If the light doesn't have a slot knows there will be one available just a bit later, the light can signal the car to coast down from 45MPH to 35MPH, arriving just a bit later. By doing so it reduces the energy lost into the brakes and the car ends up coasting through the intersection on the green light instead of stopping and then having to restart just a few seconds later.
You can do this manually by paying attention to what's going on in the next several stoplights. It saves gas and brake wear. It's kind of nice just cruising along and hitting all the lights. Getting feedback from the light would make it much more effective.
Unfortunately it also drives some drivers crazy. They can't stand it that I'm going 35MPH in a 45MPH zone and go racing past... Just to end up stopped at a stoplight which then turns green a few seconds later and I go drifting on past. And still they don't get it.
Somewhere, the storage or bandwidth require must grow with the number of transactions that any token is used in in any secure digital cash system, regardless of how the token is manipulated
You either didn't read what I said or didn't understand it. I sort of explained it from the implementation side, so let me try again from the "result" side.
Bitcoin has a different approach. The tokens are never reused. Each transaction permanently destroys all inputs and creates brand new tokens of the required values on output. Once the inputs are destroyed the only need to keep a recorded history of them is to prove that the new coins were legitimately created. Through the clever arrangement of the merkle tree, the old transactions / tokens can be accounted for without needing to actually store them going forward.
The end result is you only need to store the present balances and some history that isn't ready to be pruned yet; you do not need to store the complete ledger of all transactions since the beginning.
The net result is: the bandwidth grows with the transaction rate (and it's so low that a considerable amount of scalability is possible before it will become a problem); the storage requirement is roughly linear with the number of distinct outputs ("coins", regardless of denomination) that are being held in all wallets, which in turn is roughly linear with the number of wallets.
So the whole thing scales roughly linearly (Roughly because it's a little more complex than I'm laying out). It's heavy enough that it will have significant, but not impossible, challenges to scale as far as it will ever need.
You should take the time to read some of the work that was done on digital cash systems over the past 25 years
I have.
before making statements about how great Bitcoin is.
I've never said Bitcoin is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think it's mediocre on the whole. The economic model is just broken; there are a number of technical improvements that are never going to be incorporated for lack of consensus; there are many severe design tradeoffs that limit it to a small niche.
So don't take the fact that I'm saying some good things about it to mean I'm completely taken in by the cult. I'm not. It has it's flaws. But there are also a lot of imagined flaws where Bitcoin has actually done things right.
I'm trying to get people to recognize the things it did right to get people thinking about how to design the next cryptocurrency.
On most of the Bitcoin exchanges, X and Y deposit their respective funds (say, USD for X and BTC for Y) into their account on the exchange. During a trade the exchange immediately transfers X's USD to Y's account and Y's BTC to X's account, less fees on both sides. IE, trades are settled instantly and withdraws may be performed immediately (though the usual banking delays exist on the fiat side, and received BTC take about an hour to confirm).
Legally the exchange happens between X and Y, and the exchange is a price matcher and broker holding the funds for both sides but never owns either party's funds or acts as a counterparty to either side of the trade.
Some of your points about "peacekeeping" are good, but this:
Why does Switzerland, even today, still enforce compulsory military service for males 19 years of age and older? Why does a neutral "non-aggressive" nation have an army so large that during the 20th century it had the second largest armed force per capita after the Israeli Defence Forces? Why would a nation of peaceful citizens REQUIRE their soldiers to keep their assault rifles IN THEIR HOMES like red-necks from Texas?
By having a completely badass defense* force, they have a lot less need to intervene in their neighbors' affairs. It's nonzero as you point out, but they're not doing bad on the whole.
* actually defense, not some Orwellian Department of Defense
which have already grown because of their use in previous transactions
This isn't actually true. Coins don't keep getting split into smaller and smaller portions forever. Every time you spend it takes several old coins and combines them into (usually) two new ones: 1, the payment you make, and 2, your "change" (which goes back in your wallet). The previous inputs are permanently combined and no longer needed going forward. The current software does not yet actually implement it, but obsolete coins CAN be "pruned" entirely, facilitated by the Merkle tree.
