The problem is that it can cost a lot of money to fight, no matter how broken the patent is. Not a little amount money at all, especially not for an individual developer or a smaller company.
These sorts of things are clearly worthless and should never be allowed to get to that point.
"You think chargebacks are a essential feature of a monitory system, fair enough. I don't. Unsurprisingly neither do any governments I'm aware of as no national currency supports that feature. Nevertheless to each his own."
Of an online payment system, which you seem to be arguing it's useful for, yes. Seems from other commenters here that I'm not alone.
I also notice you use the classic "it's just like money! Money doesn't have that feature!" defence there. It's a good one. Reading through comments I've also seen "It's just like gold! gold doesn't have that feature!" and "it's just like stock! stock doesn't have that feature!". So far as I can tell it's a combination of the worst of all of the above.
On my "factual errors", you might be better received if you stopped passing off your opinions as facts.
"Just like how gold is hoarded, people will start hoarding bitcoins."
They already are. Due to the deflationary nature of the currency, people for the most part seem to mine and hoard. Check out the bitcoin.org forum, the infrequency of the occasional thread where someone decided to actually *spend* some bitcoins is enlightening. Hell, some of the early adopters consider bitcoin to be their early retirement fund.
The actual bitcoin economy seems to be pretty stagnant.
But it's supposed to be recognised as a mockery and the whole lot of religious exceptions ditched, not recognised as a religious exception!
Or so I thought.
You know, if this means more people can take the piss by wearing colanders on their heads for photos that's probably fine too. The world needs to be taken less seriously, humanity is frankly ridiculous.
You're kidding. Really? That's your argument. Wow, I got the money I have in the bank by being a merchant, who knew. Thank god people are protected from my evil merchant ways buy being able to charge back on me... Oh wait no they can't I don't take credit cards.
Not sure what you're on about here. If the money in your account isn't subject to chargeback then why is chargeback such a concern?
Chargeback is useful for consumers and consumer confidence.
"I'm sorry, but no they don't. That's just a flat out factual error. You do not ever with any credit card provider receive cash deposits into your corporate account "immediately"."
No, but the transaction is processed and the fund are allocated, immediately. I've worked on CC authorisation systems, believe me when I say I know this part of it. You know there and then that the transaction is going through ok. In principle, unless you still accept magnetic stripe cards of course, but the identity of the person performing the transaction is a separate security issue to whether or not the money exists/is available in the account.
Yes you do. Look it up. Since we're down to "yes it does"/"no it doesn't" now clearly you simply don't believe me, that's an easy thing to address.
So you're saying there's no growing certainty of transaction period, during which it could theoretically turn out the coins were spent twice, and in fact all bitcoin transactions are instantaneously performed and validated? This is not the impression I had of the system.
We have hundreds of years of history pointing us to the fact that rogue traders rip off consumers and disappear, en mass, given a 'balance'. A lot of people are happy that the current balance lies where it does. The article you link to even ends by advising traders to document sales properly - i.e. do things properly and you'll be ok. Banks do not (as that article implies) unwittingly facilitate fraud here. They deliberately protect consumers from unscrupulous merchants and they protect their own bottom line here - in many countries the chargeback from consumer to bank is part of the law. It's no wonder they write the ability to do that same thing into their contracts with merchants. Consumers that invoke the right fraudulently are criminal.
My exhortation was not to conflate purchase time double spending, a purely fraudulent activity possible in the bitcoin scheme, with consumer protection measures that have an overwhelmingly positive effect.
"Factual error here is an incomplete list of features that my be interesting to some people:"
Bitcoin has no chargeback, therefore it's a non-starter for me. Chargeback, like it or not, is a feature. Factual error yourself.
"Massive deflation punishing new entrants." - Factual error, currently the bitcoin money supply is inflationary to the tune of ~7,200 bitcoins a day.
Deflation is an increase in value of currency compared to goods over time over time. If bitcoin is successful it is necessarily deflationary.
"I think deflation steals from the productive economy." - As I've pointed out using facts, what you 'think' is not a compelling argument.
