Java was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment, I realize java itself is not a bad thing. It's just that 90% of the computers that have java installed on them, really don't need to have java installed on them, and don't really benefit from having it installed. 95% of the web works just fine now a days without Java or Flash or anything but the native browser functionality, and arguably the other 5% is mostly websites I'd recommend people stay away from anyways. Having additional runtimes like Java and Flash execute from the browser opens up all sorts of security vulnerabilities that shouldn't exist. The fact that Oracle seems hell bent on including the 'ask toolbar' with Java is just icing on the cake. I tell people all the time, that unless you've got a very specific reason to need Java installed on a machine, you're better off without it.
Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.
They're legitimate in the sense that they won't exploit vulnerabilities in your system to install themselves, or (generally) ignore (or interfere with) attempts to remove them from your computer. They might even propose to have some sort of functionality that a user could want. The reality is that the functionality they generally offer is limited at best, and may even be inferior to the native functionality of the computer. They often slow your machine down, eating up your CPU cycles, opening up your computer to additional vulnerabilities, stealing your personal information to sell to advertisers, and generally speaking are not really useful to or needed by the people who have them installed on their computers.
Imagine for a moment that a government decided they were going to go and take half of their fiat currency in existence out of the economy, this wouldn't actually mean that there was now less value worth of money in the economy, only that the individual currency denominations are individually worth twice as much as they used to be.
If an entity with the financial capability to buy $4.8 billion worth of BTC went on that much of a buying spree the price of individual BTC would skyrocket, as the demand for the product would rise while the entity was purchasing them. Then, presumably since the goal of this entity is to destroy BTC, they would not reintroduce the coins they'd purchased back into the economy, thus causing a decrease in supply, that would have the ultimate result of simply stabilizing the remaining BTC at their new higher value.
The really stupid thing is that such an "exchange" does not offer "sketchy investments". The "sketchy investment" is the actual Bitcoin. I've seen no sites offer actual interest or anything: they just offer to keep your Bitcoins.
There are sites which offer interest (paid as a % of the exchange's revenue as a way to attract new members). As well as places that offer investments/loans.
While I agree that the best way to safeguard your BTC is with an encrypted private wallet, there are valid reasons to consider storing them online. Granted you should certainly do your research first, and even if everything is on the up and up, accept that there is some risk involved if the site owner turns out to be a sleaze, or doesn't properly secure his servers against hackers etc. If you're adverse to that kind of risk then keep it in your private wallet.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but I will respond to the first point. Adding -San to a name is somewhat similar to saying Mr. but Japanese honorifics tend to be slightly more nuanced than the Mr, and Mrs, style honorifics of English. In japan it's considered very impolite to refer to someone by their given name rather than family name, unless you are very close friends. Likewise it is considered impolite in Japanese to leave off any honorific again unless you are very close friends.
Generally adding -san to a name indicates that the person is someone you do not have a close relationship with, and denotes a respectful tone. Other honorifics commonly used in modern japan include -sama, which would be given to someone you strongly look up to or who is highly above your social station, it's roughly the equivalent of calling someone 'boss' but again is more nuanced and respectful than that, -kun is generally used to refer to someone who is below your social station while still being respectful, it's common that in a work environment for a supervisor to speak to a (generally male) junior with -kun, while the junior would refer to their supervisor with -san, while the president of the company would be -sama. -chan is the last commonly used honorific, and is generally used in similar situations where -kun would be used for females, it's also used to indicate 'cuteness' or for small children. A mascot character might be referred to as Mascot-chan if they're supposed to be cute or childish, and it is common for adults to refer to elementary grade or younger children with -chan.
There's more nuances to Japanese honorifics than I give here, but that's the long and short of it, if you're ever in doubt which honorific would be appropriate to a given situation, generally going with -san is a safe fall back.
Tell you what, if 12 Mil is measly to you, then I'm sure you wouldn't even notice if half a mil went missing. And I sure could use half a million dollars . . .
