Provided that atmospheric pressure works the fact that helium leaks is irrelevant: helium leaks into the harddrive just as easily as it leaks out of the harddrive. All you have to do is make sure that the harddrive is leak-tight for everything but helium - fortunately this is pretty easy to do as helium is the only gas that leaks as easily as it.
If you don't practice manual landings you won't be able to manual land in severe weather.
He's talking about O(n^2) space, not propagation time.
Sigh, I was hoping that guy had remembered enough of my posts to quote my rebuttal to that argument - I guess I'll have to add the link myself.
Keep in mind that for Bitcoin the individuals like you running tiny little mining setups that might not be actually profitable as a fun hobby are a very good thing. Bitcoin needs mining power to be as well distributed as possible to make it difficult to co-opt, so the hundreds or maybe even thousands of individuals like you help that goal. However, it's helped best if you actually validate your blocks properly, and that means mining with P2Pool right now.
Bitcoin is lucky that the costs to mine for a small rig, on a $/hash/sec basis, are probably actually less than larger setups because on a small enough scale you can ignore cooling issues and often ignore power issues too. (heating in the winter or free power) There is overhead of course, you have to setup your mining rig, but that's often written off as a fun hobby.
How is the equipment that handles the FOUPs assembled? I assume in a cleanroom, or is in-situ cleaning good enough that you can still do maintenance in a class 10,000 room then after maintenance clean the tool to the required class 10 standards?
This article refers to a different incident where Google was explicitly blocked prior to a leadership change in China. The Pakistan routing screw up is completely different.
Case in point: Antarctica Journal of Mathematics.
You're taking me too literally. At that point in time Bitcoin didn't have any value for which to launder. Now of course it does, and doing that again now would be money laundering if you were trying to obfuscate illegality. All your examples can be money laundering because you're using objects with value. No judge would buy the argument I was money laundering by sending a chain email with a promise to pray for their soul for instance, because that email has no value.
It's well known that the vast majority of Bitcoin's created in the first half of the life of Bitcoin, back when they were totally worthless, are probably lost forever. This paper never even talks about that issue and assumes that every Bitcoin can still be spent.
In general it's a major flaw of the paper that they quote Bitcoin's in, well, Bitcoins everywhere, rather than talking about the value of the Bitcoins in USD for the transactions they're talking about.
"We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account."
Not to imply that anything wrong was happening but isn't that the definition of money laundering?
Nov 8 2010 was about a month after Bitcoins had any value at all. If you look up the Mt. Gox prices for that time they were completely flat for ages with just a couple dollars a day of trading activity. Then they picked up a bit and by Nov 2010 they were looking at low hundreds of dollars a day. It was really early in Bitcoin history and that transaction was likely just someone playing around with transaction making code, who accidentally lost their wallet.
It's only money laundering if what you're laundering is money... at that time Bitcoins were just an experiment that didn't seem to be going anywhere.
Perhaps an individual experimenting with how effectively he can automatically clean BTC with temporary internet accounts being made for transactions leading back to a brand new account? But wouldn't the whole chain of ownership be shown on that final balance? What else could be the purpose of the mentioned exercise?
Exactly. Even then people understood that you couldn't hide coins by moving stuff around. I like the analogy of trying to walk across a large desert. If you enter the desert, walk all over your tracks over and over again, then exit, anyone can deduce that the tracks entering and exiting the desert was the same person.
Real attempts at hiding the source of Bitcoins always involve swapping your coins for someone elses, and even then, that's a quite legitimate thing to do for privacy given that every transaction is public. It's only money laundering if you're trying to launder illegitimate funds, keeping privacy for legit transactions is not illegal.
Tor isn't easy to use and doesn't interface well with the web. For example if someone wanted to post a TorButton on Slashdot to receive Anonymous leaks, is Tor secure enough or set up to do that? The other problem is Tor itself isn't perfect as a technology, it too can be compromised. And of course once again most people who are journalists want access to a Tor setup without having to be security experts. Tor is only accessible by security experts at this point and the problem is most journalists don't have the expertise to safely deal with it.
If you go to the Tor website, you're presented with some software to download. Click on that, installed the software, and go. Sorry, but this is frankly very easy. There aren't solutions that "work better with the web"; HTML5 doesn't allow Javascript to open connections to arbitrary hosts on the internet, so any "web" solution would still require trusting a server run by people you don't know. Similarly the connection to that server can still be "man-in-the-middled" in a direct, but difficult to detect way. At least with Tor you can download the software on a different computer, unconnected to you.
Any technology-based solution is going to require some knowledge to use safely. Tor is already pretty close to the least-knowledge solution out there, and it has the advantage of being widely used for all sorts of reasons, so use of it doesn't raise that many red-flags by itself.
The idea of Openleaks is good. Leaks should be decentralized and the technology should be an anonymous secure channel or secure pipeline.
And how do you propose this is going to work, yet not require technological competence? At least organizations like Wikileaks and traditional journalism can provide things like maildrops, a non-technological solution that is accessible to people without security expertise.
Maybe this is why Openleaks hasn't released any code: did they go into the project with high hopes, and realized that there didn't exist technological solutions to the problems they were trying to solve?
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