The blockchain will still undergo a lot of growth if more people begin using Bitcoin (since the currency base will be divided between more wallets, and there will be greater numbers of recent transactions that are not yet pruned), but it doesn't geometrically expand forever. When Bitcoin stabilizes at a certain level of market saturation the blockchain will also stabilize in size.
Whether that will be a reasonable and manageable size is still an open question.
all of Bitcoin's advantages without the serious disadvantages; those systems use a bank or other token issuing authority
I want to know that the central bank won't just start issuing more currency and devalue mine.
I want to send money to Wikileaks, but all the banks are forbidding it.
I want to pay someone over the internet without Mastercard or Paypal or whoever taking a 2% cut.
There is no other currency that currently has ALL of those advantages of Bitcoin. Some of the advantages are inherently incompatible with centralized, bank-operated currencies. It also has a long and substantial list of disadvantages too - no argument there. But on the whole it simply has a different set of tradeoffs than any other currency, and so it (or one of it's descendants; I don't expect Bitcoin is going to be the last word in decentralized e-currency) will be relevant for some time.
NYSE was never a major stock exchange. NYSE is the only one anyone ever used. NASDAQ was started by some guy who got mad that NYSE was raking in the cash.... Then he threw up NASDAQ and it was shit.
All stock exchanges are shit. They're for speculators.
On the other hand I think it will be exchangeable to dollars for the foreseeable future, regardless of what the island-currency niche wants. As long as there's another group that DOES want it exchangeable, they'll find a way.
If Bitcoins were a national currency its population would be protesting... a 20% overnight drop would be business news if this currency had enough people caring it existed. These money-like substances always seem to fail resulting in no payout to those holding the bag. Nothing left to see here, move along.
Sure. But Bitcoin isn't a major reserve currency. It's current size is like a tiny stock, and volatility is expected at that scale.
Unlike the corporate micro-currencies (Beenz, Flooz, whatever), Bitcoin doesn't suddenly go under and not pay out. Bitcoin is volatile, but it's still liquid - if you want to trade back to dollars, you can do so at market rate on any of several dozen markets.
Bitcoin's not for you if you don't want to deal with volatility, but it has very different properties than any other currency which does make it appealing to some people for legitimate reasons.
Sure, it would only be used by a tiny niche of enthusiasts. So what? It has to start somewhere, and even if it didn't grow from there it could live on as a functional niche currency.
The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on
This is demonstrably false. There's a considerable demographic in the Bitcoin community who don't like that the speculators have eclipsed the commerce side, and who would very much prefer if they could trade it back and forth as an isolated currency rather than having everyone think of it as a proxy for dollars.
Quite simply put, no BitCoin exchange -- neither Tradehill nor Mt. Gox -- is going to be able to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
First, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Second, the important part: while it's very difficult to positively identify who sent you some Bitcoins, the exchanges know exactly who receives them, trades them back and forth to fiat currencies, and then sends them back out. They have names and bank account numbers, or they're using fiat payment services that have bank account numbers. Know Your Customer is not a problem for most exchanges.
Any guesses how well this does in a standard UL fire resistance test? My guess is it's not going to be the kind of case you want when your Li-ion cells do the Sony thing.
Does it turn mushy when you pour water on it?
It'll probably do fine if it's only a low percentage of paper (IE, it's just greenwashing), but if it's actually a substantial amount I would expect it to light off like a fire log.
I have a little bit of that too. Different remotes use different LEDs that are nearer or farther into IR. The very closest ones I'm able to see faintly. It's only enough to see that they're on - I can't actually use them as a flashlight.
Night vision cameras are usually very easy to see. I'd guess that they use the nearest IR possible to make things look as un-weird as possible, and perhaps the CCD sensors are most sensitive there too.
Easier: Buy a portable DVD player. Dirt cheap and does what you want. Less likely to get stolen. No software to break.
