However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.
Well you can. For example if copyright is replaced with better government regulation which ensures money for artists without the unneeded and artificial limitation of sharing/copying.
Trust it to an exchange and you're basically no better off than trusting real money to a bank -- worse off, in fact, because the lack of regulations means that if the exchange takes your money and runs you're SOL, while if a bank takes your money and runs it will be reimbursed (up to a limit) courtesy of the FDIC. Keep it in an offline wallet and you can be sure that no banker can abscond with it, but now your life's savings are tied to a single, stealable object.
That's true... for now. I think it would be beneficial for bitcoin if deposit insurance in bitcoin banks was mandatory and that it will happen sooner or later if/when bitcoin gets more recognition. Also the way bitcoin works could be seen as advantage over the traditional money transfers (credit cards/wire transfers) where transaction could take months to irreversibly settle.
Also note that if you decide to safeguard your bitcoins yourself you are better off then with real cash/gold. You need to keep your private key and there are many m:n encryption schemes where you divide your key to N pieces and need at least M of them to assemble it back. Those pieces can then be distributed geographically and i think that the level of safety would be good enough. (Assembling the keys to withdraw from such wallet would be quite inconvenient but you could deposit at any time... good for long-term savings).
In the end, it's all about options and i think that bitcoin gives you more of them.
Given how easily it would be to get away with the theft of anonymous cryptocurrency, I am surprised there aren't far more 'hacks' where exchanges rob all they can from their customers then close up shop.
The answer is easy - both of our presumptions are wrong. Bitcoin is not annonymous (it's mostly pseudoannonymous, like credit cards) and it is not easy to get away with exchange robbery - it's crime and the users/law enforcment would be after you.
The reporter probably doesn't understand what's going on at all.
1) the leaked data contains not only the mt.gox DB dump (which seems to be legit) but also the TibanneBackOffice.exe binary which is actualy malware which steals bitcoin wallets. So i wouldn't trust the hackers at all, they are scammers. See http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoi... for more details. 2) The article/the hackers claim that the mt.gox database dump shows that mt.gox should be in control of over 900k bitcoins and that it is an evidence that mt.gox is lying. Well it is evidence that the article/hackers don't understand anything. From the start, mt.gox is saying that because of a transaction malevability bug, their ballances in DB and their balances on their actual accounts were ouf of sync. This is the reason they didn't notice sooner. Their DB was showing everything was ok but in reality, their money was silently siphoned out of their accounts. 3) Karpeles (mt.gox owner) is probably staing silent because his lawayers told him so. Nothing unusual here.
i would rather see platinum, gold, palladium and silver made in to coins and used as currency, at least the government can not counterfeit it like they do with the USD (QE infinity)
The government also can't counterfeit or print bitcoin, that is one if its main purpose. It's advantage over metal coins is obvious: it can be sent anywhere in the world via internet.
Not to mention that while national currencies can be manipulated to affect the economy, Bitcoin floats wherever the masses bid it up/down to. It has all of the instability with none of the control mechanisms and no underlying value. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. It's really a disaster of a currency in any financial sense. The only people touting it seem to be ideologues and get-rich-quick types.
Maybe the pople touting it understand what you obviously don't: bitcoin is much more then currency. Even if it fails as currency, it can be store of value, payment network or some other service which uses proof of work concept.
So there's the difference between bitcoin and national fiat currencies: national fiat currencies have as their commodity the mutual defense of the nation, which in turn makes for more reliable business, and thus profits.
With bitcoin, the valuable commodity is... finding a greater fool. In other words, bitcoin is entirely bubble.
In case of bitcoin, the valuable comodity is it's properties. You are fool if you think that national fiat curencies will last forever. I encourage you to find the mean life-span of past curencies various nations used.
by all reports that is what happened. Mt god had a fatal flaw in their version of the bit coin processing software. A flaw which could be used to duplicate and then steal bit coins.
No bitcoins were duplicated. The flaw was that customer withdrew bitcoins, then contacted mt.gox support and claimed that the transaction didn't go through and mt.gox sent him another bitcoins because their transaction tracking was flawed.
So a currency that is supposed to untraceable and outside government control, is safeguarded by the same law it is claiming to be outside the control off.
