Every man has his price. Now we know yours.

I'm not aware of anything preventing a clean-room reimplementation of ZFS licensed under GPLv2. It worked for nouveau.

And when the government comes for the undesirable neighbors (currently the poor "drug abusing" minorities and people of middle-eastern descent), no one will be able to see the police brutality and rights violations! Everyone wins!

I honestly can't think of any detriment to having neighbors with spy drones. They send spy drones onto my property? I'll send my own drones to track theirs and watch them watching me. If it's amusing enough I'll probably document the whole thing on a public website. Privacy is *dead*. Privacy was not one of the features of our ancestral environments. Tolerance and acceptance are the way to deal with each other, not hiding.

The proof verifier won't verify sloppy software without a proof of correctness. It's much harder to write a formal proof of correctness for sloppy code, so anything that can pass the verification stage will most likely be well written, simple, and very human readable since a human has to read and understand it sufficiently to write the formal proof of correctness for it. Writing the formal proofs will also probably be the largest part of the workload in the software development process so it makes no sense to write sloppy code when the cost will be magnified during the verification stage.

So, in fact, he did not invent dippin' dots ice cream? He just shoved the wrong thing into his employer's industrial equipment? I love the U.S. patent system.

Or, like Fukushima, the plane might sufficiently damage the surrounding infrastructure so that cooling fails for a significant amount of time.

Joe Stack.

First, there have been fairly successful experiments preserving a DHT on a set of unreliable nodes using (n,m) error correcting codes to store multiple fragments of blocks on different nodes so that the DHT itself can survive a ratio of up to n-m out of n nodes leaving the network. Most likely the bitcoin block chain is too large and too fragile to do that effectively without choosing n so large that calculating the error correction codes would be too burdensome or m so low that you get nearly O(N^2) behavior anyway. Leaving the storage of transactions up to the nodes that care about them makes sense in this case.

Second, it's not necessary to keep the entire merkle hash chain in the DHT and in fact only the path from the current root down the branch to the original leaf is necessary to validate the entire tree with a proof of work at each level and can be stored by each node. It's just as easy to DoS miners by preventing them from receiving the latest blocks and pending transactions. Nodes that want to complete transactions have to do the work of getting their pending transactions to miners in the current protocol. It shouldn't be too much of a burden on those nodes to also provide their own transaction history to the miners.

Something I didn't think about long enough was the ability to prevent double spending; it's necessary to build an index of the most recent withdrawal from a given address (at least, although an index to the most recent transaction would work too) and each transaction must include the hash of the immediately prior transaction so that no transaction can be dropped from the hash tree. This can be accomplished by keeping a b-tree index of the hash blocks pointing to the most recent transaction ordered by address and only storing the newly required blocks of the b-tree in the hash block chain. Each b-tree block will be hashed into the merkle tree block chain to validate it. Addresses which don't appear in the index are assumed to have a zero balance. The b-tree index should take roughly O(n log n) in the number of addresses ever used, and lookups should be O(log n), and again the node that cares about an address will have an incentive to store the necessary index blocks or else risk having a zero-balance address. Because an address owner relies on the entire branch from the root of the index to its last-transaction pointer all nodes will care about and keep the root index entry, most will care about the second level, etc.

In this case miners who worked on the ~20 blocks in the 8.0 chain won't see a reward for another 140 blocks. There was still a waste of cycles==electricity==money.

If the world economy switched to Euros or Yen or Canadian Dollars tomorrow there would be U.S. Dollars littering the streets that one could use to pay taxes with. Of course, there might be a bit of a question of the exchange rate that should apply for taxation of other currencies if no U.S. dollar was ever spent again, but presumably it would work for the current accounting year. There is an actual, real demand in the World market for U.S. dollars, and not just to pay taxes.

The people putting together the mining hardware didn't have enough capital to purchase all the units they have to build in order to get a reasonable economy of scale for the ASICs and other development costs. If the developers had enough capital I assume they wouldn't have bothered selling them (although there is also slightly more risk holding a few hundred Bitcoin miners instead of dollars...). It's more like a cooperative investment by lots of miners to fund what they all wish they could afford individually. You can't just buy a one-off ASIC.

It may be possible to store the block chain as a distributed hash tree such that each node is responsible for maintaining its own transactions and a portion of the block chain. This would reduce the storage requirement to O(n*m) where n is the total number of transactions and m is the average number of addresses that appear in a transaction. Communication would also be reduced to O(n*m) because only nodes responsible for the addresses in a transaction would be responsible for checking and approving the transaction. The block chain itself would just be a merkle-tree of hashes of nodes' own block chains. Double-spending would be prevented by transactions incorporating the last hash of each responsible node's block chain so that an individual block chain exhibiting double spending would not be signed into the merkle tree. It would be possible for the history of particular coins to be lost but the overall hash tree would guarantee that at the time of a transaction all balances (including historically lost ones) were valid. Still, not being able to validate the entire economy could be a fairly large weakness. There wouldn't be a hard requirement that nodes could only store certain addresses, so it's entirely possible that some nodes would still try to collect and maintain the entire history. That would only add O(n*p) communication and storage where p is the number of full "archive" nodes. Of course then it wouldn't really be bitcoin anymore, but it might be possible to rebuild the existing block chain into such a structure while retaining the current mining payouts and total number of coins.

Something, because there will always be some core of crazy people running miners and keeping the difficulty just high enough that it's not worth it to mine as many bitcoins as you want in the original chain. That value will probably be the cost of the electricity to run whatever the last ASIC miner produced is, at least before general purpose GPUs become more powerful than ASICs.

10KB of RAM, 30KB of ROM. That should also tell you what the processor and power requirements are. Anything with that amount of memory is running at a few MHz and sipping milliwatts.

Anyone can still be sued for civil damages or prosecuted for criminal actions regardless of any other action on the part of the copyright owner or ISP. It might be easier to argue that the copyright owner acted in bad faith if they used a strike and a lawsuit at the same time but the point of the lawsuits is to overwhelm people with the legal system in the first place; most people just settle.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. Even if both the economist and accountant are completely indifferent between paying or receiving $40 as the cost of licking a frog they valued the overall experience, e.g. the utility of having walked and licked frogs was greater than the utility of doing nothing regardless of the face value of the money that was equally exchanged. Otherwise they would have just sat in the park doing absolutely nothing.