Several of them will get cancer anyway. We expect one extra to get cancer.
But even that is bullshit, since that is based on a model called "Linear, No Threshold" or LNT.
At large doses, ibuprofen will kill you. I've got a bottle of 160 pills in my desk drawer, which should be plenty. According to LNT, since 160 pills at once into one person would cause one death, one pill each into 160 people would also cause one death. So if I gave one pill, one time, to 160 of the Fukushima workers, one more than normal of them would die of liver failure eventually.
Where the analogy breaks down is that in reality, everyone would be getting 1 to 10 ibuprofen pills per day from their environment, and the people living and working in places with higher natural doses get less liver failure. (See hormesis)
Not everyone can prune. You especially can't prune if you are aiming to seed new nodes. Jeff's torrents, assuming he is still doing them, can help with that, but there are trust issues there too.
They were indeed dirt cheap consumer motherboards. Carefully selected to support relatively large memory (for the category, at the time).
For what I was doing, it wasn't about the size, it was about the seeks. Bootstrapping a new node is murder on a spinning disk. It is, or at least was, incredibly unfriendly to cache schemes because you keep skipping backwards by 1000 blocks to get to the root.
Also, SSD is fast, but it isn't as fast as you are thinking, particularly when every single read is a cache miss. Hell, even DDR3 isn't so fast when everything misses, but it is still WAY faster than even SSDs.
You can test it yourself, if you've got the RAM. Grab a copy of the source from the 0.6 or 0.7 era (newer versions are somewhat better, but this is what we had at the time) and sync it up on disk, then isolate it and bootstrap a second node. Then copy it to RAM, wipe the second node, and run it again. The second one will probably save you a day or two. Seems absurd, since the limiting factor appears to be the CPU validating the blocks, but there it is.
Now imagine that box sitting on the public network, usually feeding two or three nodes at a time. Bootstrapping a new node was so bad that lots of people took active measures to prevent it. At one point, there was a cron script floating around that would poll the peer table of the local node and use iptables to kick peers that were too far behind.
That reminds me, I should probably see if that distro is still active, maybe kick a donation at the maintainer.
SDI was/would have been worth it for any of 3 distinct reasons.
First, life. If it worked when needed, even a little, as you pointed out, it would have saved millions of lives.
Second, MAD. By defending our retaliatory capability, it would have enhanced the A and the D, further increasing the costs of an initial attack.
Third, Strategy of Technology (google it). Chasing us helped bankrupt the soviets. Communism produces mostly poverty, at a time when the west was producing apparently endless wealth. The soviets could afford to keep up with two or three fields, but at the cost of everything else. They won the first stage of the space race, but in the long run our computers made our shitty rockets safe, and took us to the moon first. Still, it was close enough for the soviets to retain some credibility. Computerized lasers in space? Pack it in and hope you get out alive.
(By the way, I'm a typical American boy who had rocket trading cards as a kid, and once upon a time could recognize and name every launch vehicle, capsule and variant we ever used. Don't take my comment about our shitty rockets the wrong way. As rocket motors get bigger and/or more efficient, the cost of controlling them mechanically, or with analog electronics, multiplies.
The end of this road is the SSME. Without digital control, the SSME would explode long before you could even start the pumps that feed the precombustion chamber that powers the pumps that keep the engines from exploding. If you don't have access to digital computers, if you haven't lived with them long enough to trust them with your life, this is a shitty design because the only difference between the SSME and a bomb is a couple milligrams of doped silicon.
Keep in mind that in 1982 we (allegedly) blew up a soviet pipeline by planting an easter egg in a digital control system which we quietly allowed the soviets to acquire. After that, it should be pretty obvious that they couldn't make their own computerized laser platform using stolen computers. They either needed to develop a computer industry fast, or go without space weapon platforms. The western press (their allies) tried their best to ridicule the idea so that they wouldn't lose too much face by going without, but that backfired by drawing so much attention to it.
The demand for most goods tends towards infinity as the cost drops. Bitcoin transactions have been fantastically cheap, which everyone sensible knew couldn't possibly last.
So, do we make bigger blocks, or increase fees? Miners should get more fees from either option. Users would prefer bigger blocks, since it keeps their costs artificially low.
But the real problem is the relay node shortage. Running a node is no longer trivial, and there is no mechanism to recover costs. The blockchain is around 80 GB now (including the index), and growing by ~100 MB per day. Larger blocks will only make that worse, and will almost certainly knock yet more nodes offline.
