"With the notable exceptions of the City of London Corporation and the Laugharne Corporation, the term has fallen out of favour in the United Kingdom, but the concept remains central to local government in the United Kingdom, as well as former British colonies such as India and Canada."
Ubuntu precise comes with gcc 4.6 and glibc* 2.15. So does Debian wheezy. So unless google is really really slow at updating their internal variant of ubuntu to the latest LTS release of ubuntu this shouldn't be an issue now (though it may have been an issue in the past and driven people to migrate).
* Strictly eglibc but afaict the difference is just in details surrounding some ports
Selling and buying power is not in itself a bad thing.
Using your neighbours as a battery makes your unpredictable generation source look more viable than it really is and depending on the billing model may be effectively externalising your costs on them. This applies regardless of whether you are talking about individual users with solar panels on their roofs or whole countries.
And to do that you conventionally used a mixture of plants. You used something with high capital costs but low running costs (coal, nuclear, possiblly CCGT) to run all the time and then you use something that has low capital costs but high running costs to cover the peaks. You may also use hydro dams (which have the unusual characterstic of having a peak power much higher than their continuous power due to the limited water supply) if they are available.
So where do wind and solar fit into this? not very well! they don't provide a continuous base load and they don't provide power on demand either. They provide power when the weather is right which may or may not match up with when you need power. So you still need the hydro dams or fossil fuel plants to cover load peaks that come when the weather is not right for solar/wind and especially in colder climates you often need pretty much the same ammount of those fossil fuel plants as you would have needed if you didn't have the solar and wind, you just run them a smaller proportion of the time.
and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..
BS, it is certainly possible to follow the demand curve with a single type of generation. It's just that for large scale loads it's usually more economical to use a mix.
HDDs could just as easily suffer from firmware bugs.
SSDs have to use a complex and constantly changing mapping of logical blocks to flash blocks because the erase blocks of the raw flash are much larger than the logical blocks and because flash cells have a limited number of erase cycles. To maintain reasonably level wear and to deal with erase blocks that have become mostly "garbage" logical blocks that are not rewritten must from time to time be moved around on the flash. This must all be done in a way that is robust against power failures. It's really easy to screw this up and have the controller either get itself into a broken state or silently corrupt data.
While HDDs do perform some remapping to deal with weak areas of the platter it's a relatively rare event. So bugs in it are far less likely to cause problems in practice.
I belive a truer statement would be (changes in bold)
If you think about how to distribute the initial bitcoins (somewhat) equitably, the only non-exploitable and automatic method you can realistically come up with - that involves no central authority - is approximately the one bitcoin uses: Hand out the bitcoins slowly over a period of time via an automatic lottery, and in proportion to computing power. (Anything else, such as: in proportion to the number of nodes, etc. gets easily exploited.)
Bitcoin was created by people who were extremely anti-inflation. Therefore the coin allocation was heavilly weighted towards the start.
What if you are the person responsible for designing self destruct mechanisms for landmines to reduce the risk to civilians when the conflict is over? is that ethical?
while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same....
In a few small areas.
Most of suburbia in the UK is getting fiber to the cabinet from BT openreach, better than what we had before certainly but way off what fiber to the home can deliver. Openreach are planning to do a "fiber to the premisis on demand" service but it looks like it will be pretty expensive (installation charges predicted to be in the thousands iirc making it impractical for anyone who isn't well settled) and they don't seem to be planning to offer gigabit speeds, upstream in particular seems to be being artificially limited (presumablly to protect expensive buisness fiber services).
Many rural areas look like they will either continue to be stuck with ADSL or possiblly get fiber to the cabinet but not be able to take full advantage of it due to long subloops.
Note: this post is from a UK perspective, things may vary a little arround the world.
By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
And then things more or less stopped there. There was one more marginal speed increase (56K) but they had pretty much hit fundamental limits of the phone system. Pushing speeds further required bypassing parts of the phone network.
