bitcoin is the crank's currency. cranks don't do legitimacy
so bitcoin will lose its lustre with those who launched it onto slashdot's front page for the past few years
Bitcoin is a distributed multiuser ledger system. It allows people to send IOUs to each other without involving third parties. It has utility, regardless of whether it has lustre.
look out for the rise of the new utopian idealization project:
I think that would be "Bitcoin over Freenet", since any "crank" users are probably already using both, and it would be a pretty simple project - just post the transactions and solved blocks into a Frost board and accept that you'll have a lot of temporary forks. Or maybe "Bitcoin over Tor" - the point remains that hiding you're running a node would be a natural evolution for the paranoid.
How does one know that bitcoins will be honoured - that they have value? And is that guarantee as solid as, say, the USD or the RMB, which are backed by large, strong governments? I don't know, but I suspect not.
Then again, it seems that such backing is somewhat questionable, since whether or not IOUs will be honored and at what value depends on the whims of politicians. And of course this is ignoring the many national bankrupties and economic bubbles in history, as well as normal fluctuation of currency values.
So no, one does not and can not know that Bitcoins or any other IOU will be honored, for the simple reason that guaranteeing that would basically mean guaranteeing that some unnamed person in the future will accept it in an economic exchange.
The US military is by far the most powerful entity on the planet, it could literally nuke the bitcoin system from orbit but most of us trust that it won't.
I'm pretty sure that a global thermonuclear war would somewhat disturb other online payment systems, too. And probably more, since they tend to be centralized, so a single solid hit is all it takes.
Still, you rise an important point, and I agree that we must ensure that Bitcoin shall remain a viable alternative to bottle caps in a real-world Fallout setting. How else could it possibly succeed?
As far as the motivations of detractors... if you seriously can't tell why some people might be a bit wary of a non-government backed, largely unregulated currency that's recognized in only limited locations, you need to step back from the Kool-Aid bowl for a minute.
I understand perfectly well why people might be wary. Being wary is different from trying to convince everyone else to not use the thing. That latter part is suspicious.
Right, because anyone who thinks Bitcoin is dumb must be a shill for some shadowy interest that fears its potential.
No, but anyone who posts on a Bitcoin story explaining how dumb he thinks it is probably has some kind of reason for it. And an organized FUD campaign is certainly a plausible explanation for the amount and vehemency of such posts.
Just like anyone who thinks Bitcoin is good must be a speculator who's working to further his pump-and-dump scheme.
Or he could simply want to use it for making online payments without needing the approval of third parties.
It's amazing how everyone who discusses Bitcoin at all is engaged in one sinister conspiracy or the other.
The difference is that the people who advocate Bitcoin have a plausible non-sinister reason for doing so: they want to use it. It is harder to see what the motivation of someone who calls for mental evaluation of someone for using it might be, besides spreading FUD.
This fella needs some form of psychiatric evaluation. Question is, am I alone?
No, the usual astroturfers began posting their FUD right away. Which rises the question: are they employed by governments or banks? In other words, which fears Bitcoin more: governments, for not being able to inflate the currency, or the banks, for no longer being able to nickel-and-dime people? Or am I ignoring the most obvious culprit: VISA, for no longer being able to tax all online transactions?
They are encouraged by our wealthy masters in order to reduce the population of the poor so that they can keep more wealth for themselves.
Actually, the wealthy want there to be hordes of poor people to compete for their table scraps, as this helps depress wages and working conditions. Their actual actions - abusing work visas, offshoring to places with lots of cheap labour, etc - support this theory.
Thus, they can't be described as "live and let live", but more "I've got mine and the rest of you can just die".
Not getting children is not the same as killing people.
Why not simply have a single instance of linux, and then multiple instances of erlang running under that linux kernel?
Since a cloud is made of millions of tiny water particles (the virtual servers), and this condenses them all to a single body of water, I suggest we call this revolutionary new approach "pond" computing.
Fellow Slashdotters we have to stop cringing for our values ("beta" behaviour) and be proud of what we believe in ("alpha" behaviour).
