Except it has the advantage of electronic currency like most of actual currency in circulation (paper dollars are like 2% of the actual volume of dollars across all accounts.)
Logistics of transferring $100mln in gold, not to mention storing it, is a terrible range of headaches. Meanwhile, transferring 1mln of BTC across the globe is as easy as typing the number in the right window.
The notes gained their popularity simply because gold is extremely unwieldy as currency. (the result of turning them into fiat currency controlled by a central authority is a later story.)
I don't think so. The very recent manipulation of bitcoin prices was much less subtle: a massive DDOS against most bitcurrent sites, causing panic in the market and rapid drop in bitcoin value. It lost like 70% value in matter of hours, and there was no elaborate cryptography behind it, just a stupid botnet pounding several big sites - followed by avalanche of panicked investors who DDOSed them more efficiently than the botnet did.
I believe as the new currency gains market, people will simply buy it for bitcoin, with bitcoin demand dropping until the last ones to leave the bitcoin ship are left with billions of worthless bitcoins.
With limited amount of goods available, the process of recovery of these goods is simply bound to either stop or slow to unreasonably glacial pace. There is a point where mining would become entirely pointless for miners - they would only need to keep it up for the good of the network with no personal reward whatsoever, keep spending power or investing in hardware for no personal profit.
I wonder if the (currently optional) transaction fees will begin to grow over time.
A factory floor can switch off in matter of seconds if you use the emergency switch. A whole district can be switched off within minutes if there's a suspicion of a major gas leak.
Extinguishing a coal power plant boiler takes many hours. Sure the energy production can be reduced quite fast but then the coal doesn't stop burning and the water doesn't cease to be heated. Simply, the steam circles in the system bypassing the turbines and it will take hours till the temperature is reduced enough that only needed turbines are powered and no steam wasted. Worse yet, if the district goes back online, you need the power back on, and increasing the heat of the boiler takes even longer. So, unless the power plant has prior knowledge of the demand increase they will keep wasting energy, running the turbines dry without producing electricity so that they can be switched on at any time.
They try to keep up with the demand, but demand changes are much more rapid than the supply can follow, so the supply runs at peak expected demand and wastes all the surplus.
I'd like to see your conversation with the salesperson at a checkout point of a supermarket with you trying to pay for other purchased goods (of matching value) with a bag of potatoes.
You can get a bag of potatoes for dollars at one market, then go to another and get ice cream for your bag of potatoes? Sorry, but currency works both ways.
Increasingly more sites will both pay and accept bitcoin.
As time goes by, new, more efficient methods of mining emerge. First there was CPU, then GPU, now we got FPGA.
I guess next comes a dedicated ASIC, an order of magnitude faster than FPGA.
With current difficulties CPU yields roughly 1-10 Mhash/s, GPU: 10-100, FPGA: 100-1000 (with rare exceptions.)
Breaking even on a CPU is nearly impossible nowadays, but the FPGA yields still a decent ROI. And creating 100BTC on a CPU in the early days took about as much time and money as creating 100BTC nowadays on FPGA.
Of course nowadays 100BTC is worth vastly more than early on, but that only means those who *bought* early got really rich. Those who mined early got rich only due to spending more time mining...
Was it Wisconsin, where following worries about contaminating groundwater with oil they passed a law stating "any even motor vehicle even partially immersed in water must be immediately moved to dry ground" efficiently banning all ships and motorboats?
CIA, DCRI and all other intelligence agencies are merely tools, impartial, indifferent organizations following orders. They do very little on their own accord.
The actual culprits are something else. Some of them may be employees of these agencies, but whether they are or not is moot - they may be members of the government, or just of nameless shadow cabinet (and no, no imagery of secret meetings in secluded manors behind hidden doors. Just influential businessmen, former military and so on, who just know where to call in for favors, doing this from comfort of their bright offices and comfortable homes.)
They are the ones that suggest what the orders to be carried out by the intelligence agencies are to contain.
So, like the snake attacking a stick it's being poked with, you can attack the intelligence agencies - or you can look beyond them and bite the one who wields that stick.
How long? "Until next page update, or as short as possible after it occurs".
Google Cache is a backup resource for the case the site is temporarily down, not a history resource to show how the site looked like before. If the site goes missing, keep until it's deemed gone permanently. But if the site changes, apply the changes and don't hoard expired pages.
Wait, so "They are playing dirty" makes "We are playing dirty" right?
Siding with scoundrels tends to return and bite you in the ass. Osama is the proof (and he did win with 9/11. Look at your law and your freedoms today.)
Oh, come on! I understand you might not like Sam&Max or Monkey Island, but you've got to admit Rescue on Fractalus a.k.a. Behind Jaggi Lines for 8-bit Atari was a work of genius! It was the first game that literally made me jump out of my chair when the alien started knocking on the window.
