First off, aircraft don't follow each other in the sky at distances of around 3 airplane-lengths apart. They also aren't confined to just two dimensions. Outside of ATC control zones, they don't have speed limits. Pilots in aircraft with HUDs are highly-trained (think very-high-end commercial jets, fighter jets, etc.) The HUD is specifically built and engineered to assist the pilot, and nothing else. Finally, unless it's a fighter jet, the HUD doesn't swallow the entire pilot's field-of-view. HUD gear is certified by the FAA before use on a given model/type of aircraft.
Notice that Google Glass on some douchebag's face while driving his/her car is the polar fucking opposite of all these things.:/
Google glass doesn't swallow you entire field of view either. All the other things are also true for GPS navigation on smartphone, are you saying those should be banned too while driving?
Vehicle huds do not display emails, text messages, etc that Glass does.
I'm pretty sure that google glass is perfectly capable of displaying information similar to car HUD without distracting you with e-mails, facebook and youtube videos.
and a dash mounted tablet is legal as long as you keep it in car mode, and don't get caught watching youtube on it while driving. google glass is clearly a huge distraction while driving. if talking on a cellphone is illegal, then wearing google glass should also be illegal.
Why should be tablet in car mode allowed but google glass in car mode banned?
Yeah, just ignore the people he tried to have murdered and all.
He tried to murder a scumbag who tried to blackmail him and only because he didn't have any legal recourse. If the blackmailer reported Ross and his users to the authorities the damage to their personal life would be overhelming. Again, it's fault of the law enforcement which rages war on innocent drug users and don't protect its citizens agains serious crimes like blackmailing.
I just love it when bitcoin posts show up on Slashdot. The circle-jerk of anti-bitcoin butthurt makes me so happy. It's quieting down, though. We've got a major retailer accepting bitcoin, now.
Exactly, i'm also pretty amused by the heavily upvoted anti-bitcoin bullshit in every slashdot bitcoin story. It has been 5 years now? I wonder how long would bitcon need to stay or how widespread it would need to become for slashdot to accept it. Maybe the readers here are just too old and conservative and it will never happen, like most old people will never use internet or smartphones or online-banking. I guess when you are of some age you are too old to learn and endorse new technologies.
There's no reason that a single bitcoin should be worth more than $1, much less close to $1,000. It's all based on speculators, rather than any inherent value to bitcoins.
How did you come to the $1 figure? Why not 0.01$ or 1000$? Can you please elaborate?
ordering fake ids (another trap)... he was not trying to stay hidden at all.
Why did he order fake IDs if he wasn't trying to stay hidden at all? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty to run hidden service. It's asymetric war, the operator must do everythink correctly, the attacker needs to find only single mistake.
Ross is not an idiot, he is a hero who tried to run usefull service which could save many lives by ensuring some quality of the goods the shop was selling (thanks to user ratings). The idiots are the politicians who run war on drugs and the voters who support them. I feel sorry for his live ruined by the government.
Very well said. BitCoins resemble company scrip more than any other medium of exchange.
You missed one of the most important feature of Bitcoin - no central authority which can issue new units at will. Also the correct way to write the word is Bitcoin, no BitCoin.
People who are getting all Drunk on bitcoin really need to look at what happens when private industry is allowed to control currency and payment systems. Here's a start: wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip Make no mistake, bitcoin is not nearly as "decentralized" as people would like you to think, and it's not nearly as free from manipulation as is claimed. The difference is that it's the privately owned Exchanges which get to make the rules, as opposed to governments.
What do you mean by that? Scrip has central authority which controls how is it issued, bitcoin has no such think. What rules did the exchanges make? I thought all the rules are given by the bitcoin protocol described in the original whitepaper: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. No private industry controls bitcoin.
It was BTC's "dirty little secret" that as long as you could buy drugs with it, it had value. Losing SR caused panic on the BTC market for exactly that reason.