I don't think all advertisers are inherently malicious. There are some sure, but then there are some crooked cops, some sleazy salesmen, corrupt politicians etc. The problem comes in that most of the time we see advertisements on the internet its because there really is no other way for the company to provide the services they provide unless someone is footing the bill. Would you use Google search if you had to pay for it? Some people might, but I'd be willing to bet that most people wouldn't. Using AD blockers is the digital equivalent of saying "I want to use your service but I don't think it's good enough to to pay for it".
Now I might sound a little hypocritical, since I do have an ad blocker installed myself, but when I regularly visit a website that I know makes it's money off of ads I'll usually disable it. And I have been known to spring for 'premium' accounts occasionally (which usually ditch the ads) for services I use a lot, so maybe I am a bit of a hypocrite for not wanting to pay for the hosting of 'Joe and Jim's Spam blog' that I happened to visit once when just surfing around the net, but for sites that I visit Daily, I usually have no problem with a couple tasteful ads that don't significantly detract from the content of the page.
Actually it wasn't designed to do that, it was designed to be a charger + serial data connection, exactly like microUSB. Someone else on here helpfully linked to this article which I found interesting. (apologies to whoever originally linked it, the article stuck in my mind, not the poster). If you read the article it tears down a lightning to HDMI video adapter, and notes that it has an ARM processor in it, something that would be unneeded if the cable itself was capable of spitting out straight HDMI video.
TL;DR Lightning cables have that nifty 'can be plugged in either way' thing going for them, and are arguably more durable than microUSB, but at the end of the day they're two specs, and two connectors doing exactly the same thing, if you want to snag a video feed from either of them, you need to have a 'dongle' that can capture and process the data pins on the connector into a proper video signal.
To be fair, you could almost certainly build a cable which includes the dongle and HDMI conversion inline, especially if there are variants that don't require an external power source. Personally I like having components separated out a bit more, a 'cell phone video cable' is worthless to me if I'm not using it for hooking up a cell phone. A dongle with an HDMI cable attached to it, is still an HDMI cable if I remove the dongle and want to use it on something else. I feel the same way about DVI to HDMI cables. I'd rather have the cable be a straight A to B, and have an adapter at the end.
As someone who lives in one of the most liberal states in the Union, I imagine that our social security here is one of the more abused ones in the nation, and still you can't get more than 933 a month from SSI. That's a far cry from 25k a year. Heck 25k a year is a livable wage for someone with no dependents, 11k from SSI? Not really.
Of course I agree with your idea of 'Suggested Labor' for their SSI, unless they're physically disabled they should work for their living.
I would respectfully argue that pictures distributed after the fact are still harmful to the original victims. Nothing makes it harder to move past some unpleasant event in the past than the constant reminder that it happened. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way (not even necessarily sexually), now imagine that the event was recorded on camera. Now imagine that 10 years after the fact people are still leering at the pictures of your victimization. How would that make you feel? The damage of child pornography doesn't necessarily end when the abuse stops.
But is this something that we can convert into a practical design for transporting goods or people cross country or is it just a gimmicky air craft that while nifty will likely never see any wide scale use beyond hobbyists, a la ultralights.
I think it's unlikely that BTC will ever be used in a brick and mortar environment, but see my arguments about transaction fees below. OTOH for web based transactions if someone is ordering physical goods it's a non-issue to wait for some confirmations to hit the network (I mean by the time you have their product boxed up and ready for shipping the transaction would have already been confirmed), and if they're ordering some web based service, you can probably grant the user instant access without confirmation and just revoke it if there seems to be a double spend attempt or some other fishiness going on.
As far as security goes, that's no different than dealing with security in any other financial environment, banks deal with it, credit card companies deal with it, wall street deals with it; if it doesn't want to have it's reputation dragged through the mud and very likely go out of business, any company dealing with BTC (or any sort of money) should be putting at least as much effort into security.
