That's not so fair I think. In this case, you have delivered your gold to a company in Singapore, and that company got robbed, and they promised to cover the losses, and they got robbed again.
I think you are exaggerating the importance of mining rewards and the reach of hackers.
If you don't want to get involved with all this mining thing, which a casual user shouldn't anyway, then you can just buy or earn the coins. The mining output doesn't even get close to the number of coins that are exchanged for other currencies. If you don't want to avoid the effects of volatility, buy only to spend and don't keep your money in Bitcoin.
Mining is a losing game, because there is a lot of competition and only those who have an edge do make some money, and I don't think they make enough that's worth the effort. It's like gold mining but even worse because there aren't higher-up connections you can use to smooth your way. In the current picture, those who sell shovels (mining equipment manufacturers, pool operators, etc.) will be making the most of it.
So I don't think there is any support for your analogy. The mining reward scheme isn't an analogy to the modern society. There is no need for such an analogy, because it already is the modern society. The richest aren't the miners, the richest are only that, the richest (may be a miner, may be an exchange operator, may be a merchant, may be an ordinary investor, etc.). And the poorest are the poorest, not because they mine poorly, because they don't have coins.
Regarding hackers; today there is a 100 million USD worth of bitcoins in circulation, and in the last 2 hours 3 million USD worth of coins changed hands. In Bitcoin's short history, there has been a lot of security breaches, and a lot of coins were stolen, and the ratio of it compared to the economy might be greater than, say, the same statistics for USD. However, I really don't see any reason for seeing it as a show-stopper. Securing your coins is not an impossible task, it's very much like how you learn to secure your cash while you grow up. It will become common sense eventually.
Your description is accurate in effect, but I'd like to clarify some points.
Technically, encryption is not part of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just a distributed data store that preserves a list of transactions, which themselves are digitally signed. This data is maintained by a p2p network.
The servers that were hacked were keeping a list of private keys, and these were stolen. With these keys, the thief has the ability to sign transactions which move the site's money elsewhere, which they did.
With that said, these servers that need to be secured aren't necessarily "Bitcoin server"s. One can even write a private key on a piece of paper and anyone reading it can make a transaction, emptying the balance tied to that key. If you keep these keys on a server, there isn't much Bitcoin developers can do technology-wise to prevent people from stealing it, besides trivial tricks like wallet encryption.
There are easy remedies to this. Not keeping the private keys on the server for one. You can poll the list of transactions from a different machine in which you keep the keys. Another is, using a separate key (kept outside the server) to confirm transactions initiated from the server (which is called a multiple signature transaction).
With either of these, there is still risk that the infiltrators would change the accounts in your database and direct the money to themselves, but there is no way around it anyway for any kind of financial business. Just secure your damn servers. However, these methods let you enact sanity checks (limiting transfers for one) which will at least save the bulk, if not everything.
I actually don't think the nature of Bitcoin's technology is what's causing these issues, though its cash-like behavior is very enabling. The problem is, anyone can run a financial business now, and the first entrepreneurs that are willing to take the risk are of course the least cautious ones. Add to that, that we are born in a world that is guarded by a top-down structure, where everyone has the right to act stupid and will be saved by some institution anyway. So the users are far too trusting. I would be surprised if we didn't live through these problems. It's as if we are re-experiencing the last few centuries of financial history in fast motion.
However, I don't think this will result in the re-gained wisdom of central regulation. Quite the contrary, the experience is being re-coded and every new generation of the greater structure will be more resilient. We'll have to wait and see though.
It's impossible to cut off exchange without hands-on regulation of all trade activity, which is itself impossible. You would use most of your ad coins to buy hosting, hosting providers will use some of it to post ads, and sell the rest over-the-counter for fiat. If OTC is forced, there will be better solutions for it and some obscurity would even help with price fluctuations.
Obviously we mean different things by "pushing", but so what anyway? I would be causing them more harm by teaching them it is a good thing to put limits to what you may confront. And then if they are brave enough, have them break the rules to get what they want and hide their guilt from the society. They will conform one way or the other, either by acting as they are supposed to or by pretending that they are. I don't want that.
Defining sentience is not easy, and I don't think it's obvious as a criterion for free speech.
Consider the example of randomly generated sentences. Now, I programmed the thing, but I don't know what it will say. Am I now responsible of the speech it generates? Will the programmer be responsible if the postmodernism generator creates hate speech?
Let's advance the example to using genetic programming. Now, not only that I don't know what it will say, I don't even know what it can say.