ISDN BRI delivered slightly better speeds in the 90s but the way it was priced (if you wanted a 128k connection you had to pay for two phone calls in addition to the ISDN line itself costing more than twice what an analog phone line did, AIUI most unmetered dialup packages allowed single channel ISDN but not dual channel ISDN) made it an expensive option. ADSL turned up in the early 2000s but again it was initially expensive.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those close to the phone exchange could get 20mpbs, those stuck a long way from the exchange got less than 1mbps and we have pretty much hit the limit of what phone cables can carry over long distances even with advanced modulation techniques.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
The problems with mixed fiber/dsl systems don't really have anything to do with the fiber that is being put in the ground.
1: it still relies on that old phone wiring for the last hop. There are a few tricks we can pull but we have pretty much hit the limits of what those cables can carry over those distances. You still have the "cable length lottery" except now it's distance from the point of fiber to copper transition to the house rather than distance from the phone exchange to your house. 2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large. On the other hand there were places in the UK that had their POTs and ISDN delivered over an early fiber to the cabinet system and these were among the last to get ADSL because it wasn't worth putting a DSLAM in a cabinet for a handful of subscribers. So even if there was a system that could get a slight improvement over the current VDSL gear rolling it out would be very expensive.
The only real way to substantially improve a "partial fiber" system (fiber to the cabinet, fiber to the distribution point etc) is to push the fiber closer to the subscriber but each time you do that your infrastructure ends up even more spread out. Eventually you get to the point that you may as well just take the fiber all the way.
On the other hand with a fiber to the home system all you have to upgrade to deliver faster speeds is the consumer premises equipment and the exchange equipment. All the outdoor infrastructure can remain the same. Plus current fiber to the home equipment has a much wider margin over current needs than the VDSL that is being deployed in current fiber to the cabient system.
Deploying fiber to the cabinet now means in a few years time either internet speeds will stagnate again or a fiber to the home project will be needed anyway making the fiber to the cabinet equiment redundant.
Suppose you were german but had gone to a big US university (say MIT), while you are there you made contacts and wanted to start a buisness together. You also learnt how things are done in the US.
If you want to start the buisness in the US then you have to get a work visa for the US (much harder than a student visa or a buisness visa). If you go back to Europe you have the reverse problem, you will have to somehow get your american co-entrepreneurs into europe. You will also have to deal with doing things the european way rather than the american way (not saying if it's better or worse just different).
You could split things across two locations but it's much harder to work together if you aren't physically together.
If you start your business on a seastead near the US then you maintain easy access to US customers and services while avoiding the need to get a work visa for the US. When the business is big enough then as I understand it there are methods you can use the fact you are an executive of the company to get a visa and enter the US proper.
That is the idea anyway, whether it will work is more debatable.
The article is light on details but it does mention the vessel having three thrusters at the rear. Not clear whether those are just for direction control or if they can be used to move the whole vessel.
What am I missing here? Don't know of any ISP that supplies routers.
Maybe this is a regional thing, round here pretty much every ISP either gives you a router or tries to sell you one when you sign up for service. Some even insist on you using it.
And even replacing an older router with a faster one won't do a thing for speed. (unless it's bad) Most will handle 10 times the speed that the modem will.
It depends, if you are on ADSL or a slow cable package then it's not going to make much difference.
As you move up to high end cable or FTTC+VDSL services then older routers can certainly become a bottleneck and if you move up to FTTH services then you will allmost certainly need a new router to avoid bottlenecking the connection.
As I understand is there is a much greater range of types of tape drives than types of interface for tape drives. So your chances of being able to quickly buy an interface card locally when you move into the temporary office full of whatever PCs you could buy in a hurry are much greater than your chances of being able to quickly buy a replacement tape drive locally.
Might still be worth storing an interface card with the drive though.
The problem is many webapps are designed with the password hashes stored in a database that is directly accessible to the webapp. So if there is a security hole in the webapp that allows arbitary database queries then the attacker can simply steal the password database and brute force it at their leisure.
Of course now you have posted your scheme on slashdot then you have to assume the password cracker writers will know about it, if indeed they hadn't guessed already.
More can be created, but only if the majority of existing bitcoin holders agree to do so.
People who are merely holding bitcoin are irrelevent.
