Oh, I understand how that all works. I'm not saying that I have a problem with the mandated minimum fractional reserve; clearly we'd have bank failures left and right without it.
Here's my concern: as new debt is created, the currency pool grows, which causes inflation. If debt is reduced, we will experience deflation. With the low required reserve, a very large majority of the money supply is subject to this effect.
For economic growth, we need inflation to be somewhere from zero to slightly positive. To achieve that when most currency is debt-based, we have to keep increasing consumer debt. And indeed, we have, ever since the Great Depression:
So what happens when we've taken on all the debt we possibly can? Either the banks end up owning everything, or we have to pay it down; either way we end up with deflation and the economy tanks.
The links I posted are not "quasi-religious convictions", or economic theories. They are explaining cold, hard facts - codified in law, the simple mechanics of how the system works. Specifically: commercial banks don't just store and lend currency; they create it. Every time a loan is generated more currency - actual money in circulation - comes into existence.
But you think: commercial banks can't just spontaneously create money, right? That's what the central banks do! Most people don't understand how this works, and are even dismissive of the idea as some crackpot theory, since it sounds absurd at first. As I said, this is not a theory, and it's not some shadowy secret; it's the fully legal, in-the-open, way that the majority of USD$ is created.
I'm curious why you can't just post under a pseudonym, but I suppose you can't answer that.:)
The changes wouldn't be impossible. There was some adjustment of the transaction fees just recently, actually - mostly to lower the minimum fee due to the decreasing transaction size that's come with the value growth. The advantages are significant: it could entirely fix the problem of deflation, and that might be a strong enough argument to gain widespread acceptance.
Having given it some thought, I'm not sure how it would work. How do you determine which coins are "old money"? It's easy enough to spot ones that were mined and then shelved, but I'm not sure how you could stop people from mixing their idle coins around between accounts to make them appear like they're in active circulation. I'm curious if you have any other thoughts on that.
Pre-release announcements are *getting old*. Please save it for when you have something that's going to be really earthshaking. The Pope rape tapes. Oswald's gunsight cam. The Illuminati's member list. Proof that not only does God exist, but he's being detained in Gitmo.
Y'know, shit that could start a war.
For anything else, please just post the torrent already, okay?
I'm referring to the Visa transaction fees. You as a customer don't see them, but they're very real for the merchant.
Absolutely, you're right that the centralized model has advantages - but the no-chargebacks, works-like-cash-even-when-stolen model has a very real place as well. Right now I have to do that with wire transfers which are cumbersome, slow, and quite expensive. I've had $3000 tied up for the last two weeks due to a bank error on an international wire, and even after it gets sorted out they'll still charge me $50 for the service once you include the fees on the receiving side. But even that is cheaper than what Visa would charge, which is one of the reasons that my vendors don't take credit.
As for the guy who had near USD$500k in his bitcoin wallet... Well, all I can say is it's like cash. If you have that much, you ought to keep it in a secure place. I'd personally use an offline wallet stored in a secure location - quite possibly in a safe deposit box at my bank.
Actually, I think that's an excellent idea. Have you brought this idea up on any of the BTC forums?
(For anyone not aware, this is basically how transaction fees already work; this would just require raising the minimum transaction fees on old money.)
You're correct - the bitcoin infrastructure will have to scale up considerably beyond that couple racks. My example was poor - I was describing transaction processing, whereas the whole infrastructure has to be considerably larger to provide security.
Still, I think that it's hard to foresee it ever being profitable to try to subvert the system. The only thing the exploit would allow is to revert very recent (within the last block or two) transactions. Everyone requires several rounds of confirmations for any nontrivial transaction. Thus, the exploit is: get an amazingly powerful cluster; transfer someone a large value of BTC; have them give you whatever you're getting in return without waiting for the transaction to be confirmed; then have your amazingly powerful cluster revert the BTC transaction. Basically no one is ever going to be performing transactions like that that are large enough to justify that much investment in computing power and energy.