Bitcoin lost no value because of SilkRoad closure, look at the value of bitcoin when silkroad closed (october 2013, cca 250 USD/BTC) and look at the value now (cca 950 USD/BTC). I wouldn't call it loss. There wasn't even any dramatic drop right after the news broke in october, just look at the graph at bitcoinity.
If you think about the primary advantage of bitcoin, making anonymous electronic transactions that are much harder to trace
Except anonymity is not one of bitcoin designed features, so it's hardly it's primary advantage. All the transactions are public and it's very hard to keep your bitcoin address not tied to your real-live identity in the long run.
The primary advantage of bitcoin is the lack of central authority which would devalue the currency by printing new units at will.
Indeed. The only use for Bitcoin (other than gambling) is immediate money transfers that do not need to be anonymous. But I can do those with my credit card already, and at far lower risk.
Can you send me money with your credit-card to my european bank account? What about countries in africa, south america, middle/far-east etc.?
1) Enough already. I hear so much hype about it, it's almost as bad as the never-ending election coverage I have to suffer through for 18 months before the elections. I know about it, am not interested, and would rather not see reminders about it every-fucking time I blink.
Just set-up blacklist on "bitcoin" tag in your preferences and you want be bothered anymore.
2) It over-promises and under-delivers (at least as reported on in every story I read, and implemented in the real world). A world changing innovation that will revolutionize currency and break our dependence on evil national governments and usher in a new era.... except that it won't because it's so fundamentally broken on so many levels.
Can you quote some real promises from bitcoin.org website or from the original http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf whitepaper which are not true? What you state in your post is your wrong perception of bitcoin which you maybe gained from slashdot discusions.
3) I would love to see a viable cryptocurrency take off and break or loosen the hold that evil leviathan government has over the world today. The reality of Bitcoin, however, is that it is a bubble/ponzi scheme/lottery that enriches the lucky few early adopters at the expense of public trust in cryptocurrency, and once the Bitcoin bubble has come and gone, the odds of a fair, viable cryptocurrency being widely accepted by the public go way down. The fact that such a badly broken system is what's going to be equated with all cryptocurrency by the public and the media shatters any hopes I have of actually seeing a meaningful adoption of purely digital, non-government backed currency transactions for the foreseeable future.
Bitcoin is not ponzi scheme. Read up the definition of ponzi on wiki. It's maybe volatile but not bubble (people has been talking about bubble several times in the short history of bitcoin, how long would bitcoin need to survive to be considered non-buble?). It's not lottery either, you are probably talking about mining, which is based on luck but the mechanism is open and documented. it indeed enriches early adopters. that's feature of every sucessfull project. What alternative, which would enrich late adopters or everyone equaly, do you propose?
Please - please, stop accepting every submission that has the word Bitcoin in it.
Please - please ignore the parent who is not tech-savy enough to blacklist bitcoin stories from his slashdot feed and continue to accept submissions about this revolutionary technology.
That's good question and i don't know the answer. Maybe the space-time would be more bent on the edges resulting in some kind of anomally in our 3d space, maybe the edges would be only smoothly bent and the scale would be so large that we wouldn't notice anything.
The main problem is that we don't know the size of the whole universe and we don't know where exactly we are in it.
You are right that physicists determined that our universe is either 100% flat or very slightly positively bent. But again, it's hard to tell anything aboud global geometry of the universe from our local point where we see only so much.
If the universe is expanding, does that actually mean that the universe has a border? Or does it mean that the universe is infinite, but its coordinate system (so to speak) is expanding?
Most astrophysics think that universe has no border like a surface of the sphere has no border. Space-time of the universe is similar but has one more dimension so imagine it like some kind of inflating hypersphere. The exact geometry is not clear so it's probably not hypersphere but something more fancy, perhaps dodecahedron
I think it's very short-sighted to believe bitcoin would ever be used by itself as a form of digital currency. It's worth a high enough value already (and continues to trend upwards) that it's very inconvenient to use to pay for smaller items or more inexpensive services. (Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.)