What ultimately matters is those who accept bitcoin in payment. They are the ones who get to decide whether a change to the rules is legitimate or not by deciding if their software will accept blocks that comply to the new rules but not the old rules. A coin you can't spend is not worth anything.
The largest denomination in circulation is £50 but the largest denomination dispensed by ATMs and commonly seen by normal people (dunno about rich guys who like to flaunt their wealth) is £20. I've lived in the UK all my life and seen a £50 note in person once. Some shops explicitly display notices that they will not take £50 notes. In summary if you want to carry cash you can easilly spend anywhere then you want to carry £20 notes.
That means we are talking between 100 and 250 banknotes. So not "suitcase full" but not "fit in your wallet" either.
Both are equally "real", a "wallet" file doesn't store bitcoins as such, it stores the keys which allow transfer of those bitcoins.
If someone hacked into your system and made an unencrypted copy* of your "wallet" file then they could use the keys in that file to transfer the money to addresses they control. Once they do that you will no longer have access to the coins. On the other hand if they just made a copy and didn't do anything with it (unlikely) then you wouldn't notice anything at all.
* Either because it wasn't encrypted in the first place or because they managed to steal the encryption key for the wallet too.
remember how it halved not too long ago? who made that call? **kind of a big deal**
The rules for what can go into blocks (including mining rewards and many other things) were baked into the bitcoin software when it was written. If you want an authoritative source for what the rules are I would suggest you read the sourcecode.
Any miner who modifies their software to generate blocks that don't follow the rules will find their blocks rejected by everyone else and therefore any coins created in those blocks will be worthless.
To loosen the rules would require getting both the vast majority of miners (or your blocks will be "forked off") and the vast majority of merchants (or you won't be able to spend your coins) to agree that your new looser rules were now the valid rules. That is unlikely to happen.
The rate of production is laregely known and is not significantly affected* by changes in mining power.
The rate of loss is a trickier one, it is not possible for an analysist to tell the difference between a permanently bitcoins (one where all copies of the private key have been destroyed), temporally lost bitcoins (where the private key still exists and may be found but the owner has forgotten where it's stored or is having difficulty remembering the passphrase or whatever), and hoarded bitcoins (where the owner knows how to access the bitcoins but has decided not to do anything with them).
* Short term fluctuations can happen since the difficultry takes time to adjust.
IP telephony can have great call quality, however there are two prerequisites, firstly a network that can deliver consistent low latency, secondly an operator who doesn't penny pinch on the codecs.
IP telephony on the open internet is always going to be something of a crapshoot, it can be fine but it can also be terrible due to latency and jitter caused by factors beyond your control. IP telephony on a controlled network with QOS should be able to avoid these problems.
If nobody mines anymore, how will the network operate? There is nothing on the horizon, and the difficulty would make it prohibitive anyway.
The difficulty is set to keep the rate at which miners successfully create blocks roughly constant. If miners stop mining and the total network hashrate drops then the difficulty will also drop.
When a transaction is included in a block any transaction fees in that transaction* go to the miner who included the transaction in the block. Where the bitcoins originally came from is irrelevent.
* Including transaction fees in your transaction is not mandatory but doing so increases the chance of it getting included in a block in a timely manner.
also, if you're dodging taxes you're dodging taxes.. it's not like using real money or not is affecting that
Using the "regular financial system" makes dodging taxes a lot riskier. If the government thinks you are dodging tax they can demand records from the financial institutions you deal with and cross-check them against what you are writing on the tax form
Cash works ok for face to face transactions but isn't very practical for distance selling. Centralised alternatives to the "regular financial system" have generally ended up either crushed or bullied into essentially becoming part of it.
Bitcoin allows one to have a store of value that is both easilly transferable between remote parties and outside the "regular financial system".
I use RPM distros for these reasons as things break less and I can uninstall rpms cleanly with the right tools with YUM.
Afaict both RPMs and DEBs can contain both files directly in the package (which are removed by the package manager) arbitary scripts that run during install and uninstall. Whether a package can be removed cleanly is entirely dependent on the correctness of those scripts.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not aware of any other similar city "corporations" in the UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_corporation
"With the notable exceptions of the City of London Corporation and the Laugharne Corporation, the term has fallen out of favour in the United Kingdom, but the concept remains central to local government in the United Kingdom, as well as former British colonies such as India and Canada."
