FWIW - the numbers for the combination are almost always remembered using a dictionary word - next to almost all locks you will see a drawing of a 12 button phone number / letter pad.
How sad that this piece of well-engineered technology can be subverted by something so simple... This drastically reduces the keyspace. It's not quite as bad as leaving the combination on a post-it, but it's still considerably degraded from what it should be.
There are an unlimited number of domains. They expire 12,000 blocks after the last renewal (so you have to continue spending resources to maintain a name, just like you have to keep paying money to maintain a.com), but there can be multiple renewals per block.
You can check over here to see recent transactions (of which there are usually several per block): http://explorer.dot-bit.org/
He's sending unwanted messages to people with whom he has no business relationship in order to collect money from people paying for eyeballs. How is that not spam?
Er, no. Rare earths aren't actually that rare. The reason we get them from China isn't because they have a monopoly on the source. They just have the cheapest labor to dig them out of the ground.
Take IE9 to a web page that wants a plugin, and you're about two clicks away from installing it.
You mean like the huge warning they get when downloading programs from the web? CLI doesn't exist for 99% of users.
Yes, I mean exactly that. The very *existence* of that dialog is the problem. The workflow for installing things on Windows means you have to do that. Doing it right doesn't mean writing a better warning message, because the user is solely focused on "what do I need to click to make it go" and isn't going to read the warning.
It doesn't mean you have to go to the CLI: right click, properties, permissions, executable, and then you run it. That's considered backward UI in Windows because you're making a routine task difficult... But my point is needing to execute downloaded binaries shouldn't be routine.
Android is the only operating system which has tackled this issue, and by most accounts it has failed at it.
At least they're trying. A few more cycles of the idea and we might get somewhere.
Except they don't. By using centralized package management, I don't have to run random binaries I downloaded to install things. I go into the package manager, and I know exactly what the implications are: it'll install a piece of software. If I don't like it, I uninstall it, and it does so cleanly.
I get flash through the package manager. My mailreader doesn't let me directly execute programs (unless they're.exe which get run in Wine amusingly). My removable storage doesn't auto-run. Programs have to be chmod +x .
I do have the same vulnerability if I run a randomly downloaded program as root so it can go off and do whatever, and I don't have any better insight as to it's changes than I do in Windows. The key difference is that's an exceptionally rare thing to do in Linux, whereas it's an everyday occurrence in Windows.
Sure, these things *could* be made to happen, but they don't, because it's not a desirable way to do things. Since that's not how you normally install software, it doesn't make things difficult for users, except those who're used to the Windows way of doing things. From my own experience, my father came to me confused because he wanted to install a program, and had downloaded a half dozen things but couldn't get them to install. I showed him how to use the Ubuntu Software Center, and he won't stop raving about how wonderful it is.
Like antivirus, and antimalware, they're trying to provide active defenses for when code tries to do something bad.... but they continue to ignore the fact that the best defense is to not run bad code to begin with. They're so gung-ho on making it easy for the user to do what they want to do (which is an admirable enough goal) that we have:
browsers that auto-install plugins
Mailreaders that let you run attachments with a couple clicks
Removable storage that auto-runs programs
Files that run because they're called *.exe instead of making the user contemplate for a moment the ramifications of chmod +x
Prompts to "allow the following program to make changes to this computer" without any useful context of the nature of the changes or their implications
Instead they're trying to install laser-turrets to shoot down every incoming mosquito after it's already intruded into our secure zone. Sure, that's nice too, but it's not a substitute.
Ironically, in this case, it's people giving up privacy for Facebook's convenience. To translate a bit:
People behave a lot better when they have their real names down.
People don't rock the boat make our jobs harder when they have to put their real names down.
I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.
People shouldn't feel they can say whatever they want, so we oppose anonymity.
I'm not sure what "behind closed doors" has to do with anything, though. That's usually a metaphor for doing something when only a few consenting people whom you already personally know are present. It's kind of irrelevant in this context.
China isn't engaging in an undeclared war. War is when you use enforce your political policy through violence.
China, more than any other nation, knows how to play the long game. They've been very carefully avoiding violence, instead making long-term strategic maneuvers. They don't need war; in fact, they're playing by our own rules: they're using (and perhaps abusing, but that's not "war") the free market to compete us right into the ground.
Decimeter precision with fast acquisition and several accurate fixes per second would open up a lot of possibilities too. Just think of using a GPS for street navigation - the absolute positioning is usually fine, and most most of the problems you see are either on initial startup or due to lag, especially when you change velocity in any direction.
