Because it's difficult to understand and difficult to use and most people don't know and don't care about encryption.
Users don't need to understand encryption to use it. It is not dificult to use if implemented correctly by e-mail clients. Users would just write an e-mail like they normaly do, the e-mail client would handle the encryption (send user's public key in outgoing e-mail headers, use recipient public key to encrypt any outgoin e-mail if it is available). Most people care about encyption. How many users do you know which don't care if their e-mails are being read by middle-mans?
Huh? The CPUs are digital circuits. There is no "wear" involved in sending more electrons though them, or running them at higher load.
I'm not talking about CPU but about the whole computer. Higher load means more waste heat produced, higher temperature of cpu/gpu/motherboard and shorter life of capacitors and other components.
I also find it very unlikely that he is right. From the summary:
'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications — meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like — are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact.
That would mean that also strongly encrypted communication is not safe from government and i'm not aware of any evidence that this is true.
On the other hand, if he means that no unencrypted communication is secure from government, than i agree and add: that this was true for some time now and any unencrypted communication is not secure not only from goverment but from all networks nodes which relay your communication. It is safe to assume that unencrypted communication over the internet could be sniffed and read by anyone.
Encryption has been available for a long time now. Why it isn't used more often even for common browsing and non-critical applications is beyond me. It's very easy to set-up.
Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
You're assuming the value of the bitcoins generated are equal to the cost of electricity... they might be worth more.
The value of bitcoins generated using stock CPUs us much lower then the cost of electricity. Soon this will be true for bitcoins mined using high-end GPUs. In the near future the only economic way to mine bitcoins would be using specialised hardware - ASICs.
This plan is waste of money and computer equipment (hardware under full load wears much faster then hardware used only occasionaly). Buying bitcoins on exchange and sending them to software author directly would better solution.
I advocate the involved parties all be arrested and charged with relevant computer hacking charges.
Sure, charges should be brought to them, but is it necessary to imprison them for such minor offense? Prison time is not justified in this case. We always need to keep in mind that the sentence should be appropriate to the damages done. Charges and sentences unproportional to the (claimed) damages are not OK and can destroy innocent lifes (think of Aaron Schwarz for example).
How do you provide "poverty is eliminated" when some people don't care to work? By robbing the people who do work, of course. So much for Justice, rule of law, and respect. Vision: "college... high-quality healthcare is available for everyone". Again, if someone produces $18,000 / year and is going to get $20,000 worth of healthcare, and $20,00 for college, who are you taking that $40,000 from? Someone whom you're not treating with "justice", "respect", etc.
If you think that taxation is theft you are one of the anarchists who call for complete abolishment of government then? Or you think that some taxes are OK? If yes, what is the right amount of taxation and how do you know that OPs political platform would exceed it?
Does that plan, which has been an utter failure anytime anyone has tried anything like that, sound like "Rationality" or "Farsightedness"?
Norway or other scandinavian countries are utter failures according to you? I for one think that USA is much worse than those countries where OPs ideas are already being realised. What's wrong with good education and healthcare available for anyone? First world HDP has grown enourmously in past decades so we can surely afford it. But you probably believe that there is nothing wrong with the world where 99% of wealth belongs to 1% of richest people and the only option for the 99% is to work like slaves for the 1% in order to not starve.
How do you provide "poverty is eliminated" when some people don't care to work? By robbing the people who do work, of course. So much for Justice, rule of law, and respect.
You think that there don't exist people who do care to work but just can't find any work or no one wants to employ them? Or you think those people should be left on the street in our modern society? Are you aware that mob of those hungry unemployed and very unhappy people could one day be knocking on the doors of your house and demand share of your wealth? I think that social welfare is a great way to prevent the situation to escalate to this point. As a bonus, it's also humane.
So it might not be your definition of 'money'. But, it's something that has value and can be used to trade for other currencies, goods, and services. What is it?
Nice point. All this arguing whether bitcoin is money or isn't money, if it is currency or isn't currency seems really pointless to me. It always depends on the definition you use and everyone can use his own definition. In time, natural language evolution will pin one term or other which everyone will agree on.
How is bitcoin corruption? What are the miners doing to corrupt the system? Who are they corrupting exactly? Do you even know what corruption means?
