"Normal folks with a modicum of work ethics do not resent slash and burn techniques if they are aimed at the right target."
Slash and burn techniques aren't normally aimed at the useless. They are normally aimed at those who have been around long enough to have earned disproportionate salaries. These people have passed up better paying positions and have stuck around through the challenges that come with the hard times. They've chosen not to walk away when the opportunity arose and to help to build something. The salaries they are earning aren't a reflection of what they are doing today but payment for services already rendered.
They have been loyal to the company when greed dictated they could do otherwise. The company now owes them loyalty in turn. If the company doesn't honor that debt why would anyone be willing to give loyalty to the company when something potentially better comes along? Slash and burn them now because they will slash and burn you later.
"Keeping non-performers, letting them accumulate seniority"
There is plenty of opportunity to identify and slash non-performers BEFORE they ever get anywhere near seniority and the tempting to cut fat paycheck.
"There is no "tenure" at technology companies, and very few tech workers have any delusional expectations about lifetime employment."
Only because the thinking above is pretty rampant in tech. Everyone is constantly shifting positions. By the time someone knows the lay of the land they are 5mins away from going out the door either voluntarily or not.
The industry pushes this. Things like token raises of a few percent a year. Salary adjustments for positions that only get applied to new hires. Ridiculous advancement treadmills while new hires with great resume building and interviewing skills bypass them completely. It all amounts to a company constantly bearing the expense of training new staff and while constantly watching the people with a clue walk out the door.
In all fairness to wallstreet. Normal valuations do fail to account for the fact that any company is likely trying to increase growth rather than profit since growth is tax free while profit is tax laden.
Much better to reinvest every penny before it crosses from the gross to net column.
That's beside the point. Nobody who sees you slash and burn your tenured staff is going to have any loyalty to the company.
This is the kind of shit that breeds every man for himself and short term thinking. How much something counts is only about how much it appears to count. Jump to the greener pasture on the other side at the first instant. Etc. Etc. It's actually bad for morale and bad for the company. Management and staff take an aggressive and hostile view of one another.
Makes for a shitty place to work and the last place anyone is going to innovate, ever.
Sure but at least put it up in a way that PRETENDS not to be an advertisement. I think a fair number of us work in the enterprise tech world and browse Slashdot to escape it for awhile. This stuff floods our inbox all day long.
This thing doesn't even promote an actual solution it just delivers the rah rah pep talk these guys would have in the company meetings they subject their staff to. Lots of enthusiasm and feigned altruism, no content. I don't mind a slashvertisment slipping through now and again if it introduces me to some neat new thing or raises interesting discussion. But this has none of that. Just the nonsense philosophical spin a random company is putting on having the same goal as every other corp, milking profits.
Hopefully this is just a one off event that resulted from an editor doing a solid for a friend. Still i think it would be more effective if some geek driving the tech for a project in this company wrote up about something sweet it does and the marketing department kissed off. I think you'll find that I'm not one of those who usually rants about the editors.;)
You have to be careful with words like cost when talking about an economic platform. I believe you are referring to computational cost. The economic costs balance out. Any increase in fiscal cost has a related increase in market rate for the mining output that negates it. And from the perspective of users who aren't miners the valuation doesn't really matter it just changes the size of transaction units.
"It is possible to design a digital cash system with this property, but Bitcoin does not have it."
You are leaving the window open too wide with "digital cash system." There are digitial cash systems all over the place. Bitcoin is unique in being a decentralized system. Without decentralization a digital cash system is about the most intrusive and evil thing one can imagine. It may well be possible to design one differently but as far as I know Bitcoin is the first and only such currency system that is functional.
"The recent price surge should tell you that the cost of the equipment needed to attack Bitcoin may become smaller compared to the payoff of such an attack."
The is covered by the design. The higher the price goes the greater the incentive to mine. The result being that the mining power of the network grows. So the incentive to protect the network grows comparably to the incentive to attack it.
"there is no way to raise the cost of an attack without also raising the cost of using the system"
This is universally true of all applied security. On a whiteboard or spec it might be otherwise but in the real world systems do not have the primary purpose of being secure. They have some other primary purpose and security is an overhead burden be it cost of hardware, implementation, maintaining, or burden upon users. Just as in the real world it is the burden of maintaining security properly and following procedures and not theoretical weakness that typically provide the openings used by attackers. Any applied system can be compromised. The only question is the cost to do so.