Someone made a distro that ran bitcoin entirely out of tmpfs. I once had a bunch of super-fast nodes using it. When the blockchain finally exceeded my ability to add more RAM to those boxes, the average time for a new node on the network to sync up increased by a factor of 3 or so.
That's just my personal example. Hundreds of other nodes have dropped off for their own reasons.
(b) Each candidate for nomination for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8) or more states, severally, prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.
Trump won a majority (50 out of 50) of the delegates in South Carolina, so he's already at 1.
A WiFi system that generates 9.999 watts of free energy per milliwatt of transmit power is going to rewrite ALL of the physics books!
Oh, wait, never mind. The author just meant that it uses one ten-thousandth as much power as standard methods, but was apparently too dumb to write it properly.
Dear socialists, quasi-socialists, and proto-socialists everywhere,
Who died and made you emperor?
Why does your pet project get elevated in importance? Why is it the market that is deemed to have failed when the people want something other than what you want?
And why do you get to decide what is a "want" and what is a "need"? And what mechanism do you use to determine what is in "our best interest as a society"?
What is the market if not a means of finding out what we really want?
And finally, where is the line? What decisions do I get to make on my own without you watching over my shoulder and exercising a veto? Is there one? Is your idea of my best interest ever less important than mine?
No, but I did report it as "use tax" on my next state tax return.
I bet you've never done that, even though you are almost certainly required to whenever you buy from an out of state vendor that ships to you but doesn't collect your state's sales tax.
Literal backing? What does that even mean? And are you aware that when you withdraw cash from your bank account, you are "paying hundred[s] of dollars for something that ultimately cost a few cents to" print?
Personally, if I had to pick from your three groups, I'd probably be in the first one, but that's mostly because it is no longer possible for a U.S. citizen to get through a day without committing a federal crime of some sort.
None of my bitcoin uses had anything to do with crime, or paranoia, or taking advantage of others. I used bitcoins to purchase a rifle, for example, and it was shipped to a FFL in my state, where I filled out the 4473 and waited for the NICS check. I wouldn't have done it that way if my interest had been either crime or paranoia. And the seller was well known for taking bitcoin payments long before I came around, so I don't see how I could have taken advantage of some poor defenseless gunstore.
I prefer to think of myself as a student of money, and a fan of technology. Bitcoin is a step closer to the platonic ideal of "money". It is no more or less virtual than the dollar or the euro or the yen, but it is decentralized. And just like the dollar, the euro, the yen, or even (to an extent) gold, it is worthless beyond being useful as money. (Yes, I know that gold has industrial and aesthetic uses, but they are economically trivial.)
Brain wallets are not and never have been part of bitcoin (the software) or bitcoin (the protocol) or bitcoin (the network), but they are part of bitcoin (the ecosystem).
A key is just some bits, and a transaction is just a script. You can manage your keys and transactions offline, with only minimal contact to the software/network. This enables some really cool stuff, and even some really serious high security schemes.
But it also enables some really stupid bad ideas. Guess which category "Brain wallets" fits into...
This won't help you recover your old wallet. It has nothing to do with bitcoin wallet passwords, which are encrypted with AES-256-CBC.
Amusingly, they appear to have applied Sipa's highly optimized ECDSA library to help find UTXOs that can be spent with their brute forced "brain wallet" privkeys.
Is it even possible for Slashdot to do competent reporting on a bitcoin story? I know you guys rely on "news" sites to do the actual reporting, but one thing the new management could really do to win favor from older users is to learn a little about the topics being reported so that misleading or stupid stories and headlines could be avoided now and then.
The passwords used by the bitcoin program to encrypt wallets is just fine.
What is broken is "brain wallets", which were never a good idea, and were never safe.
Any arbitrary string of the appropriate length can be a bitcoin private key. The bitcoin software tries really hard to generate them with as much entropy as possible ("randomly"). To create a "brain wallet", you start with a low entropy string, so low that you can remember it in your brain, and then you do stuff to it to expand it out to the key length.
Naturally, the "do stuff to it" part cannot add any entropy, otherwise you wouldn't end up with the same private key every time.
Now some brain wallet schemes try really hard to maximize the amount of work involved in the "do stuff to it" stage. Some of them even use highly regarded PBKDF functions.
Password researchers optimized step 1 years ago. Clusters for hire in the cloud have been attacking step 2 for a while now, mitigating the work amplification in PBKDF.