On the contrary, it's a very compelling argument to me, your facts have been nothing more than your opinions anyway. If btc enter serious large-scale use there will be deflation. Deflation is the money sitting unused gaining value because other people are performing economic work. Not a system I wish to support.
Instability of the value of bitcoin does not mean that bitcoin as a system has no value, it's value is unstable.
It means that a merchant of any size taking btc is screwed as they hit withdrawal and exchange limits, relyi
"I am not a merchant, I do not want people to be able to pull back money they have given me. And interestingly enough it's hard for me to accept credit cards too."
If you are a seller, you're a merchant. That's generally why people give you money. Or at least it's why people with an unknown trust relationship to yourself give you money. Plus accepting credit cards through paypal is easy...
"Agreed, an hour vs. six months, the rewording is not helping you."
Card payments are processed immediately, so you know the money exists. You don't even know this with bitcoin. Conflating out and out fraud (possible with bitcoins in a payment scenario in which instant payment is needed) with the chargeback policy is duplicitous nonsense.
indeed don't do business with shady people.
Ah, the libertarian answer to everything! I don't need no government involvement in food standards because if I get food poisoning and die I'm never going to eat there again!
And know who you're doing business with so that you can involve the law if you need to.
And immediately the success of likes of ebay become impossible. As a society we have taken steps to ensure that buyers do not need to do this because history shows us that it can and will be abused.
In a transaction between two people that goes bad it is not objectively known who the defrauder is. They will both blame the other. Facts must be properly investigated. This is what the legal system is for. Chargebacks avoid the legal system.
This is why chargebacks are subsequently investigated by the card schemes and charges of fraud can be brought against people who abuse it. The buyer is given the initial benefit of the doubt because there are hundreds of years of history pointing to unscrupulous sellers ripping people off left right and centre, and the buyer is the one typically left without goods or cash.
The fact that this mechanism exists is one of the major reasons people trust credit card systems and internet commerce as a whole.
Then by all means please do. I truly want to see some good arguments against it.
Oh for god's sake... I'm not going to go into this in depth, but here's a list:
Instability for multiple reasons
No real economy, just speculation
No security, your wallet gets compromised you're screwed
Massive deflation punishing new entrants. You think inflation steals from your savings? I think deflation steals from the productive economy.
Less features than current solutions
"Let me guess, you're not really left handed."
???
Look, you indulge in your btc fantasy all you like, but don't expect other people not to point and laugh as you ignore history and a plethora of perfectly valid criticisms.
"You can't chargeback with cash and people rather appreciate that feature."
Merchants.
People rather like it, drop in to a thread about credit vs debit cards some day, and the superior consumer protection they provide.
Not true we're talking about an hour in which you become increasingly sure that you have received money permanently.
Yes, an hour in which you're not sure if you've been defrauded.... not sure how rewording helps here. And we've dealt with the permanent aspect.
And there is nothing about bitcoins that causes these laws not to apply. You can always demand a refund just like you can with cash, but you cannot force a chargeback.
Demanding a refund forces the vendor to be involved. Rogue traders are one of the reasons that we have chargeback. Fake goods, or goods not delivered, and a vendor that disappears into the ether, these are real phenomena. Bitcoin makes it easy, expect it to rise if bitcoin does.
Notice how every argument you present has a compelling counter argument, does it not make you just a little suspicious that perhaps you could learn a little more about the subject?
I can make much better arguments against bitcoin then[sic] this too.
"There is a limited amount of gold, but no one has ever had a problem seen that as a currency."
Gold is a terrible currency!
"The argument that bitcoins are deflationary, which is by design, is a bad thing and will at some as yet unspecified date stall the economy has yet to be compelling."
Then read harder! There are lots of compelling arguments about this out there, the fact you ignore them is up to you.
Hey there, one of the the few technical posts and you get all but ignored!
I started looking at this a little while ago for the purposes of drawing fractals. I haven't yet got great results (I do have results) but I'm still learning.
