Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
The only real problem with using raw materials from areas dominated by various tribal warlords comes from the risk of supply disruption. Anything else amounts to denying domesticated primates their reality-given right to treat each other like shit.
False. There is an obligation on US citizens, but there is ALSO a new requirement on the foreign banks under FATCA.
That only applies to banks choosing to do business in the US, whether or not the US says otherwise. Though as you point out, most banks do choose to do some of their business in the US.
Actually, the EEA hasn't said that at all. Many foreign banks are choosing to not do business with US citizens since that is an easier solution.
people leaving negative feedback for a carpet cleaning service are not allowed to remain anonymous. Yelp must unmask seven critics to the carpet cleaner
That presumes Yelp actually knows their real identity. Good luck with that.
BTW, as a word of advice for any company hoping to sanitize its online image - When I search for product reviews, if I find nothing but positives, I consider that worse than a legitimately mixed bag of pros and cons... Or even more laughable, tossing in some pathetic token "cons" that complain about your product just working too well: "After trying a handful of wimpy competitors, I thought I could easily handle the awesome power of SpleemCo(tm)'s Widget Frobulator, but it had me scared to go past 60%! For pros only, guys!"
- comply with FATCA and break Canadian law
- get permission from their US customers to hand over info to the IRS
- don't do business with US citizens living in Canada (of which there are about a million)
I fail to see how that puts the banks in a difficult situation. Canadian banks have no obligation to comply with US law; they do, however, have an obligation to comply with Canadian law.
The burden of compliance here rests entirely on those US citizens storing money in Canada. The Canadian banks simply need to join the EEA in telling the US to go fuck itself as regards the wholesale presumption of US hegemony over global AML regulations.
That'd be the value over which some country's national labs or universities turn on their supercomputers and mine almost everything
The current Bitcoin mining network operates at twenty times the aggregate processing power of the entire TOP500 supercomputer list.
For comparison, today's most powerful commercially available ASIC-based Bitcoin mining rig, the KNC Neptune, pushes 3000GH/s. Using the semi-official conversion of 12,697 Flop/Hash (somewhat fuzzy given that BTC mining involves no actual floating point operations, but that number gives a fair estimate of the processing power involved), we come up with a whopping 38 PFlop/s. That puts the Neptune - a single unit, all by itself - solidly above the #2 supercomputer in the world (and above #1 by some metrics, since the Neptune can actually sustain that while the #1 can only sustain 34 PFlop/s).
No government - Not even the US government - Has the ability to flip a switch and monopolize BTC mining. They would need to buy (or make) rigs just like the Neptune and compete will all the other people running them (admittedly rare, but 1/5th that much power, 600+ GH/S ASIC rigs, have become relatively commonplace). At best, a government willing to throw infinite resources at the project could push the cost of mining above the cost of the electricity needed... Not much of a victory, there, since that government would itself need to use the electricity needed to go block-for-block vs the entire rest of the network, at a net loss.
We can therefore pretty much put all the nails in this coffin with a single fact: Bitcoin in itself does not exist as an investment vehicle any more than US Dollars do. Done. Not mere pedantry over who started it and whether or not they used foreign postal coupons, but an undermining of the whole silly concept.
Or to put this another way, if someone exchanges USD for BTC, as the other side of that transaction, someone else has exchanged BTC for USD. Do you consider USD a Ponzi scheme? Incidentally, you can make a much stronger case for that, since it does have a central issuing authority "paying" returns out of investment capital. But still, not really. Just people tossing around terms they don't understand as an expression of FUD.
All the people decrying BTC as some sort of scheme have failed to grasp a key concept:
Not all speculative bubbles involve fraud - The housing bubble, the tech bubble, the tulip bubble...
And not all fraudulent investments count as Ponzi schemes - Florida swampland, and buying the Golden Gate Bridge.
Not a single Ponzi scheme among them.
So basically I instantly and unquestionably recognize you as an idiot
So basically, I instantly and unquestionably recognize you as... Someone who has never actually tried to do what you describe.
Make no mistake, such services do exist. And for transactions under a hundred bucks, you can expect to pay well over a third of that for that service.
But hey, "only" paying 35% more in exchange for chargeback privileges, well, we all have our priorities... Sure, over time you would pay 34% more after factoring in all those chargeback you get to do. But that one foreign friend or small business that screws you over on a small-change transaction wouldn't get away with it, no-siree!