What these researchers have done now is find a faster method of generating the pubkey hashes and scanning the UTXO set for coins that can be spent. (Steps 3-5)
Bitcoin remains fine. Don't use brain wallets. We told you they were a bad idea years ago, and now we have (even more) confirmation.
We don't trust your judgment, and you did it to yourself.
SJWs routinely define the existence of the patriarchy as harassment, and males as being part of the patriarchy.
When we hear vague accusations, we understand that there is a non-zero chance that it is bullshit, because you've been trying to feed us an ever increasing stream of bullshit for the last few decades. We don't trust you any more. We want to know exactly what happened, so that we can use our own judgment.
In late September 2014, less than 2 months after Richmond had begun at AMNH, he and the research assistant attended a meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) in Florence. The research assistant says that on the last night of the meeting, she, Richmond, and several young European researchers were out on the town, visiting bars and drinking red wine and shots of limoncello, an Italian liqueur. She recalls âoewalking around Florence and realizing that I was way too drunk.â The next thing she remembers, she says, is waking up on the bed in Richmond's hotel room in the wee hours of the morning with him on top of her, kissing her and groping under her skirt.
The research assistant says that she immediately told Richmond to stop, and left the room. Because she was not a guest at the hotel, the reception desk in the lobby, perhaps concerned that she was not supposed to be there, would not let her leave without authorization. She had to call up to Richmond and get him to vouch for her. Still in shock, she says, she allowed Richmond to accompany her to her Airbnb nearby. With just a couple of hours before her flight back to New York, she quickly packed and made her way to the airport.
This is one of the accusations against him. Sounds like a real monster.
Of course, according to space age legends, the attempt to avoid using military boosters is what held us back long enough to let the Soviets get Sputnik up first.
The only reason anyone bothers with Bitcoin is because they believe a bigger fool will buy the Bitcoins off of them at a later date
This is absolutely true. Of course, it is also true of dollars, gold, euros, etc. We accept our paychecks in money instead of useful goods precisely because we expect to be able to pass the money on to a bigger fool later (and he accepts it because he has the same expectation, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Several of them will get cancer anyway. We expect one extra to get cancer.
But even that is bullshit, since that is based on a model called "Linear, No Threshold" or LNT.
At large doses, ibuprofen will kill you. I've got a bottle of 160 pills in my desk drawer, which should be plenty. According to LNT, since 160 pills at once into one person would cause one death, one pill each into 160 people would also cause one death. So if I gave one pill, one time, to 160 of the Fukushima workers, one more than normal of them would die of liver failure eventually.
Where the analogy breaks down is that in reality, everyone would be getting 1 to 10 ibuprofen pills per day from their environment, and the people living and working in places with higher natural doses get less liver failure. (See hormesis)
And yet, despite your attempt at snark, demand for each and every one of the 4 things you listed has exploded as costs dropped.
Not everyone can prune. You especially can't prune if you are aiming to seed new nodes. Jeff's torrents, assuming he is still doing them, can help with that, but there are trust issues there too.
They were indeed dirt cheap consumer motherboards. Carefully selected to support relatively large memory (for the category, at the time).
For what I was doing, it wasn't about the size, it was about the seeks. Bootstrapping a new node is murder on a spinning disk. It is, or at least was, incredibly unfriendly to cache schemes because you keep skipping backwards by 1000 blocks to get to the root.
Also, SSD is fast, but it isn't as fast as you are thinking, particularly when every single read is a cache miss. Hell, even DDR3 isn't so fast when everything misses, but it is still WAY faster than even SSDs.
You can test it yourself, if you've got the RAM. Grab a copy of the source from the 0.6 or 0.7 era (newer versions are somewhat better, but this is what we had at the time) and sync it up on disk, then isolate it and bootstrap a second node. Then copy it to RAM, wipe the second node, and run it again. The second one will probably save you a day or two. Seems absurd, since the limiting factor appears to be the CPU validating the blocks, but there it is.
Now imagine that box sitting on the public network, usually feeding two or three nodes at a time. Bootstrapping a new node was so bad that lots of people took active measures to prevent it. At one point, there was a cron script floating around that would poll the peer table of the local node and use iptables to kick peers that were too far behind.
That reminds me, I should probably see if that distro is still active, maybe kick a donation at the maintainer.
SDI was/would have been worth it for any of 3 distinct reasons.