There are two major technologies I know of - OpenCL and CUDA. They are pretty similar. CUDA is nVidia specific, OpenCL is more cross-vendor and is a partner to OpenGL. OpenCL is the one I started with. If you use Linux then install your distribution's OpenCL packages, on windows I'm not sure, you probably want to go to your vendor's website for drivers.
OpenCL is a language by itself, and an API in other languages. You write coordinating code in whichever language it is you do your project in (C for me), and you also write code in OpenCL ( which is C-like) you then compile OpenCL into 'kernels' and run it on the GPU. you can run them on the CPU as well but that's a whole other driver setup issue...
The main pain point for all this is poor documentation and poor error reporting. Sometimes your OpenCL code doesn't run and nothing will tell you why. I recommend getting the OpenCL sample programs from nVidia and Apple to take a look at how they work.
CUDA I haven't played with much. Maybe the error reporting is better. Maybe the error reporting on OpenCL is better under Windows or Mac, I just don't know.
Right, the fact that any one of the early adopters sitting on a few thousand coins (or 'Satoshi' and his millions) could destroy the market in seconds, that's not an issue for you? The complete lack of stability implied by that?
An effect that can and will become worse over time as bitcoin prices rise and bitcoin generation for new entrants generates ever smaller amounts.
And that's leaving out the general idiocy of building in such a tiny limit to the currency and ensuring massive deflation over time.
Also this -
"money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour..."
Is self contradictory and you know it. The value of bitcoins is a consensual delusion (like other money). Predictions of its failure are interesting, it just remains to be seen which one comes true.
He did what he said he would on that front - $10k (equal to all received donations) went to the EFF. Not something I have a problem with, though clearly not the preferred outcome for everyone else.
The lesson that if you take a hacker to court then they roll over and sign a settlement saying they'll never touch another piece of Sony equipment for as long as they live?
Not that I can blame geohot for doing that, but he did rather hype the 'we will fight them on the beaches' stuff first.
And Sony are still going after various others right now. Of course suing for a hardware mod like this should get them laughed out of court, but there's a huge difference between 'should' and 'will'.
I don't have a problem with the concept. I am not retracting anything.
I have a problem with any execution that is proposed because politicians (and people in general) can't be trusted, but the concept, no. This is no change from where we started.
Also I have a case where constricting the market works just fine - Singapore. Would never want to live in that society, but they've been pretty damned effective at stamping out drug use. You also might want to consider how many people in western places like the US and UK would smoke weed if it was legalised and easily available. It's not gone away now, and the war on drugs is an abject failure for so many reasons. However if its mandate was to reduce use of weed regardless of cost or other societal implications, then you'd have to say it had worked.
Your naive view that regulation is never effective at all is exactly that, naive.
I've made it clear in various places that I don't trust anyone to run such a thing, nor do I think it can be 100% effective, so a filter shouldn't be implemented.
"That means, unless you're about to argue for vigilante justice, that you support government involvement in censorship at the domain level for CP."
No, I don't support any filtering that has humans administering it, because humans are both fallible and corruptible. And as we have no perfect alternative I don't support any filtering at all. Sorry if you didn't get this from my previous posts, I have mentioned it a few times now.
Ask the UK voluntary collection of ISPs that implement such a scheme.
They haven't got it perfect yet but I believe that what happens in their current setup is that when a URL is identified, all traffic on the ISP's network to that server is routed through a proxy that then filters on specific URLs.
I'm afraid I don't know how (or if) this can map to https.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got your history backwards, compiz beat the rest to market by a mile on using 3d hardware for window managment.
The problem is that it can cost a lot of money to fight, no matter how broken the patent is. Not a little amount money at all, especially not for an individual developer or a smaller company.
These sorts of things are clearly worthless and should never be allowed to get to that point.
"You think chargebacks are a essential feature of a monitory system, fair enough. I don't. Unsurprisingly neither do any governments I'm aware of as no national currency supports that feature. Nevertheless to each his own."
Of an online payment system, which you seem to be arguing it's useful for, yes. Seems from other commenters here that I'm not alone.