In Star Trek, they've had enough time to get past the awful mistakes we make in computers now.
The replicator doesn't have any hidden settings, preferences dialog, user-anticipation, or auto-tuning. There's no first-time setup wizard, advanced configuration, recommendations based on your prior purchases, or new user help balloons. When it doesn't give you what you want, it's because you didn't ask for the right thing, and it doesn't leave you wondering about some hidden internal state. The only feedback required is a subtle acknowledgement that your request is understood and being processed, or an explanation when it can't be performed.
The UI is minimal and easy. I think it's a wonderful design.
Everyone starts out ambitious and idealistic. But sometime in your mid-20s you get saddled with car payments, medical bills, and a Lawn. Just keeping your job and trying to maintain a little free time to watch some TV is all you really aspire to. American culture is broken, and that's about all that's left of the American Dream.
I'm not speaking about everyone of course, but demographically, any free spirit you had that survived through school gets promptly crushed when you get a job.
Part 2:
Teenage hackers come in a range from Stupid to Smart. The Stupid ones get caught because they do Stupid things. By their mid-20s, all the real losers have been weeded out and you're just left with the ones who can use discretion, conceal their identities, and keep their trap shut.
The differences between the mouthpieces demonstrate a huge difference in the parties' constituencies. Clearly the red team and the blue team are voted for by extremely different demographics.
That vote is earned by each side pandering to a few hot-button issues. That's where all the rhetoric goes. But once you get past those few issues, no, they're really not all that different when considered on a global scale.
I've given it some thought, and I think you're right: inflation to match the growth sounds like a good policy. I'm trying to think through all the unintended consequences, and I'm not certain that the flat-difficulty mining is the best way to implement it, but I think the principle is sound. I'm also worried about what happens if the BTC economy shrinks: how do we implement the reciprocal deflation?
Currently I'm in favor of adjusting the current BTC system, rather than a complete reboot. It's a high bar to do so since it has to be accepted by the majority of the network, and there are high costs for doing so (people will balk if the rules for their currency can be changed on a whim - then again the same objection applies to any fiat currency), but I think it's possible to do if a very strong economic case can be made.
It took out the UPS. In proper operation this would not have happened. This was during a maintenance window when the UPS vendor was installing upgrades. The whole site was operating on generator power during the outage; when they went to cut back over to mains the whole thing popped. The root cause was a wiring fault by the UPS vendor. Fortunately we had plenty of maintenance window left to boot and fsck everything.
I don't know too much about diesel generators, but I *have* seen what happens when one is switched in when it's out of phase: no mechanical damage, but the magic smoke escaped from the transfer switch. I don't know if that counts as "blow[ing] out/all/ the electronics", but it definitely blew, and the server room was dark for hours.
True, "exponential" is not the real problem. The problem is the rate. While computing power is the ultimate limit, right now the network growth is driven by increasing interest and adoption, and to a lesser degree, the ability of AMD to ship 6990s. The processing growth has averaged about 1000% yearly for the last year and a half. The actual inflation would be a bit less since it'd be diluted into the pool of coins from the last couple years, but you're still looking at 800% or so. That will continue as long as the BTC's reach is growing.
Yes and no. People holding a currency long-term is bad for everyone; savings are better off kept in stocks or assets. And it's not like the current mining-payout algorithm has kept the price stable.
I agree with both points. I'm not opposed to inflation; just hyperinflation.
People probably sold them for what they cost them to make, so that's not surprising. But to say that someone's watt two years ago is worth thousands of times what my watt is now doesn't add up.
Again, you have to compare the value of the asset at the time of acquisition, not the value gains since acquisition. Is it fair that someone's penny stock from two years ago is worth thousands of times what you can afford to buy in the no-longer-penny-stock today?
Someone who gets a penny stock buys it from someone else, on an open market.
And someone who held onto the BTC a year ago chose not to sell it to someone else, on an open market. As such, they effectively paid the fair market value in opportunity cost, IE, by choosing to not have those few dollars in their pocket, the same as you chose to keep a few dollars in your pocket rather than buy some bitcoins.
The early adopters of bitcoin are far more analogous to the issuers of a new currency - they've created a bunch of tokens and declared they're worth something. And back when private banks issued their own currencies, customers would insist that those banks held proportionate reserves of hard assets that they could claim from if need be. That's what's missing from bitcoins.
Mmmm, you're conflating two things there. One is the issuance of the currency, and the other is the backing of the currency.