Agreed. Less press coverage means less volatility, which virtually every legitimate user of BTC would appreciate.
2) It over-promises and under-delivers
Then you haven't actually used it. Honestly, if you don't trade small amounts of money/goods/services with people in other countries - You have no use for Bitcoin. IF, however, you have any reason to transact with people in another country, you would instantly and unquestionably recognize the value of Bitcoin.
3) The reality of Bitcoin, however, is that it is a bubble/ponzi scheme/lottery
You just lost all credibility by not having the faintest clue about what a "Ponzi" scheme means. Yes, speculators-galore exist in the Bitcoin economy. Speculation also exists in the corn market, which doesn't make "corn" a Ponzi scheme.
And all so some lucky fucks (who aren't me) can get rich on the Bitcoin bubble. What's not to hate?
Someone has to print the money. At least BTC came about in a relatively organic manner, rather than one central authority getting all the profits. That has no relevance whatsoever to the day-to-day use of that currency.
The network exists to 'mine' coins and process transactions.
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I've mined a few hundred BTC (and "sold" 95% of of them at under $100, and over 70% at under $10).
And I still use BTC, even though I don't have a dedicated ASIC mining rig and can no longer actually mine them. Put bluntly, Bitcoin makes national borders and government-sponsored currencies a moot point. Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.
Yes, it has a lot of potential for tax evasion. So does cash.
I've changed it to "$BossIsAMicromanagingFucktard" - But don't worry, you can reset it to whatever else you want... Just as soon as the minimum password age requirement of three months has elapsed. Oh, and by the way, I quit.
FWIW, though, this wouldn't come up, because I wouldn't work for anyone who would try to pull crap like that in the first place.
For work-related passwords, my boss has every right to know my passwords if I get sick.
Absolutely not. Your employer has every right to reset your work-related passwords to gain access to your machine - An easily detected, even auditable, event that proves "you" didn't try to bribe a Central American dictator to use your company's brand of widgets (or bullets, as appropriate).
Now, for truly shared company passwords like a corporate Twitter account, you should already have a key escrow plan set up - That might mean a formal third-party service, or something as simple as the old trick of writing it on a note-card, sealing the note-card in an envelope, and signing across the flap. Store envelope in a secure area.
For all the unknowns in bitcoins history. Such a thing could as easily be a clever way of crowd sourcing the generation of massive rainbow tables.
First, that doesn't in any way count as an unknown. You can actually step through the entire blockchain and see every single input and output that led to the acceptance of that particular block.
Second, BitCoin mining has the "goal" of coming up with the lowest hash. For the same reason it currently takes 10-20 times the total processing power of the entire TOP500 supercomputer list, to crank out one BTC block every 10 minutes or so, you will virtually never see a hash with anywhere near that many leading zeros in a real world situation.
And finally, I think you underestimate the size of the problem space involved here - Yes, you could conceivably use the blockchain as a sort of rainbow table, but one so sparsely populated and with low-probability hashes (as mentioned above), that it only works as the "reverse" of exactly one thing: The dual-SHA256 hash of a given Bitcoin block.
I do agree that rip-off crap like Litecoin and all the other Bitcoin copies are cynical scams trying to rip off the success of Bitcoin. There is just no need for a clone of something that already exists like there is no need for 1s44c dollars.
In fairness, I'll agree with you completely that the alternates to BitCoin have indeed jumped the shark. But LiteCoin makes perhaps the single worst example of that, as it addressed a few very specific problems when it came out. Most notably, it used SCrypt rather than SHA256, making it significantly harder to port to GPU (Tenebrix tried that first, but it had a huge premine and a major bug in the protocol) - Though, people managed to do it eventually, largely because of the poor choice of 1024/1/1 as the SCrypt parameters.
Now, as for why LTC has remained popular now that we have not only GPU, but ASIC miners for it, I have no idea. Inertia, I suppose.
It cannot become more stable. The supplies of BTC are limited by design.
Those have nothing to do with each other, and the first doesn't even hold true. Bitcoin needs nothing except more "normal" ways to use it for the value to stabilize. If someone like Amazon started taking BTC, you'd see the exchange rate nailed down to a tolerable level of variability in short order.
Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it.
I hear that a lot from people who oppose deflationary economies. Except, it only holds true for deflation rates in excess of what a reasonably safe investment will yield. If you had the same rate of deflation as the USD has for inflation (2-3% over time), only an idiot would hold it rather than invest at a higher yield.
Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of people don't view currency as an "investment", whichever way it moves year to year... They view it as a short-term way to convert time spent at a job into rent and food. If not for that, if most people actually realized the exponential power of inflation to chip away at their liquid assets over time, you'd see a whole lot of central bank chairs' heads mounted on poles.
If you replace all USD with BTC, each BTC would cost a million dollars, and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC
12.5 million BTC exist. The US economy has an MB of 3.7 trillion and an M2 of 11 trillion. Using M2, that gives a USD-to-BTC rate of $880k, so you have it close to say each BTC would cost a million dollars. You have it absolutely wrong to say you can't divide BTC that finely, however - Currently, Bitcoin clients use a base unit of one Satoshi as one-hundred-millionth of a BTC. You could effectively map 1.14x the size of the US economy to Bitcoins, at penny-level granularity.
And that, even without any major updates to allow more divisibility. And without taking into consideration that the number of BTC in circulation will roughly double over the next 126 years.
Bitcoin has its flaws, but stick to the real ones, not the bogey-men.
No, that's wrong. Anarchists are completely against ANY form of government. If you're in favor of a minimalist government then you're thinking of a Libertarian, not an Anarchist.
Not all anarchists count as parodies of themselves, believe it or not. Yes, they oppose ALL government, as you point out; in the real world, however, they understand the utility of some level of centralized organization in a society as large and densely populated as ours.
That is the ugliest chunk of milled aluminum I have ever seen. I'd have been ashamed to admit creating it. They should have skipped the statue and just laid a larger plaque instead.
Agreed, but TFA mentions that it couldn't have any clear race or even gender.
I find it more bizarre that people actually wanted a copy of it. I mean, the stamps that had actually gone to the Moon, sure, I can see the appeal there. But a copy of an ugly statue merely left there, rather than the original? Meh. Maybe as a $10 trinket from the Smithsonian gift shop.
They often want chaos. How do you convince anarchists that chaos is bad?
Although we certainly have enemies that just want to give us a papercut at any expense, most terrorists do not count as mere anarchists. They hate us for usually-pretty-valid reasons (even if we can't say the same for their methods).
Also, anarchists don't want "chaos". They want a lack of (or at least minimal-needed-to-keep-us-from-killing-each-other) government. Huge difference. One amounts to a comic book villain; the other considers what we have to keep us in check as slightly worse than having nothing at all.
The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy
...A population of mindless consumer zombies most likely to die in a car accident yet intensely afraid of low-probability events like shark attacks and terrorists.
Wow. Un-fucking believable. Golly, it sure would help the government if everyone would just put a camera in their living room, and designed homes to minimize the number of places the camera can't see...
The correct accounting would be that you should be charged retail rates for what you draw out of the grid, but reimbursed only at wholesale rates for what you feed into the grid, like any other power producer who feeds into the grid is paid.
I absolutely do agree with you that a grid tie provides a service to me, exactly as you describe - It allows me to time-shift my production vs my usage, which in the case of typical residential customers, means generating for a few hours centered on noon, and consuming for a few hours centered on suppertime. I don't, however, agree with your retail-vs-wholesale argument.
Solar has already become "cheap enough" to pave the yard (even after the BS 270% tariffs the US imposed on cheap Chinese panels). As soon as space-efficient reliable batteries follow suit, the policy you suggest would lead to the complete collapse of the grid, as anyone with a few grand to invest in a lifetime of energy independence flips the bird to the utilities.
If we want to view electricity as a service instead of a commodity, I have no problem with that. But it damned well better cost less than running a bank of batteries for a year or two.
Better, but related question: When the FP asks the question "For businesses with a need for all that muscle, however, is that steep price justifiable", why the hell does the article start off debating the merits of the case color???
Brushed aluminum or titanium black? Seriously guys? By the time you start discussing the merits of color, you may as well just buy the damned Apple, because you've already "bought" into their culture.
