Bitcoin certainly seems to be winning the currency battle until now. Its nearest competitor appears to be Litecoin, which offers only 2% of the value per coin and is rarely if ever mentioned by anyone although I see articles about Bitcoin daily. Another big danger is that the whole area of virtual currencies could be declared illegal and Mt. Gox shut down. It is illegal to create alternative currencies to the dollar in the United States, after all. There are other minor dangers. For example, it occurred to me that a botnet of sufficient size might be enough to overwhelm to whole computational capacity of the entire Bitcoin network, and thus, effectively destroy it. The same forces that work to ensure the integrity of the network now might work against it then, if the majority of nodes are bots and dishonest manipulators. Currently the botnets are cooperating to mine bitcoins. In the future, that may change...
I think your argument is rather sound. At least it is more sound than the usual pro-Bitcoin claim that "there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins, therefore deflation forever." However, there is a counterargument that I thought of. There are a couple of things that could cause bitcoin to retain its value in the long term: fame, and the network effect. Fame, because Bitcoin is the first of its kind and the most frequently discussed. It is like the Kleenex or Xerox of virtual currencies, the one that gives its name to all the rest, and that gives it enduring value. The second is the network effect. The more people use it, the more people want to use it. Thus, even with low barriers to entry, Bitcoin could eventually win a near-monopoly in the virtual currency market.
You're probably right. People who pass the test have nothing to complain about and don't cause problems. The teacher is unlikely to care if they actually read the material in that case. On the other hand, imagine the student who didn't pass. They can tell him, "You didn't pass because you didn't read the material, so you have nothing to complain about." His complaints will get nowhere. If nothing else, it makes their job defending themselves as educators easier. The one who never cracks the book then blames the teacher when he fails will no longer cause problems for them.
I have been following these Bitcoin stories with some interest and I have a technical question maybe Slashdot can answer. It seems to me that Bitcoin has problems with scalability.
My impression is that to perform a Bitcoin transaction you have to download the entire history of Bitcoin transactions before you can get started and the entire network has to confirm your transaction and it's authenticity to prevent double-spending of coins. So far, so good. The problem is that this is an all-to-all network in terms of storage and processing requirements and its needs seem to scale exponentially. Last year, I hear there was 2 GB of storage required and this year 6 GB.
My question is: doesn't that imply that Bitcoin won't scale and will eventually fizzle out due to impractical storage and processing requirements? Who will want to download 100 GB or 1 TB of history of transactions of the entire world just to buy a sandwich?
And doesn't that imply that there is room for Bitcoin 2.0, a new virtual currency with better scalability and possibly other improved characteristics? Compare Bitcoin with the Internet itself. The Internet is far more scalable because it is broken down into subnets and features more point-to-point communication and no need of transaction history which makes it far more scalable.
Hypothetically, couldn't another virtual currency like Bitcoin be devised, that separates its users into subcommunities based on their frequency of transaction or physical location, and thus feature more efficient local transactions, which most transactions are, while allowing the occasional transaction to be routed between subcommunities? It could also feature a shorter history that only remembers a certain period worth of transactions, like one month, along with everyone's balance, thus avoiding the need of storing the entire history. Further, it could develop a reputation system that enhances the ability of the system to reject bogus transaction.
tl, dr: How is Bitcoin supposed to scale to more usage given its exponentially increasing storage requirements, and what can we replace it with that is more scalable, being better structured, with shorter history, or more efficiently rejecting bogus transactions?
Within the past century, 95% of the purchasing power of the US dollar has been taken away by inflation. Exactly how safe do you think the US dollar is again?
They were not just communists, but communist sympathizers of a major hostile foreign power to whom they were transferring valuable secrets, such as nuclear technology, in the middle of the Cold War. I don't think "so what?" quite covers the possibility of treason by State Department employees.
Your remarks are absurd. I bet you never once objected to anyone carrying their camera-equipped cellphone or other device to those places. I doubt if you will start actually bullying wearers of Google Glasses either.