The fact that it's not plausible for these examples to generate sentences that make sense doesn't directly relate to whether freedom of speech applies to them.
I'm a parent of two and I don't agree with you. They are pretty much able to comprehend what's going on with goatse or porn or whatever. Traumas are problems with the simulation environment you create. I don't argue against the simulation (of real life environment you create to prepare them for the future), it's what we parents do, but if it's easily breached by a picture on a computer, there's probably something wrong about your own doctrines.
Also, it's not like someone's pushing porn or pictures of dead bodies on the kids. If motivated, they will seek out and find it anyway. Why not be able to discuss it with them instead of becoming an alien? If your kid wants to watch porn, sit and watch together. Discuss it. If it's mere curiosity, they will move on very fast. If it's bodily desire, then you either won't be able to do shit by censoring, or your kids will become people who welcome such restrictions.
I hope we can all agree that governments (or more correctly, states) are by far the dominant force that kill and maim people to spread a way of life. Whether they do this to empower the will of their peoples (spreading some regime, religion, etc.) or some ulterior motive is of course debatable. I think it's some mixture of both in all cases.
Yeah, quantum money would be impossible to counterfeit. Counterfeiting Bitcoin is not against the rules of the universe. I'm not claiming it is as secure or something to that effect, actually I don't claim anything.
However, the commentor implied that Bitcoin is not so secure, which requires some knowledge about how it can be counterfeited. If I claim right here that SSH is not so secure, would you upvote me?
I don't think why you'd expect the publishers to care about timing. It is what it is.
Also robberies really aren't that much of a deal. Running a financial business is pretty hard, security-wise, and Bitcoin enables inexperience people to do it. Some of them fail. Awareness increases, traditions form, etc. Bitcoin isn't about inexperienced people running financial institutions. From the perspective of the researcher, this is a non-issue.
There will be Bitcoin FUD for the foreseeable future. However the rhetoric changes form as time passes. There will always be theft and scams too, but these topics will be addressed more and more in howto type articles.
I can't say I'm really with them (quite the opposite actually), but it seems to me that their world view is as metaphysically sound as any other candidate that seems to be implicitly assumed around here. There is violence everywhere, everyday, most of which we at least indirectly contribute to. Are the excuses we have in place water-tight? I don't believe so.
So they have a cause, we may deem it against us, but I don't see any reason to assume that they are stupid.
Yeah, this is obviously theft of electricity/computing power.
I'm not sure you'd have to to seek users' consent though, just like the online ads don't need to, but it should have been made explicit. Therefore it is stealing.
The "malware" part, I don't know. If we call it that, then a lot of scripts fall in the gray area. There are a lot of things that websites do without knowledge or explicit consent of the user, that a user may or may not want. This specific case is immoral (let's call it theft of computing power) but technically it's not malware. You can just stop visiting that website, just like how you avoid sites with tens of flash animations, which probably consume more power than web-based Bitcoin mining.
A wild guess is that he just embedded js code in there to mine some coins. Or WebGL? I wouldn't call it an "installation" and I don't imagine he put malware in there.
The preference between a physical and onscreen keyboard is just that, a preference, most certainly not "matter of fact" one way or the other. I don't prefer one over the other.
Yeah, nothing can be "better" "as a matter of fact" without an agreed upon metric. I was thinking about the talk about how the new types of touchscreens make it easier to type, etc. Let's say there are potential advantages and disadvantages of a separate mechanical keyboard and leave it at that.
I bought three N900 phones until now (one for wife, one for a friend), two of them were second hand, none of them broke. And they've been constantly abused by my two toddlers, fell down from tables and into puddles god knows how many times. Recently I tried to smash mine against a wall (was having a rage episode), threw it directly at the wall two times with all my might. It's still working, apart from the camera function, and I'm still using it. I also constantly overclock it from 600 to 1150 MHz.
I'm not such a gadget enthusiast, but I've read some criticism against N900, which focused on screen/keyboard, but never heard about resiliency. My wife also recently bought an Asus Transformer Prime. Screen? I can read from N900 in broad daylight but it's impossible with the transformer. Keyboard? Mechanical keyboards are still better than on-screen ones as a matter of fact.
What else? I love being able to run the same programs on my desktop PC and my mobile tablet. I love being able to carry one in my back pocket. If you have a better solution for this than the N900, I'd probably be inclined to buy one.
Bitcoin seems a lot like pre-existing currencies. No fix.
Well, it is supposed to fix the problems with and overcome limitations of centralized control, nothing else. And it does it to a certain degree.