If I'm wrong on that, then we'll need to rethink some things.:)
It's a problem. Right now, the currency has to be stable enough to trade $USD to BTC, buy things in BTC, and then trade BTC back to $USD, without a large fluctuation in value. If mining gave exponentially increasing money supply, the exchange rate would be spiraling down insanely fast.
In the future it would be even better if the BTC was a reasonably stable value store (like the dollar) so that you could simply receive and then spend BTC directly instead of as a proxy for USD.
No one got them for free. When the early miners got them, they were worth very little - the USD$ net-present-value returned per watt invested isn't terribly less now than in the beginning.
The very high returns are from taking the risk of holding onto the asset hoping it'd appreciate. That part is just like buying a penny stock and hoping the company pulls through the crisis. In both cases, it was very likely that they'd lose what they were continuing to hold. Would you consider an investor who bought into a penny stock to be getting that money for free? I say they earned it through accepting risk - the same risk that people who bought or mined into BTC at $35 were taking, and are now losing on. Continuing to hold it is holding onto a risky investment - it's like if your $1000 investment in a penny stock is now worth $1/shrare = $100,000, but you want to keep holding it, hoping for $10/share.
All that said, I've said several times in this thread that I think the BTC is in a speculative bubble. The current economic demand doesn't justify the price - it's driven by speculators who are either naive (geeks who've never owned a stock and experienced an asset bubble), or optimistic (if BTC continues to gain acceptance as a legitimate currency, the demand will rise).
Personally, my business is in the making and selling of actual goods and services, and I don't have the spare time and capital for speculative investments. I don't hold any significant amount of BTC (I have less than BTC$2 in my wallet right now), so I have no personal stake in whether it goes up or down... But I'm rooting for down, because I *do* have an interest in the BTC being *stable*, and I think it'll be much more stable when the speculators are washed out of the market and pricing is back in control of the people trading for present value.
From what I've seen, some sold out a while ago, others held the coins and sold at a higher value, and so on; there was a speculative bubble. (I'm actually rooting for the exchange rate to go down; I think it's considerably overvalued based on current demand.)
I have not seen any evidence that any early adopters have attempted to pump and dump. Honestly, they couldn't - with the current market depth (very shallow), there's no way you can trade a large quantity of BTC into USD. You could buy the entire mtgox order book for about BTC$35k.
Do you have any evidence that such a pump and dump has occurred?
My point is that people are very dismissive of BitCoin often because it's an unbacked currency, and because it's generated out of thin air... But USD is actually generated in much larger percentages out of thin air, and in a much less controlled manner than BTC. The insanity of the debt-generated dollar is an interesting subject in itself, but the relevant point is that people's objections to the BTC, while valid, are even more applicable to the USD, the most universally-recognized and trusted currency in the world. It's an attempt to show the BTC in perspective.
It's actually much more insidious than that. With fractional reserve banking, you can actually have substantially more money out on loans than you ever originally had in cash deposits. With the 10.3% reserve in the US, you can have nearly a million dollars generated in loans from $100k in deposits. That sounds insane (and I agree), but it's deeply rooted in how banks originated.
You don't have to back up your wallet that often. The wallet doesn't contain your actual bitcoins; it's just a public/private key pair. The coins are publicly sent to your public key, and the transaction is recorded by all bitcoin nodes. The private key is how you prove you own them, which lets you spend them. You just need to back up the keys once, and then you're safe for all future transactions with that key pair.
People often generate new keypairs for each person they do business with, or sometimes for each new transaction, to better protect their identity. If you do this you need to back up the new key pairs, of course. The bitcoin client does something clever: it pre-generates the next 100 key pairs and stores them for future use. Thus, you only need to back up your wallet once for every hundred keys you give out.
And I suggest that calling me a crackpot isn't the best way to get through either.
I'm not really trying to be PC to be convincing. I'm just having a conversation here, and that's how I phrase things in casual conversation.
Visa's got themselves lined up to skim a few percent off of damned near every transaction that happens, and they're really not doing that much work for it. Pretty much the whole modern world outside of the US is able to move money electronically without these middlemen. I feel screwed. OK, I'll quit calling it rape. But what woulds would you suggest I use?
