The security issue here is identity theft. If you have access to someone's email account, you can pretend to be him. In this case, the new owner of the domain doesn't have access to old mail, but they do have access to new mail sent to those accounts. Any verification mail sent to those accounts will end up in the hands of the new owner, without the original user of that email account ever knowing.
For Apple, the only reason would be patents. They don't want Nokia's market share. Microsoft wants the patents as well as the market share (or what little of that remains once they finally buy them).
Where are my mod points today? You make a very good point about the security risks involved in such a domain transfer. How many services use email verification? How many people are aware of all the services they subscribed to over the years? And even if they are, will they have time to track them all down and change all email addresses within one month?
One month is really not enough notification for something this invasive. Of course you can't really forbid someone to sell a domain name they own, but when you have users, they have rights too. I hope they will at least forward all incoming mail to their users' new addresses. If not, the security issues involved are pretty serious.
I thought there'd been plenty of announcements that only the GOG version would be DRM-free, and everything else would have DRM.
Of course it would have been way better if all versions had no DRM, but CDProject is not a major publisher, so it's quite possible that Atari demanded that they include DRM. Or maybe they decided to do that themselves for whatever strange reason. So yes, I guess they're not quite as noble as Stardock or the other few DRM-less publishers, but they're still way ahead of the likes of Ubisoft, EA or most other major game developers/publishers.
What I'm trying to figure out is why anyone in their right mind would cross our border willingly, for a vacation no less.
While I love travelling and have never been to the US so far, I've accepted that I probably won't be going there for the foreseeable future. Not with their policies and politics being the way they are, unless I have a really, really compelling reason to go there. It's a shame, because there are a lot of really cool places and people in the US that I'd love to see and meet, but that will have to wait until the country becomes somewhat sane again (I'm not holding my breath).
Two countries? Two peoples, yes, but whether one of the countries really exists is questionable, considering it's been occupied by the other for quite some time now (with much of it being annexed completely), and most of its day to day life exists mostly at the mercy of the other.
What would be really nice, though, is if they first replaced all their coal plants with renewables. I'm glad to see nuclear plants go, mind you, but getting rid of coal plants is quite a bit more urgent.
Or maybe, they just couldnt get the game to run properly with the DRM they never intended to remove (because well DRM sucks and has a habit of wrecking things), and they thought they could create some positive spin by removing it to fix a broken game.... who knows *shrug*
That could be it. Mind you, the game was available without DRM right from the start, and widely publicized as such, so I think the complete story is that retail publishers demanded that they include DRM, they didn't get it working properly, and after release they dropped it as soon as they could.
I guess the most difficult part here is having two levels of game contents in your game.
That's not hard. Games that are a playable demo without a key and turn into the full game when you purchase a key, are well-established technology. The real problem with your idea is downgrading existing keys for single-player desktop games.
What the summary fails to mention is that the company still will actively be looking for pirates on torrent sites.
I don't care. Since my version is DRM-free, I don't need a torrent.
Of course there's also try-before-you-buy. I don't think there's a demo for The Witcher 2, which is unfortunate, because that would have killed that reason to torrent.
They mentioned that as the reason why only GOG would sell DRMless: they trusted them not to leak the code before release. Whether that's a credible reason, I have no idea.
I also get the impression there were some problems with the DRM causing people to be unable to play properly (aren't there always?), so maybe they just removed it to get rid of those problems quickly.
In any case, I'm glad they make a big point of removing DRM. I hope The Witcher 2 sells well, and other publishers will take that as a sign that DRM hurts sales.
Was there a set time for the lunch, with no option to trade lunch time for extra game time? In my experience, with very immersive games, many players gladly skip food in order to keep playing.
Also, have they compared the increased energy usage of brainy activity to simply sitting about? It's quite likely that any kind of physical or mental exercise increases food intake, simply because you burn more energy.
We're talking Europe here, aren't we? They're pretty far from dictatorships (most countries at least), and I think many are more likely to try to cure the zombies before they're willing to send in the military with deadly force. Riot police with nonlethal weapons are another matter; our riot police is pretty good at beating up peaceful students, so they might be able to put a dent in some zombies. I doubt that will accomplish much, though.
When the zombie apocalypse comes, I'm afraid Europe is pretty fucked.
The obvious incentive is that they'll be able to mine new bitcoins too, and not all money will be in the hands of the early adopters.
The really big question, of course, is whether there's some acceptance threshold for the network where even the old-timers will be forced or persuaded to accept the new, easier bitcoins.
