but that is between myself and the state, not society.
What legitimacy has the state, if it isn't society's representation of its common interests?
I think you're conflating two different uses of the word private here. It's not private as in privacy. I'm not denying that your property is your business, but quite often it is also my business.
By the way, you can't strictly speaking find out how much I own, because you only see how much tax I pay. You don't see my deductions, or the breakdown of income vs. various other taxes. Is it really a private business how much you contribute to society?
I doubt you're really more individualist than me. However, I consider most of our private property arrangements as useful constructions of our society (though the state), not any natural inherent right or anything.
The practice hasn't been abandoned last time I checked, it's just a little harder to get access. You need a MinID identity (= Norwegian citizenship, plus you leave traces!), and the lists are taken down after a brief period.
That attitude is very useful for employers to keep down wages, too:) I suspect that's why the system persisted, despite the rich hating it and the rest being reluctant to admit that they used it. It's a useful tool for labor unions.
I take a different attitude. Cash transfers are property transfers too, and property is an institution between society and individuals. If you want me to respect your property, surely I'm entitled to some information about what you claim as property? For some classes of property (especially real estate and business ownership), it's likely mandated to be public even in your country. Norway just takes it a bit further, that's all.
synthesized piano is getting very good, but it still cannot be mistaken for the real thing.
Citation needed. When a physical piano is of a brand that goes for an intensely clean and standardized sound (e.g Yamaha grand pianos), it often sounds more "synthetic" than an actual piano synth.
Go here and listen to one of the examples of "chamber recording" or "concert recording". IMO, it's very, very easy to mistake that for the real thing.
You can either sit at a computer pasting together sound samples and massaging them into some semblance of emotion,
or you can hire a musician to play it for you and give you the sound you're looking for.
Orchestras and different instruments evolved because there was no other way to produce music rich in various sounds, and it could not be automated at all.
Case in point: Opera. Many people find the singing style of classical opera weird and gross, but fact is there are very few other ways to make yourself heard over an orchestra without a microphone. Except the ones that are uglier, and/or would wear out your voice quickly.
digesting breakfast, having families, etc. I think you can hear all of that in many ensembles.
Holy cow, what sort of concerts do you go to?!
Seriously, though. Empathy is nice and all, but don't imagine that it is something other than empathy. If you hear the performers' breakfast and kids, that doesn't really come across with the sound waves, but rather with your foreknowledge and beliefs. Don't confuse the music with the baggage, nice as though the baggage may be.
Check out Modartt's Pianoteq, it's extremely good, and almost completely synthesized. I think they still maybe use samples for the pedal noises and other very faint, nonlinear sounds inside the piano, but the steel string is 100% synthesized.
Sampled piano synths are also pretty good these days, although not as flexible. Take something that ought to be well-known to everyone, the Minecraft music. Do the pianos in there sound synthetic to you? (It's a sample based synth piano - Native Instruments' Komplete, I believe.)
You may be able to pick out differences, if you really go listening for them. But as far as I'm concerned, the difference between a recording of a piano vs. a live piano is so much greater than the difference between a recorded vs. a synthesized piano, that it's silly to make a distinction. Yeah, it'd be nice if was clinically impossible in blind tests to tell the difference between a piano synth and a piano. It would also be nice if I had live musicians in my room rather than streamed music.
This would be a good point, except that there's not really much NSA gets from having extreme hashing capacity. Breaking badly salted/hashed passwords, maybe, but if Snowden has taught us anything, it's that they don't need to rely on such crude tactics.
No, they didn't say Satoshi Nakamoto was a group of scammers.
(For those not following, Butterfly Labs have become infamous in the bitcoin community by selling ASIC mining machines, promising delivery in one week. If they arrive at all, it's more than six months later, and by that time the difficulty of bitcoin mining has inevitably increased enough to make them unprofitable.
Yet they keep advertising one week's delivery time.
They have a record of breaking down due to defects, too, if they arrive. People suspect that BFL let these miners run for themselves in the months between advertised delivery time and actual delivery time.)
How or why would they ever know I bought a Ferrari? Are such purchases reportable in Norway? (they aren't in the US)
You're not in Kansas anymore, friend! Not only is the Ferrari dealership (I think there is a single one) obliged to report purchases over a certain amount, but how much you're taxed is a matter of public record. They used to print them in the newspaper, even, though there's slightly more restrictions on them these days. Want to know how much I made in 2009? be my guest! (Spoiler alert: I'm not rich:P)
So when your neighbors see you driving a Ferrari, jealousy and/or civic duty might compel them to check the tax records, and if you're listed with zero in income and assets, the tax authorities might get a tip.