And will this "new" positive-pressure central heat tower design work under load and over time? Hey, I'll mock Apple fans for favoring style over function and paying for the privilege, but I'd go out on a limb here and bet Apple's engineers thought to at least test that sucker under full load for weeks at a time in the "dog hair and cigarette ash" lab to see if it held up. You don't sell $10k consumer hardware that doesn't work.
Yes, "consumer". At that price, you may well only really see these in the workplace, but you'll see them only because your obnoxious hipster graphic designer threw a fit until they company bought her one of these monsters - Making it targeted at a specific consumer, not business, demographic. Everyone else in need of that much horsepower will just get the black rectangular Lenovo with comparable specs at half the price.
The first statement is not true for the share of developers among the Linux or unix users, which is substantial.
"Could" does not equal "is".
I code for a living, 20 year veteran. I've rolled my own Linux distros (back before the likes of Knoppix remastering made that trivial). I've tweaked my own kernels to (for example) force enumeration of a second PCI bus on a box that only announced it had one (nothing impressive, not bragging, just establishing my "cred").
And honestly, 99% of a modern Linux distro still amounts to a black box to me. Yes, I could open the box, and have the background skills to understand what I see inside; but the GP's claims stand, IMO. To 99% of Linux users, even including devs, Linux may as well run on caffeine and enslaved pixies for all we passively know about the internals.
That said, I will agree with you to the extent that having the ability to open the box when necessary makes a world of difference. But going back to TFA, that doesn't mean squat to someone who only sees pixies even when they do look inside.;)
Of course, many folks who "invest" in Bitcoin don't actually understand those laws or even realize that they should try to.
...Primarily because most of the world's governments haven't yet issued guidance as to whether to consider Bitcoin a commodity or a currency for purposes of calculating your taxes.
they don't know that capital gains often must be reported for taxes
You raise an excellent example of why this matters - If someone makes $50k per year (comfortably under $72500) and sells off a few grand in BTC that they've held for over a year, do they pay 15% on it as normal income, or 0% as long term capital gains, or something else entirely?
Don't just assume people haven't paid attention to this issue. We have, and can see all too clearly that the government has held its hand this long solely in an effort to play both sides of the fence.
Careful with your words... as you are accusing the lot of them of crimes.
To hell with your technicalities - We are accusing the lot of them with crimes. Perhaps not crimes anyone thought to formalize yet, but crimes, none-the-less. If I do business in location-X, I have to pay taxes there. The fact that companies like Apple and Google can afford to export all their profits to places with so little government oversight as to evade taxes outright, doesn't make it just peachy.
That said, I have to wonder how this rule will play out with Italy's membership in the EEA - This move looks suspiciously like a discriminatory restriction of free transfer of services and capital between itself and another member state, Ireland, a big no-no, especially if they hope to get their German bailout in their next few years.
Tax evasion is illegal in most locals... tax avoidance is not.
"Turn the world to sand, and still commit no crime".
RSA has categorically denied that they cut a deal with the NSA. But Mr. Hypponen and the rest of the internet has declared them guilty based on unseen evidence. How is that fair?
You can expect that to become a trend. The NSA has well and truly fucked over the entire American IT security industry. Even ultra-low-end "security" products like home broadband routers have become suspect, thanks to their interference.
Fair? No. Obvious consequence of the NSA's actions? Absolutely. People haven't trusted them for decades - Anyone remember Tempest? Or the improved S-Boxes that made DES more resistant to an attack that wouldn't exist for another 25 years? But in the back of our minds, we always told ourselves they might count as completely scary bastards, but at least they counted as our completely scary bastards. Now we know better - They have zero regard for US law and work for no one but themselves.
On a positive note, I'd still rather see the TSA disbanded first. But at this point, they both need to go.
Then again, this just follows a loooong history of ineffective, illegal, self-serving "intelligence" agencies in the US, from Hoover's FBI to Bush-the-elder's CIA to our current situation, you'd think we'd eventually learn and say "no more". Sadly, most people don't even have a clue we have a problem, or worse, outright support giving up our freedoms if it will protect us from the evil brown people across the sea.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
The only real problem with using raw materials from areas dominated by various tribal warlords comes from the risk of supply disruption. Anything else amounts to denying domesticated primates their reality-given right to treat each other like shit.