Oh, don't get me wrong - the Bitcoin computing infrastructure would be significantly greater than the amount Visa needs. The estimates I've seen are that BTC would need a full rack worth of 2U servers to compete with Visa... Which I think isn't really that big a deal for pushing that much money around. The rape isn't paying for Visa's computers. Visa rapes you for *profit*.
How would you structure the distribution of a fiat currency? Giving it out to the people running the network (miners are providing the processing to secure the transaction log) is a pretty decent way, I think. How would you do it differently? Who deserves the generated currency more?
Nope. My wallet is under 2 BTC right now. I have no vested interest in pumping it.
Actually, I think it's overvalued right now due to naive speculative investors. Fortunately, the market's correcting well from last month's bubble: a nice slow slide downward rather than a brutal crash. I expect it to keep going a ways down, and indeed, I *hope* it does, until the value is more reasonably demand-based, instead of driven by speculation. I think that's what's healthy for its long-term stability.
All that said, I'm not an investor, just someone who wants to see the BTC succeed for my own needs as someone who needs to send money internationally on a regular basis.
Actually, it still is. The money supply can only keep expanding as long as debt keeps increasing. Once everybody has taken on all the debt they can handle, the money supply will *have* to contract (which will be catastrophic to the economy), or the fed will have to issue money like mad to keep stringing it along (which will be catastrophic to the economy). The pyramid still eventually runs dry even if everyone's bought in.
It's good to know your magic 8 ball is working perfectly.:)
Perhaps it will fail, but I see it gaining acceptance and recognition. It's useful now for things that Paypal, Visa, etc have found politically unpopular, like donating to Wikileaks. It makes small personal transfers easy. It has value. I think it's much too early to just dismiss it offhand as a failed experiment.
Actually they do in fact own around 80% of USD in existence in the form of debt. Fractional reserve banking is pretty amazing when you dig into it.
Anyway, as for the large number of coins that were mined and never circulated, I honestly don't think it's people trying to take advantage of it like a pyramid scheme. If that was the case they'd have cashed out en masse during last month's valuation bubble. The exchange trade volumes never really got that high - which indicates this isn't a pump and dump, but something else. I believe it's two things: #1, a lot of them were mined on a whim, but people can't be bothered to actually set themselves up to move them; or #2, a lot of them were mined on a whim, and then the wallets lost and discarded when people lost interest.
What would you have it be, then? If you gave out proportionately more BTC as the number of users grow, the inflation would be insane. So it's 500 BTC per hour, divided among everyone. Yeah, as the number of people grows, your slice becomes tiny. Now you have to earn (or exchange earned money for) bitcoins. Why is it shocking to have to earn your currency?
Bitcoin at its core isn't about making money through mining. It's about having a currency that gets rid of a lot of the disadvantages of current paper currency and payment processing systems. The rapid growth of people participating is making it much more valuable in that regard. You only get "next to nothing" if you were looking for a free handout. For the rest of us, it's a way to actually buy goods and services. For me, the advantage is I dislike and distrust Paypal, and I very much welcome a replacement that isn't tied to yet another flimsy or greedy company.
That energy is actually put to a good use - it provides security for the block chain against double-spending attacks, by making them computationally infeasible. And it gives pretty good value for the money: as far as costs go for a payment-processing network, it's damned cheap compared to what Visa or Paypal charges.
Yes, early adopters come out well. That's true in any venture. But at the end of the day, that doesn't mean it won't be useful as a payment processing network. The amount that early adopters will get out of this utterly pales in comparison to what the big financial corporations are raping you for.
If you think THIS is a scam, read up more on fractional-reserve banking. The debt-driven US dollar is the biggest ponzi scheme ever.
Actually, LastPass may have been hacked back in May. Fortunately, they do their security right: your data is all encrypted client-side with your master password. And kudos to them for doing the right thing and publicising the breach. As long as you use a cryptographically secure* master password, you have very little to worry about.
* I consider 64+ bits of entropy (a 16 character, mostly-random password with a couple capitals, digits and symbols thrown in) completely adequate for general personal use; use 128+ (22 characters of completely random line-nose) bits if you think someone would be willing to spend $10k to get your passwords.