Theft is a problem when there is a point where value is stored. Bitcoin can solve this by requiring multiple signatures for a transaction (there is experimental support for this already). So, you can store these keys in different locations. Keys never have to be in the same place ever to confirm a transaction, so this is very different from dividing a single key. It would take some time for common sense to form around this concept though.
Even if this eliminates most of theft (it can't eliminate all of it) speculation remains a problem. You could add scams, worker exploitation, corporatism, environmental disregard or whatever you don't like about the economy here. Bitcoin won't fix them, sorry.
However, at least to me, it sounds like claiming that eliminating slavery won't fix hunger. Well, who could disagree with that?
I think you're making the unfounded assumption that extremists like the Taliban can be reasoned with.
Your parent's comment doesn't require that property. Even if you are dealing with irrational animals, what you know about how they function will still help you solve problems exactly the same way if it were otherwise.
Making up random facts won't help your cause. Either you'd be fooling yourself to believe that some action is helping your cause, or someone else would be doing it for you. Then you'd be the one who's irrational, no?
Also, are you making the unfounded assumption that "extremists" like the Taliban can't be reasoned with? You like believing they are irrational, don't you? Because your normal is the rational one?
Look, being enemies with others because you are supporting different norms is perfectly understandable. You don't have to make it holier than it is. Want to destroy them? Fine. The religious narration is unnecessary.
I did it for my first kid but not the second one. Paid around 2000 EUR for 20 years of preservation. They split the harvested stem cells and sent them to vaults in different countries to be frozen. However, they kept it in a shelf for three days after birth and then sent it through DHL, so I'm not quite sure how successful they were in harvesting them.
They usually advertise it as a potential cure for early leukemia (stem cells harvested this way are too few to be helpful if the patient is not a baby), but my rationale was that since their genetic material is almost perfect, they would be better suited to develop in vitro organs and such, than older cells. So, I regret that I didn't do it for my daughter as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not so fair I think. In this case, you have delivered your gold to a company in Singapore, and that company got robbed, and they promised to cover the losses, and they got robbed again.
I think you are exaggerating the importance of mining rewards and the reach of hackers.
If you don't want to get involved with all this mining thing, which a casual user shouldn't anyway, then you can just buy or earn the coins. The mining output doesn't even get close to the number of coins that are exchanged for other currencies. If you don't want to avoid the effects of volatility, buy only to spend and don't keep your money in Bitcoin.
Mining is a losing game, because there is a lot of competition and only those who have an edge do make some money, and I don't think they make enough that's worth the effort. It's like gold mining but even worse because there aren't higher-up connections you can use to smooth your way. In the current picture, those who sell shovels (mining equipment manufacturers, pool operators, etc.) will be making the most of it.
So I don't think there is any support for your analogy. The mining reward scheme isn't an analogy to the modern society. There is no need for such an analogy, because it already is the modern society. The richest aren't the miners, the richest are only that, the richest (may be a miner, may be an exchange operator, may be a merchant, may be an ordinary investor, etc.). And the poorest are the poorest, not because they mine poorly, because they don't have coins.
Regarding hackers; today there is a 100 million USD worth of bitcoins in circulation, and in the last 2 hours 3 million USD worth of coins changed hands. In Bitcoin's short history, there has been a lot of security breaches, and a lot of coins were stolen, and the ratio of it compared to the economy might be greater than, say, the same statistics for USD. However, I really don't see any reason for seeing it as a show-stopper. Securing your coins is not an impossible task, it's very much like how you learn to secure your cash while you grow up. It will become common sense eventually.
Your description is accurate in effect, but I'd like to clarify some points.
Technically, encryption is not part of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just a distributed data store that preserves a list of transactions, which themselves are digitally signed. This data is maintained by a p2p network.
The servers that were hacked were keeping a list of private keys, and these were stolen. With these keys, the thief has the ability to sign transactions which move the site's money elsewhere, which they did.
With that said, these servers that need to be secured aren't necessarily "Bitcoin server"s. One can even write a private key on a piece of paper and anyone reading it can make a transaction, emptying the balance tied to that key. If you keep these keys on a server, there isn't much Bitcoin developers can do technology-wise to prevent people from stealing it, besides trivial tricks like wallet encryption.
There are easy remedies to this. Not keeping the private keys on the server for one. You can poll the list of transactions from a different machine in which you keep the keys. Another is, using a separate key (kept outside the server) to confirm transactions initiated from the server (which is called a multiple signature transaction).