I also notice you use the classic "it's just like money! Money doesn't have that feature!" defence there. It's a good one. Reading through comments I've also seen "It's just like gold! gold doesn't have that feature!" and "it's just like stock! stock doesn't have that feature!". So far as I can tell it's a combination of the worst of all of the above.
On my "factual errors", you might be better received if you stopped passing off your opinions as facts.
"Just like how gold is hoarded, people will start hoarding bitcoins."
They already are. Due to the deflationary nature of the currency, people for the most part seem to mine and hoard. Check out the bitcoin.org forum, the infrequency of the occasional thread where someone decided to actually *spend* some bitcoins is enlightening. Hell, some of the early adopters consider bitcoin to be their early retirement fund.
The actual bitcoin economy seems to be pretty stagnant.
But it's supposed to be recognised as a mockery and the whole lot of religious exceptions ditched, not recognised as a religious exception!
Or so I thought.
You know, if this means more people can take the piss by wearing colanders on their heads for photos that's probably fine too. The world needs to be taken less seriously, humanity is frankly ridiculous.
You're kidding. Really? That's your argument. Wow, I got the money I have in the bank by being a merchant, who knew. Thank god people are protected from my evil merchant ways buy being able to charge back on me... Oh wait no they can't I don't take credit cards.
Not sure what you're on about here. If the money in your account isn't subject to chargeback then why is chargeback such a concern?
Chargeback is useful for consumers and consumer confidence.
"I'm sorry, but no they don't. That's just a flat out factual error. You do not ever with any credit card provider receive cash deposits into your corporate account "immediately"."
No, but the transaction is processed and the fund are allocated, immediately. I've worked on CC authorisation systems, believe me when I say I know this part of it. You know there and then that the transaction is going through ok. In principle, unless you still accept magnetic stripe cards of course, but the identity of the person performing the transaction is a separate security issue to whether or not the money exists/is available in the account.
Yes you do. Look it up. Since we're down to "yes it does"/"no it doesn't" now clearly you simply don't believe me, that's an easy thing to address.
So you're saying there's no growing certainty of transaction period, during which it could theoretically turn out the coins were spent twice, and in fact all bitcoin transactions are instantaneously performed and validated? This is not the impression I had of the system.
I'm sorry I'm not sure now if we're on the same planet togeather. http://www.merchantcouncil.org/merchant-account/fraud-chargeback/chargeback-fraud-illegitimate.php
We have hundreds of years of history pointing us to the fact that rogue traders rip off consumers and disappear, en mass, given a 'balance'. A lot of people are happy that the current balance lies where it does. The article you link to even ends by advising traders to document sales properly - i.e. do things properly and you'll be ok. Banks do not (as that article implies) unwittingly facilitate fraud here. They deliberately protect consumers from unscrupulous merchants and they protect their own bottom line here - in many countries the chargeback from consumer to bank is part of the law. It's no wonder they write the ability to do that same thing into their contracts with merchants. Consumers that invoke the right fraudulently are criminal.
My exhortation was not to conflate purchase time double spending, a purely fraudulent activity possible in the bitcoin scheme, with consumer protection measures that have an overwhelmingly positive effect.
"Factual error here is an incomplete list of features that my be interesting to some people:"
Bitcoin has no chargeback, therefore it's a non-starter for me. Chargeback, like it or not, is a feature. Factual error yourself.
"Massive deflation punishing new entrants." - Factual error, currently the bitcoin money supply is inflationary to the tune of ~7,200 bitcoins a day.
Deflation is an increase in value of currency compared to goods over time over time. If bitcoin is successful it is necessarily deflationary.
"I think deflation steals from the productive economy." - As I've pointed out using facts, what you 'think' is not a compelling argument.
On the contrary, it's a very compelling argument to me, your facts have been nothing more than your opinions anyway. If btc enter serious large-scale use there will be deflation. Deflation is the money sitting unused gaining value because other people are performing economic work. Not a system I wish to support.