Ubuntu precise comes with gcc 4.6 and glibc* 2.15. So does Debian wheezy. So unless google is really really slow at updating their internal variant of ubuntu to the latest LTS release of ubuntu this shouldn't be an issue now (though it may have been an issue in the past and driven people to migrate).
* Strictly eglibc but afaict the difference is just in details surrounding some ports
Selling and buying power is not in itself a bad thing.
Using your neighbours as a battery makes your unpredictable generation source look more viable than it really is and depending on the billing model may be effectively externalising your costs on them. This applies regardless of whether you are talking about individual users with solar panels on their roofs or whole countries.
Supply must match the demand curve
And to do that you conventionally used a mixture of plants. You used something with high capital costs but low running costs (coal, nuclear, possiblly CCGT) to run all the time and then you use something that has low capital costs but high running costs to cover the peaks. You may also use hydro dams (which have the unusual characterstic of having a peak power much higher than their continuous power due to the limited water supply) if they are available.
So where do wind and solar fit into this? not very well! they don't provide a continuous base load and they don't provide power on demand either. They provide power when the weather is right which may or may not match up with when you need power. So you still need the hydro dams or fossil fuel plants to cover load peaks that come when the weather is not right for solar/wind and especially in colder climates you often need pretty much the same ammount of those fossil fuel plants as you would have needed if you didn't have the solar and wind, you just run them a smaller proportion of the time.
and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..
BS, it is certainly possible to follow the demand curve with a single type of generation. It's just that for large scale loads it's usually more economical to use a mix.
HDDs could just as easily suffer from firmware bugs.
SSDs have to use a complex and constantly changing mapping of logical blocks to flash blocks because the erase blocks of the raw flash are much larger than the logical blocks and because flash cells have a limited number of erase cycles. To maintain reasonably level wear and to deal with erase blocks that have become mostly "garbage" logical blocks that are not rewritten must from time to time be moved around on the flash. This must all be done in a way that is robust against power failures. It's really easy to screw this up and have the controller either get itself into a broken state or silently corrupt data.
While HDDs do perform some remapping to deal with weak areas of the platter it's a relatively rare event. So bugs in it are far less likely to cause problems in practice.
I belive a truer statement would be (changes in bold)
If you think about how to distribute the initial bitcoins (somewhat) equitably, the only non-exploitable and automatic method you can realistically come up with - that involves no central authority - is approximately the one bitcoin uses: Hand out the bitcoins slowly over a period of time via an automatic lottery, and in proportion to computing power. (Anything else, such as: in proportion to the number of nodes, etc. gets easily exploited.)
Bitcoin was created by people who were extremely anti-inflation. Therefore the coin allocation was heavilly weighted towards the start.
What if you are the person responsible for designing self destruct mechanisms for landmines to reduce the risk to civilians when the conflict is over? is that ethical?
while google in the US is rolling out gigabit, and the private sector in UK is doing the same....
In a few small areas.
Most of suburbia in the UK is getting fiber to the cabinet from BT openreach, better than what we had before certainly but way off what fiber to the home can deliver. Openreach are planning to do a "fiber to the premisis on demand" service but it looks like it will be pretty expensive (installation charges predicted to be in the thousands iirc making it impractical for anyone who isn't well settled) and they don't seem to be planning to offer gigabit speeds, upstream in particular seems to be being artificially limited (presumablly to protect expensive buisness fiber services).
Many rural areas look like they will either continue to be stuck with ADSL or possiblly get fiber to the cabinet but not be able to take full advantage of it due to long subloops.
Note: this post is from a UK perspective, things may vary a little arround the world.
By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
And then things more or less stopped there. There was one more marginal speed increase (56K) but they had pretty much hit fundamental limits of the phone system. Pushing speeds further required bypassing parts of the phone network.
