "told ya so's" when it crashed back down to $100
There is something bitcoin has that diamond and tulip bulbs don't, and even if crypto isnt your bag, I' expected more insight from such and otherwise smart crowd.