Yes, I know. The "record" the grandparent claimed irrelevant is the record that you have deposited dollars ($) into a bank in case it was robbed or otherwise subverted, not Bitcoin. I'm arguing for Bitcoin here, y'know.
But if I could get the system I am transacting with seperated from the network--a "holodeck" simulating the internet--can't I fake that consenus?
No. You'd need to totally isolate that system from the Internet, and even then they could detect that by monitoring the difficulty of blocks - it would suddenly fall off sharply as all of the sudden they're part of a far smaller network. Or, more likely, you'd never convince them, since difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks so that they take 2 weeks to mine, and if it's suddenly just you, it'd take years to mine even one - and it takes 6 blocks to confirm a transaction, giving the target system plenty of time to realize something's very wrong.
To spend Bitcoin money multiple times, you only need slightly more computing power than everyone else using Bitcoin combined.
Which sums up to 703 PetaFLOPS, which is (much) more than the top 10 supercomputers in the world combined. And not only that, you also need to have malicious, rather than financial, motivations - otherwise you wouldn't bother double-spending, but would simply gather transaction fees and coinbases.
Actually, the proofs do not mention any specific attacks; they simply assume the existence of some attack, and then show that the attacker can also solve some hard problem efficiently.
Actually, no. To do so you have to define what "attack" means. As the complexity of your system increases, so does the complexity of that task, and pretty soon it reaches the point of having bugs itself. You don't have to solve any hard problem to sell someone the Golden Gate bridge.
The effort required for a successful double-spending attack on Bitcoin scales linearly with the effort required to use Bitcoin; this is worthless as far as cryptographic security is concerned.
The effort required for a succesful double-spending attack on Bitcoin scales linearly with the size of the network (the total hash rate of all miners, to be exact), while the effort required to use Bitcoin does not change at all with the size of the network.
Usually we want security proofs to rule out *all* theoretically feasible attacks, even those that we do not know of.
There are two possible attack models against Bitcoin, or any other currency system for that matter:
Forgery: someone can create money from thin air. Bitcoin is secure against this, since the origin of all BC can be traced to their creation.
Thieft: someone can spend money they don't have. This has two variants: double-spending (spending money you once had but have already spent) and pick-pocketing (using someone else's money). Bitcoin is secure against double-spending as long as any conspiracy attempting to do it doesn't control 50% or more of total miner computing power and the block hashing algorithm (currently SHA-256) remains secure. Bitcoin is secure against pick-pocketing as long as the signing scheme (currently ECDSA) remains secure.
Also, it is impossible to prove that something is secure against an attack you can't imagine, because ruling out an attack requires defining it first, which requires imagining it in some way. At best you can rule out such large categories of attacks (like forgery and thieft) that pretty much anything imaginable falls under them.
Irrelevant. The guarantee is by first the bank then the U.S. Government, regardless of how the funds are recorded.
If the record is lost, then how will you collect that guarantee? How can you prove that there was money in your account in the first place, and how much? So the security of the record is very relevant indeed.
If you don't understand thin markets and "bid-ask gap", post with an account and I'll explain.
I'm not the grandparent, but I'll ask nonetheless. In what specific scenario(s) will the presence of HFT mean that a trade is made that couldn't be made without it? Walk me through the process step-by-step and leave no detail out, since I'm too dumb to figure out how adding an intermediary helps when the seller is asking for more than the buyer is willing to pay (that's what "bid-ask gap" means, right?) and the intermediary also wants a profit.
I applaud the creation of Bitcoin, but really, would you trust your $10,000 more on a server somewhere or in an FDIC-covered bank?
Neither is trustworthy. However, why would you store your Bitcoins on a server, rather than a memory stick? Encrypt, make a few easily hidden backup copies, and be at ease.
Most people talk a good talk about how taxes do so much for everyone and are such a wonderful thing, but they are usually referring to taxes paid by other people and not themselves. Very few of these people add a few hundred dollars to their tax payments just to help promote the general welfare, etc.
This is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, and is precisely the reason why taxes are mandatory. Unless, of course, if you are rich, in which case you get to do Hollywood accounting to avoid paying your fair share and pretend it's okay because "no one else pays more than they have to either" - never mind that no one else can afford to pay.
Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility, while little power only brings little responsibility. Not paying more than you have to when you're already struggling to make ends meet is not a sign of great villainy, while hiding your assets when you're already living on the lap of luxury, and thus pushing even more of the burden to those struggling, is. Trying to pretend these are in any way similar requires a level of self-deception that pushes the bounds of credibility way beyond the breaking point.
