The net result of zerocoin is only that of a distributed mixing service. Since mixing services have fundamental problems of a non-technical nature, it just won't work.
But it's true to the bitcoin dream. Krugman accused bitcoin fans of trying to divorce the concept of economic value from the mess of human society. I expect zerocoin will just make it even clearer how nonsensical that dream is.
No, the evidence is really pretty clear. You can trace the history of any coin. Here's what they show:
* some extremely early coin, from parts of the block that virtually never has exchanged hands, found its way into Silk Road.
* It was a considerable amount, too.
This might be just the slip-up that unmasks the inventor(s) of the currency.
I'm not sure it was an investment, though, as the article suggests. I think Silk Road was profitable enough that they wouldn't really need an investment, at least not in the form of bitcoin.
Yes, this is a classic investor trap, which has been covered before on Slashdot. I seem to recall another story about seawaterfarms dot com on slashdot, but I can't find it. Anyway, you can see that page in the Wayback Machine and see how it didn't exactly go anywhere.
The big rusting tank they talked about that supposedly gave valuable micronutrients to the plant, maybe says something about the seriousness of the project.
As usual, people don't have a clue about prohibition.
Prohibition only targeted sales, production and importation, not possession or use.
Prohibition was instituted with a constitutional amendment too, and enjoyed broad popular support. Opposition to it was concentrated with city-dwellers, higher classes, men and Catholics. Support for it came from rural areas, the working class, women and protestants. The places it had most negative effects were the places where support for it was disastrously low (urban centres).
Prohibition closed down a industry that used to be legal. It closed down 1300 breweries. Some of the big alcohol corporations we have today (Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller) barely survived by switching production to malted milk and porcelain products.
Illegal drug use has never been remotely as high as alcohol use was, not even alcohol use at its lowest.
All this made it a completely different situation from the prohibition of drugs. It's just not comparable. Argue for legalization or decriminalisation or what you want, but please shut up about prohibition, because you don't have a clue about prohibition.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
on
The Silk Road Is Back
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· Score: 1
I think strength is the wrong measure. Volatility is more important. I believe, as do many bitcoin users, that it will have huge boom and bust cycles for a long time, if not forever.
That this hurts its non-speculative uses shouldn't really be a controversial assertion.
Everyone makes mistakes. You hear about the dumb things he did. The smart things he did you don't hear about, because they worked. Of course it doesn't take many dumb things to catch you.
Especially not if the dumb things aren't needed to actually identify you, but only to make a parallel construction.
I am surprised that law enforcement allowed it to be shut down in the first place. They should have taken it over, and run it for a few months, track every transaction, and then come down hard on all the dealers.
They probably did something like that. We know they knew DPR's identity and kept him under surveillance for months. All it would have taken is a keylogger on one of the public terminals he used to manage his stuff, and they'd know everything he knew.
Pure chemical addiction is easily broken. It happens routinely at hospitals.
I knew a guy who shot himself in the foot with a shotgun accidentally on a hunting trip. He spent months in hospital, got opiates for the pain, and developed physical addiction to it (tolerance). When he was written out, he went through withdrawal symptoms like any other addict - more severe, actually, since you get more and purer morphine in a hospital (in a situation like that) than a street addict can ever hope to get.
Yet once he recovered, he had zero need for morphine. Quite the opposite, in fact, he never wanted to go through that again. This is typical. A large study of Vietnam veterans treated with morphine showed that they had no larger chances of ending up as drug abusers than any other veteran.
So it's the soft, "psychological" addiction people should care about anyway. It's not the withdrawal symptoms that keep an addict on opiates, because street addicts regularly go through that, voluntarily or not. What makes them addicts is that they start again after being through it.
Yup. It's not for deliberate poisoning - for that, you might as well go to any grocery store's cleaning product aisle. But we should worry about where the buyers dump or spill it during and after their little operation.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
on
The Silk Road Is Back
·
· Score: 1
No, it's pretty rare. Articles discussing why the yen is undervalued or the Swiss franc is not do happen, but considerably more rarely than every day IME.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
on
The Silk Road Is Back
·
· Score: 1
Trying to hide transactions is illegal in itself. It's money laundering by definition, illegal over certain amounts.
Yet FBI have stated officially that bitcoin is legal.
This ought to tell people something about how effective bitcoin is at hiding transactions.
Tumblers are illegal, though. They do succeed in hiding what crime the coin was originally the proceeds of.