That issue is already being solved by lots of merchants/wallets and other services switching to milibitcoins denomination by default.
Another "whole point" of bitcoin? I wonder how many whole points bitcoin has. I regulary read on slashdot that the whole point of bitcoin is that it cannot be regulated, that it is currency, that it is annonymous/untracable, that it can be used to avoid taxes... all of this is of course false (it is not unregulated, it is not annonymous and untracable) . Bitcoin has no single purpose, it could be currency (but the volatility prevent this at the moment), or long term store of value (like gold), or payment network or many other things. Bitcoin can be all of that or some of that. Thinking that bitcoin has just single purpose is silly.
The status of copyright laws anywhere is ridiculous. Any law firm can send out threatening letters, literally saying "pay us X currency units or we will take you to court". It's like the Mob.
So with the current market, why would someone spend bitcoins? They can wait a day and spend less coins for the same goods, or wait two days and possibly spend even less.
Why did you bought the computer you wrote this on? You could wait a day...
All currencies are volatile to some extent, but this thing has no fundamentals to back it up.
Bitcoin has sound mathematical and cryptographic backing. I suggest you read the original bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto if you want to learn about bitcoin fundamentals.
The police pulled a guy over, smelled pot, searched his car, and found a hidden compartment. Not necessarily an open and shut case, but not "absurd" like some describe it.
It would be absurd even if they found weed in his car, because the law which criminalizes the use, production and distribution of soft drugs is absurd!
I see the complaint about Bitcoin transaction history all the time in these stories. From what I can gather, there are two downsides: theoretical loss of anonymity and data storage.
So, is it impossible for Bitcoin to eventually support some form of transaction truncation, where a chunk of transactions are authenticated and then replaced with a detail-losing marker?
At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.
The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, aircraft don't follow each other in the sky at distances of around 3 airplane-lengths apart. They also aren't confined to just two dimensions. Outside of ATC control zones, they don't have speed limits. Pilots in aircraft with HUDs are highly-trained (think very-high-end commercial jets, fighter jets, etc.) The HUD is specifically built and engineered to assist the pilot, and nothing else. Finally, unless it's a fighter jet, the HUD doesn't swallow the entire pilot's field-of-view. HUD gear is certified by the FAA before use on a given model/type of aircraft.
Notice that Google Glass on some douchebag's face while driving his/her car is the polar fucking opposite of all these things. :/
Google glass doesn't swallow you entire field of view either.
All the other things are also true for GPS navigation on smartphone, are you saying those should be banned too while driving?
Vehicle huds do not display emails, text messages, etc that Glass does.
I'm pretty sure that google glass is perfectly capable of displaying information similar to car HUD without distracting you with e-mails, facebook and youtube videos.
and a dash mounted tablet is legal as long as you keep it in car mode, and don't get caught watching youtube on it while driving. google glass is clearly a huge distraction while driving. if talking on a cellphone is illegal, then wearing google glass should also be illegal.
Why should be tablet in car mode allowed but google glass in car mode banned?
Yeah, just ignore the people he tried to have murdered and all.
He tried to murder a scumbag who tried to blackmail him and only because he didn't have any legal recourse. If the blackmailer reported Ross and his users to the authorities the damage to their personal life would be overhelming. Again, it's fault of the law enforcement which rages war on innocent drug users and don't protect its citizens agains serious crimes like blackmailing.
I just love it when bitcoin posts show up on Slashdot. The circle-jerk of anti-bitcoin butthurt makes me so happy. It's quieting down, though. We've got a major retailer accepting bitcoin, now.
Exactly, i'm also pretty amused by the heavily upvoted anti-bitcoin bullshit in every slashdot bitcoin story. It has been 5 years now? I wonder how long would bitcon need to stay or how widespread it would need to become for slashdot to accept it. Maybe the readers here are just too old and conservative and it will never happen, like most old people will never use internet or smartphones or online-banking. I guess when you are of some age you are too old to learn and endorse new technologies.