If you didn't expect there to be costs related to tens of thousands of people running resource intensive software
I can assure you that no one inside of bitcoins community thinks that replacement of the current centralised banking system would be free, with no costs in resources. That being said, tha article is wrong in one major aspect: it doesn't take into account increase of efficiency of mining. It computes the energy consumption like all the mining was done on normaln CPUs but that's not true at all. Majority of mining today is done using GPUs and FPGAs which are orders of magnitude more energy efficient then normal CPU. Soon majority of mining would be done on ASICs which are even more efficient then FPGA. So the number in the article is totaly off.
to game a system designed to protect people from responsibility
Please explain how are the miners gaming the system? Also, how is bitcoin designed to protect people from responsibility? I think you have large holes in your understanding of bitcoin protocol and the role miners have in it.
Once a bitcoin is produced, it cannot be redeemed for an equal amount of computer time. In fact, using a bitcoin requires SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the verification chain that makes this electronic currency at all feasible.
I'm pretty sure that it would be no problem to trade 1 BTC for a computing power needed to produce 1 BTC (at the time of the trade).
The mere fact that you even have to ASK such a question means the answer is "Yes."
IMO the very fact that slashdot suggested totaly closed and 3rd party controlled device to be used for safe communication speaks that this website has fallen. There is no news for nerds anymore, no knowledgable operators/moderators. Trully nerdy/inovative/liberating technologies (like bitcoin) are shuned and rejected here based on FUD. The majority of good users have moved elsewhere (reddit for example). Clueless apple fanboys and similar are the only ones left.
- good, what if somebody had a much longer stretch of time to work out the answers before they could even become questions? It's not like those transactions are random.
This will not work. You cannot compute the answers to unknown questions. The questions are composed of all transactions in recent 10 minutes which are basically input and output addresses signed with unknown private keys. In order to successfully employ 51% attack on bitcoin you must be able to ouperform the rest of the network in real time for at least 10 minutes.
It does not matter what happens to WoW gold because it's an irreversible transaction, you cannot turn it back into real gold
I'm sure yuou can turn WoW or diablo 3 gold into real money and back pretty easily, just like bitcoin. So again, are you supposed to pay income taxes when you earn wow gold? Whatever you answer, the same apply to bitcoin.
Can you imagine $1m for a Bitcoin? I could hold your family at gunpoint for one coin, and at worst get a few months in prison. Or just pay some meth head a couple hundred bucks to do it. Meanwhile, you can't prove I stole anything of real value from you - just a file from your computer. You can't insure it like a piece of property, you can't "cancel" it like you could a check, and nobody gives a crap where the BTC ends up because it doesn't count as real currency.
Please what terrible country do you live in and what terrible legal system do you have,where police ignores digital data theft? If someone stole important documents from your computer (for example passwords, private keys, digital certificates and so on), police would just tell "you can't prove it has any value, it was just file, now piss off"? That is quite sad.
there are still significant support staff needed to shuffle the documents around and maintain the servers, hardware cost, bandwidth costs, insurance costs, customer service costs, etc.
ArXiv is great but i wonder how much of these costs are waranted?
Servers maintance, hardware costs, insurance costs could be almost zero if they used p2p plattform like piratebay to distribute the papers.
Generaly Library.nu proved that repository of scientific papers could be made and run pretty cheaply. According to wikipedia, they even made a profit probably on online ads on their website.
Publishing an edited, peer reviewed paper in a journal is much more that making it available on e web site.
There may be some value in editing and peer reviewing the article, but if the research was funded by public money, the results should be always also available for free even in unedited form without peer review. I'm not against research journals charging money for their work, but preventing the original submission from being shared for free under the claim of copyright is in my opinion theft. Public paid for the research, copyright should belong to them (or rather the research and all of it's results should be in public domain from the start).
No. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is the Satoshi, which is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin.
This is true only in current implementations of bitcoin protocol. If needed, future clients can be made which would work with smaller fractions of bitcoin then one satoshi.
bitcoin is the crank's currency. cranks don't do legitimacy
so bitcoin will lose its lustre with those who launched it onto slashdot's front page for the past few years
I wonder how long would bitcoin need to stay around for some people to accept its legitimate reason for existence.
When bitcoin started four years ago, people like you posted almost constantly that it is scam, pyramid, ponzi scheme and will not survive too long.
Now bitcoin is around for years and is stronger then ever. I wonder, if bitcoin would be around in another 10 years and it would trade for $5000 yeach, would you still insist it's crang money? Probably yes, but i hope you can see how this statement is becoming more and more funny in the face of reality.