How are they cryptographically incompatible? From what I understand, the difficulty is dynamically set, based on information from the entire network. So that's definitely overridable. The halving of the reward for mining new blocks every however many thousands of blocks sounds like a pretty ad-hoc agreement that's checked in software but not intrinsically tied to the cryptography. I suppose it's possible that the number of the block and the size of the reward play an important role in the cryptography, but it doesn't sound that way to me.
It sounds more like it's merely a matter of whether the network consensus is that your block, bitcoin or transaction is acceptable. So if enough of the network claims it's acceptable, what are those few old-timers who know it's not acceptable according to the original agreement going to do about it? I suppose they could refuse the transaction, but it sounds to me like they'd only be making it harder on themselves.
If it's the network that decides what's valid and what isn't, then once you lose control of the network, I don't think you have much choice but to accept the new reality.
That won't stop banks from creating more. The (virtual) money supply in the real economy is far bigger than the amount of money that has actually been printed by governments.
If anything, your example serves as an illustration of how BitCoin works better than the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve's fractional lending requirements are somewhat of a joke because, as you illustrated, the funds loaned can eventually be deposited which allows the bank to loan ten times that amount back out. The bank, with one stroke of a pen (or keyboard), creates money that gets put into the economy. BitCoin, OTOH, requires processing power to create new money. So it doesn't matter that there's no central authority tracking it, the banks can only lend what is deposited or what they mine themselves.
You're missing the point about how bank loans really work. The real, physical money in existence may still be very limited, but banks create many times that amount in virtual money based simply on promises that you'll get your deposit back, and that loan will be repaid.
What's to stop a BitCoin bank from accepting a deposit of X BTC from Alice, giving the Alice an account with X BTC on it, then loaning those X BTC to Bob, who then deposits them in exchange for X BTC on his account, so the bank can loan out the BTC again. Those accounts aren't boxes with real BTCs in them; they're virtual money, created by the bank. It's a promise that if you withdraw it, you'll get X BTC from the bank. Not the same ones you deposited, just X BTC that the bank happens to have access to at that moment. If everybody withdraws all money from their accounts, the bank won't have enough BTC to give everybody their money, and collapses, just like in the real world.
This is called banking, and from what I've seen, there's nothing in BitCoins that prevents it. The number of real BTCs being limited is irrelevant. The banks just create the promise of more.
The big problem, however, is that the gold rush is over and a small handful of people control the vast majority of BitCoins. It will be impossible to convince the majority of the population to switch to using it as a currency and thereby making a few people vastly wealthy. This is a problem with traditional currency, which is why we hear so much about how much "the 1%" control, but there's little chance of switching to a new currency if it just creates a new, different, 1%. This is especially true considering how much of the current government is controlled by that 1% and how much they'll do to retain control. Basically, if BitCoin starts becoming too popular, it will be banned.
Even if it's not banned, it won't take off, simply because few people will want to switch from one economy owned by others to a less certain economy that's every bit as much owned by others.
What happens when A1,A3,A5 decide to withdraw the M bitcoins?(since the bank has only M bitcoins, and it would require 3M bitcoins if they withdrew)
The bank collapses. This has happened to a few banks during the banking crisis. The Dutch DSB bank died this way because some people were explicitly calling for a run on the bank.
Oh yeah, everybody who didn't get their money out in time, loses it. Unless the government decides to reimburse the people, which usually happens when the bank and the account holders are based in the same country. But when IceSave collapsed, the (small) Icelandic government didn't want to put themselves deeply into debt in order to reimburse lots of Dutch and British account holders, and politicians are still bickering about that.
Of course anyone who owed the bank any money still owes it. Only now to someone who bought that debt from the bank on the moment it collapsed. Or to the curator, or whoever. Trade in debts is one of the major causes of the banking crisis.
As far as I understand bitcoin mining, it's not the actual power that gives it value, but only the relative power. Generation of bitcoins is artificially limited by agreement. I believe they want one new block generated every 10 minutes, and each new block gains the miner 50 bitcoins. If only one person is the entire network is mining, he'll get 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes. If a million people are mining, they can expect to get their 50 bitcoins after about 10 million minutes. (25 bitcoins if it takes them until 2012, 12.5 bitcoins after 2016, etc.) Unless they provide more computing power than the average bitcoin miner; then their chance of getting their bitcoin earlier goes up.
So CPU's getting faster won't cause inflation, because the bitcoin supply is artificially limited. That also means that the value of bitcoins is not directly tied to computing power. It's merely tied to agreement of the network. Had bitcoins merely been tied to the discovery of hard-to-find primes, they might have some intrinsic value related to computing power, but that doesn't seem to be the case, as far as I understand it.