There's no reason that a single bitcoin should be worth more than $1, much less close to $1,000. It's all based on speculators, rather than any inherent value to bitcoins.
How did you come to the $1 figure? Why not 0.01$ or 1000$? Can you please elaborate?
ordering fake ids (another trap)... he was not trying to stay hidden at all.
Why did he order fake IDs if he wasn't trying to stay hidden at all? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty to run hidden service. It's asymetric war, the operator must do everythink correctly, the attacker needs to find only single mistake.
Ross is not an idiot, he is a hero who tried to run usefull service which could save many lives by ensuring some quality of the goods the shop was selling (thanks to user ratings). The idiots are the politicians who run war on drugs and the voters who support them. I feel sorry for his live ruined by the government.
Very well said. BitCoins resemble company scrip more than any other medium of exchange.
You missed one of the most important feature of Bitcoin - no central authority which can issue new units at will. Also the correct way to write the word is Bitcoin, no BitCoin.
They don't have the option in the US (or most countries) to pay their workers in bitcoin
This is obviously lie. One counterexample: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/03/kentucky-town-from-colbert-report-to-pay-police-chief-in-bitcoin/
People who are getting all Drunk on bitcoin really need to look at what happens when private industry is allowed to control currency and payment systems.
Here's a start: wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
Make no mistake, bitcoin is not nearly as "decentralized" as people would like you to think, and it's not nearly as free from manipulation as is claimed. The difference is that it's the privately owned Exchanges which get to make the rules, as opposed to governments.
What do you mean by that? Scrip has central authority which controls how is it issued, bitcoin has no such think. What rules did the exchanges make? I thought all the rules are given by the bitcoin protocol described in the original whitepaper: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. No private industry controls bitcoin.
It was BTC's "dirty little secret" that as long as you could buy drugs with it, it had value. Losing SR caused panic on the BTC market for exactly that reason.
Bitcoin lost no value because of SilkRoad closure, look at the value of bitcoin when silkroad closed (october 2013, cca 250 USD/BTC) and look at the value now (cca 950 USD/BTC). I wouldn't call it loss. There wasn't even any dramatic drop right after the news broke in october, just look at the graph at bitcoinity.
If you think about the primary advantage of bitcoin, making anonymous electronic transactions that are much harder to trace
Except anonymity is not one of bitcoin designed features, so it's hardly it's primary advantage. All the transactions are public and it's very hard to keep your bitcoin address not tied to your real-live identity in the long run.
The primary advantage of bitcoin is the lack of central authority which would devalue the currency by printing new units at will.
Indeed. The only use for Bitcoin (other than gambling) is immediate money transfers that do not need to be anonymous. But I can do those with my credit card already, and at far lower risk.
Can you send me money with your credit-card to my european bank account? What about countries in africa, south america, middle/far-east etc.?
This is only true if you believe that central banking is inherently harmful/evil, and things like a gold standard are a great idea.
Wrong. Currencies with central authorities and bitcoin-like denectralised cryptocurencies can very well coexist.
1) Enough already. I hear so much hype about it, it's almost as bad as the never-ending election coverage I have to suffer through for 18 months before the elections. I know about it, am not interested, and would rather not see reminders about it every-fucking time I blink.
Just set-up blacklist on "bitcoin" tag in your preferences and you want be bothered anymore.
2) It over-promises and under-delivers (at least as reported on in every story I read, and implemented in the real world). A world changing innovation that will revolutionize currency and break our dependence on evil national governments and usher in a new era.... except that it won't because it's so fundamentally broken on so many levels.
Can you quote some real promises from bitcoin.org website or from the original http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf whitepaper which are not true? What you state in your post is your wrong perception of bitcoin which you maybe gained from slashdot discusions.