The thing about the assumption that the state "cannot" control something, is that it is almost always entirely wrong. This discovery is almost always accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Well state seems to have pretty hard time controling bittorrent. Why do you think it will manage to control bitcoin? Sure, it can declare it illegal, so most honest merchants would probably stop using it just because of that. But if anyone is willing to engage in illegal activities, i think it will be difficult for goverment to stop him using bitcoins.
So, if someone used your computer to hack into chinese goverment agency and then, the Chinese would assume you are responsible and sent undercover agent to kill you, you would be OK with it?
In my opinion, no nation has right to kill anyone for cyber attack as you are never sure who is the real attacker. The proper action would be to secure your systems, make counter-hack attempt or try to sue/extradict the culprit, if you think you know who he is.
The bar owner can maybe ban people from wearing this iteration of recording technology in his bar, but what will he do in few years, when invisible camera and augmented reality will be build-in in devices indistinguishable from common glasses, or later build-in directly into our eyes and brains? No one will be able to control what you are recording and archiving then. People should get used to it.
Suppose I buy an ebook. It becomes valuable due to the limited number of copies that were originally made.
This is one of the reasons i'll never suppoort copyright. Artificial scarity and greed. Supporting creators is good think bud limiting distribution to achieve it is nonsense and causes much more harm then good.
Think again about what you would do if you found a person who was not supposed to be there in your server room, copying files and doing who knows what else before you talk about "not remotely criminal."
I would look at the logs, see what did he copy. I would find out, he is copying scientific articles. I would thank him for spreading the knowledge and probably help him.
The prosecutor, from what I can tell, did nothing wrong.
Charging someone with 30 years in prison for copying scientific articles (note that he never released the copies, so no big damage was done) is not wrong? The charges were totaly out of proportions.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's difficult to understand and difficult to use and most people don't know and don't care about encryption.
Users don't need to understand encryption to use it.
It is not dificult to use if implemented correctly by e-mail clients. Users would just write an e-mail like they normaly do, the e-mail client would handle the encryption (send user's public key in outgoing e-mail headers, use recipient public key to encrypt any outgoin e-mail if it is available).
Most people care about encyption. How many users do you know which don't care if their e-mails are being read by middle-mans?
Huh? The CPUs are digital circuits. There is no "wear" involved in sending more electrons though them, or running them at higher load.
I'm not talking about CPU but about the whole computer. Higher load means more waste heat produced, higher temperature of cpu/gpu/motherboard and shorter life of capacitors and other components.
He's not right.
I also find it very unlikely that he is right. From the summary:
'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications — meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like — are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact.
That would mean that also strongly encrypted communication is not safe from government and i'm not aware of any evidence that this is true.
On the other hand, if he means that no unencrypted communication is secure from government, than i agree and add: that this was true for some time now and any unencrypted communication is not secure not only from goverment but from all networks nodes which relay your communication. It is safe to assume that unencrypted communication over the internet could be sniffed and read by anyone.
Encryption has been available for a long time now. Why it isn't used more often even for common browsing and non-critical applications is beyond me. It's very easy to set-up.
Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
You're assuming the value of the bitcoins generated are equal to the cost of electricity... they might be worth more.
The value of bitcoins generated using stock CPUs us much lower then the cost of electricity. Soon this will be true for bitcoins mined using high-end GPUs. In the near future the only economic way to mine bitcoins would be using specialised hardware - ASICs.
This plan is waste of money and computer equipment (hardware under full load wears much faster then hardware used only occasionaly). Buying bitcoins on exchange and sending them to software author directly would better solution.
I advocate the involved parties all be arrested and charged with relevant computer hacking charges.
Sure, charges should be brought to them, but is it necessary to imprison them for such minor offense? Prison time is not justified in this case. We always need to keep in mind that the sentence should be appropriate to the damages done. Charges and sentences unproportional to the (claimed) damages are not OK and can destroy innocent lifes (think of Aaron Schwarz for example).
Dollars, euros and other fiat currency are just as vulnerable.
Bullshit! Currencies backed by the economic activity of entire 1st-world nations are nowhere near as vulnerable.
Tell that to people who lost their EUROs in their Cyprus accounts.
How do you provide "poverty is eliminated" when some people don't care to work? By robbing the people who do work, of course. So much for Justice, rule of law, and respect. ... high-quality healthcare is available for everyone". Again, if someone produces $18,000 / year and is going to get $20,000 worth of healthcare, and $20,00 for college, who are you taking that $40,000 from? Someone whom you're not treating with "justice", "respect", etc.