Instability of the value of bitcoin does not mean that bitcoin as a system has no value, it's value is unstable.
It means that a merchant of any size taking btc is screwed as they hit withdrawal and exchange limits, relyi
True.
If bitcoin does really take off as a currency, expect governments to become very interested in this, all of a sudden.
I am not a true believer, I am a sceptic.
This is becoming a more and more obvious lie.
"I am not a merchant, I do not want people to be able to pull back money they have given me. And interestingly enough it's hard for me to accept credit cards too."
If you are a seller, you're a merchant. That's generally why people give you money. Or at least it's why people with an unknown trust relationship to yourself give you money. Plus accepting credit cards through paypal is easy...
"Agreed, an hour vs. six months, the rewording is not helping you."
Card payments are processed immediately, so you know the money exists. You don't even know this with bitcoin. Conflating out and out fraud (possible with bitcoins in a payment scenario in which instant payment is needed) with the chargeback policy is duplicitous nonsense.
indeed don't do business with shady people.
Ah, the libertarian answer to everything! I don't need no government involvement in food standards because if I get food poisoning and die I'm never going to eat there again!
And know who you're doing business with so that you can involve the law if you need to.
And immediately the success of likes of ebay become impossible. As a society we have taken steps to ensure that buyers do not need to do this because history shows us that it can and will be abused.
In a transaction between two people that goes bad it is not objectively known who the defrauder is. They will both blame the other. Facts must be properly investigated. This is what the legal system is for. Chargebacks avoid the legal system.
This is why chargebacks are subsequently investigated by the card schemes and charges of fraud can be brought against people who abuse it. The buyer is given the initial benefit of the doubt because there are hundreds of years of history pointing to unscrupulous sellers ripping people off left right and centre, and the buyer is the one typically left without goods or cash.
The fact that this mechanism exists is one of the major reasons people trust credit card systems and internet commerce as a whole.
Then by all means please do. I truly want to see some good arguments against it.
Oh for god's sake... I'm not going to go into this in depth, but here's a list:
"Let me guess, you're not really left handed."
???
Look, you indulge in your btc fantasy all you like, but don't expect other people not to point and laugh as you ignore history and a plethora of perfectly valid criticisms.
Yes, that's right, gold always appreciates, always. Just put all your money into gold, you can't possibly lose!
*facepalm*
"You can't chargeback with cash and people rather appreciate that feature."
Merchants.
People rather like it, drop in to a thread about credit vs debit cards some day, and the superior consumer protection they provide.
Not true we're talking about an hour in which you become increasingly sure that you have received money permanently.
Yes, an hour in which you're not sure if you've been defrauded.... not sure how rewording helps here. And we've dealt with the permanent aspect.
And there is nothing about bitcoins that causes these laws not to apply. You can always demand a refund just like you can with cash, but you cannot force a chargeback.
Demanding a refund forces the vendor to be involved. Rogue traders are one of the reasons that we have chargeback. Fake goods, or goods not delivered, and a vendor that disappears into the ether, these are real phenomena. Bitcoin makes it easy, expect it to rise if bitcoin does.
Notice how every argument you present has a compelling counter argument, does it not make you just a little suspicious that perhaps you could learn a little more about the subject?
I can make much better arguments against bitcoin then[sic] this too.
"There is a limited amount of gold, but no one has ever had a problem seen that as a currency."
Gold is a terrible currency!
"The argument that bitcoins are deflationary, which is by design, is a bad thing and will at some as yet unspecified date stall the economy has yet to be compelling."
Then read harder! There are lots of compelling arguments about this out there, the fact you ignore them is up to you.
Hey there, one of the the few technical posts and you get all but ignored!
I started looking at this a little while ago for the purposes of drawing fractals. I haven't yet got great results (I do have results) but I'm still learning.
There are two major technologies I know of - OpenCL and CUDA. They are pretty similar. CUDA is nVidia specific, OpenCL is more cross-vendor and is a partner to OpenGL. OpenCL is the one I started with. If you use Linux then install your distribution's OpenCL packages, on windows I'm not sure, you probably want to go to your vendor's website for drivers.