I think a lot of these stupid password policies were the result of Lanman and L0phtcrack.
First, there are two kinds of things that people call "passwords". #1, a secret phrase that you tell to a remote system to authenticate yourself. #2, a key that has to be cryptographically secure against local attacks.
Traditional Windows NT domains essentially published a Lanman hash of everyone's password. Lanman had a bizarrely bad hashing scheme: it null-pads your password to 14 characters, then splits it in half to two 7 character passwords. Thus, an attacker gets a local copy of your hash and only has to crack a 7 character long portion of it, which is exactly what L0phtcrack does. Decently good passwords get cracked within hours.
The band-aid attempt to secure this horrible situation was to try to make the most cryptographically secure 7 character password possible. That isn't a lot of key data to work with so you basically have to have an absurdly line-noised password - and even then it could be cracked given enough time, so NT admins forced changing passwords frequently (which actually doesn't help, since the attacker just picks up random-guessing on the new hashes as they come out - sooner or later they'll find one).
So that got enshrined as what a "secure password policy" was supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was designed to protect against an absurdly-bad implementation of scenario #2, when for the most part, your password only needs to be secure in scenario #1, because the hash isn't published and you can only make a half-dozen attempts to guess it before it gets locked out.
IMO: Like you say, PulseAudio doesn't add any important technical features.
The problem with ALSA is the configuration. Changing anything (even as simple as redirecting audio to a digital out, or indeed, even enabling dmix) requires monkeying around in your.asoundrc which to put it politely, is arcane at best, and there are no user-friendly tools to make it easier.
So you slap PulseAudio on top of it, and it provides a convenient API. As such, there are easy GUI tools to configure where you want your sound to come out.
Of course that's a terrible solution to the problem. It just adds another confusing layer of complexity and incompatibility, but I think we're stuck with it until someone writes a better UI for ALSA.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I understand how that all works. I'm not saying that I have a problem with the mandated minimum fractional reserve; clearly we'd have bank failures left and right without it.
Here's my concern: as new debt is created, the currency pool grows, which causes inflation. If debt is reduced, we will experience deflation. With the low required reserve, a very large majority of the money supply is subject to this effect.
For economic growth, we need inflation to be somewhere from zero to slightly positive. To achieve that when most currency is debt-based, we have to keep increasing consumer debt. And indeed, we have, ever since the Great Depression:
http://dailybail.com/storage/chart%20debt%20to%20gdp.png
So what happens when we've taken on all the debt we possibly can? Either the banks end up owning everything, or we have to pay it down; either way we end up with deflation and the economy tanks.
The links I posted are not "quasi-religious convictions", or economic theories. They are explaining cold, hard facts - codified in law, the simple mechanics of how the system works. Specifically: commercial banks don't just store and lend currency; they create it. Every time a loan is generated more currency - actual money in circulation - comes into existence.
But you think: commercial banks can't just spontaneously create money, right? That's what the central banks do! Most people don't understand how this works, and are even dismissive of the idea as some crackpot theory, since it sounds absurd at first. As I said, this is not a theory, and it's not some shadowy secret; it's the fully legal, in-the-open, way that the majority of USD$ is created.
I'm curious why you can't just post under a pseudonym, but I suppose you can't answer that. :)
The changes wouldn't be impossible. There was some adjustment of the transaction fees just recently, actually - mostly to lower the minimum fee due to the decreasing transaction size that's come with the value growth. The advantages are significant: it could entirely fix the problem of deflation, and that might be a strong enough argument to gain widespread acceptance.
Having given it some thought, I'm not sure how it would work. How do you determine which coins are "old money"? It's easy enough to spot ones that were mined and then shelved, but I'm not sure how you could stop people from mixing their idle coins around between accounts to make them appear like they're in active circulation. I'm curious if you have any other thoughts on that.
Pre-release announcements are *getting old*. Please save it for when you have something that's going to be really earthshaking. The Pope rape tapes. Oswald's gunsight cam. The Illuminati's member list. Proof that not only does God exist, but he's being detained in Gitmo.
Y'know, shit that could start a war.