First, life. If it worked when needed, even a little, as you pointed out, it would have saved millions of lives.
Second, MAD. By defending our retaliatory capability, it would have enhanced the A and the D, further increasing the costs of an initial attack.
Third, Strategy of Technology (google it). Chasing us helped bankrupt the soviets. Communism produces mostly poverty, at a time when the west was producing apparently endless wealth. The soviets could afford to keep up with two or three fields, but at the cost of everything else. They won the first stage of the space race, but in the long run our computers made our shitty rockets safe, and took us to the moon first. Still, it was close enough for the soviets to retain some credibility. Computerized lasers in space? Pack it in and hope you get out alive.
(By the way, I'm a typical American boy who had rocket trading cards as a kid, and once upon a time could recognize and name every launch vehicle, capsule and variant we ever used. Don't take my comment about our shitty rockets the wrong way. As rocket motors get bigger and/or more efficient, the cost of controlling them mechanically, or with analog electronics, multiplies.
The end of this road is the SSME. Without digital control, the SSME would explode long before you could even start the pumps that feed the precombustion chamber that powers the pumps that keep the engines from exploding. If you don't have access to digital computers, if you haven't lived with them long enough to trust them with your life, this is a shitty design because the only difference between the SSME and a bomb is a couple milligrams of doped silicon.
Keep in mind that in 1982 we (allegedly) blew up a soviet pipeline by planting an easter egg in a digital control system which we quietly allowed the soviets to acquire. After that, it should be pretty obvious that they couldn't make their own computerized laser platform using stolen computers. They either needed to develop a computer industry fast, or go without space weapon platforms. The western press (their allies) tried their best to ridicule the idea so that they wouldn't lose too much face by going without, but that backfired by drawing so much attention to it.
Possony and Pournelle deserve medals.)
Pay higher fees if you are in a hurry.
The demand for most goods tends towards infinity as the cost drops. Bitcoin transactions have been fantastically cheap, which everyone sensible knew couldn't possibly last.
So, do we make bigger blocks, or increase fees? Miners should get more fees from either option. Users would prefer bigger blocks, since it keeps their costs artificially low.
But the real problem is the relay node shortage. Running a node is no longer trivial, and there is no mechanism to recover costs. The blockchain is around 80 GB now (including the index), and growing by ~100 MB per day. Larger blocks will only make that worse, and will almost certainly knock yet more nodes offline.
Someone made a distro that ran bitcoin entirely out of tmpfs. I once had a bunch of super-fast nodes using it. When the blockchain finally exceeded my ability to add more RAM to those boxes, the average time for a new node on the network to sync up increased by a factor of 3 or so.
That's just my personal example. Hundreds of other nodes have dropped off for their own reasons.
That theory has been circulating since July. Every time Trump's number go higher, we've found his new ceiling at last.
Are you forgetting about Trump? Or have you just not read the rules for yourself?
https://prod-static-ngop-pbl.s...
Trump won a majority (50 out of 50) of the delegates in South Carolina, so he's already at 1.
Hard drive gigadollars or memory gigadollars?
A WiFi system that generates 9.999 watts of free energy per milliwatt of transmit power is going to rewrite ALL of the physics books!
Oh, wait, never mind. The author just meant that it uses one ten-thousandth as much power as standard methods, but was apparently too dumb to write it properly.
The $100 bill is already dead. You can hardly buy 6 real dollars (1oz silver coins) with it.
Dear socialists, quasi-socialists, and proto-socialists everywhere,
Who died and made you emperor?
Why does your pet project get elevated in importance? Why is it the market that is deemed to have failed when the people want something other than what you want?
And why do you get to decide what is a "want" and what is a "need"? And what mechanism do you use to determine what is in "our best interest as a society"?
What is the market if not a means of finding out what we really want?
And finally, where is the line? What decisions do I get to make on my own without you watching over my shoulder and exercising a veto? Is there one? Is your idea of my best interest ever less important than mine?
No check. In fact, you owe. You forget that the price was "reduced" by 400% twice.
The first reduction reduced the price from $x to $(x-4*x), or $(-3x). The second reduction reduced the price to $(-3x-4*(-3x)), or $(9x).
If your phone had a retail price of $500, you should prepare a check for $4000 ASAP.
No, but I did report it as "use tax" on my next state tax return.
I bet you've never done that, even though you are almost certainly required to whenever you buy from an out of state vendor that ships to you but doesn't collect your state's sales tax.