When private banks issued currency, they weren't giving it away for free. It was in exchange for some other asset (gold being typical). And a little secret for you: even in antiquity, gold backed currency was not backed 1:1. But that's a whole 'nother subject.:)
The early adopters didn't spontaneously create 3M BTC, divide it among themselves, and then begin trading. It was always available to everyone to mine and/or buy. They just got there early. You could have been there too; so could I; we weren't.
Now, that said, I agree that to a degree, the early adopters were able to unfairly capitalize on their knowledge of the currency before it was widely publicized. The question is how much that is, and whether it's worth undermining the faith in the currency by using inflation to revoke a significant percentage of their wealth.
If you buy in now and two years from now it's trading at USD$1000, should your share be inflated down to compensate?
Unfortunately that would make the BTC non-fungible. That's a very poor attribute in a currency. I doubt it would be possible to get the network to accept that change. It might be possible to have a one-time step-devaluation of the early coins, but that would still screw a lot of people who just happened to be holding them.
It's an ugly problem, and my gut instinct is that even if it's making some people rich, the need for such a currency outweighs my sense of injustice at some people getting too much easy money.
Thanks for your thoughts, though. I'll keep turning them over for a while.:)
#1, "building your own" misses the entire point of using a cloud service. The whole idea is that I don't have to build my own infrastructure - I just sign up and use theirs.
#2, changing to another provider or buying a piece of sync software is not building your own.
Yes, that method makes sense, but that's not what I'm concerned about. Sorry, I asked my question poorly.
Two scenarios:
Miner1 earns 50BTC in Block 5. He then takes that 50BTC and sends it to a new account every few days. He'll rack up perhaps 1BTC of fees along the way. Today, he cashes out on an exchange. The coin is only a few days old, even though it's always been in his possession.
Miner2 earns 50BTC in Block 6. A few days later he spends it to buy a paper clip. The recipient then spends it to buy a rubber band. And so on, until today, when the final recipient cashes out on an exchange. The coin is only a few days old, having been spent many times.
Miner1 is the one we want to tax, not the last guy who was holding Miner2's coin at end. How do we tell the difference?
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW - the numbers for the combination are almost always remembered using a dictionary word - next to almost all locks you will see a drawing of a 12 button phone number / letter pad.
How sad that this piece of well-engineered technology can be subverted by something so simple... This drastically reduces the keyspace. It's not quite as bad as leaving the combination on a post-it, but it's still considerably degraded from what it should be.
There are an unlimited number of domains. They expire 12,000 blocks after the last renewal (so you have to continue spending resources to maintain a name, just like you have to keep paying money to maintain a .com), but there can be multiple renewals per block.
You can check over here to see recent transactions (of which there are usually several per block): http://explorer.dot-bit.org/
He's sending unwanted messages to people with whom he has no business relationship in order to collect money from people paying for eyeballs. How is that not spam?
Rare is relative. Even the "rare" deposits were already available in plentiful quantities domestically before this find.
Er, no. Rare earths aren't actually that rare. The reason we get them from China isn't because they have a monopoly on the source. They just have the cheapest labor to dig them out of the ground.
That hasn't been true since the IE6 days.
Take IE9 to a web page that wants a plugin, and you're about two clicks away from installing it.
You mean like the huge warning they get when downloading programs from the web? CLI doesn't exist for 99% of users.
Yes, I mean exactly that. The very *existence* of that dialog is the problem. The workflow for installing things on Windows means you have to do that. Doing it right doesn't mean writing a better warning message, because the user is solely focused on "what do I need to click to make it go" and isn't going to read the warning.
It doesn't mean you have to go to the CLI: right click, properties, permissions, executable, and then you run it. That's considered backward UI in Windows because you're making a routine task difficult... But my point is needing to execute downloaded binaries shouldn't be routine.
Android is the only operating system which has tackled this issue, and by most accounts it has failed at it.
At least they're trying. A few more cycles of the idea and we might get somewhere.
Except they don't. By using centralized package management, I don't have to run random binaries I downloaded to install things. I go into the package manager, and I know exactly what the implications are: it'll install a piece of software. If I don't like it, I uninstall it, and it does so cleanly.
I get flash through the package manager. .exe which get run in Wine amusingly).
My mailreader doesn't let me directly execute programs (unless they're
My removable storage doesn't auto-run.
Programs have to be chmod +x .