For anything else, please just post the torrent already, okay?
OK, rape is hyperbole. :)
I'm referring to the Visa transaction fees. You as a customer don't see them, but they're very real for the merchant.
Absolutely, you're right that the centralized model has advantages - but the no-chargebacks, works-like-cash-even-when-stolen model has a very real place as well. Right now I have to do that with wire transfers which are cumbersome, slow, and quite expensive. I've had $3000 tied up for the last two weeks due to a bank error on an international wire, and even after it gets sorted out they'll still charge me $50 for the service once you include the fees on the receiving side. But even that is cheaper than what Visa would charge, which is one of the reasons that my vendors don't take credit.
As for the guy who had near USD$500k in his bitcoin wallet... Well, all I can say is it's like cash. If you have that much, you ought to keep it in a secure place. I'd personally use an offline wallet stored in a secure location - quite possibly in a safe deposit box at my bank.
Actually, I think that's an excellent idea. Have you brought this idea up on any of the BTC forums?
(For anyone not aware, this is basically how transaction fees already work; this would just require raising the minimum transaction fees on old money.)
You're correct - the bitcoin infrastructure will have to scale up considerably beyond that couple racks. My example was poor - I was describing transaction processing, whereas the whole infrastructure has to be considerably larger to provide security.
Still, I think that it's hard to foresee it ever being profitable to try to subvert the system. The only thing the exploit would allow is to revert very recent (within the last block or two) transactions. Everyone requires several rounds of confirmations for any nontrivial transaction. Thus, the exploit is: get an amazingly powerful cluster; transfer someone a large value of BTC; have them give you whatever you're getting in return without waiting for the transaction to be confirmed; then have your amazingly powerful cluster revert the BTC transaction. Basically no one is ever going to be performing transactions like that that are large enough to justify that much investment in computing power and energy.
If I'm wrong on that, then we'll need to rethink some things. :)
It's a problem. Right now, the currency has to be stable enough to trade $USD to BTC, buy things in BTC, and then trade BTC back to $USD, without a large fluctuation in value. If mining gave exponentially increasing money supply, the exchange rate would be spiraling down insanely fast.
In the future it would be even better if the BTC was a reasonably stable value store (like the dollar) so that you could simply receive and then spend BTC directly instead of as a proxy for USD.
No one got them for free. When the early miners got them, they were worth very little - the USD$ net-present-value returned per watt invested isn't terribly less now than in the beginning.
The very high returns are from taking the risk of holding onto the asset hoping it'd appreciate. That part is just like buying a penny stock and hoping the company pulls through the crisis. In both cases, it was very likely that they'd lose what they were continuing to hold. Would you consider an investor who bought into a penny stock to be getting that money for free? I say they earned it through accepting risk - the same risk that people who bought or mined into BTC at $35 were taking, and are now losing on. Continuing to hold it is holding onto a risky investment - it's like if your $1000 investment in a penny stock is now worth $1/shrare = $100,000, but you want to keep holding it, hoping for $10/share.
All that said, I've said several times in this thread that I think the BTC is in a speculative bubble. The current economic demand doesn't justify the price - it's driven by speculators who are either naive (geeks who've never owned a stock and experienced an asset bubble), or optimistic (if BTC continues to gain acceptance as a legitimate currency, the demand will rise).
Personally, my business is in the making and selling of actual goods and services, and I don't have the spare time and capital for speculative investments. I don't hold any significant amount of BTC (I have less than BTC$2 in my wallet right now), so I have no personal stake in whether it goes up or down... But I'm rooting for down, because I *do* have an interest in the BTC being *stable*, and I think it'll be much more stable when the speculators are washed out of the market and pricing is back in control of the people trading for present value.
From what I've seen, some sold out a while ago, others held the coins and sold at a higher value, and so on; there was a speculative bubble. (I'm actually rooting for the exchange rate to go down; I think it's considerably overvalued based on current demand.)
I have not seen any evidence that any early adopters have attempted to pump and dump. Honestly, they couldn't - with the current market depth (very shallow), there's no way you can trade a large quantity of BTC into USD. You could buy the entire mtgox order book for about BTC$35k.