ISDN BRI delivered slightly better speeds in the 90s but the way it was priced (if you wanted a 128k connection you had to pay for two phone calls in addition to the ISDN line itself costing more than twice what an analog phone line did, AIUI most unmetered dialup packages allowed single channel ISDN but not dual channel ISDN) made it an expensive option. ADSL turned up in the early 2000s but again it was initially expensive.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those close to the phone exchange could get 20mpbs, those stuck a long way from the exchange got less than 1mbps and we have pretty much hit the limit of what phone cables can carry over long distances even with advanced modulation techniques.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
The problems with mixed fiber/dsl systems don't really have anything to do with the fiber that is being put in the ground.
1: it still relies on that old phone wiring for the last hop. There are a few tricks we can pull but we have pretty much hit the limits of what those cables can carry over those distances. You still have the "cable length lottery" except now it's distance from the point of fiber to copper transition to the house rather than distance from the phone exchange to your house.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large. On the other hand there were places in the UK that had their POTs and ISDN delivered over an early fiber to the cabinet system and these were among the last to get ADSL because it wasn't worth putting a DSLAM in a cabinet for a handful of subscribers. So even if there was a system that could get a slight improvement over the current VDSL gear rolling it out would be very expensive.
The only real way to substantially improve a "partial fiber" system (fiber to the cabinet, fiber to the distribution point etc) is to push the fiber closer to the subscriber but each time you do that your infrastructure ends up even more spread out. Eventually you get to the point that you may as well just take the fiber all the way.
On the other hand with a fiber to the home system all you have to upgrade to deliver faster speeds is the consumer premises equipment and the exchange equipment. All the outdoor infrastructure can remain the same. Plus current fiber to the home equipment has a much wider margin over current needs than the VDSL that is being deployed in current fiber to the cabient system.
Deploying fiber to the cabinet now means in a few years time either internet speeds will stagnate again or a fiber to the home project will be needed anyway making the fiber to the cabinet equiment redundant.
Suppose you were german but had gone to a big US university (say MIT), while you are there you made contacts and wanted to start a buisness together. You also learnt how things are done in the US.
If you want to start the buisness in the US then you have to get a work visa for the US (much harder than a student visa or a buisness visa). If you go back to Europe you have the reverse problem, you will have to somehow get your american co-entrepreneurs into europe. You will also have to deal with doing things the european way rather than the american way (not saying if it's better or worse just different).
You could split things across two locations but it's much harder to work together if you aren't physically together.
If you start your business on a seastead near the US then you maintain easy access to US customers and services while avoiding the need to get a work visa for the US. When the business is big enough then as I understand it there are methods you can use the fact you are an executive of the company to get a visa and enter the US proper.
That is the idea anyway, whether it will work is more debatable.
The article is light on details but it does mention the vessel having three thrusters at the rear. Not clear whether those are just for direction control or if they can be used to move the whole vessel.
What am I missing here? Don't know of any ISP that supplies routers.
Maybe this is a regional thing, round here pretty much every ISP either gives you a router or tries to sell you one when you sign up for service. Some even insist on you using it.
And even replacing an older router with a faster one won't do a thing for speed. (unless it's bad) Most will handle 10 times the speed that the modem will.
It depends, if you are on ADSL or a slow cable package then it's not going to make much difference.
As you move up to high end cable or FTTC+VDSL services then older routers can certainly become a bottleneck and if you move up to FTTH services then you will allmost certainly need a new router to avoid bottlenecking the connection.
As I understand is there is a much greater range of types of tape drives than types of interface for tape drives. So your chances of being able to quickly buy an interface card locally when you move into the temporary office full of whatever PCs you could buy in a hurry are much greater than your chances of being able to quickly buy a replacement tape drive locally.
Might still be worth storing an interface card with the drive though.
The problem is many webapps are designed with the password hashes stored in a database that is directly accessible to the webapp. So if there is a security hole in the webapp that allows arbitary database queries then the attacker can simply steal the password database and brute force it at their leisure.
Of course now you have posted your scheme on slashdot then you have to assume the password cracker writers will know about it, if indeed they hadn't guessed already.
More can be created, but only if the majority of existing bitcoin holders agree to do so.
