boldra - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Can someone clarify the state of BitCoin? (Score 1, Interesting) 134

by boldra on Tuesday September 09, 2014 @12:12PM (#47862865) Attached to: Paypal Jumps Into Bitcoin With Both Feet

You'll get lots of different opinions, but there are plenty of weaknesses 1. Mining is centralized, and there's no incentive to decentralization 2. Mining is quite wasteful 3. The block size is too small for high transaction volume. Solutions require more nodes, but as the blockchain grows running a node becomes more expensive. 4. The prices is too volatile 5. Bitcoins aren't fairly distributed. My main gripe is that the price of coins is dictated by the cost of mining them, and is not related to the cost of keeping the network secure. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600436.0) Despite all this, the increase in adoption in the last twelve months has been phenomenal. Many large retaillers (Expedia, Dell, Newgg) have started accepting bitcoin. Hundreds of ATMs have been rolled out. Numerous financial products featuring Bitcoin have been confirmed. So on the one hand, Bitcoin has some serious problems, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people with a lot of money interested in keeping it going.

Submission + - Steorn's free energy demo delayed

Submitted by

Lisandro

on Friday July 06, 2007 @10:16AM

Lisandro writes: "Steorn announced that the demo for its Orbo free-energy technology, which was to be presented at Kinentica Museum in London, complete with a live broadcast with 4 cameras over Internet, has been postponed. Steorn's CEO stated that 'technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.' Slasdot covered the original announcement in a previous story."

Submission + - free energy demo melts

Submitted by boldra on Friday July 06, 2007 @07:09AM

boldra writes: Steorn's perpetual motion engine (reported here yesterday) has apparently melted beyond repair. According to CEO Sean McCarthy:

Technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.
They may have cheated thermodynamics, but they're still victims of Murphy!

Submission + - Belgium's SWIFT does a runner to America

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26, 2007 @07:52AM

An anonymous reader writes: A new twist to an old story. SWIFT, the Belgium bank transfer company that admitted it handed all transaction data to the NSA & CIA without warrants or limits, faces prosecution in Belgium. Their response is to do a runner to the USA. Shifting their data to USA data stores and seeking protection under the US-EU safe harbor treaty.

If you were the CIA and had access SWIFT's data, whose details would you look up. I'd look up every world leaders bank transfers, every politician's payments, every civil servants interbank transactions. Maybe look up what money Democrats send abroad too, might be some political leverage in that.

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