See subject: What I needed to know was if they can operate ON THEIR OWN independently & they don't - thus, they can be blocked (provided you have what they point @, which IS tougher to do but NOT 'impossible').
Yeah, if you know all the IP addresses of the mining cluster, you can theoretically block bitcoin mining in your browser. But I think in practice, most websites that do this probably send their work back to the server via a standard http request, and the server aggregates all the work done, and only then sends it to the bticoin cluster.
But both of them are now process driven companies, primarily focused on not overturning the boat, and the result is code that follows process.
I see evidence of this in a lot of different places. For Microsoft, there is this, and from what I've heard from people who worked there, it's basically like that all over Microsoft. Similarly, you can see the results in their products (that link shows an example of their processes entering the product in an obvious way). Similarly, at Google, I've talked to people who work there, and it seems about the same. Again you can see it in the output of their product (they must have some good people on the search team, though).
Honestly though, looking at the turnover these two company (check out their turnover rate) you have to focus on process, because you need them to be able to replace engineers when they leave.
As long as process is followed, you don't have to worry about whether you did a good job or not. Just go home at the end of the day
This isn't an assertion about Microsoft or Google, it's a description of how process driven companies are in general. This has been my experience both observing and being a part of them.
That is the mentality of the vast majority of mediocre programmers at both companies
This is what I get from talking to people who've worked there. Note that not everyone is a mediocre programmer.
Do bitcoin mining scripts have to talk back to a central server OR point @ servers for it that are 'centralized'?
It's a P2P network, all decentralized. You need to find the IP address of one of the peers, then from there you open a connection to 10 (or so) of the other peers. To make a transaction, you tell them all that you want to make the transaction. Eventually (usually within 10 minutes), the transaction gets verified and added to the block-chain.
Currencies have their own supply/demand curve. If the demand drops to zero, the price will also drop to zero, no matter how much the country produces. If the supply increases to infinity.........I'll let you figure that one out.
You must have taught a high-school economics class, to have missed that important principle.
Gold does have innate value. It is a rare metal with many desirable qualities.
No, you are wrong. It is your desire that gives it value. You desire those qualities and are willing to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay for them, then it has no value (not many years ago, no one was willing to pay for the conducting properties of gold. If a better, cheaper conductor gets invented, again no one will care).
The trouble with your argument is that the relatively few hotels & pizzaria's that accept BTC don't handle it
That's not the trouble with my argument, it's a trouble with you: all you did was skim through, found the first line you half-understood, and made an argument against that half-understanding. In other words you set up a strawman and destroyed it.
Next time focus more on understanding than on destroying.
When people point out that "fiat" currencies are only backed up by government promises, they forget to note that cryptocurrencies are only backed up by "fiat" currency
This is not right and shows you never took an economics class. I'll try to explain it for you briefly, but you should know it is nuanced and complex.
No currency has innate value, including gold. If "innate value" determined the price of an object, then people would be paying a lot for air, because it's as valuable as life itself.
The value of a currency is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (again, just like anything). If no one is willing to pay more than $10 for an ounce of gold (for example, if the world collectively realized wedding rings are stupid), then that's its price. If people are willing to give you $5000 for a single bitcoin, then that's its price. In other words, Bitcoin is backed by what people are willing to give for it, not by fiat currency. You can exchange Bitcoin for pizza or for hotel bookings.
The price of bitcoin isn't based on "how much 'real' money people have put into it." Bitcoin (and stocks) are not a bank account. The price is determined by what people are willing to pay. Assume for a moment that the bitcoin bubble crashes: in that case, its price could drop to $0 without a single person withdrawing money from it. No one will be willing to buy them. Likewise, the price can jump dramatically in the same manner.
I did a bit of research and I think that falling costs (disk space and bandwidth getting cheaper, CDNs pooling resources) and some newer crypto currencies
That's interesting, which currencies are you looking at here?
It's not the annoyance of the popups, although those are indeed annoying. It's that advertising revenue is a motivation for creating content that is a blight on humanity.......designed to get page views without regards to quality, truthfulness, or even fun and entertainment. The ads themselves are often manipulative and lies, and they encourage that kind of content to be created.
Endless standardized testing and data collection are completely useless.