Basically, if you have power, you have to choose whether you use it for the common good or for selfish gain, whether you are a hero or a villain; if you choose the latter, and are hated and reviled for that, you only have yourself to blame.
For the "existing" passwords that the memo says they'll be checking, they should be stored already hashed, so it's too late for that.
Or they could simply be running a password cracker, and you're putting too much weight on exact wording. In fact, I'd almost bet it was that; after all, the point is to make passwords hard to crack, so testing whether they are makes more sense than some arbitrary rules.
If it's a check done at login (before the client hashes), that implies that there's a feasible way to inject code to access the unhashed password, and frankly that worries me more.
What client? It is pointless to do hashing on client end, and of course the system admin can inject code to their login procedure.
It's not just the corporate elites. It's the elites period. Once day you'll be one of them. And you will shit on your fellow man with just as much disdain as the current batch of elites do now.
No, you won't. That's the Big Lie: if you put up with being shat upon for now, you get to do the shitting one day. You won't. It's just a lie to keep you sitting there in a shower of shit rather than fight those who shit on others. It's that simple.
Besides, if by some miracle you actually became an elite yourself, is getting to shit on others really such a desirable goal? How about you grow up, or at leat try to get past your anal stage?
The only fair system is the one that does nothing equally for everyone,
And that's another lie.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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What you are talking about is not a loan, but instead a form of indentured servitude.
Wouldn't that be an improvement, though? An indentured servant is guaranteed a job, basic necessities and a specified date of freedom, while debt can keep on ballooning forever.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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· Score: 1
Our public universities don't have a profit motive, but they're the worst offenders. They consume all the resources they can- state subsidies aren't used to lower tuition, but hire more administration, build fancy new facilities (that don't add to the instructional value.), or just have fun with the college kids at taxpayer's expense.
If they're getting state money, is there some particular reason why the state can't simply order them to lower tuition, or better yet remove it completely? I've never really understood why anything should be some weird hybrid of public and private institution that combines the drawbacks of both and the benefits of neither. Either treat them as public institutions subject to public will, or stop giving them money and let them sink or swim on their own.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The one making the loan, of course. Moneylending is investting, and investments aren't risk-free.
Stupid rot13 trick. Whoever came up with the idea of running it this long should be fired summarily.
Workplaces where people are fired sumarily for mistakes are ones where no one ever does anything except cover their ass and search for any other employer. The quality and amount of work that gets done reflects this.
Why should I have to work hard and "be good" -- and then get lucky -- just for minimum wage?
Because after communism fell, there's no more reason for capitalism to pretend, thus it's reverting back to the good old Gilded Age.
The American Dream? What a lark. You work hard, they pay just the same: very little. You wanna get ahead in life? Suck dick.
They are going to pay the least they can get away with, for either IT or blowjobs. Join a union and use collective bargaining to force them to pay more. It's either that, or continue dreaming of winning the lottery. We no longer have a frontier, so the original American Dream of getting some land and living independently is no longer possible, and the modern version of starting your own company doesn't really work for most people - which almost certainly includes you, no matter how much above average you might think you are.
Alternatively, you could accept that your economic position will always be terrible, and seek solace from spirituality, flights of fancy, mind-altering substances, or whatever. Basically, disengage from economy as much as possible, and alter your value system accordingly. The problems with this are that it's not possible to do so completely (you still need food and shelter), it's very difficult to truly cange your value system, and since people not caring about the rat race is one of the few things that actually threaten the powers that be, mind-altering substances tend to get banned and communes raided.
Yes, I was talking about hydro as it is cheap (the grand-parent was arguing that nuclear was the cheapest) though limited and if built in the wrong place can cause lots of deaths through a bad failure. The same can be said about nuclear, a nuclear power plant in Manhattan having a really bad failure can also kill a lot of people. Nuclear has a slight advantage as it only needs lots of water instead of lots of water uphill.
Any kind of industrial process having a bad failure in the middle of a city can kill a lot of people. Using this as an argument against nuclear power is extremely dishonest. On the other hand, "we can't build more" is a rather severe argument against building more dams and powering the country with them.
The damn that supplies my power was built by private enterprise with the only government help being perhaps cheap water rights. I'm not aware of any nuclear plants built by private enterprise without massive government subsidies beyond cheap water rights.