OpenCL is a language by itself, and an API in other languages. You write coordinating code in whichever language it is you do your project in (C for me), and you also write code in OpenCL ( which is C-like) you then compile OpenCL into 'kernels' and run it on the GPU. you can run them on the CPU as well but that's a whole other driver setup issue...
The main pain point for all this is poor documentation and poor error reporting. Sometimes your OpenCL code doesn't run and nothing will tell you why. I recommend getting the OpenCL sample programs from nVidia and Apple to take a look at how they work.
CUDA I haven't played with much. Maybe the error reporting is better. Maybe the error reporting on OpenCL is better under Windows or Mac, I just don't know.
Good luck.
Transfer is instantaneous, chargeback is a different phenomenon. You're talking about an hour in which you have no idea if you've just been defrauded.
And as someone that is a buyer more often than a seller, let me say this - chargeback is a feature, not a bug.
There's a reason that there are consumer protection laws on the books. doing away with them is not a useful idea.
Right, the fact that any one of the early adopters sitting on a few thousand coins (or 'Satoshi' and his millions) could destroy the market in seconds, that's not an issue for you? The complete lack of stability implied by that?
An effect that can and will become worse over time as bitcoin prices rise and bitcoin generation for new entrants generates ever smaller amounts.
And that's leaving out the general idiocy of building in such a tiny limit to the currency and ensuring massive deflation over time.
Also this -
"money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour..."
Is self contradictory and you know it. The value of bitcoins is a consensual delusion (like other money). Predictions of its failure are interesting, it just remains to be seen which one comes true.
He did what he said he would on that front - $10k (equal to all received donations) went to the EFF. Not something I have a problem with, though clearly not the preferred outcome for everyone else.
The lesson that if you take a hacker to court then they roll over and sign a settlement saying they'll never touch another piece of Sony equipment for as long as they live?
Not that I can blame geohot for doing that, but he did rather hype the 'we will fight them on the beaches' stuff first.
And Sony are still going after various others right now. Of course suing for a hardware mod like this should get them laughed out of court, but there's a huge difference between 'should' and 'will'.
"That is exactly the kind of BS word dancing I predicted."
If saying the same thing from start to end is "word dancing" to you, then it appears to me continued discussion with you is beyond pointless.
Good day to you.
I don't have a problem with the concept. I am not retracting anything.
I have a problem with any execution that is proposed because politicians (and people in general) can't be trusted, but the concept, no. This is no change from where we started.
Also I have a case where constricting the market works just fine - Singapore. Would never want to live in that society, but they've been pretty damned effective at stamping out drug use. You also might want to consider how many people in western places like the US and UK would smoke weed if it was legalised and easily available. It's not gone away now, and the war on drugs is an abject failure for so many reasons. However if its mandate was to reduce use of weed regardless of cost or other societal implications, then you'd have to say it had worked.
Your naive view that regulation is never effective at all is exactly that, naive.
What position do you think I take?
I've made it clear in various places that I don't trust anyone to run such a thing, nor do I think it can be 100% effective, so a filter shouldn't be implemented.
"That means, unless you're about to argue for vigilante justice, that you support government involvement in censorship at the domain level for CP."
No, I don't support any filtering that has humans administering it, because humans are both fallible and corruptible. And as we have no perfect alternative I don't support any filtering at all. Sorry if you didn't get this from my previous posts, I have mentioned it a few times now.
Ask the UK voluntary collection of ISPs that implement such a scheme.
They haven't got it perfect yet but I believe that what happens in their current setup is that when a URL is identified, all traffic on the ISP's network to that server is routed through a proxy that then filters on specific URLs.
I'm afraid I don't know how (or if) this can map to https.
Of course I see the difference.
The fact I can see the difference between two things doesn't mean I can't agree with them both (in principle, if not in execution).
They must cry themselves to sleep at night on their enormous piles of money...
No, you're quite clear that you support centralised enforcement:
You suck at reading huh?