Bitcoin is not supposed to be untracable, that is a myth, see blockchain. Every transaction can be traced to unique bitcoin address.
Also bitcoin is not outside of all govrrnment control. Nothing is. Bitcoin has no central authority which could print new bitcoins but that doesn't mean is somehow stands outside of existing laws.
Fact is, I'd have had much more respect if he'd done his play to cameras, and then just followed through the legal system properly. We would have all kept an eye on it to make sure suspicious things didn't happen, and at no point would you have broken the law.
Suspicious things already did happen. Interpol invovlemnt in this kind of charges is unheard of. The constant monitoring of his residence by several UK policemens is also unheard of. The whole sequence of events after the "sexual assault" case his highly suspicious (he was questioned, than he was released and told he can travel off the country, after he did it, suddenly, both of the "victims" changed their minds and he is wanted for another questioning again). All of this makes me believe that this is indeed political case and mr. Assange is right to be afraid to travel to sweeden.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
In the pirate bay case history has shown us that sweden and it's authorities easily succumb to the pressure from U.S. I think that Assange's fear of return to the sweeden is very well justified.
...that there's only a finite number of stars in the observable universe, so eventually they'll exhaustively find the oldest one of the lot, provided they can see it, and accurately verify its age, and tick off all the other candidates so as to ensure they have the correct answer. Then one has to ask what real-world survival problem will ever be aided by such research?
Studying old stars will help us understand how our universe began. We will learn about the fundamental forces in nature, how the big bang happend, what is the relation between gravity and quantum mechanics. If we understand that, the posibillities are endless - warping spacetime, FTL travel, unlimited energy sources etc. That could solve a lots of real-world survival problems we have today, certainly more than funds spent on wars or propaganda.
In a few years we'll look back at this and laugh at the bitcoin pyramid players as if they were methheads. In the meantime it's a obvious scam baited for geek. We've become mainstream enough to attract predators.
Six years ago, when bitcoin started, slashdot haters were "predicting" that this "scam" will collapse in months. Now it should last few years, that is improvement! In few years maybe you will even realize your error and admit that bitcoin is indeed revolutionary technology!
But how can the black hole's mass go down when particles are being added to it?
Pair of virtual particles is created on the event horizon of black hole. One particles falls into the black hole, other escapes it. Total energy of the virtual pair must be conserved. The particle that escapes the black hole has positive energy, so the other particle must have equal but negative energy. When negative energy is added to the blackhole, it loses some mass because energy = mass.
He used the money he made to arrange a murder. How is that at all defensible?
Easily. Someone extorted him and users of his site even if he caused no harm to anyone. Government refused to help him. If he ignored the threat, he and his users would end up in jail. Under those circumestances, killing the extorter is perfectly sensible defense. The main problem is of course the fact that selling drugs is illegal.
That is future "glassholes" are working to bring and it is freaking nightmare.
You are shooting the messanger. The progress in our technologies will bring the lack of privacy you describe regardless of google or any other group. Our only option is to deal with it. First step would be to abolish stupid laws which force us to do many things in secret like criminalisation of drug consumption and production.
No, the lesson from this story is that copyright is unsustainable with our emerging technologies which will enable us to record everything without anyone noticing.
The point is, there are no BUYERS. It will not happen. No one is going to pay $20k of REAL money for bitcoins.
I don't know WTF are you talking about but converting bitcoins to 20k USD is non-issue on most existing exchanges like coinbase, bitstamp, mtgox or btc-e. Just go and see their daily trade volume.
Slashdot Mirror
However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.
Well you can. For example if copyright is replaced with better government regulation which ensures money for artists without the unneeded and artificial limitation of sharing/copying.
Trust it to an exchange and you're basically no better off than trusting real money to a bank -- worse off, in fact, because the lack of regulations means that if the exchange takes your money and runs you're SOL, while if a bank takes your money and runs it will be reimbursed (up to a limit) courtesy of the FDIC. Keep it in an offline wallet and you can be sure that no banker can abscond with it, but now your life's savings are tied to a single, stealable object.