Getting semi-exclusive use for the entire river and all the energy in it for unlimited time is a rather significant subsidy. In fact I'd argue that it's almost impossible to build a dam without such generous gifts from the government. And most of nuclear's cost comes from the fact that it's held to a far higher standard than other energy forms - including dams, which typically release tremendous amounts of CO2 from all the plant matter buried under the water, which the company is not required to clear beforehand.
Oh well, at least no one had to relocate when your dam went up, right? Nothing culturally or otherwise important was buried beneath the waves? The local fish population didn't suffer, any traffick at the waterway has a way around it, and the company paid for any lost real estate to landowners free to negotiate the price? And it paid for and is still paying for insurance to pay for any damages that might result from dam failure? Because when people say that nuclear power is expensive and X is cheap, they usually ignore the fact that X can leave its externalities to be paid for by other people and nuclear can't, and nuclear is still competitive.
If morals are objective, they are black and white, yes or no.
No, that's not what objective means. Something being objective simply means that if two peple come to different conclusions about it, at least one of them must be wrong. It does not say anything about the nature of the observations, for example that they must be black and white.
Likewise, you will find with most moral codes, there is a lot of subjectivity to it. We raise our children to not tell iies and not call other people names. Why? Because that is part of a moral code that society says should exist. Exist, that is until you enter politics, which somehow, means what is important for our children to learn, is not important enough for adults to actually practice and society, for the most part is okay with that.
Power corrupts, and has always corrupted everywhere. And attracts power-hungry people. And power-hungry, corrupt people are willing to do corrupt and immoral acts to get even more power. This does not mean that the society is "okay" with it, just that it's a chronic illness it is unable to get rid of and thus just has to tolerate.
Because historically, morality was based, right or wrong, on an external source, religion. Now, it is up to the individual.
Somethings, such as sexuality, have moved from community regulated towards individually decided, while others, such as whether you use cannabis, have moved from individually decided towards community regulated.
Even if you can't reach conclusions about external conditions "X" without the condition "if", that does not in any way imply that you can never logically argue to an absolute conclusion like "torture is wrong", because there is nothing preventing you from arguing logically while using the condition "if".
But you haven't actually reached the conclusion "torture is wrong". You have reacehd the conclusion "if X, then torture is wrong". That's useful, if X is something you're willing to assume; if it isn't, then you haven't reached any reached a conclusion about the morality or immorality of torture.
Basically, your conclusion is not absolute, it's conditional, and you haven't proven the condition.
Gold and silver along with other traditional coinage metals copper and nickle are real money because they have an intrinsic value.
The material a gold coin is made from might have value even if the coin is melted down. However, only "might". After all, no one is required to accept gold in payment, and they are unlikely to do so unless they think they can sell the gold forward, or have a need for its specific properties. Gold stops being currency the second people stop thinking it is; it will remain a pretty material useful for jewelry, but so is quartz. Thus, almost all of gold's value is based on people having faith in that value, which is no different than paper money (you can burn paper or wipe your ass with it, thus banknotes have intrinsic value - it's just tiny compared to the nominal value, just as with gold).
Something is money if and only if enough people to form a functional economy agree it is. At this point, Dollar and Euro are far more so than gold, and Bitcoin is getting there and will almost certainly surpass gold if it survives to the point where the network effect really begins.
Simple: limit regulation to the strict protection of private property rights.
You end up with an outright slave society, since anyone who has any kind of advantage over anyone else can use it as leverage to gain ever more draconian agreements, leading ultimately to de facto or de juro ownership.
Yours is a bad idea, even if we ignore the obvious problems of there no longer being regulations against selling tainted food and other such lovely details.
The government can always scale the BC network down by blocking, or damaging, BC connections at the router level. China has the capability, for example, and they are using it for more complex blocking.
Good point. Better start working on running Bitcoin through Tor as hidden services. It should give the Tor network a nice boost, too.
I can't find any figures what it cost to construct in 1909-1912 but I bet it was cheaper then a nuclear plant and its operating costs have been much cheaper. Very worst failure (multiple bombs being detonated to create the maximum damage) would result in much fewer deaths and property damage compared to a nuclear plant as well.
You mentioned driftwood, so you're probably talking about hydropower. True, that can be cheap, but it's pretty much tapped out already, and dam failures can cause hundreds of thousands of deaths - that's on the ballpark of nuclear attack, not an accident.
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Having a government approval for genocide is a requirement for committing genocide because otherwise it will shut down your operation by force.
Say "ass". You know you want to. We're all adults here, we can take a vulgar reference every now and then.
