We also raised turkeys and released them into the wild (illegally)
While I applaud your spirit, I condemn your reckless hippie bullshit. The bears and cougar showed up because there's food around, good job on acclimating some large predators to humans (slow clap).
If you're really afraid of bears and cougars, move to a city, there's plenty of urban areas to choose from.
I don't think we need to eradicate wildlife (including large predators) from every place humans live, and "studying the problem" endlessly and carefully managing reintroduction doesn't work nearly as well as the Chernobyl approach of just stepping back and letting it happen.
As far as taxes, some people will place "the back 40" in to tree growth. State law here allows a landowner to develop a timber harvest plan and get a significant reduction on property tax. In unincorporated parts of the state, I've heard this amounts to $1/acre per year in total tax.
Florida is trying to move in this direction at a State level, but the rural county tax collectors would shrivel up and blow away if they couldn't soak owners of conserved lands for residential level taxes.
something i noticed while looking for some land to buy, the only trees the usa has left in any large areas is in national and state parks.
That's not entirely true. I live in Maine. Indeed, it was pretty much clear cut a century ago....
Many other parts of the country have similar stories. Trees were clear cut a century ago.
My land in Florida was clearcut in the late 1800s, more for a quick buck at the sawmill than to grow anything on it - they built a town downriver with all the pine, then the town burned in about 1905. My land has been more or less ignored since then, some neighbors graze cattle.
Where do you live? In Florida, it's the pines that are fire adapted and the oaks that burn. If a fire is hot enough / the pines are small enough, the pines die too, but pre-European settlement, Florida had vast old-growth pine forest which experienced natural (lightning ignited) fires every few years.
Today, the oaks don't burn either because they live in damp bottomlands that don't burn easily due to moisture content, or because fires in oak forest are actively suppressed. Many pine forests in Florida today are managed with periodic prescribed (intentional) burning, which kills the oak scrub.
Very damaging to the environment, if planted in excess - which is why it is common in the US.
Contrary to your statement (belief?), U.S. land owners do not actively seek to damage the environment, they do occasionally seek a quick payout which has the same effect, but land managers aren't really trying to destroy Bambi's home.
Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.
True enough, also, the maths are sufficiently advanced as to be incomprehensible to the average attention span (which has difficulty getting all the way through "This note legal tender for all debts private and public" in one go), so I think general acceptance will also be weak.
I still stand by my overly simple statement of Secure = Traceable, maybe you can thwart double spending with cleverness, but that cleverness amounts to "traceable if you double spend," and that makes the system unattractive both to people who want to trace transactions and people who don't want to be traced, since they can never really be sure if somebody sniffed a copy of their "token" before it got spent - if the token was successfully copied, then it can be double spent to reveal their identity.
Ions (charged particles) are not all related to radiation.
Then why are alpha, beta, and gamma radiation called "ionizing"? Alpha is a positive helium ion, and beta is an electron.
Note the phrasing: "not all", implying that some are, and some are not. An ion is a charged particle, a waterfall produces additional ions in the air without the involvement of radon or other ionizing radiation.
It is interesting, and has the same feel about it as quantum cryptography, including the aspect that only a very small percentage of people will truly understand the privacy and security implications.
The success of money lies partly in its simplicity: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." People can understand that. The Chaum system is going to be inherently asking a lot of people to just trust that it works, because a lot of people won't have the working memory capacity to hold all the concepts at one time and without getting the whole picture at once, they're not likely to really understand it beyond an assertion that "a lot of really smart people have checked this out, trust us, just push this button and it will all be o.k."
Having to involve the bank in every transaction feels just as "big brother watching you" as a credit card transaction. I do like being able to buy some things for cash when I want to, but I, personally, only do that either as a favor to the recipient - decreasing their overhead in processing my payment, or to keep an untrusted recipient away from my credit card info - Chaum's system seems good for the latter, but not so much for the former.
Thanks for the discussion, most secure payments proponents sound like they just sunk $50 in bitcoins and are trying to pump up the market and/or insult anyone who doesn't believe that bitcoin is going to take over the world.