A few days ago I've been to a local mall. A very generic mall. And there were posters encouraging visitors to download that mall's app. The app would provide interactive map of the mall - list of stores. Somthing that would be much better done as a webpage. Someone paid someone else to write that, and they hoped for return on the investment, the app attracting enough customers to the stores to return its cost and more.
People bought (commissioned) the app, because they expected to get more money from the stores than the app cost. When they realize this is bullshit and the 1000 downloads followed by 800 uses resulting in 15 more actual sales made doesn't translate to the cost they paid the developer, the demand will collapse.
The mobile game development is not going to stop. It's rather to kill handheld consoles.
As hardware grows, things currently impossible in apps will become possible. Think jquery and dynamic in-browser page creation - Javascript could do this 12 years ago, but the computers and the browsers simply weren't mature enough and fast enough to handle it.
The whole wearable / augmented reality is yet to take off. Currently speed of mobile devices is the limiting factor to perform sufficient image recognition.
There is stuff that cannot and will not be handled by mobile devices - they will never get "beefy" enough, but they can always serve as thin client for something running on heavy iron / cloud somewhere far. The mobile network infrastructure is not ready yet to handle that yet.
Integration of smartphone with the rest of the world hardware is still in its infancy. Make it control all kinds of real-world gadgetry.
In essence, while the days of bullshit apps like "local market map" - shit that should be a webpage - are numbered, the scope of life that is yet to be covered by apps is pretty huge, and there is still a plenty of room to grow. Not at current speed maybe, but I expect the bursting of this particular bubble will be much less violent than, say, the web one.
The guy saw the truck contained $800k in legal tender. Is it illegal to possess that much cash? Some managers adapt policy of hush-hush cash transport: instead of armored van and very visible escort they choose inconspicuous vehicles and security through obscurity. Whether it's wise is moot - it's legal.
Slashdot Mirror
41 megawatts; 7200 BTC per day (the network automatically adjusts difficulty so that a new bitcoin is created every 10 minutes.)
41 megawatts * 10 minutes = 6.83 MWh per BTC.
Producing one bitcoin takes up 6.83 MWh. The production rate requires sustained 41 MW power supply.
The daily production of BTC (7200pcs) uses up 984 MWh of energy.
Except it has the advantage of electronic currency like most of actual currency in circulation (paper dollars are like 2% of the actual volume of dollars across all accounts.)
Logistics of transferring $100mln in gold, not to mention storing it, is a terrible range of headaches. Meanwhile, transferring 1mln of BTC across the globe is as easy as typing the number in the right window.
The notes gained their popularity simply because gold is extremely unwieldy as currency. (the result of turning them into fiat currency controlled by a central authority is a later story.)
I don't think so. The very recent manipulation of bitcoin prices was much less subtle: a massive DDOS against most bitcurrent sites, causing panic in the market and rapid drop in bitcoin value. It lost like 70% value in matter of hours, and there was no elaborate cryptography behind it, just a stupid botnet pounding several big sites - followed by avalanche of panicked investors who DDOSed them more efficiently than the botnet did.
I believe as the new currency gains market, people will simply buy it for bitcoin, with bitcoin demand dropping until the last ones to leave the bitcoin ship are left with billions of worthless bitcoins.
The point with the fees is quite significant.
With limited amount of goods available, the process of recovery of these goods is simply bound to either stop or slow to unreasonably glacial pace. There is a point where mining would become entirely pointless for miners - they would only need to keep it up for the good of the network with no personal reward whatsoever, keep spending power or investing in hardware for no personal profit.
I wonder if the (currently optional) transaction fees will begin to grow over time.
A factory floor can switch off in matter of seconds if you use the emergency switch. A whole district can be switched off within minutes if there's a suspicion of a major gas leak.
Extinguishing a coal power plant boiler takes many hours. Sure the energy production can be reduced quite fast but then the coal doesn't stop burning and the water doesn't cease to be heated. Simply, the steam circles in the system bypassing the turbines and it will take hours till the temperature is reduced enough that only needed turbines are powered and no steam wasted. Worse yet, if the district goes back online, you need the power back on, and increasing the heat of the boiler takes even longer. So, unless the power plant has prior knowledge of the demand increase they will keep wasting energy, running the turbines dry without producing electricity so that they can be switched on at any time.
They try to keep up with the demand, but demand changes are much more rapid than the supply can follow, so the supply runs at peak expected demand and wastes all the surplus.
I'd like to see your conversation with the salesperson at a checkout point of a supermarket with you trying to pay for other purchased goods (of matching value) with a bag of potatoes.
I don't know but that's like the energy of swimming 80,000 olympic swimming pool lengths.
There are physical *coin* bitcoins, and currency can be either paper or coins.