Vision: "college
If you think that taxation is theft you are one of the anarchists who call for complete abolishment of government then? Or you think that some taxes are OK? If yes, what is the right amount of taxation and how do you know that OPs political platform would exceed it?
Does that plan, which has been an utter failure anytime anyone has tried anything like that, sound like "Rationality" or "Farsightedness"?
Norway or other scandinavian countries are utter failures according to you? I for one think that USA is much worse than those countries where OPs ideas are already being realised. What's wrong with good education and healthcare available for anyone? First world HDP has grown enourmously in past decades so we can surely afford it. But you probably believe that there is nothing wrong with the world where 99% of wealth belongs to 1% of richest people and the only option for the 99% is to work like slaves for the 1% in order to not starve.
How do you provide "poverty is eliminated" when some people don't care to work? By robbing the people who do work, of course. So much for Justice, rule of law, and respect.
You think that there don't exist people who do care to work but just can't find any work or no one wants to employ them? Or you think those people should be left on the street in our modern society? Are you aware that mob of those hungry unemployed and very unhappy people could one day be knocking on the doors of your house and demand share of your wealth? I think that social welfare is a great way to prevent the situation to escalate to this point. As a bonus, it's also humane.
So it might not be your definition of 'money'. But, it's something that has value and can be used to trade for other currencies, goods, and services. What is it?
Nice point. All this arguing whether bitcoin is money or isn't money, if it is currency or isn't currency seems really pointless to me. It always depends on the definition you use and everyone can use his own definition. In time, natural language evolution will pin one term or other which everyone will agree on.
This is crowd sourced corruption, nothing more.
How is bitcoin corruption? What are the miners doing to corrupt the system? Who are they corrupting exactly? Do you even know what corruption means?
If you didn't expect there to be costs related to tens of thousands of people running resource intensive software
I can assure you that no one inside of bitcoins community thinks that replacement of the current centralised banking system would be free, with no costs in resources. That being said, tha article is wrong in one major aspect: it doesn't take into account increase of efficiency of mining. It computes the energy consumption like all the mining was done on normaln CPUs but that's not true at all. Majority of mining today is done using GPUs and FPGAs which are orders of magnitude more energy efficient then normal CPU. Soon majority of mining would be done on ASICs which are even more efficient then FPGA. So the number in the article is totaly off.
to game a system designed to protect people from responsibility
Please explain how are the miners gaming the system? Also, how is bitcoin designed to protect people from responsibility? I think you have large holes in your understanding of bitcoin protocol and the role miners have in it.
how can you predict the average of 100 dice rolls, when you can't even predict what the next dice roll will give?
Quite easily. In 100 six-sided dice rolls, there would be on average 16.6 ones, 16.6 twos, 16.6 threes, 16.6 fours, 16.6 fives and 16.6 sixs.
Actually the more dice rolls you allow me to perform the more accurate my prediction about the result would be. It's called statistics.
Once a bitcoin is produced, it cannot be redeemed for an equal amount of computer time. In fact, using a bitcoin requires SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the verification chain that makes this electronic currency at all feasible.
I'm pretty sure that it would be no problem to trade 1 BTC for a computing power needed to produce 1 BTC (at the time of the trade).
The mere fact that you even have to ASK such a question means the answer is "Yes."
IMO the very fact that slashdot suggested totaly closed and 3rd party controlled device to be used for safe communication speaks that this website has fallen. There is no news for nerds anymore, no knowledgable operators/moderators. Trully nerdy/inovative/liberating technologies (like bitcoin) are shuned and rejected here based on FUD. The majority of good users have moved elsewhere (reddit for example). Clueless apple fanboys and similar are the only ones left.
Right because the sign of a good currency is 35% variability over the course of a couple days.
That's certainly not sign of good currency but perhaps new emerging currency with big potential.
- good, what if somebody had a much longer stretch of time to work out the answers before they could even become questions? It's not like those transactions are random.
This will not work. You cannot compute the answers to unknown questions. The questions are composed of all transactions in recent 10 minutes which are basically input and output addresses signed with unknown private keys. In order to successfully employ 51% attack on bitcoin you must be able to ouperform the rest of the network in real time for at least 10 minutes.