Even if human societies behaved like dogpacks (which they don't), simply declaring yourself "alpha" wouldn't make you...
I believe that there is no substitute for victory, of you start a war you do *everything* in your power to win;
...but I guess we can't expect great logic from someone who's proudly declaring his believe in the Sunk Cost Fallacy (also hypocrisy, since *everything* includes genocide which you just condemned "jihadists" for).
No matter what point of view you take someone will dispute it and may even (childishly) not like you as a result.
Well, anyone who's ever seen the kind of total war you're promoting or gets caught up in one might dislike you for said promotion, which doesn't really strike me as particularly childish reason. Also, most people will probably not like someone who dismisses their culture, so add Muslims to the list. And I doubt scientists are happy with you trying to elevate their results into capital-T Truth, since that tends to hinder their work.
Don't vote for any politician unless they sound like they're paraphrasing Atlas Shrugged? Sorry, but no; having hundreds of millions of dollars does not mean you "generated" that wealth, it means that you are good at concentrating economic power into your hands - and even most often, than you were born rich.
Once upon a time the West felt it could do achieve any goal - at it nearly could. We have lost our mojo because we keep listening to the "beta" message: be nice, make everyoine like you, get along. Well, we can and should still do that - but let's set our horizons a little bigger. Per Ardua Ad Astra.
What it actually achieved were a number of colonial empires. Those collapsed after two world wars caused by people who tried to be "alpha". Then people like you start twisting history to fit into your (totally non-racist, because you believe racism is wrong, and this all sounds exactly like classic racist spiel purely by accident) superhero fantasy, all because you want a strong leader who doesn't care about being liked to make you feel more like "alpha" - you know, coming to think of it, this is almost starting to sound like the prelude to one of those world wars.
Why get add impressions from one page when you can get them from two? Also, the second headline has a different meaning than the first, since "donglegate" refers not only to the alleged sexism, but also to the response to that, the response to that, the implications of someone playing thought vigilante, this ongoing conversation...
Yes, it is just. They can keep anything they earned/saved in their lifetime. Any wealth amassed prior should be confiscated. (i.e "your dad stole this car, no you can't keep it")
So what if I don't have the car anymore? Do I need to pay for it? What if I've made bad investments, and no longer have as much as you'd confiscate - will I be made a debt slave for the rest of my life through no fault of my own?
You are describing a situation here where no one - not the wealthy and not the poor - can ever be safe or secure.
Debt forgiveness and asset hiding for the wealthy is one of the greatest crimes to humanity.
Bullshit. Economy would function a lot better if easy debt forgiveness was extended to everyone - that is, if both the debtor and the debtee bore equal responsibility of the debt, rather than the debtee as is now the case - because it would arrest the domino of bankruptcies that make economic bubbles so destructive, and make lenders more cautious in the first place. The only crime is in that the rich get different rules, not in the rules themselves.
Also, I repeat: you are suggesting punishing innocents for crimes they did not commit. That is neither just nor practical. If anything, it gives people incentive to bury stories like this, because publishing them will hurt people who had nothing to do with the whole affair.
Hate the wealthy for being the looters and parasites that they are, but don't cross the line where you become the enemy.
To accuse Nixon of being a Liberal Democrat in 3.... 2.... 1.....
To be fair, I don't think that there are many politicians in American history who would count as Republican by today's standards. The unholy combination of serving both big business and the worst manifestations of religious fundamentalism is a recent one. Seeking to prolong a war might be appealing to the "hawks", however.
Anything that remains of Nixon's estate (should be traceable still) should be immediately frozen to be used to compensate those affected by this - the families of those who died as a result of this act of treason that continued the war for a further 5 years, and those injured as well.
Thus punishing people who likely were not even born when this happened, and exposing all of us to a risk of having our property confiscated because it turns out our grandparents did something nasty half a century ago. Yes, that certainly sounds just.
A better approach would be to delete random files from the user's computer.
It is a good way to ensure no one will touch your programs with a ten-foot pole once word gets out, and also get sued by any user bit by false positives.
The barrier of entry is an important factor with many things, piracy included.