You need a way to measure, otherwise you can't improve. Data collection does that for you. Teachers don't like it because it can be used against them (and in fact, has been used against them).
You'll have to narrow it down a bit more, I'm not going to give you a citation for every sentence in my post. If there's something I said that seems particularly unlikely, let me know, and I will either give some evidence to support it, give it a disclaimer, or outright retract it.
Yeah that analysis seems right, indicating that bitcoin mining won't be able to replace traditional advertising. Nice calculating, btw.
So going farther, in what way could a blockchain be used to give money to the server? Something like micropayments, but without needing to pay $5 transaction fees to Paypal. Obviously bitcoin isn't suitable for this (at least not mining in the browser), so it would have to be modified.
It's worth considering how the blockchain could be modified to make this actually viable. I don't know the answer, but it seems like a research avenue with potential.
The economics of mining on the CPU make even less sense than the economics of online adverts,
Intuitively I think you are right (partially because adverts can pay a lot), but I'd like to see an analysis of this. Is it actually economically feasible to pay for your servers with bitcoin mining? You would have to take into consideration a lot of factors.....among them the fact that mining gets more expensive the more people are working on it.
Advertising is a plague, but that's not the real problem: the real problem is that you can monetize users by showing them garbage, and then you won't believe what happens next: the garbage pushes out the good stuff so it's hard to find.
That means RSA tokens are in many ways worse than a well-chosen password (like the XKCD method) because at least in the case of a well-chosen password, the attacker will need to put some effort into discovering it when the password file leaks.
Slashdot Mirror
See subject: What I needed to know was if they can operate ON THEIR OWN independently & they don't - thus, they can be blocked (provided you have what they point @, which IS tougher to do but NOT 'impossible').
Yeah, if you know all the IP addresses of the mining cluster, you can theoretically block bitcoin mining in your browser. But I think in practice, most websites that do this probably send their work back to the server via a standard http request, and the server aggregates all the work done, and only then sends it to the bticoin cluster.
But both of them are now process driven companies, primarily focused on not overturning the boat, and the result is code that follows process.
I see evidence of this in a lot of different places. For Microsoft, there is this, and from what I've heard from people who worked there, it's basically like that all over Microsoft. Similarly, you can see the results in their products (that link shows an example of their processes entering the product in an obvious way). Similarly, at Google, I've talked to people who work there, and it seems about the same. Again you can see it in the output of their product (they must have some good people on the search team, though).
Honestly though, looking at the turnover these two company (check out their turnover rate) you have to focus on process, because you need them to be able to replace engineers when they leave.
As long as process is followed, you don't have to worry about whether you did a good job or not. Just go home at the end of the day
This isn't an assertion about Microsoft or Google, it's a description of how process driven companies are in general. This has been my experience both observing and being a part of them.
That is the mentality of the vast majority of mediocre programmers at both companies
This is what I get from talking to people who've worked there. Note that not everyone is a mediocre programmer.
Do bitcoin mining scripts have to talk back to a central server OR point @ servers for it that are 'centralized'?
It's a P2P network, all decentralized. You need to find the IP address of one of the peers, then from there you open a connection to 10 (or so) of the other peers. To make a transaction, you tell them all that you want to make the transaction. Eventually (usually within 10 minutes), the transaction gets verified and added to the block-chain.
Currencies have their own supply/demand curve. If the demand drops to zero, the price will also drop to zero, no matter how much the country produces. If the supply increases to infinity.........I'll let you figure that one out.
You must have taught a high-school economics class, to have missed that important principle.
See, economists aren't very smart.
Oh yeah? And you're the smart one who sees all the holes in their logic, are you? Don't be this guy.
you also failed one of the basic economic principles - do not discuss a commodity unless you know the entirety of its uses.
That's not one of the basic principles of economics.
they mean value besides the currency.
I mean they should take an economics class or buy an economics book before talking out of their ass. Nothing has innate value until someone wants it.
Gold does have innate value. It is a rare metal with many desirable qualities.
No, you are wrong. It is your desire that gives it value. You desire those qualities and are willing to pay for them. If no one is willing to pay for them, then it has no value (not many years ago, no one was willing to pay for the conducting properties of gold. If a better, cheaper conductor gets invented, again no one will care).
Again, you have not taken an economics class, it shows, and by posting you have become a personification of this comic.