True, but if Canaveral is going to start lifting the tools necessary for a major L3 habitat construction (100K+ residents), they're going to need to start making a LOT more fuel.
My perception of politics is that the U.S. citizens (Newt included) would get behind a major space push before they approved construction of a new Nuke plant, especially in Florida.
Modern trading systems based on identity and accountability transact millions of dollars of value in microseconds
Do they? Last time I checked, that's just for Wall Street - everyone else's international money transfers take the same old 2-5 days or sometimes even weeks.
You're clearly not in the 1%. All kidding aside, if you have a need for fast transfer of money, it can happen, banks just abuse the ordinary man with 2-5+ day delays so they can hold your money for free for as long as possible. It becomes crystal clear when you're trying to clear $250K for a home mortgage just why they do it ($35/day in interest in a 5% annual yield investment.)
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
Well, in Chaum's system the bank does not actually know what token a person receives; this is Chaum's use of blind signatures, where the bank signs a token but does not learn what the token is.
It sounds good, but feels incomplete - when the double spend does occur, how is the culprit unmasked?
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point,
No, Chaum's system relies on a trusted authority to issue currency; the information the authority stores is not enough to identify a spender except when double spending occurs.
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
If the bank can identify the second man, they can identify the first, if they choose to. If we trust the authority, then we really don't need to be anonymous at all, do we?
Definitely can be done, some of the better earth-berm buildings I have seen in Florida basically make an artificial hillside with a concrete wall, then the actual structure is set back from the wall 6-10 feet for air circulation and light, you still have the massive heat sump nearby, and blocking of the direct blazing sun, without getting much more damp and musty than a conventional building.
Earthen berms (Hobbit holes) were all the rage in the early 1970's, just after the OPEC crisis. By the late 1970's, lots of people discovered firsthand the problems with trapped moisture, lack of ventilation, lack of natural light, and lack of egress options.
I think the soil and climate conditions in Shaanxi are relatively unique, so they might get away without the moisture problems.
What all these "anonymous" banking systems lack is a method to catch a con man who gives you something that appears to be of value but turns out to be fake. If you really throw away the records of who gave you something you believed to be of value, you have no recourse when the fraud is exposed.
On the flip-side, if you trust that the records will be destroyed at a certain point in the future, you are equally gullible and likely to be identified when you least want to.
Modern trading systems based on identity and accountability transact millions of dollars of value in microseconds - the anonymous system is either entirely vulnerable to fraud, or unable to compete in speed and convenience - I believe both.
This doesn't mean Bitcoin is untraceable, but you have to do more than "convince" some server operator to keep logs.
This is where most Bitcoin explanations go all mumbly about how it's really really hard to trace... if the information is there in the inputs, all that remains to be done is keeping the transaction database to implement the traceability. Just because the current servers don't do this doesn't mean that future ones won't, and publicly published logs mean that essentially anybody interested in developing that database can do it.
One vulnerability comes in the injection of value to the system... if I want to "buy in" to Bitcoin with Dollars, Euros, Yuan or Gold, the system will need to identify me, if for nothing else to come after me if my other currency turns out to be counterfeit. If I am not identified, then I can "game" the system by buying in with rubber checks, or iron pyrite Krugerands. If buy-in occurs between ordinary users with no "bank" type authority, so much the easier to fool somebody who isn't in the business of identifying counterfeits. If there is truly no traceability, it makes the currency a target for this kind of exploit.
If bitcoin owners are happy trading these bit patterns around for value, it doesn't really matter how anonymous or secure the system is. Most major businesses would want to deal in currency recognized by the same government that enforces contract law, and such governments would keep trace logs for all kinds of reasons.
Except that Chaum did publish a system where digital cash could be spent in multiple transactions before being deposited. Double spending is thwarted by revealing the identity of people who double-spend, as in Chaum's earlier work. Okamoto also published a system with similar properties.
Like many things in public key cryptography, it sounds like it should be impossible but it actually is not.