I do have the same vulnerability if I run a randomly downloaded program as root so it can go off and do whatever, and I don't have any better insight as to it's changes than I do in Windows. The key difference is that's an exceptionally rare thing to do in Linux, whereas it's an everyday occurrence in Windows.
Sure, these things *could* be made to happen, but they don't, because it's not a desirable way to do things. Since that's not how you normally install software, it doesn't make things difficult for users, except those who're used to the Windows way of doing things. From my own experience, my father came to me confused because he wanted to install a program, and had downloaded a half dozen things but couldn't get them to install. I showed him how to use the Ubuntu Software Center, and he won't stop raving about how wonderful it is.
Oh, I know this isn't a recent thing. As I said, China knows how to play the long game.
Like antivirus, and antimalware, they're trying to provide active defenses for when code tries to do something bad. ... but they continue to ignore the fact that the best defense is to not run bad code to begin with. They're so gung-ho on making it easy for the user to do what they want to do (which is an admirable enough goal) that we have:
Instead they're trying to install laser-turrets to shoot down every incoming mosquito after it's already intruded into our secure zone. Sure, that's nice too, but it's not a substitute.
The intent is to make China the world's number 1 superpower without starting a war.
I just object to diluting the term 'war' when what they're doing is something considerably more subtle.
Ironically, in this case, it's people giving up privacy for Facebook's convenience. To translate a bit:
People behave a lot better when they have their real names down.
People don't rock the boat make our jobs harder when they have to put their real names down.
I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.
People shouldn't feel they can say whatever they want, so we oppose anonymity.
I'm not sure what "behind closed doors" has to do with anything, though. That's usually a metaphor for doing something when only a few consenting people whom you already personally know are present. It's kind of irrelevant in this context.
China isn't engaging in an undeclared war. War is when you use enforce your political policy through violence.
China, more than any other nation, knows how to play the long game. They've been very carefully avoiding violence, instead making long-term strategic maneuvers. They don't need war; in fact, they're playing by our own rules: they're using (and perhaps abusing, but that's not "war") the free market to compete us right into the ground.
It's my turn on the military-industrial complex's gravy train!
Decimeter precision with fast acquisition and several accurate fixes per second would open up a lot of possibilities too. Just think of using a GPS for street navigation - the absolute positioning is usually fine, and most most of the problems you see are either on initial startup or due to lag, especially when you change velocity in any direction.
In Star Trek, they've had enough time to get past the awful mistakes we make in computers now.
The replicator doesn't have any hidden settings, preferences dialog, user-anticipation, or auto-tuning. There's no first-time setup wizard, advanced configuration, recommendations based on your prior purchases, or new user help balloons. When it doesn't give you what you want, it's because you didn't ask for the right thing, and it doesn't leave you wondering about some hidden internal state. The only feedback required is a subtle acknowledgement that your request is understood and being processed, or an explanation when it can't be performed.
The UI is minimal and easy. I think it's a wonderful design.
Part 1:
Everyone starts out ambitious and idealistic. But sometime in your mid-20s you get saddled with car payments, medical bills, and a Lawn. Just keeping your job and trying to maintain a little free time to watch some TV is all you really aspire to. American culture is broken, and that's about all that's left of the American Dream.
I'm not speaking about everyone of course, but demographically, any free spirit you had that survived through school gets promptly crushed when you get a job.
Part 2:
Teenage hackers come in a range from Stupid to Smart. The Stupid ones get caught because they do Stupid things. By their mid-20s, all the real losers have been weeded out and you're just left with the ones who can use discretion, conceal their identities, and keep their trap shut.
The differences between the mouthpieces demonstrate a huge difference in the parties' constituencies. Clearly the red team and the blue team are voted for by extremely different demographics.
That vote is earned by each side pandering to a few hot-button issues. That's where all the rhetoric goes. But once you get past those few issues, no, they're really not all that different when considered on a global scale.
I've given it some thought, and I think you're right: inflation to match the growth sounds like a good policy. I'm trying to think through all the unintended consequences, and I'm not certain that the flat-difficulty mining is the best way to implement it, but I think the principle is sound. I'm also worried about what happens if the BTC economy shrinks: how do we implement the reciprocal deflation?
Currently I'm in favor of adjusting the current BTC system, rather than a complete reboot. It's a high bar to do so since it has to be accepted by the majority of the network, and there are high costs for doing so (people will balk if the rules for their currency can be changed on a whim - then again the same objection applies to any fiat currency), but I think it's possible to do if a very strong economic case can be made.