The trouble with your argument is that the relatively few hotels & pizzaria's that accept BTC don't handle it
That's not the trouble with my argument, it's a trouble with you: all you did was skim through, found the first line you half-understood, and made an argument against that half-understanding. In other words you set up a strawman and destroyed it.
Next time focus more on understanding than on destroying.
When people point out that "fiat" currencies are only backed up by government promises, they forget to note that cryptocurrencies are only backed up by "fiat" currency
This is not right and shows you never took an economics class. I'll try to explain it for you briefly, but you should know it is nuanced and complex.
No currency has innate value, including gold. If "innate value" determined the price of an object, then people would be paying a lot for air, because it's as valuable as life itself.
The value of a currency is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (again, just like anything). If no one is willing to pay more than $10 for an ounce of gold (for example, if the world collectively realized wedding rings are stupid), then that's its price. If people are willing to give you $5000 for a single bitcoin, then that's its price. In other words, Bitcoin is backed by what people are willing to give for it, not by fiat currency. You can exchange Bitcoin for pizza or for hotel bookings.
The price of bitcoin isn't based on "how much 'real' money people have put into it." Bitcoin (and stocks) are not a bank account. The price is determined by what people are willing to pay. Assume for a moment that the bitcoin bubble crashes: in that case, its price could drop to $0 without a single person withdrawing money from it. No one will be willing to buy them. Likewise, the price can jump dramatically in the same manner.
I did a bit of research and I think that falling costs (disk space and bandwidth getting cheaper, CDNs pooling resources) and some newer crypto currencies
That's interesting, which currencies are you looking at here?
So it's certain methods of advertisement that you dislike. I can agree with that
No, that's not really what I said. It sounds like you are re-echoing your own viewpoint.
It's not the annoyance of the popups, although those are indeed annoying. It's that advertising revenue is a motivation for creating content that is a blight on humanity.......designed to get page views without regards to quality, truthfulness, or even fun and entertainment. The ads themselves are often manipulative and lies, and they encourage that kind of content to be created.
Endless standardized testing and data collection are completely useless.
You need a way to measure, otherwise you can't improve. Data collection does that for you. Teachers don't like it because it can be used against them (and in fact, has been used against them).
That's how advertisers justify annoying people.
Is there evidence he has deep knowledge about technology? Is there evidence he has deep knowledge about programming, for example?
You can look at his code and judge for yourself. He aced the SAT so it's reasonable to assume he could acquire deep knowledge about programming, whether he did or not. Reports are that he was technical at Microsoft. Other reports suggest he mentored other programmers.
All in all, there's plenty of evidence that Bill Gates understands programming as well as many working programmers.
The analysis suggests you could make several magnitudes more money by selling ads than by using someone else's electricity.
You'll have to narrow it down a bit more, I'm not going to give you a citation for every sentence in my post. If there's something I said that seems particularly unlikely, let me know, and I will either give some evidence to support it, give it a disclaimer, or outright retract it.
Yeah that analysis seems right, indicating that bitcoin mining won't be able to replace traditional advertising. Nice calculating, btw.
So going farther, in what way could a blockchain be used to give money to the server? Something like micropayments, but without needing to pay $5 transaction fees to Paypal. Obviously bitcoin isn't suitable for this (at least not mining in the browser), so it would have to be modified.
if a short bit of JS mining is viable over an ad, it is making a higher return than the electricity used
How are you calculating this? What is your reasoning?
It's worth considering how the blockchain could be modified to make this actually viable. I don't know the answer, but it seems like a research avenue with potential.
The economics of mining on the CPU make even less sense than the economics of online adverts,
Intuitively I think you are right (partially because adverts can pay a lot), but I'd like to see an analysis of this. Is it actually economically feasible to pay for your servers with bitcoin mining? You would have to take into consideration a lot of factors.....among them the fact that mining gets more expensive the more people are working on it.
Not going to matter if the password files get hacked.
Advertising is a plague, but that's not the real problem: the real problem is that you can monetize users by showing them garbage, and then you won't believe what happens next: the garbage pushes out the good stuff so it's hard to find.
That means RSA tokens are in many ways worse than a well-chosen password (like the XKCD method) because at least in the case of a well-chosen password, the attacker will need to put some effort into discovering it when the password file leaks.