With either of these, there is still risk that the infiltrators would change the accounts in your database and direct the money to themselves, but there is no way around it anyway for any kind of financial business. Just secure your damn servers. However, these methods let you enact sanity checks (limiting transfers for one) which will at least save the bulk, if not everything.
I actually don't think the nature of Bitcoin's technology is what's causing these issues, though its cash-like behavior is very enabling. The problem is, anyone can run a financial business now, and the first entrepreneurs that are willing to take the risk are of course the least cautious ones. Add to that, that we are born in a world that is guarded by a top-down structure, where everyone has the right to act stupid and will be saved by some institution anyway. So the users are far too trusting. I would be surprised if we didn't live through these problems. It's as if we are re-experiencing the last few centuries of financial history in fast motion.
However, I don't think this will result in the re-gained wisdom of central regulation. Quite the contrary, the experience is being re-coded and every new generation of the greater structure will be more resilient. We'll have to wait and see though.
It's impossible to cut off exchange without hands-on regulation of all trade activity, which is itself impossible. You would use most of your ad coins to buy hosting, hosting providers will use some of it to post ads, and sell the rest over-the-counter for fiat. If OTC is forced, there will be better solutions for it and some obscurity would even help with price fluctuations.
Obviously we mean different things by "pushing", but so what anyway? I would be causing them more harm by teaching them it is a good thing to put limits to what you may confront. And then if they are brave enough, have them break the rules to get what they want and hide their guilt from the society. They will conform one way or the other, either by acting as they are supposed to or by pretending that they are. I don't want that.
Iran is terrorist, that's why.
Defining sentience is not easy, and I don't think it's obvious as a criterion for free speech.
Consider the example of randomly generated sentences. Now, I programmed the thing, but I don't know what it will say. Am I now responsible of the speech it generates? Will the programmer be responsible if the postmodernism generator creates hate speech?
Let's advance the example to using genetic programming. Now, not only that I don't know what it will say, I don't even know what it can say.
The fact that it's not plausible for these examples to generate sentences that make sense doesn't directly relate to whether freedom of speech applies to them.
I'm a parent of two and I don't agree with you. They are pretty much able to comprehend what's going on with goatse or porn or whatever. Traumas are problems with the simulation environment you create. I don't argue against the simulation (of real life environment you create to prepare them for the future), it's what we parents do, but if it's easily breached by a picture on a computer, there's probably something wrong about your own doctrines.
Also, it's not like someone's pushing porn or pictures of dead bodies on the kids. If motivated, they will seek out and find it anyway. Why not be able to discuss it with them instead of becoming an alien? If your kid wants to watch porn, sit and watch together. Discuss it. If it's mere curiosity, they will move on very fast. If it's bodily desire, then you either won't be able to do shit by censoring, or your kids will become people who welcome such restrictions.
I hope we can all agree that governments (or more correctly, states) are by far the dominant force that kill and maim people to spread a way of life. Whether they do this to empower the will of their peoples (spreading some regime, religion, etc.) or some ulterior motive is of course debatable. I think it's some mixture of both in all cases.
Governments create terrorists only in the sense that gay people create bigots.
let's not pretend that there are not some very real people out there who would and do kill and maim others to spread their way of life.
I hope you'll notice the irony in your comment...
Fuck yeah!!!
Yeah, quantum money would be impossible to counterfeit. Counterfeiting Bitcoin is not against the rules of the universe. I'm not claiming it is as secure or something to that effect, actually I don't claim anything.
However, the commentor implied that Bitcoin is not so secure, which requires some knowledge about how it can be counterfeited. If I claim right here that SSH is not so secure, would you upvote me?
They've never been counterfeited, if that's your point. Otherwise I guess quantum money can still get stolen, just as your bitcoins can.
You'll still get upvotes for satirizing Bitcoin though, don't worry.
I don't think why you'd expect the publishers to care about timing. It is what it is.
Also robberies really aren't that much of a deal. Running a financial business is pretty hard, security-wise, and Bitcoin enables inexperience people to do it. Some of them fail. Awareness increases, traditions form, etc. Bitcoin isn't about inexperienced people running financial institutions. From the perspective of the researcher, this is a non-issue.
There will be Bitcoin FUD for the foreseeable future. However the rhetoric changes form as time passes. There will always be theft and scams too, but these topics will be addressed more and more in howto type articles.
I can't say I'm really with them (quite the opposite actually), but it seems to me that their world view is as metaphysically sound as any other candidate that seems to be implicitly assumed around here. There is violence everywhere, everyday, most of which we at least indirectly contribute to. Are the excuses we have in place water-tight? I don't believe so.