The scarcity of bitcoins depends on cryptographic principles - there are no more than ~21 million bitcoins that can potentially exist, regardless of how hard 'miners' work to discover them.
Is it really cryptographically guaranteed? From what I heard, it seems it's merely agreed upon by the majority of bitcoin users. They agree on the speed with which new blocks are produced (adjusting the difficulty required for a block to be accepted), and they agreed that after a certain number of blocks, the number of bitcoins rewarded for mining a block will halve. Blocks need to be accepted by the network in order for related bitcoins to be accepted as currency, but technically, it sounds like the network could simply change their agreements, and more bitcoins could be allowed to exist.
Suppose bitcoin gets a huge influx of new users who don't like the idea that all money has been mined (and possibly hoarded) by the early adopters. They agree to increase the mining rate and the reward. If there's enough of them to outnumber the old bitcoiners (let's say that China switches to bitcoins and distributes its own bitcoin software), wouldn't that have an impact?
Yeah I don't really see this catching on in the short term; there aren't that many use cases where you need the the anonymity of cash, but where you can't just use cash. Buying grey- or black-market stuff online seems to be the major one, and if that's the only market you can be sure the regulators are going to come after them.
Why just grey- or black market stuff? We need a good, neutral online payment infrastructure. We still don't have one yet. The Wikileaks bans proved that Paypal and credit cards are not neutral and reliable enough for this. BitCoin could be perfect for anyone who wants a payment system that's not at the mercy of politically motivated corporations.
Eventually -- maybe in my lifetime, maybe not -- I think governments are going to try and get rid of cash. We think of cash as being a frictionless medium for exchange, and it's certainly better than barter or carrying around large amounts of metallic coinage, but it's not that easy to manage. Cash has to be physically moved from one place to another (e.g. a merchant has to physically make a deposit at the end of the business day, banks have to physically return worn bills to the Federal Reserve and get new ones, etc.) and that involves a lot of trouble and expense.
So wouldn't BitCoin be a sensible replacement? Aren't you contradicting yourself here, saying that cash is superior yet impractical?
I have a lot of questions and doubts about BitCoin, but if it works, it certainly seems to fill a need.
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The security issue here is identity theft. If you have access to someone's email account, you can pretend to be him. In this case, the new owner of the domain doesn't have access to old mail, but they do have access to new mail sent to those accounts. Any verification mail sent to those accounts will end up in the hands of the new owner, without the original user of that email account ever knowing.
For Apple, the only reason would be patents. They don't want Nokia's market share. Microsoft wants the patents as well as the market share (or what little of that remains once they finally buy them).
Where are my mod points today? You make a very good point about the security risks involved in such a domain transfer. How many services use email verification? How many people are aware of all the services they subscribed to over the years? And even if they are, will they have time to track them all down and change all email addresses within one month?
One month is really not enough notification for something this invasive. Of course you can't really forbid someone to sell a domain name they own, but when you have users, they have rights too. I hope they will at least forward all incoming mail to their users' new addresses. If not, the security issues involved are pretty serious.
I thought there'd been plenty of announcements that only the GOG version would be DRM-free, and everything else would have DRM.
Of course it would have been way better if all versions had no DRM, but CDProject is not a major publisher, so it's quite possible that Atari demanded that they include DRM. Or maybe they decided to do that themselves for whatever strange reason. So yes, I guess they're not quite as noble as Stardock or the other few DRM-less publishers, but they're still way ahead of the likes of Ubisoft, EA or most other major game developers/publishers.
What I'm trying to figure out is why anyone in their right mind would cross our border willingly, for a vacation no less.
While I love travelling and have never been to the US so far, I've accepted that I probably won't be going there for the foreseeable future. Not with their policies and politics being the way they are, unless I have a really, really compelling reason to go there. It's a shame, because there are a lot of really cool places and people in the US that I'd love to see and meet, but that will have to wait until the country becomes somewhat sane again (I'm not holding my breath).
Two countries? Two peoples, yes, but whether one of the countries really exists is questionable, considering it's been occupied by the other for quite some time now (with much of it being annexed completely), and most of its day to day life exists mostly at the mercy of the other.
There was? How did I manage to miss that so completely?
Doesn't matter, though. I was already sold.
They're still nicer than Ubisoft or Sony, who would have told their users to suck it.
What would be really nice, though, is if they first replaced all their coal plants with renewables. I'm glad to see nuclear plants go, mind you, but getting rid of coal plants is quite a bit more urgent.