It is impossible to get the barrier of entry so high that no one on the planet could pirate it, and once anyone has, the barrier falls to zero for everyone else - they just need to download the cracked program.
I disagree with you, you should at least have a soft protection to prevent the average Joe from emailing the program to his BFF which just has to run the exe after.
But that requires either a physical token (DVD) or activation servers, both of which instantly increase costs a lot over simple downloads and inconvenience legitimate users. It also won't stop the software from ending up on Pirate Bay.
Just live with the fact that some people will use your program for free. You can't stop it from happening, and will simply piss off your customers by trying. And besides, Joe Average emailing your program forward will probably end up increasing your profits - after all, your biggest challenge is going to be getting word of its existence out there, and it's always possible that whoever it is emailed to will decide to pay the $5 out of the goodness of his heart, or whoever he emails it will, or...
It is perfectly natural to get angry at the thought of someone benefiting from your hard work without paying you, but if you run a business you can't afford to let it affect your decisions.
Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
Yeah. We should just nuke the whole thing from the orbit, it's the only way... Oh.
The SimCity kerfuffle is a drop in the bucket. And I highly doubt it was a financial desaster. They sold a lot of copies of it and that's what shareholders care about.
They sold a lot of copies. They also likely killed a golden goose franchise. They won't be selling a lot of copies of the next SimCity game, at least not on hype - and it's a lot harder to compete on actual merit than on hype. The shareholders know this, and any potential future shareholder also knows, so it affects the shareholders whether they choose to stick with EA or not. And that's something they do care about.
So yeah, it is/will be a financial disaster, just one with slow-motion special effects.
SC5, on the other hand, turns that model upside down - now, instead of having a single simulated organism (the theme park or city) with a small number of centres for behaviour collection (rides in the theme park, city zones/buildings/events in Sim City) for which to generate the statistical behaviours that your actors will show, now each individual actor is their own organism - the model is too complex to resort to "averaging" and modeling the overall system, but it is not complex enough to give each actor enough behaviours to be able to form creative solutions such as taking a detour around a road block.
The problem with that argument is that the ancient (1994) very first Settlers game already did model the flow of individual packets from producers to consumers through a limited-capacity road system, did this in real time, and implemented such niceties as priorities and terrain effects on delivery speed. There were no statistics involved, you could trace any delivery on-screen from the moment the producer leaves his door with it to the moment the final hauler walks in the target building's door with it. There's no excuse whatsoever for losing to a game that ran on Amiga 500 in AI complexity.
A PC could easily handle that level of simulation because you don't have to calculate everything every frame.
A PC can easily handle that level of simulation because it is actually not very computing intensive. SimLife, for example, was an agent-based simulation, and came out in 1992. Or take Tropico, which is a city-building game which models every citizen. So does Simcity Societies, for that matter, so there's really no excuse: they could had just bolted in a few additional simulations and better graphics on that and called it a day.
Some of these people might have had upper middle class parents, but there's a looooooooonnnnngggggg way between "wealthy" and 'richest person on earth".
The Low Earth Orbit is only a few hundred kilometers closer to the Moon than the surface, but those kilometers - about 0.04 percent of the whole journey - are the hardest part. Once you're there, you can work to slowly increase your altitude using the most efficient method at your disposal, but before you reach the orbit, most of your effort is wasted simply to keep from falling right back where you started from.
It is interesting how every mention of Bitcoin attracts people saying how they're worthless, useless, or a scam that's about to collapse any second now. It's interesting, because people don't usually spend this much time hating something that wouldn't affect them in any way even if they were right. It's almost starting to seem like a FUD campaign, which leads to a question: who is behind it, the banks, the government, Visa or PayPal?
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin is a distributed multiuser ledger system. It allows people to send IOUs to each other without involving third parties. It has utility, regardless of whether it has lustre.
look out for the rise of the new utopian idealization project:
I think that would be "Bitcoin over Freenet", since any "crank" users are probably already using both, and it would be a pretty simple project - just post the transactions and solved blocks into a Frost board and accept that you'll have a lot of temporary forks. Or maybe "Bitcoin over Tor" - the point remains that hiding you're running a node would be a natural evolution for the paranoid.