Seriously, either curse or don't; this *bleeb* business is simply pathethic.
Yes, I know. The "record" the grandparent claimed irrelevant is the record that you have deposited dollars ($) into a bank in case it was robbed or otherwise subverted, not Bitcoin. I'm arguing for Bitcoin here, y'know.
No. You'd need to totally isolate that system from the Internet, and even then they could detect that by monitoring the difficulty of blocks - it would suddenly fall off sharply as all of the sudden they're part of a far smaller network. Or, more likely, you'd never convince them, since difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks so that they take 2 weeks to mine, and if it's suddenly just you, it'd take years to mine even one - and it takes 6 blocks to confirm a transaction, giving the target system plenty of time to realize something's very wrong.
So no, just no.
Which sums up to 703 PetaFLOPS, which is (much) more than the top 10 supercomputers in the world combined. And not only that, you also need to have malicious, rather than financial, motivations - otherwise you wouldn't bother double-spending, but would simply gather transaction fees and coinbases.
It's not going to happen.
Actually, no. To do so you have to define what "attack" means. As the complexity of your system increases, so does the complexity of that task, and pretty soon it reaches the point of having bugs itself. You don't have to solve any hard problem to sell someone the Golden Gate bridge.
The effort required for a succesful double-spending attack on Bitcoin scales linearly with the size of the network (the total hash rate of all miners, to be exact), while the effort required to use Bitcoin does not change at all with the size of the network.
There are two possible attack models against Bitcoin, or any other currency system for that matter:
Also, it is impossible to prove that something is secure against an attack you can't imagine, because ruling out an attack requires defining it first, which requires imagining it in some way. At best you can rule out such large categories of attacks (like forgery and thieft) that pretty much anything imaginable falls under them.
If the record is lost, then how will you collect that guarantee? How can you prove that there was money in your account in the first place, and how much? So the security of the record is very relevant indeed.
I'm not the grandparent, but I'll ask nonetheless. In what specific scenario(s) will the presence of HFT mean that a trade is made that couldn't be made without it? Walk me through the process step-by-step and leave no detail out, since I'm too dumb to figure out how adding an intermediary helps when the seller is asking for more than the buyer is willing to pay (that's what "bid-ask gap" means, right?) and the intermediary also wants a profit.
Neither is trustworthy. However, why would you store your Bitcoins on a server, rather than a memory stick? Encrypt, make a few easily hidden backup copies, and be at ease.
This is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, and is precisely the reason why taxes are mandatory. Unless, of course, if you are rich, in which case you get to do Hollywood accounting to avoid paying your fair share and pretend it's okay because "no one else pays more than they have to either" - never mind that no one else can afford to pay.
Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility, while little power only brings little responsibility. Not paying more than you have to when you're already struggling to make ends meet is not a sign of great villainy, while hiding your assets when you're already living on the lap of luxury, and thus pushing even more of the burden to those struggling, is. Trying to pretend these are in any way similar requires a level of self-deception that pushes the bounds of credibility way beyond the breaking point.
Basically, if you have power, you have to choose whether you use it for the common good or for selfish gain, whether you are a hero or a villain; if you choose the latter, and are hated and reviled for that, you only have yourself to blame.
Or they could simply be running a password cracker, and you're putting too much weight on exact wording. In fact, I'd almost bet it was that; after all, the point is to make passwords hard to crack, so testing whether they are makes more sense than some arbitrary rules.
What client? It is pointless to do hashing on client end, and of course the system admin can inject code to their login procedure.
No, you won't. That's the Big Lie: if you put up with being shat upon for now, you get to do the shitting one day. You won't. It's just a lie to keep you sitting there in a shower of shit rather than fight those who shit on others. It's that simple.
Besides, if by some miracle you actually became an elite yourself, is getting to shit on others really such a desirable goal? How about you grow up, or at leat try to get past your anal stage?
And that's another lie.
Wouldn't that be an improvement, though? An indentured servant is guaranteed a job, basic necessities and a specified date of freedom, while debt can keep on ballooning forever.
If they're getting state money, is there some particular reason why the state can't simply order them to lower tuition, or better yet remove it completely? I've never really understood why anything should be some weird hybrid of public and private institution that combines the drawbacks of both and the benefits of neither. Either treat them as public institutions subject to public will, or stop giving them money and let them sink or swim on their own.
The one making the loan, of course. Moneylending is investting, and investments aren't risk-free.