However, that's no good, as the coin is now associated with the crime of money laundering instead, and just as much a hot commodity.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
on
The Silk Road Is Back
·
· Score: 1
I'm a critic of bitcoin as well, but it's not true that illegal uses is the only thing bitcoin is good for. What it has potential for is as a decentralized and low-fee payment infrastructure, to compete with Visa and Western Union or whatever hoops people have to go through to transfer money.
Though that is not presently what it's used for. That is still 95% speculation and 5% illegal stuff. Certain of its features also sabotage its legitimate uses, most especially its inherent deflationary nature.
Never mind the NSA then, if you want to give them the benefit of "just following orders". It's still the responsibility of the US president to not betray the trust of your allies, not lie to them. At least not if he wants to stay allied with them.
Whatever the mission of the NSA is, you're not supposed to breach trust. Get this?
You're never supposed to promise a leader "We'll not spy on you" and then go on to spy. You never say "We'll not attack" and then attack. No matter your views of your superiority and exceptionalism, promises like these undermine themselves. If you keep making and breaking them eventually no one will believe them. Then there will be no trust between you.
It's generally thought that trust is valuable - that keeping it is worth occasionally telling truths when lies would have been easier.
If no, the concept of "allies" is a sham, and it would come out eventually anyway.
No, they are not. It would be great if regular people had as much clout as heads of state. But there's actually a lot of personal trust involved between heads of state, along with personal power. They aren't just tools of their systems.
Betraying that personal trust is a big deal. Maybe the attacks on our liberties should be a bigger deal in the perfect world. But it isn't. Right now the best we can hope for is that your pseudo-autarch faces some consequences from our pseudo-autarch for his bad behavior.
Oh, the bitcoin community is perfectly OK with misconceptions (bitcoin is anonymous, you need to control 50% of the mining pool to cheat) as long as they prop up the price.
In that case, wouldn't "ransom" or "bounty" have been better? There have been projects like this before. As I recall, there was even one before Kickstarter came and made everyone talk about "crowdfunding" - but it didn't catch on.
By the measure you use, it will be measured up to you. It might have been outrageous to think so before, but maybe there will come a day where you'll have to answer for what you did - and risk losing something more than reelection prospects.
Slashdot Mirror
If you doubt that, I doubt you really read up the details of the case
Ah, that explains it.
The net result of zerocoin is only that of a distributed mixing service. Since mixing services have fundamental problems of a non-technical nature, it just won't work.
But it's true to the bitcoin dream. Krugman accused bitcoin fans of trying to divorce the concept of economic value from the mess of human society. I expect zerocoin will just make it even clearer how nonsensical that dream is.
No, the evidence is really pretty clear. You can trace the history of any coin. Here's what they show:
* some extremely early coin, from parts of the block that virtually never has exchanged hands, found its way into Silk Road.
* It was a considerable amount, too.
This might be just the slip-up that unmasks the inventor(s) of the currency.
I'm not sure it was an investment, though, as the article suggests. I think Silk Road was profitable enough that they wouldn't really need an investment, at least not in the form of bitcoin.
Not to mention if it's in a loop. Good lord, Zuckerberg could go broke!
Yes, this is a classic investor trap, which has been covered before on Slashdot. I seem to recall another story about seawaterfarms dot com on slashdot, but I can't find it. Anyway, you can see that page in the Wayback Machine and see how it didn't exactly go anywhere.
The big rusting tank they talked about that supposedly gave valuable micronutrients to the plant, maybe says something about the seriousness of the project.
As usual, people don't have a clue about prohibition.
Prohibition only targeted sales, production and importation, not possession or use.
Prohibition was instituted with a constitutional amendment too, and enjoyed broad popular support. Opposition to it was concentrated with city-dwellers, higher classes, men and Catholics. Support for it came from rural areas, the working class, women and protestants. The places it had most negative effects were the places where support for it was disastrously low (urban centres).
Prohibition closed down a industry that used to be legal. It closed down 1300 breweries. Some of the big alcohol corporations we have today (Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller) barely survived by switching production to malted milk and porcelain products.
Illegal drug use has never been remotely as high as alcohol use was, not even alcohol use at its lowest.
All this made it a completely different situation from the prohibition of drugs. It's just not comparable. Argue for legalization or decriminalisation or what you want, but please shut up about prohibition, because you don't have a clue about prohibition.
I think strength is the wrong measure. Volatility is more important. I believe, as do many bitcoin users, that it will have huge boom and bust cycles for a long time, if not forever.
That this hurts its non-speculative uses shouldn't really be a controversial assertion.