Transaction fees are largely irrelevant when dealing with BTC, right now they're entirely voluntary, but even if I choose to pay say.001 BTC as a transaction fee (again completely optional) with a BTC transaction, that translates to less than $0.10 USD by current exchange rates. More importantly the purpose of transaction fees is to make sure your transaction as a consumer is rapidly accepted by the network. On the other hand, most credit card companies charge 1-3% on their processing fees, which is paid by the merchant for the privilege of allowing their customers to use their services. Even if we weren't talking about apples and oranges here, the break even mark would be a purchase of about $10 USD or apx..1 BTC if we presume a minimum 1% processing fee for the credit card companies. On larger purchases the transaction fee for BTC remains the same (and still voluntary), while the credit card processing fees grow larger and larger.
Now for a brick-and-mortar store the instantaneous processing of a credit card has some benefits such as instant confirmation, which may very well make it 'worth it' for a store/customer to pay that sort of processing fee, vs waiting for confirmations to hit the BTC network, and I think that's a perfectly valid trade off. It would however be possible to set up a sort of BTC payment processor in that you pre-pay some BTC into an account and transactions are validated by that processor for transactions requiring 'instant' approval. In my mind this is mostly reinventing the wheel (credit card companies already exist) and invalidates the reason to use BTC in the first place (low to no transaction fees, the processing company has to make money somehow), but this COULD happen as an option to allow brick and mortar's to offer instant confirmation.
Eh, I think the 5th amendment says otherwise, I know there is some legal precedent about encryption keys but I'm not particularly familiar with the cases, and a quick google search reveals an article that seems to support my argument. Of course if you can provide some counter examples I'd be happy to look at them.
Use Tor if you really want to add a layer of anonymity to the transactions. As soon as someone trying to track down a transaction based on IP addresses realize they've hit a Tor endpoint, trying to track any further would be an exercise in futility. You just have to be particularly vigilant that ALL your transactions flow through tor and all of your coins get 'mixed' before you try to use them.
Presumably someone as paranoid about anonymity as this would have their wallet file encrypted. Of course even if they didn't, I don't know how it works in whatever country you're from, but in the US you need to be pretty specific when it comes to search warrants, the 4th amendment prevents cops from taking a 'shotgun' approach and just randomly searching people's stuff to look for potential crimes. Incidentally in the above case the cops would need to already know who you are and have a reasonable suspicion that they're going to find evidence of a specific alleged crime before they could get any sane judge to sign off on it.
Amen to that, I've yet to see a torrent site with the same level of Niche stuff that Demonoid used to have. If ever I found another site with that same quality of content I'd join in an instant.
True, but a corporation can only be this evil because there's no specific accountability to the people who own the corporation. Corporations act as a shield for individual liability, that's their only real purpose. If the people who own a corporation were exposed to the same legal and financial risks, they probably wouldn't do half the shit they do.
Well, there's certainly worse things that a zombie network can do. Hell, I'm downright in favor of some greyhat hacker putting Tor exit nodes into a botnet. I mean ideally we'd shut down every bot net out there, but since that's not realistically going to happen this would at least be a nice consolation prize while they go about their business DDoSing bitcoin or whatever else happens to be in vogue for a botnet to do these days.
Fair enough, you are correct that it's the block rate that's fixed, not the rate of coin generation, just that the 'block reward' happens to be what most people care about when it comes to a new block.
No. The rate of coin generation is fixed. The difficulty, however, is not. It increases.
Or decreases if the computational power of the network drops (granted advances in technology make that unlikely in the long term, and only minimally impactful in the short term). The difficulty self adjusts SO that the rate of coin generation remains largely fixed.
They're not independent variables, the more power you have the faster you can compute an equation to match the current difficulty, and earn more coins, it just also happens that the difficulty is self adjusting so that the rate which coins are found stays apx. = to 1 per 10 minutes. If the computational power of the network is strong enough that it's taking less than 10 minutes for someone to find a block, the difficulty rises until that is no longer true, and if the computational power of the network drops enough that it's taking more than 10 minutes for someone to find a block the difficulty drops.