Have you ever seen the Memoto (http://memoto.com/)? It's rather like what you're saying. Unlike Google Glasses, the Memoto is unobtrusive (you can clip it on your shirt) and always taking pictures (every 30 seconds it takes a snap). Given that such devices will be available in the near future, I think people will soon get over their worries. On the one hand, you're always on film, like in the movie "Freeze Frame". But on the other hand your pictures are going to be drowned in a sea of similar pictures and so are not likely to get noticed much, unless something important happens, of course. Just don't commit any crimes...
Actually, Google doesn't appear completely different to me. Like Aaron Schwartz, they have a manifesto - in their case they want to "index the word's information and make it available", which is actually rather similar to Aaron's motivation for free knowledge that got him in trouble with the prosecutor. And like Aaron Schwartz, they occasionally overstep in their zeal to make information public. Just look at all their legal trouble with book scanning, newspaper snippets, etc. So the comparison is not totally invalid.
"In such condition there is...continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short." (Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and one of our nasty brutish ancestors)
I wonder why they don't just use the camera to make the light stay yellow longer when someone is still in the intersection. That would reduce collisions from both directions. That is a better use of the technology than arbitrarily handing out fines.
Bitcoin is not as deflationary as you seem to think. It is a member of a class of virtual currencies, and each member of the class can be endlessly duplicated, creating as many new virtual currencies as you like. Since there is no limit to the currencies that anyone can create (Bitcoin 2.0, 3.0,...) none of them can rise in value without limit (deflation). Bitcoin is not a precious metal like gold. Gold is physically unable to be duplicated. It is the idea behind bitcoin that can be endlessly duplicated.
Your post reminded me of an article (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm). The average American spends 100 hours commuting and only 80 hours on vacation per year. Thus, avoiding the commute essentially doubles their vacation time. A great benefit at a small cost.
On the other hand, the US also spends twice as much on our education system and gets worse results. Maybe this country is suffering from an excess of money and a shortage of brains... it is possible that they could convert to some other healthcare system as you suggest without actually saving money or getting better results.
Your post was very insightful and it made me think of this. Imagine an "Internet government" consisting of a voluntary international association that does some of the major functions of government: retirement insurance (aka Social Security), medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid), and various other minor services, such as passport identification. You could voluntarily sign up for such a government and agree to accept its laws. In return, you could move freely within international boundaries and be freed from signing up for your local government's similar services, ie you wouldn't have to pay social security tax. Such a government, freed from geographical constraints, could be well-designed and modern, offering better guarantees of fiscal prudence and sound currency than any national government does. And membership would be strictly voluntary, unlike current national identities, so it would be in that sense "libertarian". Well, what a brainstorm!
If you could travel in time, would you rather visit an episode from the remote past of dinosaurs, or some episode from religious history? Which episode, and why?
In our current downturn, we are familiar with the failure of a few large banks. However, in the Great Depression, what they experienced was the failure of a large number of smaller banks (more than 10,000 banks went out of business between 1929 and 1933, according to http://www.econreview.com/events/banks1929b.htm, contributing to the depression). Merely breaking up banks does not guarantee that they will succeed, particularly during a widespread economic failure. Instead of "too big to fail", you have "too many and small to fail", but it's really no great improvement. It actually makes it harder to assist the individual banks, even if you intend to do so.
If other alien civilizations exist that have achieved technological singularity, shouldn't they be contacting us? Or shouldn't there be some evidence of their existence? How do you account for their silence?
The problem with that seems to be they would have to guess the commercial value of a patent in advance. If they guess too high, they end up paying large amounts of money for the privilege of a worthless patent. If they guess too low, and their patent becomes immensely valuable, other companies can license it from them at rock-bottom prices. Imagine if copyrights worked like that and you had to guess how many books you would sell before getting a copyright...
I don't agree. I replaced the original analysis (a "smart room") with a different analysis (a smart human who designed the room). However, the fact that the room is not considered smart in that particular case doesn't prove that rooms (or computers, or whatever) can't be considered smart in general. You would just need to create a different example that shows the computer to be smart. That shouldn't be hard, given my first premise, that we're only dealing with thought experiments and not real experiments, so really you can prove anything you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin certainly seems to be winning the currency battle until now. Its nearest competitor appears to be Litecoin, which offers only 2% of the value per coin and is rarely if ever mentioned by anyone although I see articles about Bitcoin daily. Another big danger is that the whole area of virtual currencies could be declared illegal and Mt. Gox shut down. It is illegal to create alternative currencies to the dollar in the United States, after all. There are other minor dangers. For example, it occurred to me that a botnet of sufficient size might be enough to overwhelm to whole computational capacity of the entire Bitcoin network, and thus, effectively destroy it. The same forces that work to ensure the integrity of the network now might work against it then, if the majority of nodes are bots and dishonest manipulators. Currently the botnets are cooperating to mine bitcoins. In the future, that may change...