If using a Linux tablet, just run X with no window manager and start a fullscreen browser. Google keywords: "Maximus", "Devilspie", "Firefox kiosk mode".
If you're using Android or iOS, it looks like HockeyPuck has you covered above.
OK, I understand the point that any equipment that could have been in Mallory's hands unsupervised needs to be considered compromised, and that it will spread the compromise if you give it a chance. I totally agree.
And I understand that thermostats have IP stacks.
But what attacker then goes and compromises the thermostat? This is the Chamber of Commerce. You're not going to use the last guy turning the heat off in the evening as the time to start your black ops raid. Thermostats don't have microphones (please, please let me be right on this).
What POSSIBLE reason would you do this, with the obvious cost that it increases the chance you'll get caught?
trying to milk corporate customers for $1/packet or something
... And somehow I remind myself that terrestrial cellular providers are charging $0.20 per packet for SMS. I tried to exaggerate some without being completely ridiculous, but marking up a mere 5x for satellite access is actually quite conservative. That's messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like this concept: http://www.toxel.com/tech/2009/12/01/countdown-traffic-light-concept/
tl;dr: countdown circle around the light
But it'll never happen since it would interfere with revenue enforcement.
If the light doesn't have a slot knows there will be one available just a bit later, the light can signal the car to coast down from 45MPH to 35MPH, arriving just a bit later. By doing so it reduces the energy lost into the brakes and the car ends up coasting through the intersection on the green light instead of stopping and then having to restart just a few seconds later.
You can do this manually by paying attention to what's going on in the next several stoplights. It saves gas and brake wear. It's kind of nice just cruising along and hitting all the lights. Getting feedback from the light would make it much more effective.
Unfortunately it also drives some drivers crazy. They can't stand it that I'm going 35MPH in a 45MPH zone and go racing past... Just to end up stopped at a stoplight which then turns green a few seconds later and I go drifting on past. And still they don't get it.
Somewhere, the storage or bandwidth require must grow with the number of transactions that any token is used in in any secure digital cash system, regardless of how the token is manipulated
You either didn't read what I said or didn't understand it. I sort of explained it from the implementation side, so let me try again from the "result" side.
Bitcoin has a different approach. The tokens are never reused. Each transaction permanently destroys all inputs and creates brand new tokens of the required values on output. Once the inputs are destroyed the only need to keep a recorded history of them is to prove that the new coins were legitimately created. Through the clever arrangement of the merkle tree, the old transactions / tokens can be accounted for without needing to actually store them going forward.
The end result is you only need to store the present balances and some history that isn't ready to be pruned yet; you do not need to store the complete ledger of all transactions since the beginning.
The net result is: the bandwidth grows with the transaction rate (and it's so low that a considerable amount of scalability is possible before it will become a problem); the storage requirement is roughly linear with the number of distinct outputs ("coins", regardless of denomination) that are being held in all wallets, which in turn is roughly linear with the number of wallets.
So the whole thing scales roughly linearly (Roughly because it's a little more complex than I'm laying out). It's heavy enough that it will have significant, but not impossible, challenges to scale as far as it will ever need.
You should take the time to read some of the work that was done on digital cash systems over the past 25 years
I have.
before making statements about how great Bitcoin is.
I've never said Bitcoin is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think it's mediocre on the whole. The economic model is just broken; there are a number of technical improvements that are never going to be incorporated for lack of consensus; there are many severe design tradeoffs that limit it to a small niche.
So don't take the fact that I'm saying some good things about it to mean I'm completely taken in by the cult. I'm not. It has it's flaws. But there are also a lot of imagined flaws where Bitcoin has actually done things right.
I'm trying to get people to recognize the things it did right to get people thinking about how to design the next cryptocurrency.
On most of the Bitcoin exchanges, X and Y deposit their respective funds (say, USD for X and BTC for Y) into their account on the exchange. During a trade the exchange immediately transfers X's USD to Y's account and Y's BTC to X's account, less fees on both sides. IE, trades are settled instantly and withdraws may be performed immediately (though the usual banking delays exist on the fiat side, and received BTC take about an hour to confirm).