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Java was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment, I realize java itself is not a bad thing. It's just that 90% of the computers that have java installed on them, really don't need to have java installed on them, and don't really benefit from having it installed. 95% of the web works just fine now a days without Java or Flash or anything but the native browser functionality, and arguably the other 5% is mostly websites I'd recommend people stay away from anyways. Having additional runtimes like Java and Flash execute from the browser opens up all sorts of security vulnerabilities that shouldn't exist. The fact that Oracle seems hell bent on including the 'ask toolbar' with Java is just icing on the cake. I tell people all the time, that unless you've got a very specific reason to need Java installed on a machine, you're better off without it.
Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.
They're legitimate in the sense that they won't exploit vulnerabilities in your system to install themselves, or (generally) ignore (or interfere with) attempts to remove them from your computer. They might even propose to have some sort of functionality that a user could want. The reality is that the functionality they generally offer is limited at best, and may even be inferior to the native functionality of the computer. They often slow your machine down, eating up your CPU cycles, opening up your computer to additional vulnerabilities, stealing your personal information to sell to advertisers, and generally speaking are not really useful to or needed by the people who have them installed on their computers.
Imagine for a moment that a government decided they were going to go and take half of their fiat currency in existence out of the economy, this wouldn't actually mean that there was now less value worth of money in the economy, only that the individual currency denominations are individually worth twice as much as they used to be.
If an entity with the financial capability to buy $4.8 billion worth of BTC went on that much of a buying spree the price of individual BTC would skyrocket, as the demand for the product would rise while the entity was purchasing them. Then, presumably since the goal of this entity is to destroy BTC, they would not reintroduce the coins they'd purchased back into the economy, thus causing a decrease in supply, that would have the ultimate result of simply stabilizing the remaining BTC at their new higher value.
The really stupid thing is that such an "exchange" does not offer "sketchy investments". The "sketchy investment" is the actual Bitcoin. I've seen no sites offer actual interest or anything: they just offer to keep your Bitcoins.
There are sites which offer interest (paid as a % of the exchange's revenue as a way to attract new members). As well as places that offer investments/loans.
While I agree that the best way to safeguard your BTC is with an encrypted private wallet, there are valid reasons to consider storing them online. Granted you should certainly do your research first, and even if everything is on the up and up, accept that there is some risk involved if the site owner turns out to be a sleaze, or doesn't properly secure his servers against hackers etc. If you're adverse to that kind of risk then keep it in your private wallet.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but I will respond to the first point. Adding -San to a name is somewhat similar to saying Mr. but Japanese honorifics tend to be slightly more nuanced than the Mr, and Mrs, style honorifics of English. In japan it's considered very impolite to refer to someone by their given name rather than family name, unless you are very close friends. Likewise it is considered impolite in Japanese to leave off any honorific again unless you are very close friends.
Generally adding -san to a name indicates that the person is someone you do not have a close relationship with, and denotes a respectful tone. Other honorifics commonly used in modern japan include -sama, which would be given to someone you strongly look up to or who is highly above your social station, it's roughly the equivalent of calling someone 'boss' but again is more nuanced and respectful than that, -kun is generally used to refer to someone who is below your social station while still being respectful, it's common that in a work environment for a supervisor to speak to a (generally male) junior with -kun, while the junior would refer to their supervisor with -san, while the president of the company would be -sama. -chan is the last commonly used honorific, and is generally used in similar situations where -kun would be used for females, it's also used to indicate 'cuteness' or for small children. A mascot character might be referred to as Mascot-chan if they're supposed to be cute or childish, and it is common for adults to refer to elementary grade or younger children with -chan.
There's more nuances to Japanese honorifics than I give here, but that's the long and short of it, if you're ever in doubt which honorific would be appropriate to a given situation, generally going with -san is a safe fall back.
Tell you what, if 12 Mil is measly to you, then I'm sure you wouldn't even notice if half a mil went missing. And I sure could use half a million dollars . . .
I don't think all advertisers are inherently malicious. There are some sure, but then there are some crooked cops, some sleazy salesmen, corrupt politicians etc. The problem comes in that most of the time we see advertisements on the internet its because there really is no other way for the company to provide the services they provide unless someone is footing the bill. Would you use Google search if you had to pay for it? Some people might, but I'd be willing to bet that most people wouldn't. Using AD blockers is the digital equivalent of saying "I want to use your service but I don't think it's good enough to to pay for it".