That's true... for now. I think it would be beneficial for bitcoin if deposit insurance in bitcoin banks was mandatory and that it will happen sooner or later if/when bitcoin gets more recognition. Also the way bitcoin works could be seen as advantage over the traditional money transfers (credit cards/wire transfers) where transaction could take months to irreversibly settle.
Also note that if you decide to safeguard your bitcoins yourself you are better off then with real cash/gold. You need to keep your private key and there are many m:n encryption schemes where you divide your key to N pieces and need at least M of them to assemble it back. Those pieces can then be distributed geographically and i think that the level of safety would be good enough. (Assembling the keys to withdraw from such wallet would be quite inconvenient but you could deposit at any time... good for long-term savings).
In the end, it's all about options and i think that bitcoin gives you more of them.
Sorry english is not my primary language and the inability to edit slashdot posts afterwards doesn't help either.
Given how easily it would be to get away with the theft of anonymous cryptocurrency, I am surprised there aren't far more 'hacks' where exchanges rob all they can from their customers then close up shop.
The answer is easy - both of our presumptions are wrong. Bitcoin is not annonymous (it's mostly pseudoannonymous, like credit cards) and it is not easy to get away with exchange robbery - it's crime and the users/law enforcment would be after you.
The reporter probably doesn't understand what's going on at all.
1) the leaked data contains not only the mt.gox DB dump (which seems to be legit) but also the TibanneBackOffice.exe binary which is actualy malware which steals bitcoin wallets. So i wouldn't trust the hackers at all, they are scammers. See http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoi... for more details.
2) The article/the hackers claim that the mt.gox database dump shows that mt.gox should be in control of over 900k bitcoins and that it is an evidence that mt.gox is lying. Well it is evidence that the article/hackers don't understand anything. From the start, mt.gox is saying that because of a transaction malevability bug, their ballances in DB and their balances on their actual accounts were ouf of sync. This is the reason they didn't notice sooner. Their DB was showing everything was ok but in reality, their money was silently siphoned out of their accounts.
3) Karpeles (mt.gox owner) is probably staing silent because his lawayers told him so. Nothing unusual here.
Do you store your wealth in Beanie Babies, or use them as a means of payment?
No, because unlike bitcoin, they are not digital, cannot be sent over internet, are not decentralized and can be easily faked.
You talk about "store of value" and "payment network", but that's exactly what a currency is
Oh realy? So paypal is currency? gold, land or houses are currency? I don't think so.
i would rather see platinum, gold, palladium and silver made in to coins and used as currency, at least the government can not counterfeit it like they do with the USD (QE infinity)
The government also can't counterfeit or print bitcoin, that is one if its main purpose. It's advantage over metal coins is obvious: it can be sent anywhere in the world via internet.
Not to mention that while national currencies can be manipulated to affect the economy, Bitcoin floats wherever the masses bid it up/down to. It has all of the instability with none of the control mechanisms and no underlying value. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. It's really a disaster of a currency in any financial sense. The only people touting it seem to be ideologues and get-rich-quick types.
Maybe the pople touting it understand what you obviously don't: bitcoin is much more then currency. Even if it fails as currency, it can be store of value, payment network or some other service which uses proof of work concept.
So there's the difference between bitcoin and national fiat currencies: national fiat currencies have as their commodity the mutual defense of the nation, which in turn makes for more reliable business, and thus profits.
With bitcoin, the valuable commodity is... finding a greater fool. In other words, bitcoin is entirely bubble.
In case of bitcoin, the valuable comodity is it's properties. You are fool if you think that national fiat curencies will last forever. I encourage you to find the mean life-span of past curencies various nations used.
that I ever trusted Bitcoin in the first place. I didn't.
I wonder what's there to trust? Bitcoin is not religion, it's open protocol with open-source implementation. It's like asking if i trust math.
by all reports that is what happened. Mt god had a fatal flaw in their version of the bit coin processing software. A flaw which could be used to duplicate and then steal bit coins.
No bitcoins were duplicated. The flaw was that customer withdrew bitcoins, then contacted mt.gox support and claimed that the transaction didn't go through and mt.gox sent him another bitcoins because their transaction tracking was flawed.