Workplaces where people are fired sumarily for mistakes are ones where no one ever does anything except cover their ass and search for any other employer. The quality and amount of work that gets done reflects this.
Because after communism fell, there's no more reason for capitalism to pretend, thus it's reverting back to the good old Gilded Age.
They are going to pay the least they can get away with, for either IT or blowjobs. Join a union and use collective bargaining to force them to pay more. It's either that, or continue dreaming of winning the lottery. We no longer have a frontier, so the original American Dream of getting some land and living independently is no longer possible, and the modern version of starting your own company doesn't really work for most people - which almost certainly includes you, no matter how much above average you might think you are.
Alternatively, you could accept that your economic position will always be terrible, and seek solace from spirituality, flights of fancy, mind-altering substances, or whatever. Basically, disengage from economy as much as possible, and alter your value system accordingly. The problems with this are that it's not possible to do so completely (you still need food and shelter), it's very difficult to truly cange your value system, and since people not caring about the rat race is one of the few things that actually threaten the powers that be, mind-altering substances tend to get banned and communes raided.
Any kind of industrial process having a bad failure in the middle of a city can kill a lot of people. Using this as an argument against nuclear power is extremely dishonest. On the other hand, "we can't build more" is a rather severe argument against building more dams and powering the country with them.
Getting semi-exclusive use for the entire river and all the energy in it for unlimited time is a rather significant subsidy. In fact I'd argue that it's almost impossible to build a dam without such generous gifts from the government. And most of nuclear's cost comes from the fact that it's held to a far higher standard than other energy forms - including dams, which typically release tremendous amounts of CO2 from all the plant matter buried under the water, which the company is not required to clear beforehand.
Oh well, at least no one had to relocate when your dam went up, right? Nothing culturally or otherwise important was buried beneath the waves? The local fish population didn't suffer, any traffick at the waterway has a way around it, and the company paid for any lost real estate to landowners free to negotiate the price? And it paid for and is still paying for insurance to pay for any damages that might result from dam failure? Because when people say that nuclear power is expensive and X is cheap, they usually ignore the fact that X can leave its externalities to be paid for by other people and nuclear can't, and nuclear is still competitive.
No, that's not what objective means. Something being objective simply means that if two peple come to different conclusions about it, at least one of them must be wrong. It does not say anything about the nature of the observations, for example that they must be black and white.
Power corrupts, and has always corrupted everywhere. And attracts power-hungry people. And power-hungry, corrupt people are willing to do corrupt and immoral acts to get even more power. This does not mean that the society is "okay" with it, just that it's a chronic illness it is unable to get rid of and thus just has to tolerate.
Somethings, such as sexuality, have moved from community regulated towards individually decided, while others, such as whether you use cannabis, have moved from individually decided towards community regulated.
It is not sound without any framework, though. Thus it's only sound if one assumes a framework exists.
Wrong.
But you haven't actually reached the conclusion "torture is wrong". You have reacehd the conclusion "if X, then torture is wrong". That's useful, if X is something you're willing to assume; if it isn't, then you haven't reached any reached a conclusion about the morality or immorality of torture.
Basically, your conclusion is not absolute, it's conditional, and you haven't proven the condition.
The material a gold coin is made from might have value even if the coin is melted down. However, only "might". After all, no one is required to accept gold in payment, and they are unlikely to do so unless they think they can sell the gold forward, or have a need for its specific properties. Gold stops being currency the second people stop thinking it is; it will remain a pretty material useful for jewelry, but so is quartz. Thus, almost all of gold's value is based on people having faith in that value, which is no different than paper money (you can burn paper or wipe your ass with it, thus banknotes have intrinsic value - it's just tiny compared to the nominal value, just as with gold).
Something is money if and only if enough people to form a functional economy agree it is. At this point, Dollar and Euro are far more so than gold, and Bitcoin is getting there and will almost certainly surpass gold if it survives to the point where the network effect really begins.
You end up with an outright slave society, since anyone who has any kind of advantage over anyone else can use it as leverage to gain ever more draconian agreements, leading ultimately to de facto or de juro ownership.
Yours is a bad idea, even if we ignore the obvious problems of there no longer being regulations against selling tainted food and other such lovely details.
Good point. Better start working on running Bitcoin through Tor as hidden services. It should give the Tor network a nice boost, too.
You mentioned driftwood, so you're probably talking about hydropower. True, that can be cheap, but it's pretty much tapped out already, and dam failures can cause hundreds of thousands of deaths - that's on the ballpark of nuclear attack, not an accident.