Now I might sound a little hypocritical, since I do have an ad blocker installed myself, but when I regularly visit a website that I know makes it's money off of ads I'll usually disable it. And I have been known to spring for 'premium' accounts occasionally (which usually ditch the ads) for services I use a lot, so maybe I am a bit of a hypocrite for not wanting to pay for the hosting of 'Joe and Jim's Spam blog' that I happened to visit once when just surfing around the net, but for sites that I visit Daily, I usually have no problem with a couple tasteful ads that don't significantly detract from the content of the page.
Actually it wasn't designed to do that, it was designed to be a charger + serial data connection, exactly like microUSB. Someone else on here helpfully linked to this article which I found interesting. (apologies to whoever originally linked it, the article stuck in my mind, not the poster). If you read the article it tears down a lightning to HDMI video adapter, and notes that it has an ARM processor in it, something that would be unneeded if the cable itself was capable of spitting out straight HDMI video.
TL;DR Lightning cables have that nifty 'can be plugged in either way' thing going for them, and are arguably more durable than microUSB, but at the end of the day they're two specs, and two connectors doing exactly the same thing, if you want to snag a video feed from either of them, you need to have a 'dongle' that can capture and process the data pins on the connector into a proper video signal.
To be fair, you could almost certainly build a cable which includes the dongle and HDMI conversion inline, especially if there are variants that don't require an external power source. Personally I like having components separated out a bit more, a 'cell phone video cable' is worthless to me if I'm not using it for hooking up a cell phone. A dongle with an HDMI cable attached to it, is still an HDMI cable if I remove the dongle and want to use it on something else. I feel the same way about DVI to HDMI cables. I'd rather have the cable be a straight A to B, and have an adapter at the end.
As someone who lives in one of the most liberal states in the Union, I imagine that our social security here is one of the more abused ones in the nation, and still you can't get more than 933 a month from SSI. That's a far cry from 25k a year. Heck 25k a year is a livable wage for someone with no dependents, 11k from SSI? Not really.
Of course I agree with your idea of 'Suggested Labor' for their SSI, unless they're physically disabled they should work for their living.
Give it to me, I'll waste it on mining hardware from BFL that will never be delivered ;p
1MEEyqA6DooLBtamSMAdvTv8doz1e4beZg
I prefer to keep it in pure gold pressed latinum, the stock market is only good until the collapse of society, latinum is forever.
I would respectfully argue that pictures distributed after the fact are still harmful to the original victims. Nothing makes it harder to move past some unpleasant event in the past than the constant reminder that it happened. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way (not even necessarily sexually), now imagine that the event was recorded on camera. Now imagine that 10 years after the fact people are still leering at the pictures of your victimization. How would that make you feel? The damage of child pornography doesn't necessarily end when the abuse stops.
But is this something that we can convert into a practical design for transporting goods or people cross country or is it just a gimmicky air craft that while nifty will likely never see any wide scale use beyond hobbyists, a la ultralights.
I think it's unlikely that BTC will ever be used in a brick and mortar environment, but see my arguments about transaction fees below. OTOH for web based transactions if someone is ordering physical goods it's a non-issue to wait for some confirmations to hit the network (I mean by the time you have their product boxed up and ready for shipping the transaction would have already been confirmed), and if they're ordering some web based service, you can probably grant the user instant access without confirmation and just revoke it if there seems to be a double spend attempt or some other fishiness going on.
As far as security goes, that's no different than dealing with security in any other financial environment, banks deal with it, credit card companies deal with it, wall street deals with it; if it doesn't want to have it's reputation dragged through the mud and very likely go out of business, any company dealing with BTC (or any sort of money) should be putting at least as much effort into security.