So a currency that is supposed to untraceable and outside government control, is safeguarded by the same law it is claiming to be outside the control off.
Bitcoin is not supposed to be untracable, that is a myth, see blockchain. Every transaction can be traced to unique bitcoin address.
Also bitcoin is not outside of all govrrnment control. Nothing is. Bitcoin has no central authority which could print new bitcoins but that doesn't mean is somehow stands outside of existing laws.
However, if it isn't "real" currency, thefts and/or fraud will not be investigated by law enforcement agencies.
Why not? In your country, law enforcments only investigates currency theft? If i steal diamonds from you i'll be ok?
Fact is, I'd have had much more respect if he'd done his play to cameras, and then just followed through the legal system properly. We would have all kept an eye on it to make sure suspicious things didn't happen, and at no point would you have broken the law.
Suspicious things already did happen. Interpol invovlemnt in this kind of charges is unheard of. The constant monitoring of his residence by several UK policemens is also unheard of. The whole sequence of events after the "sexual assault" case his highly suspicious (he was questioned, than he was released and told he can travel off the country, after he did it, suddenly, both of the "victims" changed their minds and he is wanted for another questioning again). All of this makes me believe that this is indeed political case and mr. Assange is right to be afraid to travel to sweeden.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
In the pirate bay case history has shown us that sweden and it's authorities easily succumb to the pressure from U.S. I think that Assange's fear of return to the sweeden is very well justified.
This is indeed a special case.
No
It isn't.
Yes, it is. Or do you know about any other case where interpol issued international 'red notice' over such trivial/weak accusations?
...that there's only a finite number of stars in the observable universe, so eventually they'll exhaustively find the oldest one of the lot, provided they can see it, and accurately verify its age, and tick off all the other candidates so as to ensure they have the correct answer. Then one has to ask what real-world survival problem will ever be aided by such research?
Studying old stars will help us understand how our universe began. We will learn about the fundamental forces in nature, how the big bang happend, what is the relation between gravity and quantum mechanics. If we understand that, the posibillities are endless - warping spacetime, FTL travel, unlimited energy sources etc. That could solve a lots of real-world survival problems we have today, certainly more than funds spent on wars or propaganda.
If installed VLC is the reason for the denial, i'd just uninstall VLC before sending the laptop for warranty repair.
In a few years we'll look back at this and laugh at the bitcoin pyramid players as if they were methheads. In the meantime it's a obvious scam baited for geek. We've become mainstream enough to attract predators.
Six years ago, when bitcoin started, slashdot haters were "predicting" that this "scam" will collapse in months. Now it should last few years, that is improvement! In few years maybe you will even realize your error and admit that bitcoin is indeed revolutionary technology!
But how can the black hole's mass go down when particles are being added to it?
Pair of virtual particles is created on the event horizon of black hole. One particles falls into the black hole, other escapes it. Total energy of the virtual pair must be conserved. The particle that escapes the black hole has positive energy, so the other particle must have equal but negative energy. When negative energy is added to the blackhole, it loses some mass because energy = mass.
He used the money he made to arrange a murder. How is that at all defensible?
Easily. Someone extorted him and users of his site even if he caused no harm to anyone. Government refused to help him. If he ignored the threat, he and his users would end up in jail. Under those circumestances, killing the extorter is perfectly sensible defense. The main problem is of course the fact that selling drugs is illegal.
That is future "glassholes" are working to bring and it is freaking nightmare.
You are shooting the messanger. The progress in our technologies will bring the lack of privacy you describe regardless of google or any other group.
Our only option is to deal with it. First step would be to abolish stupid laws which force us to do many things in secret like criminalisation of drug consumption and production.
Lesson from this story...don't be a glass hole!
No, the lesson from this story is that copyright is unsustainable with our emerging technologies which will enable us to record everything without anyone noticing.
The point is, there are no BUYERS. It will not happen. No one is going to pay $20k of REAL money for bitcoins.
I don't know WTF are you talking about but converting bitcoins to 20k USD is non-issue on most existing exchanges like coinbase, bitstamp, mtgox or btc-e. Just go and see their daily trade volume.
This assumes that 20,000$ worth of bitcoins can be converted to real money.
This assumption is correct.