It does not matter what happens to WoW gold because it's an irreversible transaction, you cannot turn it back into real gold
I'm sure yuou can turn WoW or diablo 3 gold into real money and back pretty easily, just like bitcoin. So again, are you supposed to pay income taxes when you earn wow gold? Whatever you answer, the same apply to bitcoin.
Can you imagine $1m for a Bitcoin? I could hold your family at gunpoint for one coin, and at worst get a few months in prison. Or just pay some meth head a couple hundred bucks to do it.
Meanwhile, you can't prove I stole anything of real value from you - just a file from your computer. You can't insure it like a piece of property, you can't "cancel" it like you could a check, and nobody gives a crap where the BTC ends up because it doesn't count as real currency.
Please what terrible country do you live in and what terrible legal system do you have,where police ignores digital data theft? If someone stole important documents from your computer (for example passwords, private keys, digital certificates and so on), police would just tell "you can't prove it has any value, it was just file, now piss off"? That is quite sad.
there are still significant support staff needed to shuffle the documents around and maintain the servers, hardware cost, bandwidth costs, insurance costs, customer service costs, etc.
ArXiv is great but i wonder how much of these costs are waranted?
Servers maintance, hardware costs, insurance costs could be almost zero if they used p2p plattform like piratebay to distribute the papers.
Generaly Library.nu proved that repository of scientific papers could be made and run pretty cheaply. According to wikipedia, they even made a profit probably on online ads on their website.
Publishing an edited, peer reviewed paper in a journal is much more that making it available on e web site.
There may be some value in editing and peer reviewing the article, but if the research was funded by public money, the results should be always also available for free even in unedited form without peer review. I'm not against research journals charging money for their work, but preventing the original submission from being shared for free under the claim of copyright is in my opinion theft. Public paid for the research, copyright should belong to them (or rather the research and all of it's results should be in public domain from the start).
No. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is the Satoshi, which is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin.
This is true only in current implementations of bitcoin protocol. If needed, future clients can be made which would work with smaller fractions of bitcoin then one satoshi.
bitcoin is the crank's currency. cranks don't do legitimacy
so bitcoin will lose its lustre with those who launched it onto slashdot's front page for the past few years
I wonder how long would bitcoin need to stay around for some people to accept its legitimate reason for existence.
When bitcoin started four years ago, people like you posted almost constantly that it is scam, pyramid, ponzi scheme and will not survive too long.
Now bitcoin is around for years and is stronger then ever. I wonder, if bitcoin would be around in another 10 years and it would trade for $5000 yeach, would you still insist it's crang money? Probably yes, but i hope you can see how this statement is becoming more and more funny in the face of reality.
The thing about the assumption that the state "cannot" control something, is that it is almost always entirely wrong. This discovery is almost always accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Well state seems to have pretty hard time controling bittorrent. Why do you think it will manage to control bitcoin? Sure, it can declare it illegal, so most honest merchants would probably stop using it just because of that. But if anyone is willing to engage in illegal activities, i think it will be difficult for goverment to stop him using bitcoins.
So, if someone used your computer to hack into chinese goverment agency and then, the Chinese would assume you are responsible and sent undercover agent to kill you, you would be OK with it?
In my opinion, no nation has right to kill anyone for cyber attack as you are never sure who is the real attacker. The proper action would be to secure your systems, make counter-hack attempt or try to sue/extradict the culprit, if you think you know who he is.
The bar owner can maybe ban people from wearing this iteration of recording technology in his bar, but what will he do in few years, when invisible camera and augmented reality will be build-in in devices indistinguishable from common glasses, or later build-in directly into our eyes and brains? No one will be able to control what you are recording and archiving then. People should get used to it.
Suppose I buy an ebook. It becomes valuable due to the limited number of copies that were originally made.
This is one of the reasons i'll never suppoort copyright. Artificial scarity and greed. Supporting creators is good think bud limiting distribution to achieve it is nonsense and causes much more harm then good.
Think again about what you would do if you found a person who was not supposed to be there in your server room, copying files and doing who knows what else before you talk about "not remotely criminal."
I would look at the logs, see what did he copy. I would find out, he is copying scientific articles. I would thank him for spreading the knowledge and probably help him.
The prosecutor, from what I can tell, did nothing wrong.
Charging someone with 30 years in prison for copying scientific articles (note that he never released the copies, so no big damage was done) is not wrong? The charges were totaly out of proportions.