Legally the exchange happens between X and Y, and the exchange is a price matcher and broker holding the funds for both sides but never owns either party's funds or acts as a counterparty to either side of the trade.
Some of your points about "peacekeeping" are good, but this:
Why does Switzerland, even today, still enforce compulsory military service for males 19 years of age and older? Why does a neutral "non-aggressive" nation have an army so large that during the 20th century it had the second largest armed force per capita after the Israeli Defence Forces? Why would a nation of peaceful citizens REQUIRE their soldiers to keep their assault rifles IN THEIR HOMES like red-necks from Texas?
By having a completely badass defense* force, they have a lot less need to intervene in their neighbors' affairs. It's nonzero as you point out, but they're not doing bad on the whole.
* actually defense, not some Orwellian Department of Defense
which have already grown because of their use in previous transactions
This isn't actually true. Coins don't keep getting split into smaller and smaller portions forever. Every time you spend it takes several old coins and combines them into (usually) two new ones: 1, the payment you make, and 2, your "change" (which goes back in your wallet). The previous inputs are permanently combined and no longer needed going forward. The current software does not yet actually implement it, but obsolete coins CAN be "pruned" entirely, facilitated by the Merkle tree.
The blockchain will still undergo a lot of growth if more people begin using Bitcoin (since the currency base will be divided between more wallets, and there will be greater numbers of recent transactions that are not yet pruned), but it doesn't geometrically expand forever. When Bitcoin stabilizes at a certain level of market saturation the blockchain will also stabilize in size.
Whether that will be a reasonable and manageable size is still an open question.
all of Bitcoin's advantages without the serious disadvantages; those systems use a bank or other token issuing authority
I want to know that the central bank won't just start issuing more currency and devalue mine.
I want to send money to Wikileaks, but all the banks are forbidding it.
I want to pay someone over the internet without Mastercard or Paypal or whoever taking a 2% cut.
There is no other currency that currently has ALL of those advantages of Bitcoin. Some of the advantages are inherently incompatible with centralized, bank-operated currencies. It also has a long and substantial list of disadvantages too - no argument there. But on the whole it simply has a different set of tradeoffs than any other currency, and so it (or one of it's descendants; I don't expect Bitcoin is going to be the last word in decentralized e-currency) will be relevant for some time.
NYSE was never a major stock exchange. ... Then he threw up NASDAQ and it was shit.
NYSE is the only one anyone ever used. NASDAQ was started by some guy who got mad that NYSE was raking in the cash.
All stock exchanges are shit. They're for speculators.
FTFY. :)
and so over the long term we should expect Bitcoin's value to decline.
That too is speculation. It's just speculating on the downside. :)
Bitcoin's value is almost entirely due to speculation.
I agree, but I want to contrast it with your earlier statement...
Without speculation, Bitcoin is worthless.
... which which I disagree.
On the other hand I think it will be exchangeable to dollars for the foreseeable future, regardless of what the island-currency niche wants. As long as there's another group that DOES want it exchangeable, they'll find a way.
How can I short this currency?
Right over here: https://bitcoinica.com/
Be careful. Volatility cuts both ways.
they will have to find at least enough of some nation's currency to pay their taxes
Just because you're using Bitcoins doesn't mean you have to use ONLY Bitcoins. There's no reason it can't exist as a niche currency.
If Bitcoins were a national currency its population would be protesting... a 20% overnight drop would be business news if this currency had enough people caring it existed. These money-like substances always seem to fail resulting in no payout to those holding the bag. Nothing left to see here, move along.
Sure. But Bitcoin isn't a major reserve currency. It's current size is like a tiny stock, and volatility is expected at that scale.
Unlike the corporate micro-currencies (Beenz, Flooz, whatever), Bitcoin doesn't suddenly go under and not pay out. Bitcoin is volatile, but it's still liquid - if you want to trade back to dollars, you can do so at market rate on any of several dozen markets.