Not to mention states. There has been talk of a government-run electronic payment infrastructure for a long time (why shouldn't there be one? After all, paper bills and coins are government-run payment infrastructure too).
But the owners of the private payment infrastructure (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, banks) lobby against it with tooth and nail.
Now the little people, cryptographers, libertarians and online geeks, have actually managed to build up a decentralized payment infrastructure without government or corporate help. That's a damn impressive achievement, but one of the consequences is that it'll be harder for governments to sit on their behinds and let their own payment infrastructure remain in the 7th century.
> You can't use BTC for any non-electronic transaction. That's alot of transactions.
You can, if you're really good at doing math in your head.
Seriously, though, you can use tricks to print redeemable coins on bits of paper. Using these, you can make transactions enitrely offline... but since the recipient can't know that the paper is worth anything until he uses a computer to check it, you need a bit of trust.
Since these days even poor people prioritize getting a cell phone, there's really little need for non-electronic transactions.
Some things we are very free to put value in, others we have very little freedom to. If I'm starving, I can't really choose to assign food no value. If I assign value to things wildly out of step with my fellow humans, I'm going to have a hard time ("Give me that sandwich? You can have my car!")
When something is of such a character that we pretty much have no choice in the value we assign it, and there's no plausible way it's going to change, we say that it has inherent or intrinsic value. Maybe a little sloppy, but you know what is meant.
No, that doesn't work. Too much information is lost. Unless you have a very narrow range of guesses of what they might be saying, you have no chance of understanding.
Bitcoin money transfers are not anonymous. They're pseudonymous - at best.
A good example is wikileaks itself. In order to receive donations, it needs to have a public address. They have, and it's completely transparent - we can see exactly how much Wikileaks has received at that address: 3,795.80380943 bitcoins. They have a balance on it of 1,111.97135027 bitcoins, or roughly a million dollars at today's prices.
Think about it. There's no economy that's more transparent to the public than the bitcoin economy. And that's a good thing. In the conventional economy, banks, credit card companies and governments can see more than we can see in the block chain, but it's completely hidden for us.
Stop trying to fight or deny the transparency of bitcoin. It's a strength, not a weakness. Governments could have effectively stopped bitcoin payments to wikileaks too, by making it a crime to give or receive money from wikileaks. Since everything is so transparent, that would have been really effective. But it would also be bare-faced tyranny. It's much more convenient for them to be able to suppress wikileaks by having private companies make the decision to not offer service, officially on their own.
It's disappointing that Stallman buys into this pipe dream.
Bitcoin worked (works) because it's not anonymous. Fundamentally, if you have dirty coin, you need someone with clean coins to help you. There's no reason people with clean coins should help you.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike!
Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
Stallman should accept that sharing and modifying software is one thing, sharing and modifying information that is used as a token of agreement (passwords, signatures, contracts, licenses, "written by Richard Stallman" notices etc.) quite another.
Transfer of property claims are not a private matter - not if you want everyone else to respect those property claims.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
No, Tor is not a mixing service, there's a big difference between anonymizing communication and anonymizing payment tokens.
The fundamental problem with mixing services is that no matter how it works, some people need to put clean coin in. What's in it for them?
Also, if the mixing service can be identified by the authorities as a mixing service, you have a problem. You can be charged with helping to "disguise the source, ownership, location or control of proceeds of a serious crime" - the definition of money laundering. Effectively, all coin that comes out of the tumbler becomes dirty.
Not weak and suggestive. "Satoshi Nakamoto" is by definition the person or group of people who invented bitcoin. If you had bitcoin in the first month, you were either that person/in that group or very close to them - which is exactly what Shamir & co says.
Anyway, I don't think Shamir is revealing anything NSA doesn't already know. DPR left very obvious traces before starting SR, but NSA could probably find far more subtle traces, and I'm sure SN left those. There are only a handful of people with the competence to write the white paper and the initial software - which could both be analyzed for writing and coding style. It was in all likelihood someone who had written to the cryptography mailing list before. This should narrow it down to less than 20 people. At that point, NSA has active and passive ways to check their guesses.
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What legitimacy has the state, if it isn't society's representation of its common interests?