Transaction fees are largely irrelevant when dealing with BTC, right now they're entirely voluntary, but even if I choose to pay say .001 BTC as a transaction fee (again completely optional) with a BTC transaction, that translates to less than $0.10 USD by current exchange rates. More importantly the purpose of transaction fees is to make sure your transaction as a consumer is rapidly accepted by the network. On the other hand, most credit card companies charge 1-3% on their processing fees, which is paid by the merchant for the privilege of allowing their customers to use their services. Even if we weren't talking about apples and oranges here, the break even mark would be a purchase of about $10 USD or apx. .1 BTC if we presume a minimum 1% processing fee for the credit card companies. On larger purchases the transaction fee for BTC remains the same (and still voluntary), while the credit card processing fees grow larger and larger.
Now for a brick-and-mortar store the instantaneous processing of a credit card has some benefits such as instant confirmation, which may very well make it 'worth it' for a store/customer to pay that sort of processing fee, vs waiting for confirmations to hit the BTC network, and I think that's a perfectly valid trade off. It would however be possible to set up a sort of BTC payment processor in that you pre-pay some BTC into an account and transactions are validated by that processor for transactions requiring 'instant' approval. In my mind this is mostly reinventing the wheel (credit card companies already exist) and invalidates the reason to use BTC in the first place (low to no transaction fees, the processing company has to make money somehow), but this COULD happen as an option to allow brick and mortar's to offer instant confirmation.
Eh, I think the 5th amendment says otherwise, I know there is some legal precedent about encryption keys but I'm not particularly familiar with the cases, and a quick google search reveals an article that seems to support my argument. Of course if you can provide some counter examples I'd be happy to look at them.
Use Tor if you really want to add a layer of anonymity to the transactions. As soon as someone trying to track down a transaction based on IP addresses realize they've hit a Tor endpoint, trying to track any further would be an exercise in futility. You just have to be particularly vigilant that ALL your transactions flow through tor and all of your coins get 'mixed' before you try to use them.
Presumably someone as paranoid about anonymity as this would have their wallet file encrypted. Of course even if they didn't, I don't know how it works in whatever country you're from, but in the US you need to be pretty specific when it comes to search warrants, the 4th amendment prevents cops from taking a 'shotgun' approach and just randomly searching people's stuff to look for potential crimes. Incidentally in the above case the cops would need to already know who you are and have a reasonable suspicion that they're going to find evidence of a specific alleged crime before they could get any sane judge to sign off on it.
Cash is only worth what people are willing to trade for it, I fail to see how Bitcoin is inherently any different.
Amen to that, I've yet to see a torrent site with the same level of Niche stuff that Demonoid used to have. If ever I found another site with that same quality of content I'd join in an instant.
True, but a corporation can only be this evil because there's no specific accountability to the people who own the corporation. Corporations act as a shield for individual liability, that's their only real purpose. If the people who own a corporation were exposed to the same legal and financial risks, they probably wouldn't do half the shit they do.
Well, there's certainly worse things that a zombie network can do. Hell, I'm downright in favor of some greyhat hacker putting Tor exit nodes into a botnet. I mean ideally we'd shut down every bot net out there, but since that's not realistically going to happen this would at least be a nice consolation prize while they go about their business DDoSing bitcoin or whatever else happens to be in vogue for a botnet to do these days.
terminal server for thin clients?
Fair enough, you are correct that it's the block rate that's fixed, not the rate of coin generation, just that the 'block reward' happens to be what most people care about when it comes to a new block.
No. The rate of coin generation is fixed. The difficulty, however, is not. It increases.
Or decreases if the computational power of the network drops (granted advances in technology make that unlikely in the long term, and only minimally impactful in the short term). The difficulty self adjusts SO that the rate of coin generation remains largely fixed.
They're not independent variables, the more power you have the faster you can compute an equation to match the current difficulty, and earn more coins, it just also happens that the difficulty is self adjusting so that the rate which coins are found stays apx. = to 1 per 10 minutes. If the computational power of the network is strong enough that it's taking less than 10 minutes for someone to find a block, the difficulty rises until that is no longer true, and if the computational power of the network drops enough that it's taking more than 10 minutes for someone to find a block the difficulty drops.