An IP address is not a Social Security number or a fingerprint. It, in the words of Judge Gary Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, "provides only the location at which one of any number of computer devices may be deployed, much like a telephone number can be used for any number of telephones.".
False. There is an obligation on US citizens, but there is ALSO a new requirement on the foreign banks under FATCA.
That only applies to banks choosing to do business in the US, whether or not the US says otherwise. Though as you point out, most banks do choose to do some of their business in the US.
Actually, the EEA hasn't said that at all. Many foreign banks are choosing to not do business with US citizens since that is an easier solution.
Nonbinding at this point, but yes, they have said exactly that.
people leaving negative feedback for a carpet cleaning service are not allowed to remain anonymous. Yelp must unmask seven critics to the carpet cleaner
That presumes Yelp actually knows their real identity. Good luck with that.
BTW, as a word of advice for any company hoping to sanitize its online image - When I search for product reviews, if I find nothing but positives, I consider that worse than a legitimately mixed bag of pros and cons... Or even more laughable, tossing in some pathetic token "cons" that complain about your product just working too well: "After trying a handful of wimpy competitors, I thought I could easily handle the awesome power of SpleemCo(tm)'s Widget Frobulator, but it had me scared to go past 60%! For pros only, guys!"
- comply with FATCA and break Canadian law
- get permission from their US customers to hand over info to the IRS
- don't do business with US citizens living in Canada (of which there are about a million)
I fail to see how that puts the banks in a difficult situation. Canadian banks have no obligation to comply with US law; they do, however, have an obligation to comply with Canadian law.
The burden of compliance here rests entirely on those US citizens storing money in Canada. The Canadian banks simply need to join the EEA in telling the US to go fuck itself as regards the wholesale presumption of US hegemony over global AML regulations.
That'd be the value over which some country's national labs or universities turn on their supercomputers and mine almost everything
The current Bitcoin mining network operates at twenty times the aggregate processing power of the entire TOP500 supercomputer list.
For comparison, today's most powerful commercially available ASIC-based Bitcoin mining rig, the KNC Neptune, pushes 3000GH/s. Using the semi-official conversion of 12,697 Flop/Hash (somewhat fuzzy given that BTC mining involves no actual floating point operations, but that number gives a fair estimate of the processing power involved), we come up with a whopping 38 PFlop/s. That puts the Neptune - a single unit, all by itself - solidly above the #2 supercomputer in the world (and above #1 by some metrics, since the Neptune can actually sustain that while the #1 can only sustain 34 PFlop/s).
No government - Not even the US government - Has the ability to flip a switch and monopolize BTC mining. They would need to buy (or make) rigs just like the Neptune and compete will all the other people running them (admittedly rare, but 1/5th that much power, 600+ GH/S ASIC rigs, have become relatively commonplace). At best, a government willing to throw infinite resources at the project could push the cost of mining above the cost of the electricity needed... Not much of a victory, there, since that government would itself need to use the electricity needed to go block-for-block vs the entire rest of the network, at a net loss.
Regarding what a Ponzi scheme is, maybe you should hit up Wikipedia (or where ever) and read the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
Okay...
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from existing capital or new capital paid by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation.
We can therefore pretty much put all the nails in this coffin with a single fact: Bitcoin in itself does not exist as an investment vehicle any more than US Dollars do. Done. Not mere pedantry over who started it and whether or not they used foreign postal coupons, but an undermining of the whole silly concept.
Or to put this another way, if someone exchanges USD for BTC, as the other side of that transaction, someone else has exchanged BTC for USD. Do you consider USD a Ponzi scheme? Incidentally, you can make a much stronger case for that, since it does have a central issuing authority "paying" returns out of investment capital. But still, not really. Just people tossing around terms they don't understand as an expression of FUD.
All the people decrying BTC as some sort of scheme have failed to grasp a key concept:
Not all speculative bubbles involve fraud - The housing bubble, the tech bubble, the tulip bubble...
And not all fraudulent investments count as Ponzi schemes - Florida swampland, and buying the Golden Gate Bridge.
Not a single Ponzi scheme among them.
So basically I instantly and unquestionably recognize you as an idiot
So basically, I instantly and unquestionably recognize you as... Someone who has never actually tried to do what you describe.
Make no mistake, such services do exist. And for transactions under a hundred bucks, you can expect to pay well over a third of that for that service.