Chaum's work is good, but you notice that it is far from anonymous.
There was just some weeks ago here on slashdot about a maglev type of rails sending trains in the orbit... Yeah, trains.
Yeah, trains that need to jack miles of track up off the ground into the stratosphere, while maintaining a vacuum tunnel. It makes building a Saturn V in 1920 look easy.
David Chaum would disagree with you, and published numerous papers on how to create secure payment systems that are not traceable.
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point, unless you grant accounts on the system to anonymous people who walk up with untraceable funding sources, and, even then, activity on that account is traceable as its own entity.
Could you imagine any national government supporting such a system today? Can you imagine the rest of the world shunning them if they did?
It doesn't have to be. It's just up to the key authority to remain incorruptible and not maintain records on transactions. Thus far, none has been very good at this.
Exactly right. The key authority will always have all the information necessary to create a trace history on all transactions. Good luck getting any national system created that does not keep permanent records.
What if you buy bomb materials at the grocery, see a movie about making bombs and then go eat at the same restaurant the President is eating at...
What if 99.999% of the people on the Planet (country, city....) are good guys? Do you think it is still OK to sniff to all of them?
I think the true number is closer to 99.5%, and as long as the sniffing is non-intrusive (as most of it is, today), I'm o.k. with that. Airport TSA screening is intrusive (and comically ineffective) - if you live in the U.S., you have been sniffed many times already this year, credit card companies constantly trend your transactions looking for fraud, traffic police stop you if you're behaving out of the ordinary, and if you are "profiled" by any number of non-intrusive methods that determine you might be a "big time serious bad guy," plenty of people will be sniffing much more closely than they do on the average citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
We also raised turkeys and released them into the wild (illegally)
While I applaud your spirit, I condemn your reckless hippie bullshit. The bears and cougar showed up because there's food around, good job on acclimating some large predators to humans (slow clap).
If you're really afraid of bears and cougars, move to a city, there's plenty of urban areas to choose from.
I don't think we need to eradicate wildlife (including large predators) from every place humans live, and "studying the problem" endlessly and carefully managing reintroduction doesn't work nearly as well as the Chernobyl approach of just stepping back and letting it happen.
As far as taxes, some people will place "the back 40" in to tree growth. State law here allows a landowner to develop a timber harvest plan and get a significant reduction on property tax. In unincorporated parts of the state, I've heard this amounts to $1/acre per year in total tax.
Florida is trying to move in this direction at a State level, but the rural county tax collectors would shrivel up and blow away if they couldn't soak owners of conserved lands for residential level taxes.
something i noticed while looking for some land to buy, the only trees the usa has left in any large areas is in national and state parks.
That's not entirely true. I live in Maine. Indeed, it was pretty much clear cut a century ago....
Many other parts of the country have similar stories. Trees were clear cut a century ago.
My land in Florida was clearcut in the late 1800s, more for a quick buck at the sawmill than to grow anything on it - they built a town downriver with all the pine, then the town burned in about 1905. My land has been more or less ignored since then, some neighbors graze cattle.
The pines burn quickly. The oaks survive...
Where do you live? In Florida, it's the pines that are fire adapted and the oaks that burn. If a fire is hot enough / the pines are small enough, the pines die too, but pre-European settlement, Florida had vast old-growth pine forest which experienced natural (lightning ignited) fires every few years.
Today, the oaks don't burn either because they live in damp bottomlands that don't burn easily due to moisture content, or because fires in oak forest are actively suppressed. Many pine forests in Florida today are managed with periodic prescribed (intentional) burning, which kills the oak scrub.
Very damaging to the environment, if planted in excess - which is why it is common in the US.
Contrary to your statement (belief?), U.S. land owners do not actively seek to damage the environment, they do occasionally seek a quick payout which has the same effect, but land managers aren't really trying to destroy Bambi's home.
Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.
True enough, also, the maths are sufficiently advanced as to be incomprehensible to the average attention span (which has difficulty getting all the way through "This note legal tender for all debts private and public" in one go), so I think general acceptance will also be weak.