I think you're conflating two different uses of the word private here. It's not private as in privacy. I'm not denying that your property is your business, but quite often it is also my business.
By the way, you can't strictly speaking find out how much I own, because you only see how much tax I pay. You don't see my deductions, or the breakdown of income vs. various other taxes. Is it really a private business how much you contribute to society?
I doubt you're really more individualist than me. However, I consider most of our private property arrangements as useful constructions of our society (though the state), not any natural inherent right or anything.
The practice hasn't been abandoned last time I checked, it's just a little harder to get access. You need a MinID identity (= Norwegian citizenship, plus you leave traces!), and the lists are taken down after a brief period.
That attitude is very useful for employers to keep down wages, too :) I suspect that's why the system persisted, despite the rich hating it and the rest being reluctant to admit that they used it. It's a useful tool for labor unions.
I take a different attitude. Cash transfers are property transfers too, and property is an institution between society and individuals. If you want me to respect your property, surely I'm entitled to some information about what you claim as property? For some classes of property (especially real estate and business ownership), it's likely mandated to be public even in your country. Norway just takes it a bit further, that's all.
Citation needed. When a physical piano is of a brand that goes for an intensely clean and standardized sound (e.g Yamaha grand pianos), it often sounds more "synthetic" than an actual piano synth.
Go here and listen to one of the examples of "chamber recording" or "concert recording". IMO, it's very, very easy to mistake that for the real thing.
Stop it, I'm dying from snobbery overdose!!
Those words could only be said by someone who's not very good at distinguishing in his mind the purely auditory experience from the full experience.
Case in point: Opera. Many people find the singing style of classical opera weird and gross, but fact is there are very few other ways to make yourself heard over an orchestra without a microphone. Except the ones that are uglier, and/or would wear out your voice quickly.
Holy cow, what sort of concerts do you go to?!
Seriously, though. Empathy is nice and all, but don't imagine that it is something other than empathy. If you hear the performers' breakfast and kids, that doesn't really come across with the sound waves, but rather with your foreknowledge and beliefs. Don't confuse the music with the baggage, nice as though the baggage may be.
Check out Modartt's Pianoteq, it's extremely good, and almost completely synthesized. I think they still maybe use samples for the pedal noises and other very faint, nonlinear sounds inside the piano, but the steel string is 100% synthesized.
Sampled piano synths are also pretty good these days, although not as flexible. Take something that ought to be well-known to everyone, the Minecraft music. Do the pianos in there sound synthetic to you? (It's a sample based synth piano - Native Instruments' Komplete, I believe.)
You may be able to pick out differences, if you really go listening for them. But as far as I'm concerned, the difference between a recording of a piano vs. a live piano is so much greater than the difference between a recorded vs. a synthesized piano, that it's silly to make a distinction. Yeah, it'd be nice if was clinically impossible in blind tests to tell the difference between a piano synth and a piano. It would also be nice if I had live musicians in my room rather than streamed music.
This would be a good point, except that there's not really much NSA gets from having extreme hashing capacity. Breaking badly salted/hashed passwords, maybe, but if Snowden has taught us anything, it's that they don't need to rely on such crude tactics.
No, they didn't say Satoshi Nakamoto was a group of scammers.
(For those not following, Butterfly Labs have become infamous in the bitcoin community by selling ASIC mining machines, promising delivery in one week. If they arrive at all, it's more than six months later, and by that time the difficulty of bitcoin mining has inevitably increased enough to make them unprofitable.
Yet they keep advertising one week's delivery time.
They have a record of breaking down due to defects, too, if they arrive. People suspect that BFL let these miners run for themselves in the months between advertised delivery time and actual delivery time.)
You're not in Kansas anymore, friend! Not only is the Ferrari dealership (I think there is a single one) obliged to report purchases over a certain amount, but how much you're taxed is a matter of public record. They used to print them in the newspaper, even, though there's slightly more restrictions on them these days. Want to know how much I made in 2009? be my guest! (Spoiler alert: I'm not rich :P)
So when your neighbors see you driving a Ferrari, jealousy and/or civic duty might compel them to check the tax records, and if you're listed with zero in income and assets, the tax authorities might get a tip.
To Brazil, or to Michigan?
It doesn't follow at all. He wouldn't express surprise if he was trying to eavesdrop on the Icelandic parliament.
The impressiveness of this feat is only slightly tainted by the fact that it wasn't supposed to be a flyby. They missed.
All us KSP fans can relate to that, I'm sure...