Economics is a math that is sometimes harder to prove and follow but I'm not sure I concur with your assertion that a security model is invalid because part of its design is based on that form of mathematics. The simple supply and demand principles upon which Bitcoin is relying for it's mining system have proven to be consistently true in review of a great deal of historical data. Enigma for instance did not become more difficult to break the more money you spent trying to break it. Throwing more mining power at Bitcoin raises the difficulty of mining, and therefore the price, and that economically drives more power to be thrown at defending the network. Where it is possible, Bitcoin does utilize algorithms where a simple length adjustment can increase security.
I get that we don't usually read TFA around here but you shouldn't actually argue the point if you don't.
From TFA:
"In a tweet on its Twitter feed, MTGox said it was fighting off a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack"
Yes. It was a DDOS. It is speculated the attackers may not have wanted to shut them down but slow them down and prevent a mass price movement in response to unloading coins. That is just guesswork but since it is theoretically possible they are re-engineering to fix or limit that possible vulnerability.
At the end of the day all computer security implementations come down to raising the cost to successfully employ an attack. It would likely be less expensive to attack an inactive wallet containing a large number of coins than to get >50% of the mining power. While such an attack is theoretically feasible it is not economically feasible.
Additionally, in the real world there is only so much of that hardware to be had at any price.
Those sorts of proof give a false sense of security. They say nothing about attacks not contained within the proof. The same is true of code that is supposedly proven bug free mathematically.
While these things don't hurt it is false to say that nothing counts in a security sense without them.
If Bitcoin is deflationary and therefore increasing in value, the incentive would be to turn inflationary (and therefore devaluing) currency into BTC as fast as possible.
"What is BitCoin if not exchangeable? BitCoin's don't do anything. That string of bits doesn't do anything unique"
Bitcoin does do something unique. It has unique properties. It can be exchanged almost instant among people anywhere in the world. No new hidden or unexpected cache of it can never be discovered that could reduce any value it represents. And anyone can detect a counterfeit without knowing a single thing about it. And once someone has given it to you they can't take it back. Despite there being no possibility of unexpected caches being discovered, It is is not dependent on any government, organization, or entity for any of that to remain true.
Those properties are quite unique. They create the ideal tool for one very specific utility that almost everyone has need for. A representative token of trade value. That is a use, an important use, a use with a great deal of practical value. It might be fair to say that everyone has need of such a tool. Other tools which people use for this are either better suited to other uses (like looking pretty on a finger) or have substantial weaknesses like people being able to "indian give" aka charge backs, or failing when an entity fails, or being counterfeitable, or being at risk of sudden devaluation if new sources are found.
The innate value of Bitcoin comes from being the uniquely ideal tool to carry trade value. Food, water, shelter, medicine, fire, and a knives have greater practical use but not much else.
"No large organization considers BitCoin a real currency, so there's no implicit demand or backing store of wealth."
fincern just released a guideline saying that they see Bitcoin as a real currency so there is one. You seem to have this backwards though. Bitcoin is already perceived to have value. Watch. I'll give you 10BTC for $50, do you want it?
There you go. 10 BTC is clearly worth more than $50. Thus it has value. BTC is the only thing I know of with no risk of being devalued through additional discovery and that can't be counterfeited, doesn't require me to trust any third party, and yet can be divided into small enough pieces to cover any quantity of transactions. Turns out that property is actually extremely rare. In fact, even with USD, EUROS, Gold, Silver, and Governments in the world Bitcoin is still the only thing I know of that meets all of those criteria. That special and unique property gives BTC utility and innate value. You are right. USD is only as good as long as the United States is around. BTC lacks that weakness.
I for one prefer BTC to fiat as a trade token. I'd much rather accept BTC in payment and use it for payment. Any business venture I engage in is likely to at the very least accept Bitcoin as a payment option and may well be centered around Bitcoin.
I know it really is amazing. I can understand why supporters want to voice their support. But I can't for the life of me grasp why people who don't see Bitcoin are vocal or hostile. If you don't think it's sound or a good idea why would you care at all?
Slashdot Mirror
"Normal folks with a modicum of work ethics do not resent slash and burn techniques if they are aimed at the right target."
Slash and burn techniques aren't normally aimed at the useless. They are normally aimed at those who have been around long enough to have earned disproportionate salaries. These people have passed up better paying positions and have stuck around through the challenges that come with the hard times. They've chosen not to walk away when the opportunity arose and to help to build something. The salaries they are earning aren't a reflection of what they are doing today but payment for services already rendered.