I still stand by my overly simple statement of Secure = Traceable, maybe you can thwart double spending with cleverness, but that cleverness amounts to "traceable if you double spend," and that makes the system unattractive both to people who want to trace transactions and people who don't want to be traced, since they can never really be sure if somebody sniffed a copy of their "token" before it got spent - if the token was successfully copied, then it can be double spent to reveal their identity.
Ions (charged particles) are not all related to radiation.
Then why are alpha, beta, and gamma radiation called "ionizing"? Alpha is a positive helium ion, and beta is an electron.
Note the phrasing: "not all", implying that some are, and some are not. An ion is a charged particle, a waterfall produces additional ions in the air without the involvement of radon or other ionizing radiation.
Ions (charged particles) are not all related to radiation.
It is interesting, and has the same feel about it as quantum cryptography, including the aspect that only a very small percentage of people will truly understand the privacy and security implications.
The success of money lies partly in its simplicity: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." People can understand that. The Chaum system is going to be inherently asking a lot of people to just trust that it works, because a lot of people won't have the working memory capacity to hold all the concepts at one time and without getting the whole picture at once, they're not likely to really understand it beyond an assertion that "a lot of really smart people have checked this out, trust us, just push this button and it will all be o.k."
Having to involve the bank in every transaction feels just as "big brother watching you" as a credit card transaction. I do like being able to buy some things for cash when I want to, but I, personally, only do that either as a favor to the recipient - decreasing their overhead in processing my payment, or to keep an untrusted recipient away from my credit card info - Chaum's system seems good for the latter, but not so much for the former.
Thanks for the discussion, most secure payments proponents sound like they just sunk $50 in bitcoins and are trying to pump up the market and/or insult anyone who doesn't believe that bitcoin is going to take over the world.
True, but if Canaveral is going to start lifting the tools necessary for a major L3 habitat construction (100K+ residents), they're going to need to start making a LOT more fuel.
My perception of politics is that the U.S. citizens (Newt included) would get behind a major space push before they approved construction of a new Nuke plant, especially in Florida.
Modern trading systems based on identity and accountability transact millions of dollars of value in microseconds
Do they? Last time I checked, that's just for Wall Street - everyone else's international money transfers take the same old 2-5 days or sometimes even weeks.
You're clearly not in the 1%. All kidding aside, if you have a need for fast transfer of money, it can happen, banks just abuse the ordinary man with 2-5+ day delays so they can hold your money for free for as long as possible. It becomes crystal clear when you're trying to clear $250K for a home mortgage just why they do it ($35/day in interest in a 5% annual yield investment.)
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
Well, in Chaum's system the bank does not actually know what token a person receives; this is Chaum's use of blind signatures, where the bank signs a token but does not learn what the token is.
It sounds good, but feels incomplete - when the double spend does occur, how is the culprit unmasked?
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point,
No, Chaum's system relies on a trusted authority to issue currency; the information the authority stores is not enough to identify a spender except when double spending occurs.
Sorry to be glib, but if I'm the authority, I take the spender's information and issue a copy, now double spending has occurred, triggering the release of identity, or is it just the identity of the second man to the bank that gets revealed?
If the bank can identify the second man, they can identify the first, if they choose to. If we trust the authority, then we really don't need to be anonymous at all, do we?
Definitely can be done, some of the better earth-berm buildings I have seen in Florida basically make an artificial hillside with a concrete wall, then the actual structure is set back from the wall 6-10 feet for air circulation and light, you still have the massive heat sump nearby, and blocking of the direct blazing sun, without getting much more damp and musty than a conventional building.
Earthen berms (Hobbit holes) were all the rage in the early 1970's, just after the OPEC crisis. By the late 1970's, lots of people discovered firsthand the problems with trapped moisture, lack of ventilation, lack of natural light, and lack of egress options.
I think the soil and climate conditions in Shaanxi are relatively unique, so they might get away without the moisture problems.
I don't count only people who are actively trying to kill the President as bad, bad comes in many forms with many targets.
