Heh, I can relate. I still make the time, the unfortunate part is that it is usually late at night when all other stuff has been taken care of, which is not the best frame of mind for learning. For me learning new stuff on my own may benefit my employer, but it benefits me far greater. It isn't work if you love the stuff.
Oh to get up on a Saturday morning with a fresh pot of coffee and a fresh mind to tinker.:-)
Are you serious? These guys are in damage control now that their complicit behaviour towards the NSA has been revealed. They are protecting their profits and that is it.
They have value because people assign value to it, just like gold. The usefulness of gold is way overrated. There are tonnes and tonnes of it sitting there doing nothing except acting as a store of value. The scarcity of gold is only caused by people hording it, it has relatively little use otherwise. I would say there is artificial scarcity to gold as well.
I see bandwidth as the limiting factor and not hard drive space. It will be interesting to see how the community addresses the increased blockchain size in the future. I would imagine that some pretty smart people are thinking about this. I don't see too many people being a full node on the network from their DSL and Cable connections at some point.
I know you meant private key and not public. Anyway, I suppose if I were to create a unique grain of sand and hide it in one of the world's deserts or beaches that you could eventually find it. You are going to need something a whole lot better then a shovel and magnifying glass, which is all you have right now with todays computing power.
Theoretically you could start mining with your laptop and despite the infinitesimal odds of solving a puzzle, actually be successful and get a 25BTC reward. That would involve incredible luck. Actually the chance is so small as to be practically impossible. In the long run you will mine in proportion to the computing power you bring to the network. It's why pretty much everyone mines from a pool today. You will just be throwing money out the window going it alone. So I would say its not luck at all. Considering the amount of money you need to invest to get a suitable mining rig and the ever increasing difficulty, you would most definitely come out ahead simply buying the coins directly.
Say you are to compare bitcoin to gold. (and i am not saying that bitcoin is gold 2.0... but for the sake of argument). Is it not expected that you will need to expend huge amounts of resources to mine gold? Does that discourage physical miners from expending huge amounts of resources, quite possibly to the detriment of the planet? No, they do this because it is profitable to do so, despite objections from environmentalists. Why should we abondon bitcoin because it consumes electricity? Also, what is the amount of energy needed to maintain the current system of government controlled currencies? In the end there is no free lunch. Validating transactions takes energy, the generation of the coins is the reward for doing so.
Or maybe the $150,000 is not the real prize. If you can access an account with that much money in it you can use it as part of your new "identity" to leverage even further into another account. The person whose identity has been stolen would be none the wiser and the thief could make off with 10 times that amount. If you try and access any of that 150k the bank would shut it down immediately after you pulled out the first $500. If a different bank really thought you were the owner of the account you can take your sweet time, maybe even make a couple of payments back to the bank to drag out the process.
I don't get digital horders. I have a friend who has TB's and TB's of downloaded crap saved on DVD's and USB Hard drives. Why? He will never watch a fraction of this stuff. All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and can watch reruns of Star Trek TNG (or thousands of other things) if I feel like it. All at the tip of my fingers 24x7. No need to download 7 season's, and the interface on Netflix is much easier then dicking around with finding an episode you may want to watch three years from now. To each his own I guess.
I'm not laughing but reminiscing. I am going to d/l it and give it a spin. Nothing but respect for slack, even if I haven't used it in ages. Time to correct that.
I was thinking more along the lines of stupid because you can see him holding his smartphone with one hand in the reflection. At least he was on the Autobahn.
I do like you but just lock down at work for all the large static stuff (photos, videos etc). For important files which tend to be smaller in size (Spreadsheets, pdfs, docs) they get encrypted and uploaded to my VPS over SSH and to Skydrive.
This is wrong. Everyday users can benefit from PGP. I would venture to say that most people are not as worried about NSA snooping as they are from keeping their personal data stolen by criminals. They may not ask for PGP specifically or understand the details of encryption, but I think your average user would understand the benefit of using email to send sensitive info to the bank, or using electronic methods to discuss sensitive personal medical information with their doctor. Most people instinctively know not to use email for this without even realizing there are ways to do it securely. It's the implementation of it that leaves them cold. Small business are another segment that could benefit from it but just can't wrap their heads around it. An easy to use implementation that provided secure communication would see some uptake among people you wouldn't consider actually needing it today.
How do I get mod points? This needs to be modded up and I would have if I had any. There used to be a section in my account where I could check a box saying I was willing to moderate. I cannot find it for the life of me and have not moderated in years. Well Xest, +1 Insightful and Informative. Hell have 4 more. +5 answer all the way. (if I could)
It's because the subject takes time to digest and respond to intelligently. As opposed to the usual "NSA is Monitoring My Brain" headline. It's nice to see this type of article, it's what brought me to slashdot so many years ago. I still come everyday hoping to see more stuff like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I can relate. I still make the time, the unfortunate part is that it is usually late at night when all other stuff has been taken care of, which is not the best frame of mind for learning. For me learning new stuff on my own may benefit my employer, but it benefits me far greater. It isn't work if you love the stuff.
Oh to get up on a Saturday morning with a fresh pot of coffee and a fresh mind to tinker. :-)
ya but there are a lot of alt-jesus'.