Not to mention states. There has been talk of a government-run electronic payment infrastructure for a long time (why shouldn't there be one? After all, paper bills and coins are government-run payment infrastructure too).
But the owners of the private payment infrastructure (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, banks) lobby against it with tooth and nail.
Now the little people, cryptographers, libertarians and online geeks, have actually managed to build up a decentralized payment infrastructure without government or corporate help. That's a damn impressive achievement, but one of the consequences is that it'll be harder for governments to sit on their behinds and let their own payment infrastructure remain in the 7th century.
> You can't use BTC for any non-electronic transaction. That's alot of transactions.
You can, if you're really good at doing math in your head.
Seriously, though, you can use tricks to print redeemable coins on bits of paper. Using these, you can make transactions enitrely offline... but since the recipient can't know that the paper is worth anything until he uses a computer to check it, you need a bit of trust.
Since these days even poor people prioritize getting a cell phone, there's really little need for non-electronic transactions.
Some things we are very free to put value in, others we have very little freedom to. If I'm starving, I can't really choose to assign food no value. If I assign value to things wildly out of step with my fellow humans, I'm going to have a hard time ("Give me that sandwich? You can have my car!")
When something is of such a character that we pretty much have no choice in the value we assign it, and there's no plausible way it's going to change, we say that it has inherent or intrinsic value. Maybe a little sloppy, but you know what is meant.
Have you looked at the block chain records of the richest people in bitcoin?
You can attach messages to transfers, and these people are spammed to death with microscopic transactions with begging messages added.
I wish people spamming me would attach pennies.
No, that doesn't work. Too much information is lost. Unless you have a very narrow range of guesses of what they might be saying, you have no chance of understanding.
Bitcoin money transfers are not anonymous. They're pseudonymous - at best.
A good example is wikileaks itself. In order to receive donations, it needs to have a public address. They have, and it's completely transparent - we can see exactly how much Wikileaks has received at that address: 3,795.80380943 bitcoins. They have a balance on it of 1,111.97135027 bitcoins, or roughly a million dollars at today's prices.
Think about it. There's no economy that's more transparent to the public than the bitcoin economy. And that's a good thing. In the conventional economy, banks, credit card companies and governments can see more than we can see in the block chain, but it's completely hidden for us.
Stop trying to fight or deny the transparency of bitcoin. It's a strength, not a weakness. Governments could have effectively stopped bitcoin payments to wikileaks too, by making it a crime to give or receive money from wikileaks. Since everything is so transparent, that would have been really effective. But it would also be bare-faced tyranny. It's much more convenient for them to be able to suppress wikileaks by having private companies make the decision to not offer service, officially on their own.
It's disappointing that Stallman buys into this pipe dream.
Bitcoin worked (works) because it's not anonymous. Fundamentally, if you have dirty coin, you need someone with clean coins to help you. There's no reason people with clean coins should help you.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike!
Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
Stallman should accept that sharing and modifying software is one thing, sharing and modifying information that is used as a token of agreement (passwords, signatures, contracts, licenses, "written by Richard Stallman" notices etc.) quite another.
Transfer of property claims are not a private matter - not if you want everyone else to respect those property claims.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
No, Tor is not a mixing service, there's a big difference between anonymizing communication and anonymizing payment tokens.
The fundamental problem with mixing services is that no matter how it works, some people need to put clean coin in. What's in it for them?
Also, if the mixing service can be identified by the authorities as a mixing service, you have a problem. You can be charged with helping to "disguise the source, ownership, location or control of proceeds of a serious crime" - the definition of money laundering. Effectively, all coin that comes out of the tumbler becomes dirty.
Not to mention evil Canadian paraplegic depressed terrorists. Can you imagine the guilt they could inspire in honest citizens with their "I'm sorry"s?
Not weak and suggestive. "Satoshi Nakamoto" is by definition the person or group of people who invented bitcoin. If you had bitcoin in the first month, you were either that person/in that group or very close to them - which is exactly what Shamir & co says.
Anyway, I don't think Shamir is revealing anything NSA doesn't already know. DPR left very obvious traces before starting SR, but NSA could probably find far more subtle traces, and I'm sure SN left those. There are only a handful of people with the competence to write the white paper and the initial software - which could both be analyzed for writing and coding style. It was in all likelihood someone who had written to the cryptography mailing list before. This should narrow it down to less than 20 people. At that point, NSA has active and passive ways to check their guesses.