Bitcoin's not for you if you don't want to deal with volatility, but it has very different properties than any other currency which does make it appealing to some people for legitimate reasons.
Sure, it would only be used by a tiny niche of enthusiasts. So what? It has to start somewhere, and even if it didn't grow from there it could live on as a functional niche currency.
The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on
This is demonstrably false. There's a considerable demographic in the Bitcoin community who don't like that the speculators have eclipsed the commerce side, and who would very much prefer if they could trade it back and forth as an isolated currency rather than having everyone think of it as a proxy for dollars.
"and it will be fine if every exchange dies off."
Except for the fact that there will be no way to acquire bitcoins?
By that logic there would be no way of acquiring US dollars either.
Without exchanges, you acquire Bitcoins in exchange for goods and services. It's money. Earn it.
Mt. Gox being the only other exchange
MtGox is the only exchange bigger than TradeHill, but there are lots of smaller exchanges: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Exchanges
Quite simply put, no BitCoin exchange -- neither Tradehill nor Mt. Gox -- is going to be able to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
First, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Second, the important part: while it's very difficult to positively identify who sent you some Bitcoins, the exchanges know exactly who receives them, trades them back and forth to fiat currencies, and then sends them back out. They have names and bank account numbers, or they're using fiat payment services that have bank account numbers. Know Your Customer is not a problem for most exchanges.
Any guesses how well this does in a standard UL fire resistance test? My guess is it's not going to be the kind of case you want when your Li-ion cells do the Sony thing.
Does it turn mushy when you pour water on it?
It'll probably do fine if it's only a low percentage of paper (IE, it's just greenwashing), but if it's actually a substantial amount I would expect it to light off like a fire log.
I have a little bit of that too. Different remotes use different LEDs that are nearer or farther into IR. The very closest ones I'm able to see faintly. It's only enough to see that they're on - I can't actually use them as a flashlight.
Night vision cameras are usually very easy to see. I'd guess that they use the nearest IR possible to make things look as un-weird as possible, and perhaps the CCD sensors are most sensitive there too.
Remote controls are hit and miss; usually miss.
I'll have to try a Wii bar sometime. :)
To give a sense of scale:
1MJ is roughly the energy in a car at highway speed.
10MJ is roughly the energy in a 55kg round fired from a tank at 600 m/s
350MJ is roughly the energy in a 767 as it lands, or a small jet at cruise speed.
350MJ is roughly the energy in 3200 pounds of TNT.
That's pretty scary. I'd never considered how careful you'd have to be just shutting the thing off.
Yeah, they pretty much ripped off Samsung's design.
Easier: Buy a portable DVD player. Dirt cheap and does what you want. Less likely to get stolen. No software to break.
If using a Linux tablet, just run X with no window manager and start a fullscreen browser. Google keywords: "Maximus", "Devilspie", "Firefox kiosk mode".
If you're using Android or iOS, it looks like HockeyPuck has you covered above.
That's a valid point, thanks.
From TFA: "... the Chamber recently discovered a thermostat in a Chamber-owned apartment was communicating ..."
That doesn't sound like a PC-PLC.
OK, I understand the point that any equipment that could have been in Mallory's hands unsupervised needs to be considered compromised, and that it will spread the compromise if you give it a chance. I totally agree.
And I understand that thermostats have IP stacks.
But what attacker then goes and compromises the thermostat? This is the Chamber of Commerce. You're not going to use the last guy turning the heat off in the evening as the time to start your black ops raid. Thermostats don't have microphones (please, please let me be right on this).
What POSSIBLE reason would you do this, with the obvious cost that it increases the chance you'll get caught?
trying to milk corporate customers for $1/packet or something
... And somehow I remind myself that terrestrial cellular providers are charging $0.20 per packet for SMS. I tried to exaggerate some without being completely ridiculous, but marking up a mere 5x for satellite access is actually quite conservative. That's messed up.