But how do I know that the ATM is not recording each serial number against my card?
And your photo while you conduct the transaction...
What all these "anonymous" banking systems lack is a method to catch a con man who gives you something that appears to be of value but turns out to be fake. If you really throw away the records of who gave you something you believed to be of value, you have no recourse when the fraud is exposed.
On the flip-side, if you trust that the records will be destroyed at a certain point in the future, you are equally gullible and likely to be identified when you least want to.
Modern trading systems based on identity and accountability transact millions of dollars of value in microseconds - the anonymous system is either entirely vulnerable to fraud, or unable to compete in speed and convenience - I believe both.
This doesn't mean Bitcoin is untraceable, but you have to do more than "convince" some server operator to keep logs.
This is where most Bitcoin explanations go all mumbly about how it's really really hard to trace... if the information is there in the inputs, all that remains to be done is keeping the transaction database to implement the traceability. Just because the current servers don't do this doesn't mean that future ones won't, and publicly published logs mean that essentially anybody interested in developing that database can do it.
One vulnerability comes in the injection of value to the system... if I want to "buy in" to Bitcoin with Dollars, Euros, Yuan or Gold, the system will need to identify me, if for nothing else to come after me if my other currency turns out to be counterfeit. If I am not identified, then I can "game" the system by buying in with rubber checks, or iron pyrite Krugerands. If buy-in occurs between ordinary users with no "bank" type authority, so much the easier to fool somebody who isn't in the business of identifying counterfeits. If there is truly no traceability, it makes the currency a target for this kind of exploit.
If bitcoin owners are happy trading these bit patterns around for value, it doesn't really matter how anonymous or secure the system is. Most major businesses would want to deal in currency recognized by the same government that enforces contract law, and such governments would keep trace logs for all kinds of reasons.
Except that Chaum did publish a system where digital cash could be spent in multiple transactions before being deposited. Double spending is thwarted by revealing the identity of people who double-spend, as in Chaum's earlier work. Okamoto also published a system with similar properties.
Like many things in public key cryptography, it sounds like it should be impossible but it actually is not.
Chaum's work is good, but you notice that it is far from anonymous.
There was just some weeks ago here on slashdot about a maglev type of rails sending trains in the orbit ... Yeah, trains.
Yeah, trains that need to jack miles of track up off the ground into the stratosphere, while maintaining a vacuum tunnel. It makes building a Saturn V in 1920 look easy.
Rocket fuels hasn't probably ever been coal and oil based, i very much doubt they ever were.
Where do you think Cape Canaveral, Florida gets the energy to produce LOX and LH2?
David Chaum would disagree with you, and published numerous papers on how to create secure payment systems that are not traceable.
Every single secure untraceable system relies on a "trusted authority" to destroy information that they possess at some point, unless you grant accounts on the system to anonymous people who walk up with untraceable funding sources, and, even then, activity on that account is traceable as its own entity.
Could you imagine any national government supporting such a system today? Can you imagine the rest of the world shunning them if they did?
It doesn't have to be. It's just up to the key authority to remain incorruptible and not maintain records on transactions. Thus far, none has been very good at this.
Exactly right. The key authority will always have all the information necessary to create a trace history on all transactions. Good luck getting any national system created that does not keep permanent records.
What if you buy bomb materials at the grocery, see a movie about making bombs and then go eat at the same restaurant the President is eating at...
What if 99.999% of the people on the Planet (country, city ....) are good guys? Do you think it is still OK to sniff to all of them?
I think the true number is closer to 99.5%, and as long as the sniffing is non-intrusive (as most of it is, today), I'm o.k. with that. Airport TSA screening is intrusive (and comically ineffective) - if you live in the U.S., you have been sniffed many times already this year, credit card companies constantly trend your transactions looking for fraud, traffic police stop you if you're behaving out of the ordinary, and if you are "profiled" by any number of non-intrusive methods that determine you might be a "big time serious bad guy," plenty of people will be sniffing much more closely than they do on the average citizen.