> You simply won't be able to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in your head
> without flaw unless you practice them over and over.

This is why it pays, for all of those passwords for websites which are low-risk, to either use some kind of "Password Safe" program, or simply have a personal algorithm for generating passwords which enables you to write down reminders in a personal shorthand.

Anyone who needs to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in their heads is simply "doing it wrong".

Uh, it's still only going to take 24 tries before you get it correct, in the very worst case in the scenario you propose. And the xkcd strip was making a "differential" argument, not an absolute one (e.g., for the same security, are you more likely to forget a password of random characters versus a series of words).

What's actually of greatest importance is how often you use the password. In my experience, complex passwords which are seldom used are a recipe for disaster. When I go on vacation, I sometime take SHA1 hashes of my more problematic passwords with me so I can "practice" them...

And if you look around the planet at the humans that are here and happy, they have learned to live with Nature, and not against it, as mankind has for the last 200 years or so.

This myth, again? Humans in the middle ages were somehow happier than we are today? Did you ever learn any history? And even without thinking about all of the cruelty that people imposed on each other (let's assume that that hasn't changed since the middle ages), for most of human history one out of every two children (if not more) died before the age of five. Yeah, I'm sure all those parents, long ago, were really much happier than we are, with all our modern technology and modern medicine.

> It also assumes you have such a trusted compiler. This has always been the tough part.

When Thompson wrote the original paper, it was tough. In the meantime, many more compiler options have arisen, and the complexity (measured in size of injected, specialized code) of Thompson's "attack" is O(n^2) where n is the total number of compilers to be compromised. When you combine this fact with the now-documented aversion of the NSA to having its methods uncovered, one quickly comes to the conclusion that it's not very likely that DCC is unproductive because all (or even most) combinations of compilers have been trojaned.

Actually, it's just more likely to affect the US economy (as foreigners run away from using resources under the thumb of the NSA), causing its entire population to be less safe against all those real dangers, like cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents, depression, undernourishment, domestic crime, not having sufficient retirement benefits, etc.

Frankly, I don't trust the intelligence community (and especially not Michael Hayden), to be able to evaluate the real risks and dangers to the US. For example, they didn't listen to Snowden when he complained that the NSA was vulnerable to what later ended up being his own attack, and we see that either this is going to be really bad for the US economy, or if, somehow, you are correct, it's going to cause "the terrorists to win" --- either way, one would think that the people whose opinion you're believing would have figured this out, no?

Well, maybe you should reconsider, then, believing them? Tell me, can you provide some examples of evidence which would cause you to stop believing what you've been posting about Snowden and the intelligence community?

Gawd, how I wish Slashdot would go back to using SRAM...

I posted something similar, but wish I could have retracted it... since the bet, as stated, is in USD. AFAIK, the contracts part of bitcoin can only manipulate bitcoin.

Ooops. Just not in USD... ouch.. .need coffee....

> Since it would be almost impossible to take the parent up on this offer, what would you call it?

No, once the "contracts" part of bitcoin reaches adoption, it should be trivial... I think.

> It's stunningly good for microtransactions.

My understanding of the situation is that in the long term (because of the cap on the total amount of bitcoin), there is a limit to how small bitcoin microtransactions can be (and still be practical), because transaction fees for mining blocks will need to replace the current incentive to mine (which is the production of new bitcoin).

Am I wrong?

He said "I MIGHT [emphasis mine] want you to die a painful death..."

I see the elegance of producing a terrific strawman troll by merely omitting one word, but really, this doesn't qualify for Insightful mods, puh-leeze!

Or (for those who think there shouldn't be the death penalty) triage.

Based on a tweet by one of Zerocoin's developers, they have decided to launch it as an independent currency, therefore requiring that one or more Bitcoin / Zerocoin exchanges will spring up to enable increased Bitcoin anonymity.

> Since mixing services have fundamental problems of a non-technical nature, it just won't work.

OK, interesting. What are these problems? Isn't Tor just a "mixing service", yet the documents from the NSA which have been revealed up to now claim that even that bastion of binary processing power is capable of de-anonymizing only a small fraction of the Tor network's throughput?

Zerocoin should be launched soon. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to add in a lot of anonymity that bitcoin lacks.