Do you have any evidence that such a pump and dump has occurred?
My point is that people are very dismissive of BitCoin often because it's an unbacked currency, and because it's generated out of thin air... But USD is actually generated in much larger percentages out of thin air, and in a much less controlled manner than BTC. The insanity of the debt-generated dollar is an interesting subject in itself, but the relevant point is that people's objections to the BTC, while valid, are even more applicable to the USD, the most universally-recognized and trusted currency in the world. It's an attempt to show the BTC in perspective.
I'm talking about private debt, not the federal debt.
An introduction to how this works:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Money_multiplier
It's actually much more insidious than that. With fractional reserve banking, you can actually have substantially more money out on loans than you ever originally had in cash deposits. With the 10.3% reserve in the US, you can have nearly a million dollars generated in loans from $100k in deposits. That sounds insane (and I agree), but it's deeply rooted in how banks originated.
Here's a good introduction to how it works and the history of how it got to be this way:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
You don't have to back up your wallet that often. The wallet doesn't contain your actual bitcoins; it's just a public/private key pair. The coins are publicly sent to your public key, and the transaction is recorded by all bitcoin nodes. The private key is how you prove you own them, which lets you spend them. You just need to back up the keys once, and then you're safe for all future transactions with that key pair.
People often generate new keypairs for each person they do business with, or sometimes for each new transaction, to better protect their identity. If you do this you need to back up the new key pairs, of course. The bitcoin client does something clever: it pre-generates the next 100 key pairs and stores them for future use. Thus, you only need to back up your wallet once for every hundred keys you give out.
And I suggest that calling me a crackpot isn't the best way to get through either.
I'm not really trying to be PC to be convincing. I'm just having a conversation here, and that's how I phrase things in casual conversation.
Visa's got themselves lined up to skim a few percent off of damned near every transaction that happens, and they're really not doing that much work for it. Pretty much the whole modern world outside of the US is able to move money electronically without these middlemen. I feel screwed. OK, I'll quit calling it rape. But what woulds would you suggest I use?
Oh, don't get me wrong - the Bitcoin computing infrastructure would be significantly greater than the amount Visa needs. The estimates I've seen are that BTC would need a full rack worth of 2U servers to compete with Visa... Which I think isn't really that big a deal for pushing that much money around. The rape isn't paying for Visa's computers. Visa rapes you for *profit*.
How would you structure the distribution of a fiat currency? Giving it out to the people running the network (miners are providing the processing to secure the transaction log) is a pretty decent way, I think. How would you do it differently? Who deserves the generated currency more?
Nope. My wallet is under 2 BTC right now. I have no vested interest in pumping it.
Actually, I think it's overvalued right now due to naive speculative investors. Fortunately, the market's correcting well from last month's bubble: a nice slow slide downward rather than a brutal crash. I expect it to keep going a ways down, and indeed, I *hope* it does, until the value is more reasonably demand-based, instead of driven by speculation. I think that's what's healthy for its long-term stability.
All that said, I'm not an investor, just someone who wants to see the BTC succeed for my own needs as someone who needs to send money internationally on a regular basis.
Actually, it still is. The money supply can only keep expanding as long as debt keeps increasing. Once everybody has taken on all the debt they can handle, the money supply will *have* to contract (which will be catastrophic to the economy), or the fed will have to issue money like mad to keep stringing it along (which will be catastrophic to the economy). The pyramid still eventually runs dry even if everyone's bought in.
It's good to know your magic 8 ball is working perfectly. :)
Perhaps it will fail, but I see it gaining acceptance and recognition. It's useful now for things that Paypal, Visa, etc have found politically unpopular, like donating to Wikileaks. It makes small personal transfers easy. It has value. I think it's much too early to just dismiss it offhand as a failed experiment.
Actually they do in fact own around 80% of USD in existence in the form of debt. Fractional reserve banking is pretty amazing when you dig into it.