They have been loyal to the company when greed dictated they could do otherwise. The company now owes them loyalty in turn. If the company doesn't honor that debt why would anyone be willing to give loyalty to the company when something potentially better comes along? Slash and burn them now because they will slash and burn you later.
"Keeping non-performers, letting them accumulate seniority"
There is plenty of opportunity to identify and slash non-performers BEFORE they ever get anywhere near seniority and the tempting to cut fat paycheck.
"There is no "tenure" at technology companies, and very few tech workers have any delusional expectations about lifetime employment."
Only because the thinking above is pretty rampant in tech. Everyone is constantly shifting positions. By the time someone knows the lay of the land they are 5mins away from going out the door either voluntarily or not.
The industry pushes this. Things like token raises of a few percent a year. Salary adjustments for positions that only get applied to new hires. Ridiculous advancement treadmills while new hires with great resume building and interviewing skills bypass them completely. It all amounts to a company constantly bearing the expense of training new staff and while constantly watching the people with a clue walk out the door.
In all fairness to wallstreet. Normal valuations do fail to account for the fact that any company is likely trying to increase growth rather than profit since growth is tax free while profit is tax laden.
Much better to reinvest every penny before it crosses from the gross to net column.
That's beside the point. Nobody who sees you slash and burn your tenured staff is going to have any loyalty to the company.
This is the kind of shit that breeds every man for himself and short term thinking. How much something counts is only about how much it appears to count. Jump to the greener pasture on the other side at the first instant. Etc. Etc. It's actually bad for morale and bad for the company. Management and staff take an aggressive and hostile view of one another.
Makes for a shitty place to work and the last place anyone is going to innovate, ever.
Sure but at least put it up in a way that PRETENDS not to be an advertisement. I think a fair number of us work in the enterprise tech world and browse Slashdot to escape it for awhile. This stuff floods our inbox all day long.
;)
This thing doesn't even promote an actual solution it just delivers the rah rah pep talk these guys would have in the company meetings they subject their staff to. Lots of enthusiasm and feigned altruism, no content. I don't mind a slashvertisment slipping through now and again if it introduces me to some neat new thing or raises interesting discussion. But this has none of that. Just the nonsense philosophical spin a random company is putting on having the same goal as every other corp, milking profits.
Hopefully this is just a one off event that resulted from an editor doing a solid for a friend. Still i think it would be more effective if some geek driving the tech for a project in this company wrote up about something sweet it does and the marketing department kissed off. I think you'll find that I'm not one of those who usually rants about the editors.
I get this everywhere else. I don't need it on Slashdot too.
You have to be careful with words like cost when talking about an economic platform. I believe you are referring to computational cost. The economic costs balance out. Any increase in fiscal cost has a related increase in market rate for the mining output that negates it. And from the perspective of users who aren't miners the valuation doesn't really matter it just changes the size of transaction units.
"It is possible to design a digital cash system with this property, but Bitcoin does not have it."
You are leaving the window open too wide with "digital cash system." There are digitial cash systems all over the place. Bitcoin is unique in being a decentralized system. Without decentralization a digital cash system is about the most intrusive and evil thing one can imagine. It may well be possible to design one differently but as far as I know Bitcoin is the first and only such currency system that is functional.
"The recent price surge should tell you that the cost of the equipment needed to attack Bitcoin may become smaller compared to the payoff of such an attack."
The is covered by the design. The higher the price goes the greater the incentive to mine. The result being that the mining power of the network grows. So the incentive to protect the network grows comparably to the incentive to attack it.
"there is no way to raise the cost of an attack without also raising the cost of using the system"
This is universally true of all applied security. On a whiteboard or spec it might be otherwise but in the real world systems do not have the primary purpose of being secure. They have some other primary purpose and security is an overhead burden be it cost of hardware, implementation, maintaining, or burden upon users. Just as in the real world it is the burden of maintaining security properly and following procedures and not theoretical weakness that typically provide the openings used by attackers. Any applied system can be compromised. The only question is the cost to do so.
Economics is a math that is sometimes harder to prove and follow but I'm not sure I concur with your assertion that a security model is invalid because part of its design is based on that form of mathematics. The simple supply and demand principles upon which Bitcoin is relying for it's mining system have proven to be consistently true in review of a great deal of historical data. Enigma for instance did not become more difficult to break the more money you spent trying to break it. Throwing more mining power at Bitcoin raises the difficulty of mining, and therefore the price, and that economically drives more power to be thrown at defending the network. Where it is possible, Bitcoin does utilize algorithms where a simple length adjustment can increase security.