But hey, "only" paying 35% more in exchange for chargeback privileges, well, we all have our priorities... Sure, over time you would pay 34% more after factoring in all those chargeback you get to do. But that one foreign friend or small business that screws you over on a small-change transaction wouldn't get away with it, no-siree!
1) Enough already.
Agreed. Less press coverage means less volatility, which virtually every legitimate user of BTC would appreciate.
2) It over-promises and under-delivers
Then you haven't actually used it. Honestly, if you don't trade small amounts of money/goods/services with people in other countries - You have no use for Bitcoin. IF, however, you have any reason to transact with people in another country, you would instantly and unquestionably recognize the value of Bitcoin.
3) The reality of Bitcoin, however, is that it is a bubble/ponzi scheme/lottery
You just lost all credibility by not having the faintest clue about what a "Ponzi" scheme means. Yes, speculators-galore exist in the Bitcoin economy. Speculation also exists in the corn market, which doesn't make "corn" a Ponzi scheme.
And all so some lucky fucks (who aren't me) can get rich on the Bitcoin bubble. What's not to hate?
Someone has to print the money. At least BTC came about in a relatively organic manner, rather than one central authority getting all the profits. That has no relevance whatsoever to the day-to-day use of that currency.
The network exists to 'mine' coins and process transactions.
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I've mined a few hundred BTC (and "sold" 95% of of them at under $100, and over 70% at under $10).
And I still use BTC, even though I don't have a dedicated ASIC mining rig and can no longer actually mine them. Put bluntly, Bitcoin makes national borders and government-sponsored currencies a moot point. Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.
Yes, it has a lot of potential for tax evasion. So does cash.
Tell me your password or you're fired.
I've changed it to "$BossIsAMicromanagingFucktard" - But don't worry, you can reset it to whatever else you want... Just as soon as the minimum password age requirement of three months has elapsed. Oh, and by the way, I quit.
FWIW, though, this wouldn't come up, because I wouldn't work for anyone who would try to pull crap like that in the first place.
For work-related passwords, my boss has every right to know my passwords if I get sick.
Absolutely not. Your employer has every right to reset your work-related passwords to gain access to your machine - An easily detected, even auditable, event that proves "you" didn't try to bribe a Central American dictator to use your company's brand of widgets (or bullets, as appropriate).
Now, for truly shared company passwords like a corporate Twitter account, you should already have a key escrow plan set up - That might mean a formal third-party service, or something as simple as the old trick of writing it on a note-card, sealing the note-card in an envelope, and signing across the flap. Store envelope in a secure area.
Don't confuse those two situations.
For all the unknowns in bitcoins history. Such a thing could as easily be a clever way of crowd sourcing the generation of massive rainbow tables.
First, that doesn't in any way count as an unknown. You can actually step through the entire blockchain and see every single input and output that led to the acceptance of that particular block.
Second, BitCoin mining has the "goal" of coming up with the lowest hash. For the same reason it currently takes 10-20 times the total processing power of the entire TOP500 supercomputer list, to crank out one BTC block every 10 minutes or so, you will virtually never see a hash with anywhere near that many leading zeros in a real world situation.
And finally, I think you underestimate the size of the problem space involved here - Yes, you could conceivably use the blockchain as a sort of rainbow table, but one so sparsely populated and with low-probability hashes (as mentioned above), that it only works as the "reverse" of exactly one thing: The dual-SHA256 hash of a given Bitcoin block.
I do agree that rip-off crap like Litecoin and all the other Bitcoin copies are cynical scams trying to rip off the success of Bitcoin. There is just no need for a clone of something that already exists like there is no need for 1s44c dollars.
In fairness, I'll agree with you completely that the alternates to BitCoin have indeed jumped the shark. But LiteCoin makes perhaps the single worst example of that, as it addressed a few very specific problems when it came out. Most notably, it used SCrypt rather than SHA256, making it significantly harder to port to GPU (Tenebrix tried that first, but it had a huge premine and a major bug in the protocol) - Though, people managed to do it eventually, largely because of the poor choice of 1024/1/1 as the SCrypt parameters.
Now, as for why LTC has remained popular now that we have not only GPU, but ASIC miners for it, I have no idea. Inertia, I suppose.
It cannot become more stable. The supplies of BTC are limited by design.