Not likely. They would need to tumble those coins.
I don't know what all these people are bitching about. I liked the read, thanks.
Now that is "fark ready" headline.
Are you serious? These guys are in damage control now that their complicit behaviour towards the NSA has been revealed. They are protecting their profits and that is it.
They have value because people assign value to it, just like gold. The usefulness of gold is way overrated. There are tonnes and tonnes of it sitting there doing nothing except acting as a store of value. The scarcity of gold is only caused by people hording it, it has relatively little use otherwise. I would say there is artificial scarcity to gold as well.
I see bandwidth as the limiting factor and not hard drive space. It will be interesting to see how the community addresses the increased blockchain size in the future. I would imagine that some pretty smart people are thinking about this. I don't see too many people being a full node on the network from their DSL and Cable connections at some point.
I know you meant private key and not public. Anyway, I suppose if I were to create a unique grain of sand and hide it in one of the world's deserts or beaches that you could eventually find it. You are going to need something a whole lot better then a shovel and magnifying glass, which is all you have right now with todays computing power.
Theoretically you could start mining with your laptop and despite the infinitesimal odds of solving a puzzle, actually be successful and get a 25BTC reward. That would involve incredible luck. Actually the chance is so small as to be practically impossible. In the long run you will mine in proportion to the computing power you bring to the network. It's why pretty much everyone mines from a pool today. You will just be throwing money out the window going it alone. So I would say its not luck at all. Considering the amount of money you need to invest to get a suitable mining rig and the ever increasing difficulty, you would most definitely come out ahead simply buying the coins directly.
Say you are to compare bitcoin to gold. (and i am not saying that bitcoin is gold 2.0... but for the sake of argument). Is it not expected that you will need to expend huge amounts of resources to mine gold? Does that discourage physical miners from expending huge amounts of resources, quite possibly to the detriment of the planet? No, they do this because it is profitable to do so, despite objections from environmentalists. Why should we abondon bitcoin because it consumes electricity? Also, what is the amount of energy needed to maintain the current system of government controlled currencies? In the end there is no free lunch. Validating transactions takes energy, the generation of the coins is the reward for doing so.
When you have kids a wired mouse it the only option. Now we need a wired tv remote.
Why do you think they want to be kings? You think these guys envision themselves as commoners?
Or maybe the $150,000 is not the real prize. If you can access an account with that much money in it you can use it as part of your new "identity" to leverage even further into another account. The person whose identity has been stolen would be none the wiser and the thief could make off with 10 times that amount. If you try and access any of that 150k the bank would shut it down immediately after you pulled out the first $500. If a different bank really thought you were the owner of the account you can take your sweet time, maybe even make a couple of payments back to the bank to drag out the process.
I mean the "ad" .
This. I have one app that as far as I can tell is updated just to change the add on the splashscreen.
I don't get digital horders. I have a friend who has TB's and TB's of downloaded crap saved on DVD's and USB Hard drives. Why? He will never watch a fraction of this stuff. All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and can watch reruns of Star Trek TNG (or thousands of other things) if I feel like it. All at the tip of my fingers 24x7. No need to download 7 season's, and the interface on Netflix is much easier then dicking around with finding an episode you may want to watch three years from now. To each his own I guess.
and by sat on their ass you mean the co-ceo was more engaged in trying to bring NHL hockey to Hamilton then running his company.
I'm not laughing but reminiscing. I am going to d/l it and give it a spin. Nothing but respect for slack, even if I haven't used it in ages. Time to correct that.
The 3472 1.44MB floppy disk set will be available immediately. :-) Ah the good old days downloading 30 diskettes all night on my dialup connection.
I was thinking more along the lines of stupid because you can see him holding his smartphone with one hand in the reflection. At least he was on the Autobahn.
I do like you but just lock down at work for all the large static stuff (photos, videos etc). For important files which tend to be smaller in size (Spreadsheets, pdfs, docs) they get encrypted and uploaded to my VPS over SSH and to Skydrive.
This is wrong. Everyday users can benefit from PGP. I would venture to say that most people are not as worried about NSA snooping as they are from keeping their personal data stolen by criminals. They may not ask for PGP specifically or understand the details of encryption, but I think your average user would understand the benefit of using email to send sensitive info to the bank, or using electronic methods to discuss sensitive personal medical information with their doctor. Most people instinctively know not to use email for this without even realizing there are ways to do it securely. It's the implementation of it that leaves them cold. Small business are another segment that could benefit from it but just can't wrap their heads around it. An easy to use implementation that provided secure communication would see some uptake among people you wouldn't consider actually needing it today.
How do I get mod points? This needs to be modded up and I would have if I had any. There used to be a section in my account where I could check a box saying I was willing to moderate. I cannot find it for the life of me and have not moderated in years. Well Xest, +1 Insightful and Informative. Hell have 4 more. +5 answer all the way. (if I could)
It's because the subject takes time to digest and respond to intelligently. As opposed to the usual "NSA is Monitoring My Brain" headline. It's nice to see this type of article, it's what brought me to slashdot so many years ago. I still come everyday hoping to see more stuff like this.