I get that we don't usually read TFA around here but you shouldn't actually argue the point if you don't.
From TFA:
"In a tweet on its Twitter feed, MTGox said it was fighting off a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack"
Yes. It was a DDOS. It is speculated the attackers may not have wanted to shut them down but slow them down and prevent a mass price movement in response to unloading coins. That is just guesswork but since it is theoretically possible they are re-engineering to fix or limit that possible vulnerability.
At the end of the day all computer security implementations come down to raising the cost to successfully employ an attack. It would likely be less expensive to attack an inactive wallet containing a large number of coins than to get >50% of the mining power. While such an attack is theoretically feasible it is not economically feasible.
Additionally, in the real world there is only so much of that hardware to be had at any price.
Those sorts of proof give a false sense of security. They say nothing about attacks not contained within the proof. The same is true of code that is supposedly proven bug free mathematically.
While these things don't hurt it is false to say that nothing counts in a security sense without them.
It was a DDOS. Nobody is immune to them and nobody's coins were stolen.
On April fools Slashdot trolls YOU!
That's a little perverted...
You are forgetting the giggle value derived from watching you lose your cool.
Way to whore for Karma Anonymous Coward!
It's never happened before. I can't see why it would start now.
I don't remember anyone saying that females only like pink things, ponies, and all write like high school girls but hey, if they say so...
Shait's Counter rule: Never use a word in spoken form that you've only read and never heard. You will end up sounding foolish.
Bring on the ponies! I can take it.
If Bitcoin is deflationary and therefore increasing in value, the incentive would be to turn inflationary (and therefore devaluing) currency into BTC as fast as possible.
"In order for national currencies to lose their value, a national government has to lose interest in it."
Or it has to be counterfeited. Or said government has to fail or destabilize. None of those things has the potential to devalue Bitcoin.
"What is BitCoin if not exchangeable? BitCoin's don't do anything. That string of bits doesn't do anything unique"
Bitcoin does do something unique. It has unique properties. It can be exchanged almost instant among people anywhere in the world. No new hidden or unexpected cache of it can never be discovered that could reduce any value it represents. And anyone can detect a counterfeit without knowing a single thing about it. And once someone has given it to you they can't take it back. Despite there being no possibility of unexpected caches being discovered, It is is not dependent on any government, organization, or entity for any of that to remain true.
Those properties are quite unique. They create the ideal tool for one very specific utility that almost everyone has need for. A representative token of trade value. That is a use, an important use, a use with a great deal of practical value. It might be fair to say that everyone has need of such a tool. Other tools which people use for this are either better suited to other uses (like looking pretty on a finger) or have substantial weaknesses like people being able to "indian give" aka charge backs, or failing when an entity fails, or being counterfeitable, or being at risk of sudden devaluation if new sources are found.
The innate value of Bitcoin comes from being the uniquely ideal tool to carry trade value. Food, water, shelter, medicine, fire, and a knives have greater practical use but not much else.
"No large organization considers BitCoin a real currency, so there's no implicit demand or backing store of wealth."
fincern just released a guideline saying that they see Bitcoin as a real currency so there is one. You seem to have this backwards though. Bitcoin is already perceived to have value. Watch. I'll give you 10BTC for $50, do you want it?
There you go. 10 BTC is clearly worth more than $50. Thus it has value. BTC is the only thing I know of with no risk of being devalued through additional discovery and that can't be counterfeited, doesn't require me to trust any third party, and yet can be divided into small enough pieces to cover any quantity of transactions. Turns out that property is actually extremely rare. In fact, even with USD, EUROS, Gold, Silver, and Governments in the world Bitcoin is still the only thing I know of that meets all of those criteria. That special and unique property gives BTC utility and innate value. You are right. USD is only as good as long as the United States is around. BTC lacks that weakness.
I for one prefer BTC to fiat as a trade token. I'd much rather accept BTC in payment and use it for payment. Any business venture I engage in is likely to at the very least accept Bitcoin as a payment option and may well be centered around Bitcoin.
I know it really is amazing. I can understand why supporters want to voice their support. But I can't for the life of me grasp why people who don't see Bitcoin are vocal or hostile. If you don't think it's sound or a good idea why would you care at all?