Those have nothing to do with each other, and the first doesn't even hold true. Bitcoin needs nothing except more "normal" ways to use it for the value to stabilize. If someone like Amazon started taking BTC, you'd see the exchange rate nailed down to a tolerable level of variability in short order.
Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it.
I hear that a lot from people who oppose deflationary economies. Except, it only holds true for deflation rates in excess of what a reasonably safe investment will yield. If you had the same rate of deflation as the USD has for inflation (2-3% over time), only an idiot would hold it rather than invest at a higher yield.
Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of people don't view currency as an "investment", whichever way it moves year to year... They view it as a short-term way to convert time spent at a job into rent and food. If not for that, if most people actually realized the exponential power of inflation to chip away at their liquid assets over time, you'd see a whole lot of central bank chairs' heads mounted on poles.
If you replace all USD with BTC, each BTC would cost a million dollars, and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC
12.5 million BTC exist. The US economy has an MB of 3.7 trillion and an M2 of 11 trillion. Using M2, that gives a USD-to-BTC rate of $880k, so you have it close to say each BTC would cost a million dollars. You have it absolutely wrong to say you can't divide BTC that finely, however - Currently, Bitcoin clients use a base unit of one Satoshi as one-hundred-millionth of a BTC. You could effectively map 1.14x the size of the US economy to Bitcoins, at penny-level granularity.
And that, even without any major updates to allow more divisibility. And without taking into consideration that the number of BTC in circulation will roughly double over the next 126 years.
Bitcoin has its flaws, but stick to the real ones, not the bogey-men.
No, that's wrong. Anarchists are completely against ANY form of government. If you're in favor of a minimalist government then you're thinking of a Libertarian, not an Anarchist.
Not all anarchists count as parodies of themselves, believe it or not. Yes, they oppose ALL government, as you point out; in the real world, however, they understand the utility of some level of centralized organization in a society as large and densely populated as ours.
That is the ugliest chunk of milled aluminum I have ever seen. I'd have been ashamed to admit creating it. They should have skipped the statue and just laid a larger plaque instead.
Agreed, but TFA mentions that it couldn't have any clear race or even gender.
I find it more bizarre that people actually wanted a copy of it. I mean, the stamps that had actually gone to the Moon, sure, I can see the appeal there. But a copy of an ugly statue merely left there, rather than the original? Meh. Maybe as a $10 trinket from the Smithsonian gift shop.
They often want chaos. How do you convince anarchists that chaos is bad?
Although we certainly have enemies that just want to give us a papercut at any expense, most terrorists do not count as mere anarchists. They hate us for usually-pretty-valid reasons (even if we can't say the same for their methods).
Also, anarchists don't want "chaos". They want a lack of (or at least minimal-needed-to-keep-us-from-killing-each-other) government. Huge difference. One amounts to a comic book villain; the other considers what we have to keep us in check as slightly worse than having nothing at all.
The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy
...A population of mindless consumer zombies most likely to die in a car accident yet intensely afraid of low-probability events like shark attacks and terrorists.
Wow. Un-fucking believable. Golly, it sure would help the government if everyone would just put a camera in their living room, and designed homes to minimize the number of places the camera can't see...
The correct accounting would be that you should be charged retail rates for what you draw out of the grid, but reimbursed only at wholesale rates for what you feed into the grid, like any other power producer who feeds into the grid is paid.
I absolutely do agree with you that a grid tie provides a service to me, exactly as you describe - It allows me to time-shift my production vs my usage, which in the case of typical residential customers, means generating for a few hours centered on noon, and consuming for a few hours centered on suppertime. I don't, however, agree with your retail-vs-wholesale argument.
Solar has already become "cheap enough" to pave the yard (even after the BS 270% tariffs the US imposed on cheap Chinese panels). As soon as space-efficient reliable batteries follow suit, the policy you suggest would lead to the complete collapse of the grid, as anyone with a few grand to invest in a lifetime of energy independence flips the bird to the utilities.
If we want to view electricity as a service instead of a commodity, I have no problem with that. But it damned well better cost less than running a bank of batteries for a year or two.
Better, but related question: When the FP asks the question "For businesses with a need for all that muscle, however, is that steep price justifiable", why the hell does the article start off debating the merits of the case color???