So they have a cause, we may deem it against us, but I don't see any reason to assume that they are stupid.
Yeah, this is obviously theft of electricity/computing power.
I'm not sure you'd have to to seek users' consent though, just like the online ads don't need to, but it should have been made explicit. Therefore it is stealing.
The "malware" part, I don't know. If we call it that, then a lot of scripts fall in the gray area. There are a lot of things that websites do without knowledge or explicit consent of the user, that a user may or may not want. This specific case is immoral (let's call it theft of computing power) but technically it's not malware. You can just stop visiting that website, just like how you avoid sites with tens of flash animations, which probably consume more power than web-based Bitcoin mining.
A wild guess is that he just embedded js code in there to mine some coins. Or WebGL? I wouldn't call it an "installation" and I don't imagine he put malware in there.
The preference between a physical and onscreen keyboard is just that, a preference, most certainly not "matter of fact" one way or the other. I don't prefer one over the other.
Yeah, nothing can be "better" "as a matter of fact" without an agreed upon metric. I was thinking about the talk about how the new types of touchscreens make it easier to type, etc. Let's say there are potential advantages and disadvantages of a separate mechanical keyboard and leave it at that.
I bought three N900 phones until now (one for wife, one for a friend), two of them were second hand, none of them broke. And they've been constantly abused by my two toddlers, fell down from tables and into puddles god knows how many times. Recently I tried to smash mine against a wall (was having a rage episode), threw it directly at the wall two times with all my might. It's still working, apart from the camera function, and I'm still using it. I also constantly overclock it from 600 to 1150 MHz.
I'm not such a gadget enthusiast, but I've read some criticism against N900, which focused on screen/keyboard, but never heard about resiliency. My wife also recently bought an Asus Transformer Prime. Screen? I can read from N900 in broad daylight but it's impossible with the transformer. Keyboard? Mechanical keyboards are still better than on-screen ones as a matter of fact.
What else? I love being able to run the same programs on my desktop PC and my mobile tablet. I love being able to carry one in my back pocket. If you have a better solution for this than the N900, I'd probably be inclined to buy one.
exploitation of the algorithms
This never happened.
Bitcoin seems a lot like pre-existing currencies. No fix.
Well, it is supposed to fix the problems with and overcome limitations of centralized control, nothing else. And it does it to a certain degree.
Theft is a problem when there is a point where value is stored. Bitcoin can solve this by requiring multiple signatures for a transaction (there is experimental support for this already). So, you can store these keys in different locations. Keys never have to be in the same place ever to confirm a transaction, so this is very different from dividing a single key. It would take some time for common sense to form around this concept though.
Even if this eliminates most of theft (it can't eliminate all of it) speculation remains a problem. You could add scams, worker exploitation, corporatism, environmental disregard or whatever you don't like about the economy here. Bitcoin won't fix them, sorry.
However, at least to me, it sounds like claiming that eliminating slavery won't fix hunger. Well, who could disagree with that?
I think you're making the unfounded assumption that extremists like the Taliban can be reasoned with.
Your parent's comment doesn't require that property. Even if you are dealing with irrational animals, what you know about how they function will still help you solve problems exactly the same way if it were otherwise.
Making up random facts won't help your cause. Either you'd be fooling yourself to believe that some action is helping your cause, or someone else would be doing it for you. Then you'd be the one who's irrational, no?
Also, are you making the unfounded assumption that "extremists" like the Taliban can't be reasoned with? You like believing they are irrational, don't you? Because your normal is the rational one?
Look, being enemies with others because you are supporting different norms is perfectly understandable. You don't have to make it holier than it is. Want to destroy them? Fine. The religious narration is unnecessary.
Hey, it's "belittle people you don't know, whom are your enemies according to what somebody you don't know told you" day again?
If so, FUCK YOU, INFIDEL!!! :D
This is so much fun!!!1! Let's continue doing this for a few more millennia!
I have this idea that these stem cells would still have better genetic material.
I did it for my first kid but not the second one. Paid around 2000 EUR for 20 years of preservation. They split the harvested stem cells and sent them to vaults in different countries to be frozen. However, they kept it in a shelf for three days after birth and then sent it through DHL, so I'm not quite sure how successful they were in harvesting them.
They usually advertise it as a potential cure for early leukemia (stem cells harvested this way are too few to be helpful if the patient is not a baby), but my rationale was that since their genetic material is almost perfect, they would be better suited to develop in vitro organs and such, than older cells. So, I regret that I didn't do it for my daughter as well.
Use free software, don't support them by "seeing ads", support them with direct donations.