You can get a bag of potatoes for dollars at one market, then go to another and get ice cream for your bag of potatoes? Sorry, but currency works both ways.
Increasingly more sites will both pay and accept bitcoin.
As time goes by, new, more efficient methods of mining emerge. First there was CPU, then GPU, now we got FPGA.
I guess next comes a dedicated ASIC, an order of magnitude faster than FPGA.
With current difficulties CPU yields roughly 1-10 Mhash/s, GPU: 10-100, FPGA: 100-1000 (with rare exceptions.)
Breaking even on a CPU is nearly impossible nowadays, but the FPGA yields still a decent ROI. And creating 100BTC on a CPU in the early days took about as much time and money as creating 100BTC nowadays on FPGA.
Of course nowadays 100BTC is worth vastly more than early on, but that only means those who *bought* early got really rich. Those who mined early got rich only due to spending more time mining...
Was it Wisconsin, where following worries about contaminating groundwater with oil they passed a law stating "any even motor vehicle even partially immersed in water must be immediately moved to dry ground" efficiently banning all ships and motorboats?
I think he means something else.
CIA, DCRI and all other intelligence agencies are merely tools, impartial, indifferent organizations following orders. They do very little on their own accord.
The actual culprits are something else. Some of them may be employees of these agencies, but whether they are or not is moot - they may be members of the government, or just of nameless shadow cabinet (and no, no imagery of secret meetings in secluded manors behind hidden doors. Just influential businessmen, former military and so on, who just know where to call in for favors, doing this from comfort of their bright offices and comfortable homes.)
They are the ones that suggest what the orders to be carried out by the intelligence agencies are to contain.
So, like the snake attacking a stick it's being poked with, you can attack the intelligence agencies - or you can look beyond them and bite the one who wields that stick.
How long? "Until next page update, or as short as possible after it occurs".
Google Cache is a backup resource for the case the site is temporarily down, not a history resource to show how the site looked like before. If the site goes missing, keep until it's deemed gone permanently. But if the site changes, apply the changes and don't hoard expired pages.
Wait, so "They are playing dirty" makes "We are playing dirty" right?
Siding with scoundrels tends to return and bite you in the ass. Osama is the proof (and he did win with 9/11. Look at your law and your freedoms today.)
Oh, come on! I understand you might not like Sam&Max or Monkey Island, but you've got to admit Rescue on Fractalus a.k.a. Behind Jaggi Lines for 8-bit Atari was a work of genius! It was the first game that literally made me jump out of my chair when the alien started knocking on the window.
Considering you posted this as AC, locating said blog may be difficult.
Now, now, projecting and building a semiautomatic rifle from scratch takes considerable talent too.
A few days ago I've been to a local mall. A very generic mall. And there were posters encouraging visitors to download that mall's app. The app would provide interactive map of the mall - list of stores. Somthing that would be much better done as a webpage. Someone paid someone else to write that, and they hoped for return on the investment, the app attracting enough customers to the stores to return its cost and more.
People bought (commissioned) the app, because they expected to get more money from the stores than the app cost. When they realize this is bullshit and the 1000 downloads followed by 800 uses resulting in 15 more actual sales made doesn't translate to the cost they paid the developer, the demand will collapse.
The mobile game development is not going to stop. It's rather to kill handheld consoles.
As hardware grows, things currently impossible in apps will become possible. Think jquery and dynamic in-browser page creation - Javascript could do this 12 years ago, but the computers and the browsers simply weren't mature enough and fast enough to handle it.
The whole wearable / augmented reality is yet to take off. Currently speed of mobile devices is the limiting factor to perform sufficient image recognition.
There is stuff that cannot and will not be handled by mobile devices - they will never get "beefy" enough, but they can always serve as thin client for something running on heavy iron / cloud somewhere far. The mobile network infrastructure is not ready yet to handle that yet.
Integration of smartphone with the rest of the world hardware is still in its infancy. Make it control all kinds of real-world gadgetry.
In essence, while the days of bullshit apps like "local market map" - shit that should be a webpage - are numbered, the scope of life that is yet to be covered by apps is pretty huge, and there is still a plenty of room to grow. Not at current speed maybe, but I expect the bursting of this particular bubble will be much less violent than, say, the web one.
And inside the US?
Besides, what authority does a car shop have to check customer's customs papers on shipment they carry?
Oh, I didn't say "not guilty". I just mean they deserve at most half the sentence their employer should get.
The guy saw the truck contained $800k in legal tender. Is it illegal to possess that much cash?
Some managers adapt policy of hush-hush cash transport: instead of armored van and very visible escort they choose inconspicuous vehicles and security through obscurity. Whether it's wise is moot - it's legal.
These compartments were for transporting jewelry and valuables, not for smuggling drugs.
Only acting on behalf of their employers. No more guilty than enforcers of mafia boss.