People who are merely holding bitcoin are irrelevent.
What ultimately matters is those who accept bitcoin in payment. They are the ones who get to decide whether a change to the rules is legitimate or not by deciding if their software will accept blocks that comply to the new rules but not the old rules. A coin you can't spend is not worth anything.
The largest denomination in circulation is £50 but the largest denomination dispensed by ATMs and commonly seen by normal people (dunno about rich guys who like to flaunt their wealth) is £20. I've lived in the UK all my life and seen a £50 note in person once. Some shops explicitly display notices that they will not take £50 notes. In summary if you want to carry cash you can easilly spend anywhere then you want to carry £20 notes.
That means we are talking between 100 and 250 banknotes. So not "suitcase full" but not "fit in your wallet" either.
Both are equally "real", a "wallet" file doesn't store bitcoins as such, it stores the keys which allow transfer of those bitcoins.
If someone hacked into your system and made an unencrypted copy* of your "wallet" file then they could use the keys in that file to transfer the money to addresses they control. Once they do that you will no longer have access to the coins. On the other hand if they just made a copy and didn't do anything with it (unlikely) then you wouldn't notice anything at all.
* Either because it wasn't encrypted in the first place or because they managed to steal the encryption key for the wallet too.
remember how it halved not too long ago? who made that call? **kind of a big deal**
The rules for what can go into blocks (including mining rewards and many other things) were baked into the bitcoin software when it was written. If you want an authoritative source for what the rules are I would suggest you read the sourcecode.
Any miner who modifies their software to generate blocks that don't follow the rules will find their blocks rejected by everyone else and therefore any coins created in those blocks will be worthless.
To loosen the rules would require getting both the vast majority of miners (or your blocks will be "forked off") and the vast majority of merchants (or you won't be able to spend your coins) to agree that your new looser rules were now the valid rules. That is unlikely to happen.
The rate of production is laregely known and is not significantly affected* by changes in mining power.
The rate of loss is a trickier one, it is not possible for an analysist to tell the difference between a permanently bitcoins (one where all copies of the private key have been destroyed), temporally lost bitcoins (where the private key still exists and may be found but the owner has forgotten where it's stored or is having difficulty remembering the passphrase or whatever), and hoarded bitcoins (where the owner knows how to access the bitcoins but has decided not to do anything with them).
* Short term fluctuations can happen since the difficultry takes time to adjust.
IP telephony can have great call quality, however there are two prerequisites, firstly a network that can deliver consistent low latency, secondly an operator who doesn't penny pinch on the codecs.
IP telephony on the open internet is always going to be something of a crapshoot, it can be fine but it can also be terrible due to latency and jitter caused by factors beyond your control. IP telephony on a controlled network with QOS should be able to avoid these problems.
If nobody mines anymore, how will the network operate? There is nothing on the horizon, and the difficulty would make it prohibitive anyway.
The difficulty is set to keep the rate at which miners successfully create blocks roughly constant. If miners stop mining and the total network hashrate drops then the difficulty will also drop.
When a transaction is included in a block any transaction fees in that transaction* go to the miner who included the transaction in the block. Where the bitcoins originally came from is irrelevent.
* Including transaction fees in your transaction is not mandatory but doing so increases the chance of it getting included in a block in a timely manner.
also, if you're dodging taxes you're dodging taxes.. it's not like using real money or not is affecting that
Using the "regular financial system" makes dodging taxes a lot riskier. If the government thinks you are dodging tax they can demand records from the financial institutions you deal with and cross-check them against what you are writing on the tax form
Cash works ok for face to face transactions but isn't very practical for distance selling. Centralised alternatives to the "regular financial system" have generally ended up either crushed or bullied into essentially becoming part of it.
Bitcoin allows one to have a store of value that is both easilly transferable between remote parties and outside the "regular financial system".
I use RPM distros for these reasons as things break less and I can uninstall rpms cleanly with the right tools with YUM.
Afaict both RPMs and DEBs can contain both files directly in the package (which are removed by the package manager) arbitary scripts that run during install and uninstall. Whether a package can be removed cleanly is entirely dependent on the correctness of those scripts.