Everyone makes mistakes. You hear about the dumb things he did. The smart things he did you don't hear about, because they worked. Of course it doesn't take many dumb things to catch you.
Especially not if the dumb things aren't needed to actually identify you, but only to make a parallel construction.
They probably did something like that. We know they knew DPR's identity and kept him under surveillance for months. All it would have taken is a keylogger on one of the public terminals he used to manage his stuff, and they'd know everything he knew.
Pure chemical addiction is easily broken. It happens routinely at hospitals.
I knew a guy who shot himself in the foot with a shotgun accidentally on a hunting trip. He spent months in hospital, got opiates for the pain, and developed physical addiction to it (tolerance). When he was written out, he went through withdrawal symptoms like any other addict - more severe, actually, since you get more and purer morphine in a hospital (in a situation like that) than a street addict can ever hope to get.
Yet once he recovered, he had zero need for morphine. Quite the opposite, in fact, he never wanted to go through that again. This is typical. A large study of Vietnam veterans treated with morphine showed that they had no larger chances of ending up as drug abusers than any other veteran.
So it's the soft, "psychological" addiction people should care about anyway. It's not the withdrawal symptoms that keep an addict on opiates, because street addicts regularly go through that, voluntarily or not. What makes them addicts is that they start again after being through it.
Yup. It's not for deliberate poisoning - for that, you might as well go to any grocery store's cleaning product aisle. But we should worry about where the buyers dump or spill it during and after their little operation.
No, it's pretty rare. Articles discussing why the yen is undervalued or the Swiss franc is not do happen, but considerably more rarely than every day IME.
Trying to hide transactions is illegal in itself. It's money laundering by definition, illegal over certain amounts.
Yet FBI have stated officially that bitcoin is legal.
This ought to tell people something about how effective bitcoin is at hiding transactions.
Tumblers are illegal, though. They do succeed in hiding what crime the coin was originally the proceeds of.
However, that's no good, as the coin is now associated with the crime of money laundering instead, and just as much a hot commodity.
I'm a critic of bitcoin as well, but it's not true that illegal uses is the only thing bitcoin is good for. What it has potential for is as a decentralized and low-fee payment infrastructure, to compete with Visa and Western Union or whatever hoops people have to go through to transfer money.
Though that is not presently what it's used for. That is still 95% speculation and 5% illegal stuff. Certain of its features also sabotage its legitimate uses, most especially its inherent deflationary nature.
Never mind the NSA then, if you want to give them the benefit of "just following orders". It's still the responsibility of the US president to not betray the trust of your allies, not lie to them. At least not if he wants to stay allied with them.
Whatever the mission of the NSA is, you're not supposed to breach trust. Get this?
You're never supposed to promise a leader "We'll not spy on you" and then go on to spy. You never say "We'll not attack" and then attack. No matter your views of your superiority and exceptionalism, promises like these undermine themselves. If you keep making and breaking them eventually no one will believe them. Then there will be no trust between you.
It's generally thought that trust is valuable - that keeping it is worth occasionally telling truths when lies would have been easier.
If no, the concept of "allies" is a sham, and it would come out eventually anyway.
No, they are not. It would be great if regular people had as much clout as heads of state. But there's actually a lot of personal trust involved between heads of state, along with personal power. They aren't just tools of their systems.
Betraying that personal trust is a big deal. Maybe the attacks on our liberties should be a bigger deal in the perfect world. But it isn't. Right now the best we can hope for is that your pseudo-autarch faces some consequences from our pseudo-autarch for his bad behavior.
Oh, the bitcoin community is perfectly OK with misconceptions (bitcoin is anonymous, you need to control 50% of the mining pool to cheat) as long as they prop up the price.
Wow, a really unethical anonymous comment. Someone trying to prop up the value of their stash?
See, this works both ways.
Where are my funny mod points when I need them.
The nice thing is that all of these currencies have a finite supply! (smirk)
This is true. However, it's also on the big side of what it could be. It could be lots of things.
Yeah well, if you've already bought in, you have an incentive to say that. Some would call it hoping for a bigger fool to turn up.
In that case, wouldn't "ransom" or "bounty" have been better? There have been projects like this before. As I recall, there was even one before Kickstarter came and made everyone talk about "crowdfunding" - but it didn't catch on.
Yeah. It's a bit rich to complain of breach of trust when you've just been caught listening in on the phone calls of allied political leaders.
By the measure you use, it will be measured up to you. It might have been outrageous to think so before, but maybe there will come a day where you'll have to answer for what you did - and risk losing something more than reelection prospects.