Then again, it seems that such backing is somewhat questionable, since whether or not IOUs will be honored and at what value depends on the whims of politicians. And of course this is ignoring the many national bankrupties and economic bubbles in history, as well as normal fluctuation of currency values.
So no, one does not and can not know that Bitcoins or any other IOU will be honored, for the simple reason that guaranteeing that would basically mean guaranteeing that some unnamed person in the future will accept it in an economic exchange.
I'm pretty sure that a global thermonuclear war would somewhat disturb other online payment systems, too. And probably more, since they tend to be centralized, so a single solid hit is all it takes.
Still, you rise an important point, and I agree that we must ensure that Bitcoin shall remain a viable alternative to bottle caps in a real-world Fallout setting. How else could it possibly succeed?
I understand perfectly well why people might be wary. Being wary is different from trying to convince everyone else to not use the thing. That latter part is suspicious.
No, but anyone who posts on a Bitcoin story explaining how dumb he thinks it is probably has some kind of reason for it. And an organized FUD campaign is certainly a plausible explanation for the amount and vehemency of such posts.
Or he could simply want to use it for making online payments without needing the approval of third parties.
The difference is that the people who advocate Bitcoin have a plausible non-sinister reason for doing so: they want to use it. It is harder to see what the motivation of someone who calls for mental evaluation of someone for using it might be, besides spreading FUD.
No, the usual astroturfers began posting their FUD right away. Which rises the question: are they employed by governments or banks? In other words, which fears Bitcoin more: governments, for not being able to inflate the currency, or the banks, for no longer being able to nickel-and-dime people? Or am I ignoring the most obvious culprit: VISA, for no longer being able to tax all online transactions?
Actually, the wealthy want there to be hordes of poor people to compete for their table scraps, as this helps depress wages and working conditions. Their actual actions - abusing work visas, offshoring to places with lots of cheap labour, etc - support this theory.
Not getting children is not the same as killing people.
Since a cloud is made of millions of tiny water particles (the virtual servers), and this condenses them all to a single body of water, I suggest we call this revolutionary new approach "pond" computing.
Even if human societies behaved like dogpacks (which they don't), simply declaring yourself "alpha" wouldn't make you...
...but I guess we can't expect great logic from someone who's proudly declaring his believe in the Sunk Cost Fallacy (also hypocrisy, since *everything* includes genocide which you just condemned "jihadists" for).
Well, anyone who's ever seen the kind of total war you're promoting or gets caught up in one might dislike you for said promotion, which doesn't really strike me as particularly childish reason. Also, most people will probably not like someone who dismisses their culture, so add Muslims to the list. And I doubt scientists are happy with you trying to elevate their results into capital-T Truth, since that tends to hinder their work.
Don't vote for any politician unless they sound like they're paraphrasing Atlas Shrugged? Sorry, but no; having hundreds of millions of dollars does not mean you "generated" that wealth, it means that you are good at concentrating economic power into your hands - and even most often, than you were born rich.
What it actually achieved were a number of colonial empires. Those collapsed after two world wars caused by people who tried to be "alpha". Then people like you start twisting history to fit into your (totally non-racist, because you believe racism is wrong, and this all sounds exactly like classic racist spiel purely by accident) superhero fantasy, all because you want a strong leader who doesn't care about being liked to make you feel more like "alpha" - you know, coming to think of it, this is almost starting to sound like the prelude to one of those world wars.
Why get add impressions from one page when you can get them from two? Also, the second headline has a different meaning than the first, since "donglegate" refers not only to the alleged sexism, but also to the response to that, the response to that, the implications of someone playing thought vigilante, this ongoing conversation...
I agree. It's turning into a gatesgate.
Which is why exposed spies are usually sent to a court, rather than simply assassinated.
So what if I don't have the car anymore? Do I need to pay for it? What if I've made bad investments, and no longer have as much as you'd confiscate - will I be made a debt slave for the rest of my life through no fault of my own?
You are describing a situation here where no one - not the wealthy and not the poor - can ever be safe or secure.