Anyway, as for the large number of coins that were mined and never circulated, I honestly don't think it's people trying to take advantage of it like a pyramid scheme. If that was the case they'd have cashed out en masse during last month's valuation bubble. The exchange trade volumes never really got that high - which indicates this isn't a pump and dump, but something else. I believe it's two things: #1, a lot of them were mined on a whim, but people can't be bothered to actually set themselves up to move them; or #2, a lot of them were mined on a whim, and then the wallets lost and discarded when people lost interest.
What would you have it be, then? If you gave out proportionately more BTC as the number of users grow, the inflation would be insane. So it's 500 BTC per hour, divided among everyone. Yeah, as the number of people grows, your slice becomes tiny. Now you have to earn (or exchange earned money for) bitcoins. Why is it shocking to have to earn your currency?
Bitcoin at its core isn't about making money through mining. It's about having a currency that gets rid of a lot of the disadvantages of current paper currency and payment processing systems. The rapid growth of people participating is making it much more valuable in that regard. You only get "next to nothing" if you were looking for a free handout. For the rest of us, it's a way to actually buy goods and services. For me, the advantage is I dislike and distrust Paypal, and I very much welcome a replacement that isn't tied to yet another flimsy or greedy company.
That energy is actually put to a good use - it provides security for the block chain against double-spending attacks, by making them computationally infeasible. And it gives pretty good value for the money: as far as costs go for a payment-processing network, it's damned cheap compared to what Visa or Paypal charges.
Yes, early adopters come out well. That's true in any venture. But at the end of the day, that doesn't mean it won't be useful as a payment processing network. The amount that early adopters will get out of this utterly pales in comparison to what the big financial corporations are raping you for.
If you think THIS is a scam, read up more on fractional-reserve banking. The debt-driven US dollar is the biggest ponzi scheme ever.
How does the decryption engine determine if it's a legitimate application or a trojan that's asking for a plaintext password?
Actually, LastPass may have been hacked back in May. Fortunately, they do their security right: your data is all encrypted client-side with your master password. And kudos to them for doing the right thing and publicising the breach. As long as you use a cryptographically secure* master password, you have very little to worry about.
* I consider 64+ bits of entropy (a 16 character, mostly-random password with a couple capitals, digits and symbols thrown in) completely adequate for general personal use; use 128+ (22 characters of completely random line-nose) bits if you think someone would be willing to spend $10k to get your passwords.
I think a lot of these stupid password policies were the result of Lanman and L0phtcrack.
First, there are two kinds of things that people call "passwords". #1, a secret phrase that you tell to a remote system to authenticate yourself. #2, a key that has to be cryptographically secure against local attacks.
Traditional Windows NT domains essentially published a Lanman hash of everyone's password. Lanman had a bizarrely bad hashing scheme: it null-pads your password to 14 characters, then splits it in half to two 7 character passwords. Thus, an attacker gets a local copy of your hash and only has to crack a 7 character long portion of it, which is exactly what L0phtcrack does. Decently good passwords get cracked within hours.
The band-aid attempt to secure this horrible situation was to try to make the most cryptographically secure 7 character password possible. That isn't a lot of key data to work with so you basically have to have an absurdly line-noised password - and even then it could be cracked given enough time, so NT admins forced changing passwords frequently (which actually doesn't help, since the attacker just picks up random-guessing on the new hashes as they come out - sooner or later they'll find one).
So that got enshrined as what a "secure password policy" was supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was designed to protect against an absurdly-bad implementation of scenario #2, when for the most part, your password only needs to be secure in scenario #1, because the hash isn't published and you can only make a half-dozen attempts to guess it before it gets locked out.
IMO: Like you say, PulseAudio doesn't add any important technical features.
The problem with ALSA is the configuration. Changing anything (even as simple as redirecting audio to a digital out, or indeed, even enabling dmix) requires monkeying around in your .asoundrc which to put it politely, is arcane at best, and there are no user-friendly tools to make it easier.
So you slap PulseAudio on top of it, and it provides a convenient API. As such, there are easy GUI tools to configure where you want your sound to come out.
Of course that's a terrible solution to the problem. It just adds another confusing layer of complexity and incompatibility, but I think we're stuck with it until someone writes a better UI for ALSA.