Brushed aluminum or titanium black? Seriously guys? By the time you start discussing the merits of color, you may as well just buy the damned Apple, because you've already "bought" into their culture.
And will this "new" positive-pressure central heat tower design work under load and over time? Hey, I'll mock Apple fans for favoring style over function and paying for the privilege, but I'd go out on a limb here and bet Apple's engineers thought to at least test that sucker under full load for weeks at a time in the "dog hair and cigarette ash" lab to see if it held up. You don't sell $10k consumer hardware that doesn't work.
Yes, "consumer". At that price, you may well only really see these in the workplace, but you'll see them only because your obnoxious hipster graphic designer threw a fit until they company bought her one of these monsters - Making it targeted at a specific consumer, not business, demographic. Everyone else in need of that much horsepower will just get the black rectangular Lenovo with comparable specs at half the price.
The first statement is not true for the share of developers among the Linux or unix users, which is substantial.
;)
"Could" does not equal "is".
I code for a living, 20 year veteran. I've rolled my own Linux distros (back before the likes of Knoppix remastering made that trivial). I've tweaked my own kernels to (for example) force enumeration of a second PCI bus on a box that only announced it had one (nothing impressive, not bragging, just establishing my "cred").
And honestly, 99% of a modern Linux distro still amounts to a black box to me. Yes, I could open the box, and have the background skills to understand what I see inside; but the GP's claims stand, IMO. To 99% of Linux users, even including devs, Linux may as well run on caffeine and enslaved pixies for all we passively know about the internals.
That said, I will agree with you to the extent that having the ability to open the box when necessary makes a world of difference. But going back to TFA, that doesn't mean squat to someone who only sees pixies even when they do look inside.
Of course, many folks who "invest" in Bitcoin don't actually understand those laws or even realize that they should try to.
...Primarily because most of the world's governments haven't yet issued guidance as to whether to consider Bitcoin a commodity or a currency for purposes of calculating your taxes.
they don't know that capital gains often must be reported for taxes
You raise an excellent example of why this matters - If someone makes $50k per year (comfortably under $72500) and sells off a few grand in BTC that they've held for over a year, do they pay 15% on it as normal income, or 0% as long term capital gains, or something else entirely?
Don't just assume people haven't paid attention to this issue. We have, and can see all too clearly that the government has held its hand this long solely in an effort to play both sides of the fence.
Careful with your words... as you are accusing the lot of them of crimes.
To hell with your technicalities - We are accusing the lot of them with crimes. Perhaps not crimes anyone thought to formalize yet, but crimes, none-the-less. If I do business in location-X, I have to pay taxes there. The fact that companies like Apple and Google can afford to export all their profits to places with so little government oversight as to evade taxes outright, doesn't make it just peachy.
That said, I have to wonder how this rule will play out with Italy's membership in the EEA - This move looks suspiciously like a discriminatory restriction of free transfer of services and capital between itself and another member state, Ireland, a big no-no, especially if they hope to get their German bailout in their next few years.
Tax evasion is illegal in most locals... tax avoidance is not.
"Turn the world to sand, and still commit no crime".
RSA has categorically denied that they cut a deal with the NSA. But Mr. Hypponen and the rest of the internet has declared them guilty based on unseen evidence. How is that fair?
You can expect that to become a trend. The NSA has well and truly fucked over the entire American IT security industry. Even ultra-low-end "security" products like home broadband routers have become suspect, thanks to their interference.
Fair? No. Obvious consequence of the NSA's actions? Absolutely. People haven't trusted them for decades - Anyone remember Tempest? Or the improved S-Boxes that made DES more resistant to an attack that wouldn't exist for another 25 years? But in the back of our minds, we always told ourselves they might count as completely scary bastards, but at least they counted as our completely scary bastards. Now we know better - They have zero regard for US law and work for no one but themselves.
On a positive note, I'd still rather see the TSA disbanded first. But at this point, they both need to go.
Then again, this just follows a loooong history of ineffective, illegal, self-serving "intelligence" agencies in the US, from Hoover's FBI to Bush-the-elder's CIA to our current situation, you'd think we'd eventually learn and say "no more". Sadly, most people don't even have a clue we have a problem, or worse, outright support giving up our freedoms if it will protect us from the evil brown people across the sea.
Pathetic, the whole lot of us.