Literal backing? What does that even mean? And are you aware that when you withdraw cash from your bank account, you are "paying hundred[s] of dollars for something that ultimately cost a few cents to" print?
Personally, if I had to pick from your three groups, I'd probably be in the first one, but that's mostly because it is no longer possible for a U.S. citizen to get through a day without committing a federal crime of some sort.
None of my bitcoin uses had anything to do with crime, or paranoia, or taking advantage of others. I used bitcoins to purchase a rifle, for example, and it was shipped to a FFL in my state, where I filled out the 4473 and waited for the NICS check. I wouldn't have done it that way if my interest had been either crime or paranoia. And the seller was well known for taking bitcoin payments long before I came around, so I don't see how I could have taken advantage of some poor defenseless gunstore.
I prefer to think of myself as a student of money, and a fan of technology. Bitcoin is a step closer to the platonic ideal of "money". It is no more or less virtual than the dollar or the euro or the yen, but it is decentralized. And just like the dollar, the euro, the yen, or even (to an extent) gold, it is worthless beyond being useful as money. (Yes, I know that gold has industrial and aesthetic uses, but they are economically trivial.)
Brain wallets are not and never have been part of bitcoin (the software) or bitcoin (the protocol) or bitcoin (the network), but they are part of bitcoin (the ecosystem).
A key is just some bits, and a transaction is just a script. You can manage your keys and transactions offline, with only minimal contact to the software/network. This enables some really cool stuff, and even some really serious high security schemes.
But it also enables some really stupid bad ideas. Guess which category "Brain wallets" fits into...
This won't help you recover your old wallet. It has nothing to do with bitcoin wallet passwords, which are encrypted with AES-256-CBC.
Amusingly, they appear to have applied Sipa's highly optimized ECDSA library to help find UTXOs that can be spent with their brute forced "brain wallet" privkeys.
Is it even possible for Slashdot to do competent reporting on a bitcoin story? I know you guys rely on "news" sites to do the actual reporting, but one thing the new management could really do to win favor from older users is to learn a little about the topics being reported so that misleading or stupid stories and headlines could be avoided now and then.
The passwords used by the bitcoin program to encrypt wallets is just fine.
What is broken is "brain wallets", which were never a good idea, and were never safe.
Any arbitrary string of the appropriate length can be a bitcoin private key. The bitcoin software tries really hard to generate them with as much entropy as possible ("randomly"). To create a "brain wallet", you start with a low entropy string, so low that you can remember it in your brain, and then you do stuff to it to expand it out to the key length.
Naturally, the "do stuff to it" part cannot add any entropy, otherwise you wouldn't end up with the same private key every time.
Now some brain wallet schemes try really hard to maximize the amount of work involved in the "do stuff to it" stage. Some of them even use highly regarded PBKDF functions.
Here is the workflow for cracking brain wallets:
1. seed phrase guess
2. derive privkey
3. derive pubkey
4. derive pubkey hash
5. scan UTXO set
Password researchers optimized step 1 years ago.
Clusters for hire in the cloud have been attacking step 2 for a while now, mitigating the work amplification in PBKDF.
What these researchers have done now is find a faster method of generating the pubkey hashes and scanning the UTXO set for coins that can be spent. (Steps 3-5)
Bitcoin remains fine. Don't use brain wallets. We told you they were a bad idea years ago, and now we have (even more) confirmation.
We don't trust your judgment, and you did it to yourself.
SJWs routinely define the existence of the patriarchy as harassment, and males as being part of the patriarchy.
When we hear vague accusations, we understand that there is a non-zero chance that it is bullshit, because you've been trying to feed us an ever increasing stream of bullshit for the last few decades. We don't trust you any more. We want to know exactly what happened, so that we can use our own judgment.
This is one of the accusations against him. Sounds like a real monster.
Yeah, not my problem.
Interesting that you think that, considering that no nukes were actually used in the cold war. Or did you mean "hiding" when you wrote "showing"?
Of course, according to space age legends, the attempt to avoid using military boosters is what held us back long enough to let the Soviets get Sputnik up first.
This is absolutely true. Of course, it is also true of dollars, gold, euros, etc. We accept our paychecks in money instead of useful goods precisely because we expect to be able to pass the money on to a bigger fool later (and he accepts it because he has the same expectation, etc).
This story appears to have nothing to do with the block hash function. He wants a block cipher that takes 64kb keys.