3) I would love to see a viable cryptocurrency take off and break or loosen the hold that evil leviathan government has over the world today. The reality of Bitcoin, however, is that it is a bubble/ponzi scheme/lottery that enriches the lucky few early adopters at the expense of public trust in cryptocurrency, and once the Bitcoin bubble has come and gone, the odds of a fair, viable cryptocurrency being widely accepted by the public go way down. The fact that such a badly broken system is what's going to be equated with all cryptocurrency by the public and the media shatters any hopes I have of actually seeing a meaningful adoption of purely digital, non-government backed currency transactions for the foreseeable future.
Bitcoin is not ponzi scheme. Read up the definition of ponzi on wiki. It's maybe volatile but not bubble (people has been talking about bubble several times in the short history of bitcoin, how long would bitcoin need to survive to be considered non-buble?). It's not lottery either, you are probably talking about mining, which is based on luck but the mechanism is open and documented. it indeed enriches early adopters. that's feature of every sucessfull project. What alternative, which would enrich late adopters or everyone equaly, do you propose?
Please - please, stop accepting every submission that has the word Bitcoin in it.
Please - please ignore the parent who is not tech-savy enough to blacklist bitcoin stories from his slashdot feed and continue to accept submissions about this revolutionary technology.
That's good question and i don't know the answer. Maybe the space-time would be more bent on the edges resulting in some kind of anomally in our 3d space, maybe the edges would be only smoothly bent and the scale would be so large that we wouldn't notice anything.
The main problem is that we don't know the size of the whole universe and we don't know where exactly we are in it.
You are right that physicists determined that our universe is either 100% flat or very slightly positively bent. But again, it's hard to tell anything aboud global geometry of the universe from our local point where we see only so much.
If the universe is expanding, does that actually mean that the universe has a border? Or does it mean that the universe is infinite, but its coordinate system (so to speak) is expanding?
Most astrophysics think that universe has no border like a surface of the sphere has no border. Space-time of the universe is similar but has one more dimension so imagine it like some kind of inflating hypersphere. The exact geometry is not clear so it's probably not hypersphere but something more fancy, perhaps dodecahedron
I think it's very short-sighted to believe bitcoin would ever be used by itself as a form of digital currency. It's worth a high enough value already (and continues to trend upwards) that it's very inconvenient to use to pay for smaller items or more inexpensive services. (Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.)
That issue is already being solved by lots of merchants/wallets and other services switching to milibitcoins denomination by default.
That's the whole point of Bitcoin, isn't it?
Another "whole point" of bitcoin? I wonder how many whole points bitcoin has. I regulary read on slashdot that the whole point of bitcoin is that it cannot be regulated, that it is currency, that it is annonymous/untracable, that it can be used to avoid taxes... all of this is of course false (it is not unregulated, it is not annonymous and untracable) . Bitcoin has no single purpose, it could be currency (but the volatility prevent this at the moment), or long term store of value (like gold), or payment network or many other things. Bitcoin can be all of that or some of that. Thinking that bitcoin has just single purpose is silly.
The status of copyright laws anywhere is ridiculous. Any law firm can send out threatening letters, literally saying "pay us X currency units or we will take you to court". It's like the Mob.
There, FTFY
So with the current market, why would someone spend bitcoins? They can wait a day and spend less coins for the same goods, or wait two days and possibly spend even less.
Why did you bought the computer you wrote this on? You could wait a day...
Edit: correct link: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
All currencies are volatile to some extent, but this thing has no fundamentals to back it up.
Bitcoin has sound mathematical and cryptographic backing. I suggest you read the original bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto if you want to learn about bitcoin fundamentals.
The police pulled a guy over, smelled pot, searched his car, and found a hidden compartment. Not necessarily an open and shut case, but not "absurd" like some describe it.
It would be absurd even if they found weed in his car, because the law which criminalizes the use, production and distribution of soft drugs is absurd!
I see the complaint about Bitcoin transaction history all the time in these stories. From what I can gather, there are two downsides: theoretical loss of anonymity and data storage.
So, is it impossible for Bitcoin to eventually support some form of transaction truncation, where a chunk of transactions are authenticated and then replaced with a detail-losing marker?
According to Bitcoin wiki it should be possible:
At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.
The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.