Bullshit. Economy would function a lot better if easy debt forgiveness was extended to everyone - that is, if both the debtor and the debtee bore equal responsibility of the debt, rather than the debtee as is now the case - because it would arrest the domino of bankruptcies that make economic bubbles so destructive, and make lenders more cautious in the first place. The only crime is in that the rich get different rules, not in the rules themselves.
Also, I repeat: you are suggesting punishing innocents for crimes they did not commit. That is neither just nor practical. If anything, it gives people incentive to bury stories like this, because publishing them will hurt people who had nothing to do with the whole affair.
Hate the wealthy for being the looters and parasites that they are, but don't cross the line where you become the enemy.
To be fair, I don't think that there are many politicians in American history who would count as Republican by today's standards. The unholy combination of serving both big business and the worst manifestations of religious fundamentalism is a recent one. Seeking to prolong a war might be appealing to the "hawks", however.
Thus punishing people who likely were not even born when this happened, and exposing all of us to a risk of having our property confiscated because it turns out our grandparents did something nasty half a century ago. Yes, that certainly sounds just.
Those can be copied and e-mailed along with the program, thus they don't accomplish anything.
It is a good way to ensure no one will touch your programs with a ten-foot pole once word gets out, and also get sued by any user bit by false positives.
Vigilantism is usually a bad idea.
It is impossible to get the barrier of entry so high that no one on the planet could pirate it, and once anyone has, the barrier falls to zero for everyone else - they just need to download the cracked program.
But that requires either a physical token (DVD) or activation servers, both of which instantly increase costs a lot over simple downloads and inconvenience legitimate users. It also won't stop the software from ending up on Pirate Bay.
Just live with the fact that some people will use your program for free. You can't stop it from happening, and will simply piss off your customers by trying. And besides, Joe Average emailing your program forward will probably end up increasing your profits - after all, your biggest challenge is going to be getting word of its existence out there, and it's always possible that whoever it is emailed to will decide to pay the $5 out of the goodness of his heart, or whoever he emails it will, or...
It is perfectly natural to get angry at the thought of someone benefiting from your hard work without paying you, but if you run a business you can't afford to let it affect your decisions.
Yeah. We should just nuke the whole thing from the orbit, it's the only way... Oh.
They sold a lot of copies. They also likely killed a golden goose franchise. They won't be selling a lot of copies of the next SimCity game, at least not on hype - and it's a lot harder to compete on actual merit than on hype. The shareholders know this, and any potential future shareholder also knows, so it affects the shareholders whether they choose to stick with EA or not. And that's something they do care about.
So yeah, it is/will be a financial disaster, just one with slow-motion special effects.
The problem with that argument is that the ancient (1994) very first Settlers game already did model the flow of individual packets from producers to consumers through a limited-capacity road system, did this in real time, and implemented such niceties as priorities and terrain effects on delivery speed. There were no statistics involved, you could trace any delivery on-screen from the moment the producer leaves his door with it to the moment the final hauler walks in the target building's door with it. There's no excuse whatsoever for losing to a game that ran on Amiga 500 in AI complexity.
A PC can easily handle that level of simulation because it is actually not very computing intensive. SimLife, for example, was an agent-based simulation, and came out in 1992. Or take Tropico, which is a city-building game which models every citizen. So does Simcity Societies, for that matter, so there's really no excuse: they could had just bolted in a few additional simulations and better graphics on that and called it a day.
The Low Earth Orbit is only a few hundred kilometers closer to the Moon than the surface, but those kilometers - about 0.04 percent of the whole journey - are the hardest part. Once you're there, you can work to slowly increase your altitude using the most efficient method at your disposal, but before you reach the orbit, most of your effort is wasted simply to keep from falling right back where you started from.
It is interesting how every mention of Bitcoin attracts people saying how they're worthless, useless, or a scam that's about to collapse any second now. It's interesting, because people don't usually spend this much time hating something that wouldn't affect them in any way even if they were right. It's almost starting to seem like a FUD campaign, which leads to a question: who is behind it, the banks, the government, Visa or PayPal?