It took out the UPS. In proper operation this would not have happened. This was during a maintenance window when the UPS vendor was installing upgrades. The whole site was operating on generator power during the outage; when they went to cut back over to mains the whole thing popped. The root cause was a wiring fault by the UPS vendor. Fortunately we had plenty of maintenance window left to boot and fsck everything.
I don't know too much about diesel generators, but I *have* seen what happens when one is switched in when it's out of phase: no mechanical damage, but the magic smoke escaped from the transfer switch. I don't know if that counts as "blow[ing] out /all/ the electronics", but it definitely blew, and the server room was dark for hours.
I agree; I should have said SAAS or IAAS.
s/a cloud service/software as a service/
True, "exponential" is not the real problem. The problem is the rate. While computing power is the ultimate limit, right now the network growth is driven by increasing interest and adoption, and to a lesser degree, the ability of AMD to ship 6990s. The processing growth has averaged about 1000% yearly for the last year and a half. The actual inflation would be a bit less since it'd be diluted into the pool of coins from the last couple years, but you're still looking at 800% or so. That will continue as long as the BTC's reach is growing.
Yes and no. People holding a currency long-term is bad for everyone; savings are better off kept in stocks or assets. And it's not like the current mining-payout algorithm has kept the price stable.
I agree with both points. I'm not opposed to inflation; just hyperinflation.
People probably sold them for what they cost them to make, so that's not surprising. But to say that someone's watt two years ago is worth thousands of times what my watt is now doesn't add up.
Again, you have to compare the value of the asset at the time of acquisition, not the value gains since acquisition. Is it fair that someone's penny stock from two years ago is worth thousands of times what you can afford to buy in the no-longer-penny-stock today?
Someone who gets a penny stock buys it from someone else, on an open market.
And someone who held onto the BTC a year ago chose not to sell it to someone else, on an open market. As such, they effectively paid the fair market value in opportunity cost, IE, by choosing to not have those few dollars in their pocket, the same as you chose to keep a few dollars in your pocket rather than buy some bitcoins.
The early adopters of bitcoin are far more analogous to the issuers of a new currency - they've created a bunch of tokens and declared they're worth something. And back when private banks issued their own currencies, customers would insist that those banks held proportionate reserves of hard assets that they could claim from if need be. That's what's missing from bitcoins.
Mmmm, you're conflating two things there. One is the issuance of the currency, and the other is the backing of the currency.
When private banks issued currency, they weren't giving it away for free. It was in exchange for some other asset (gold being typical). And a little secret for you: even in antiquity, gold backed currency was not backed 1:1. But that's a whole 'nother subject. :)
The early adopters didn't spontaneously create 3M BTC, divide it among themselves, and then begin trading. It was always available to everyone to mine and/or buy. They just got there early. You could have been there too; so could I; we weren't.
Now, that said, I agree that to a degree, the early adopters were able to unfairly capitalize on their knowledge of the currency before it was widely publicized. The question is how much that is, and whether it's worth undermining the faith in the currency by using inflation to revoke a significant percentage of their wealth.
If you buy in now and two years from now it's trading at USD$1000, should your share be inflated down to compensate?
Unfortunately that would make the BTC non-fungible. That's a very poor attribute in a currency. I doubt it would be possible to get the network to accept that change. It might be possible to have a one-time step-devaluation of the early coins, but that would still screw a lot of people who just happened to be holding them.
It's an ugly problem, and my gut instinct is that even if it's making some people rich, the need for such a currency outweighs my sense of injustice at some people getting too much easy money.
Thanks for your thoughts, though. I'll keep turning them over for a while. :)
#1, "building your own" misses the entire point of using a cloud service. The whole idea is that I don't have to build my own infrastructure - I just sign up and use theirs.
#2, changing to another provider or buying a piece of sync software is not building your own.
Yes, that method makes sense, but that's not what I'm concerned about. Sorry, I asked my question poorly.
Two scenarios:
Miner1 earns 50BTC in Block 5. He then takes that 50BTC and sends it to a new account every few days. He'll rack up perhaps 1BTC of fees along the way. Today, he cashes out on an exchange. The coin is only a few days old, even though it's always been in his possession.
Miner2 earns 50BTC in Block 6. A few days later he spends it to buy a paper clip. The recipient then spends it to buy a rubber band. And so on, until today, when the final recipient cashes out on an exchange. The coin is only a few days old, having been spent many times.
Miner1 is the one we want to tax, not the last guy who was holding Miner2's coin at end. How do we tell the difference?