I think your argument is rather sound. At least it is more sound than the usual pro-Bitcoin claim that "there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins, therefore deflation forever." However, there is a counterargument that I thought of. There are a couple of things that could cause bitcoin to retain its value in the long term: fame, and the network effect. Fame, because Bitcoin is the first of its kind and the most frequently discussed. It is like the Kleenex or Xerox of virtual currencies, the one that gives its name to all the rest, and that gives it enduring value. The second is the network effect. The more people use it, the more people want to use it. Thus, even with low barriers to entry, Bitcoin could eventually win a near-monopoly in the virtual currency market.
You're probably right. People who pass the test have nothing to complain about and don't cause problems. The teacher is unlikely to care if they actually read the material in that case. On the other hand, imagine the student who didn't pass. They can tell him, "You didn't pass because you didn't read the material, so you have nothing to complain about." His complaints will get nowhere. If nothing else, it makes their job defending themselves as educators easier. The one who never cracks the book then blames the teacher when he fails will no longer cause problems for them.
I have been following these Bitcoin stories with some interest and I have a technical question maybe Slashdot can answer. It seems to me that Bitcoin has problems with scalability.
My impression is that to perform a Bitcoin transaction you have to download the entire history of Bitcoin transactions before you can get started and the entire network has to confirm your transaction and it's authenticity to prevent double-spending of coins. So far, so good. The problem is that this is an all-to-all network in terms of storage and processing requirements and its needs seem to scale exponentially. Last year, I hear there was 2 GB of storage required and this year 6 GB.
My question is: doesn't that imply that Bitcoin won't scale and will eventually fizzle out due to impractical storage and processing requirements? Who will want to download 100 GB or 1 TB of history of transactions of the entire world just to buy a sandwich?
And doesn't that imply that there is room for Bitcoin 2.0, a new virtual currency with better scalability and possibly other improved characteristics? Compare Bitcoin with the Internet itself. The Internet is far more scalable because it is broken down into subnets and features more point-to-point communication and no need of transaction history which makes it far more scalable.
Hypothetically, couldn't another virtual currency like Bitcoin be devised, that separates its users into subcommunities based on their frequency of transaction or physical location, and thus feature more efficient local transactions, which most transactions are, while allowing the occasional transaction to be routed between subcommunities? It could also feature a shorter history that only remembers a certain period worth of transactions, like one month, along with everyone's balance, thus avoiding the need of storing the entire history. Further, it could develop a reputation system that enhances the ability of the system to reject bogus transaction.
tl, dr: How is Bitcoin supposed to scale to more usage given its exponentially increasing storage requirements, and what can we replace it with that is more scalable, being better structured, with shorter history, or more efficiently rejecting bogus transactions?
Within the past century, 95% of the purchasing power of the US dollar has been taken away by inflation. Exactly how safe do you think the US dollar is again?
Unfortunately our "central authorities" nowadays are the biggest counterfeiters of all...
They were not just communists, but communist sympathizers of a major hostile foreign power to whom they were transferring valuable secrets, such as nuclear technology, in the middle of the Cold War. I don't think "so what?" quite covers the possibility of treason by State Department employees.
Have you forgotten about air bags? They are there precisely so that you don't have to remember to use your seat belt...
Your remarks are absurd. I bet you never once objected to anyone carrying their camera-equipped cellphone or other device to those places. I doubt if you will start actually bullying wearers of Google Glasses either.
Have you ever seen the Memoto (http://memoto.com/)? It's rather like what you're saying. Unlike Google Glasses, the Memoto is unobtrusive (you can clip it on your shirt) and always taking pictures (every 30 seconds it takes a snap). Given that such devices will be available in the near future, I think people will soon get over their worries. On the one hand, you're always on film, like in the movie "Freeze Frame". But on the other hand your pictures are going to be drowned in a sea of similar pictures and so are not likely to get noticed much, unless something important happens, of course. Just don't commit any crimes...
