Comment Re:bitcoins (Score 2) 35
OMG lets make banks illegal, it is the next bitcoin.
This story nicely ilustrates that even the old financial system with it's chargebacks and deposit insurances is not imune to scam and theft.
OMG lets make banks illegal, it is the next bitcoin.
This story nicely ilustrates that even the old financial system with it's chargebacks and deposit insurances is not imune to scam and theft.
Not to mention the environmental damage is huge. They use a ton of electricity to basically do nothing...
They don't do nothing. They try to secure (so far quite successfully) the first and biggest distributed cryptocurrency and payment network.
The original idea was millions of end users running Bitcoin mining as a background job on their CPU. That's totally dead.
The author of the original idea bets to disagree:
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.
That is from Satoshi Nakamoto's post from 2008: http://www.mail-archive.com/cr...
I believe the issue isn't so much whether one group can counteract another. Rather, it is something happening that the promoters of Bitcoin claim should not happen. It doesn't instill confidence in a crypto currency when what you say is impossible (or extremely improbable) is proven to be false and your only backup is relying on parties to "play fair".
I see that only bitcoin haters are incorrectly claiming that bitcoin promoters say that 51% attack is impossible. But that is simply untrue. The 51% attack is clearly described in the original whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in the proof-of-work section and it is well understood by bitcoin enthusiasts. How are we saying that 51% is impossible when we describe it in our core specification?
It does have severe ramifications for other crypto currencies. The other crypto currencies are modeled on Bitcoin, with just some parameters different. If Bitcoin can be compromised, this nearly immediately means the other currencies can be compromised as well. The end of Bitcoin would thus also signify the end of most, if not all, other crypto currencies.
Not all cryptocurrencies use proof of work like bitcoin, some of them use proof of stake, combination of proof of work and proof of stake or maybe some completely different mechanism.
Yes, other currencies which use proof-of-stake are also vulnerable to 51% attack but this is nothing new, this is a fact known from the beginning, it is explained in the original whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
I wonder what happens if someone with more than enough CPU power to get 99% of the mining jumps in one night. What kind of Damage could they do in a short interval before people notice? What if their goals were not to steal bitcoins but rather to snatch all the coins from, say, Kim Jong Un, or Al Queda. E.g. for example the NSA or Samsung or Saudi arabia. They would not care about the loss of value in their stolen coins, the point is to deprive an adversaries use of them.
First it is highly improbable that someone with 99% of current hashing power would suddenly emerge out of the blue. He would need pretty big and completely secret hardware factory for making ASIC mining chips.
Second you can't steal third-party bitcoins even with 51% attack because you don't have control of the private keys necessary to sign the transaction. Only thing you can do is try to double-spend your own bitcoins - craft one fake transactions which sends your coins to merchant than overwrite it with another transaction which sends the money back to your own address.
But all the early-adopters / ponzi-schemers kept insisting that it was impossible.
No one except trolls like you claims that 51% attack is impossible, on the contrary, the danger of it is explicitly mentioned even in the original bitcoin white paper. Maybe you should read it before spreading misinformations:
Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority
decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested
in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the
fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to
redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the
work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up
diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.
Or, if your in good standing with your bank, don't worry about it. The banks are good about fraudulent charges in the civilized world.
But who eats the loss? I seriously doubt it's the bank. AFAIK they bill the merchant which means there IS problem (because the merchant will project those chargebacks into the price of his goods).
The right solution is payment system where you don't give your secret keys when you make a payment. For example bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
If they're banned in enough places, and enough people get their jaws cracked when they insist on wearing them in other places, then it will sink in: a lot of us DON'T FUCKING WANT some asshole recording us in public and putting it online with not even a chance to consent.
Why is everyone complaining now about visible camera in google glass when secret spy cameras are available for years?
I think that the loss of privacy is inevitable. Your eyes are basicaly making constant record of your visual input into your brain. It's just matter of time before our brain is enhanced with non-degrading memory able to store photorealistic data forever.
I can imagine legal regulations which would prevent publication of recordings made withous the subject consent. That would make sense for me. I can't realisticaly imagine how you want to prevent enyone from recording you because you have no chance to find about it.
And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.
This would be yet another principal problem with copyright in the future, when photorealistic 100% accurate memories will be made possible by computer-brain interfaces and silicon data storage implants. Imagine the cinema warnings: "please turn off your digital memory while watching this movie".
no one would create beautiful works which costs tens of millions to make and sometimes hundreds of millions without copyright protecting their work from being stolen and resold by someone else.
This is bullshit, everyone would create new works if they get money for it. There is no need for copyright, copyright is counterproductive. It actualy seriously limits sharing of information, it wastes money by preventing us from optimaly utilizing our comunication networks and data storage, it wastes money on useless IP lawsuits, it makes works artificialy and needlesly unavailable to large part of our population.
Artist need money, not copyright. We need to abolish copyright and come up with a system/regulation which will ensure money for creators without artificial limits on distribution of creative content.
Equating privacy protection with censorship misses the point. There's an old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at the bridge of my nose. It's not strictly true from a modern legal perspective, but the point that you need to balance many rights and freedoms for everyone is just as valid as it ever was.
In this particular case people seems to sympathize with the court decision but i wonder if they'd equaly support for example the right for privacy of a politician who would ask google to remove references to articles about his past coruption scandals or other inconvinient facts which are no longer "valid" (because the politician in question was never convicted or because he already served his sentence).
I see this decision as higly problematic. Even if google removes the references it could be technicaly chalenging to prevent it's search engine to crawl and index the public data again. I think that the right course of action is to determine if the published data were illegal and if yes then remove them from the source web page.
We can not afford, on many levels, and do not need: nukes. This has been shown.
Maybe not for energy production on earth. But how would you propell space craft in deep space or a lander on dark side of the planet? How would you create elements needed in research, medicine etc. which are products of fission reactions?
I think it is foolish for greens to call for complete abandonment of nuclear technology. We certainly need to research and test it, we need to build specialized reactors for various purposes.
Anyone keeping coins in an exchange for any longer than necessary to exchange them is an idiot.
If nobody kept their coins on the exchange it would be not very usefull because there would be nobody to exchange with.
Could we please stop with the endless pro-drug commentary? Not all of us are drug addicts, and it's tiresome when people like yourself have to bring up drug issues in nearly every thread. I know it's important to you, but normal people don't care about such matters.
If normal people realy don't care about such matters why are the drugs banned? Stop the ban on production and consumption of drugs and i'm sure the "drug addicts" will stop bothering you about it. If you realy don't care about it it should be no problem for you.
Neutrinos have bad breadth.