Or maybe, they just couldnt get the game to run properly with the DRM they never intended to remove (because well DRM sucks and has a habit of wrecking things), and they thought they could create some positive spin by removing it to fix a broken game.... who knows *shrug*
That could be it. Mind you, the game was available without DRM right from the start, and widely publicized as such, so I think the complete story is that retail publishers demanded that they include DRM, they didn't get it working properly, and after release they dropped it as soon as they could.
Or in this case you could buy the game from gog.com, where it was DRM-free from the start.
I guess the most difficult part here is having two levels of game contents in your game.
That's not hard. Games that are a playable demo without a key and turn into the full game when you purchase a key, are well-established technology. The real problem with your idea is downgrading existing keys for single-player desktop games.
What the summary fails to mention is that the company still will actively be looking for pirates on torrent sites.
I don't care. Since my version is DRM-free, I don't need a torrent.
Of course there's also try-before-you-buy. I don't think there's a demo for The Witcher 2, which is unfortunate, because that would have killed that reason to torrent.
They mentioned that as the reason why only GOG would sell DRMless: they trusted them not to leak the code before release. Whether that's a credible reason, I have no idea.
I also get the impression there were some problems with the DRM causing people to be unable to play properly (aren't there always?), so maybe they just removed it to get rid of those problems quickly.
In any case, I'm glad they make a big point of removing DRM. I hope The Witcher 2 sells well, and other publishers will take that as a sign that DRM hurts sales.
Was there a set time for the lunch, with no option to trade lunch time for extra game time? In my experience, with very immersive games, many players gladly skip food in order to keep playing.
Also, have they compared the increased energy usage of brainy activity to simply sitting about? It's quite likely that any kind of physical or mental exercise increases food intake, simply because you burn more energy.
We're talking Europe here, aren't we? They're pretty far from dictatorships (most countries at least), and I think many are more likely to try to cure the zombies before they're willing to send in the military with deadly force. Riot police with nonlethal weapons are another matter; our riot police is pretty good at beating up peaceful students, so they might be able to put a dent in some zombies. I doubt that will accomplish much, though.
When the zombie apocalypse comes, I'm afraid Europe is pretty fucked.
Why would anyone ever deposit bitcoins in a bank?
Interest. Banking is older than checking accounts.
The obvious incentive is that they'll be able to mine new bitcoins too, and not all money will be in the hands of the early adopters.
The really big question, of course, is whether there's some acceptance threshold for the network where even the old-timers will be forced or persuaded to accept the new, easier bitcoins.
How are they cryptographically incompatible? From what I understand, the difficulty is dynamically set, based on information from the entire network. So that's definitely overridable. The halving of the reward for mining new blocks every however many thousands of blocks sounds like a pretty ad-hoc agreement that's checked in software but not intrinsically tied to the cryptography. I suppose it's possible that the number of the block and the size of the reward play an important role in the cryptography, but it doesn't sound that way to me.
It sounds more like it's merely a matter of whether the network consensus is that your block, bitcoin or transaction is acceptable. So if enough of the network claims it's acceptable, what are those few old-timers who know it's not acceptable according to the original agreement going to do about it? I suppose they could refuse the transaction, but it sounds to me like they'd only be making it harder on themselves.
If it's the network that decides what's valid and what isn't, then once you lose control of the network, I don't think you have much choice but to accept the new reality.
That won't stop banks from creating more. The (virtual) money supply in the real economy is far bigger than the amount of money that has actually been printed by governments.
If anything, your example serves as an illustration of how BitCoin works better than the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve's fractional lending requirements are somewhat of a joke because, as you illustrated, the funds loaned can eventually be deposited which allows the bank to loan ten times that amount back out. The bank, with one stroke of a pen (or keyboard), creates money that gets put into the economy. BitCoin, OTOH, requires processing power to create new money. So it doesn't matter that there's no central authority tracking it, the banks can only lend what is deposited or what they mine themselves.
You're missing the point about how bank loans really work. The real, physical money in existence may still be very limited, but banks create many times that amount in virtual money based simply on promises that you'll get your deposit back, and that loan will be repaid.
What's to stop a BitCoin bank from accepting a deposit of X BTC from Alice, giving the Alice an account with X BTC on it, then loaning those X BTC to Bob, who then deposits them in exchange for X BTC on his account, so the bank can loan out the BTC again. Those accounts aren't boxes with real BTCs in them; they're virtual money, created by the bank. It's a promise that if you withdraw it, you'll get X BTC from the bank. Not the same ones you deposited, just X BTC that the bank happens to have access to at that moment. If everybody withdraws all money from their accounts, the bank won't have enough BTC to give everybody their money, and collapses, just like in the real world.