Actually, Google doesn't appear completely different to me. Like Aaron Schwartz, they have a manifesto - in their case they want to "index the word's information and make it available", which is actually rather similar to Aaron's motivation for free knowledge that got him in trouble with the prosecutor. And like Aaron Schwartz, they occasionally overstep in their zeal to make information public. Just look at all their legal trouble with book scanning, newspaper snippets, etc. So the comparison is not totally invalid.
"In such condition there is...continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short." (Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and one of our nasty brutish ancestors)
I wonder why they don't just use the camera to make the light stay yellow longer when someone is still in the intersection. That would reduce collisions from both directions. That is a better use of the technology than arbitrarily handing out fines.
Bitcoin is not as deflationary as you seem to think. It is a member of a class of virtual currencies, and each member of the class can be endlessly duplicated, creating as many new virtual currencies as you like. Since there is no limit to the currencies that anyone can create (Bitcoin 2.0, 3.0, ...) none of them can rise in value without limit (deflation). Bitcoin is not a precious metal like gold. Gold is physically unable to be duplicated. It is the idea behind bitcoin that can be endlessly duplicated.
Which "me" are you referring to, original me or copy me? And what if they disagree? Both are mature competent adults, so whose opinion holds sway?
Your post reminded me of an article (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm). The average American spends 100 hours commuting and only 80 hours on vacation per year. Thus, avoiding the commute essentially doubles their vacation time. A great benefit at a small cost.
On the other hand, the US also spends twice as much on our education system and gets worse results. Maybe this country is suffering from an excess of money and a shortage of brains... it is possible that they could convert to some other healthcare system as you suggest without actually saving money or getting better results.
Your post was very insightful and it made me think of this. Imagine an "Internet government" consisting of a voluntary international association that does some of the major functions of government: retirement insurance (aka Social Security), medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid), and various other minor services, such as passport identification. You could voluntarily sign up for such a government and agree to accept its laws. In return, you could move freely within international boundaries and be freed from signing up for your local government's similar services, ie you wouldn't have to pay social security tax. Such a government, freed from geographical constraints, could be well-designed and modern, offering better guarantees of fiscal prudence and sound currency than any national government does. And membership would be strictly voluntary, unlike current national identities, so it would be in that sense "libertarian". Well, what a brainstorm!
So 32% of the authors chose wrongly? And your response is to take their other choices away, because they don't know what they are doing?
If you could travel in time, would you rather visit an episode from the remote past of dinosaurs, or some episode from religious history? Which episode, and why?
In our current downturn, we are familiar with the failure of a few large banks. However, in the Great Depression, what they experienced was the failure of a large number of smaller banks (more than 10,000 banks went out of business between 1929 and 1933, according to http://www.econreview.com/events/banks1929b.htm, contributing to the depression). Merely breaking up banks does not guarantee that they will succeed, particularly during a widespread economic failure. Instead of "too big to fail", you have "too many and small to fail", but it's really no great improvement. It actually makes it harder to assist the individual banks, even if you intend to do so.
If other alien civilizations exist that have achieved technological singularity, shouldn't they be contacting us? Or shouldn't there be some evidence of their existence? How do you account for their silence?
The problem with that seems to be they would have to guess the commercial value of a patent in advance. If they guess too high, they end up paying large amounts of money for the privilege of a worthless patent. If they guess too low, and their patent becomes immensely valuable, other companies can license it from them at rock-bottom prices. Imagine if copyrights worked like that and you had to guess how many books you would sell before getting a copyright...
I don't agree. I replaced the original analysis (a "smart room") with a different analysis (a smart human who designed the room). However, the fact that the room is not considered smart in that particular case doesn't prove that rooms (or computers, or whatever) can't be considered smart in general. You would just need to create a different example that shows the computer to be smart. That shouldn't be hard, given my first premise, that we're only dealing with thought experiments and not real experiments, so really you can prove anything you like.
Why don't we call it the "all your base are belong to us" tax.