This is called banking, and from what I've seen, there's nothing in BitCoins that prevents it. The number of real BTCs being limited is irrelevant. The banks just create the promise of more.
The big problem, however, is that the gold rush is over and a small handful of people control the vast majority of BitCoins. It will be impossible to convince the majority of the population to switch to using it as a currency and thereby making a few people vastly wealthy. This is a problem with traditional currency, which is why we hear so much about how much "the 1%" control, but there's little chance of switching to a new currency if it just creates a new, different, 1%. This is especially true considering how much of the current government is controlled by that 1% and how much they'll do to retain control. Basically, if BitCoin starts becoming too popular, it will be banned.
Even if it's not banned, it won't take off, simply because few people will want to switch from one economy owned by others to a less certain economy that's every bit as much owned by others.
What happens when A1,A3,A5 decide to withdraw the M bitcoins?(since the bank has only M bitcoins, and it would require 3M bitcoins if they withdrew)
The bank collapses. This has happened to a few banks during the banking crisis. The Dutch DSB bank died this way because some people were explicitly calling for a run on the bank.
Oh yeah, everybody who didn't get their money out in time, loses it. Unless the government decides to reimburse the people, which usually happens when the bank and the account holders are based in the same country. But when IceSave collapsed, the (small) Icelandic government didn't want to put themselves deeply into debt in order to reimburse lots of Dutch and British account holders, and politicians are still bickering about that.
Of course anyone who owed the bank any money still owes it. Only now to someone who bought that debt from the bank on the moment it collapsed. Or to the curator, or whoever. Trade in debts is one of the major causes of the banking crisis.
As far as I understand bitcoin mining, it's not the actual power that gives it value, but only the relative power. Generation of bitcoins is artificially limited by agreement. I believe they want one new block generated every 10 minutes, and each new block gains the miner 50 bitcoins. If only one person is the entire network is mining, he'll get 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes. If a million people are mining, they can expect to get their 50 bitcoins after about 10 million minutes. (25 bitcoins if it takes them until 2012, 12.5 bitcoins after 2016, etc.) Unless they provide more computing power than the average bitcoin miner; then their chance of getting their bitcoin earlier goes up.
So CPU's getting faster won't cause inflation, because the bitcoin supply is artificially limited. That also means that the value of bitcoins is not directly tied to computing power. It's merely tied to agreement of the network. Had bitcoins merely been tied to the discovery of hard-to-find primes, they might have some intrinsic value related to computing power, but that doesn't seem to be the case, as far as I understand it.
The scarcity of bitcoins depends on cryptographic principles - there are no more than ~21 million bitcoins that can potentially exist, regardless of how hard 'miners' work to discover them.
Is it really cryptographically guaranteed? From what I heard, it seems it's merely agreed upon by the majority of bitcoin users. They agree on the speed with which new blocks are produced (adjusting the difficulty required for a block to be accepted), and they agreed that after a certain number of blocks, the number of bitcoins rewarded for mining a block will halve. Blocks need to be accepted by the network in order for related bitcoins to be accepted as currency, but technically, it sounds like the network could simply change their agreements, and more bitcoins could be allowed to exist.
Suppose bitcoin gets a huge influx of new users who don't like the idea that all money has been mined (and possibly hoarded) by the early adopters. They agree to increase the mining rate and the reward. If there's enough of them to outnumber the old bitcoiners (let's say that China switches to bitcoins and distributes its own bitcoin software), wouldn't that have an impact?
Yeah I don't really see this catching on in the short term; there aren't that many use cases where you need the the anonymity of cash, but where you can't just use cash. Buying grey- or black-market stuff online seems to be the major one, and if that's the only market you can be sure the regulators are going to come after them.
Why just grey- or black market stuff? We need a good, neutral online payment infrastructure. We still don't have one yet. The Wikileaks bans proved that Paypal and credit cards are not neutral and reliable enough for this. BitCoin could be perfect for anyone who wants a payment system that's not at the mercy of politically motivated corporations.
Eventually -- maybe in my lifetime, maybe not -- I think governments are going to try and get rid of cash. We think of cash as being a frictionless medium for exchange, and it's certainly better than barter or carrying around large amounts of metallic coinage, but it's not that easy to manage. Cash has to be physically moved from one place to another (e.g. a merchant has to physically make a deposit at the end of the business day, banks have to physically return worn bills to the Federal Reserve and get new ones, etc.) and that involves a lot of trouble and expense.
So wouldn't BitCoin be a sensible replacement? Aren't you contradicting yourself here, saying that cash is superior yet impractical?
I have a lot of questions and doubts about BitCoin, but if it works, it certainly seems to fill a need.