intelliot

hunter2

What did happen to ye olde slashdot anyway? The original og reddit

Is there any concrete data showing whether this has any effect on the readability or comprehensibility of text content?

It's not only about stats/data, but also the user experience. Many web pages have many more ads, videos, gifs, and clutter than they did before. There's also more spam and more low-quality content. That makes finding the info that you want harder than before. I've noticed this especially when searching for cooking recipes online.

Cue

I don't have a good answer here, but I believe it may be instructive to consider externalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). For instance, think carefully about how they may apply here.

I've researched this for a long time; for many reasons, I believe it's him. He never cryptographically signed anything, so the lack of signature actually weighs in favor of the message's authenticity -- not against it.

"Something I only recently realised is that Satoshi's apparent policy(1) of never making any cryptographically secure signatures to link together his posts - or indeed any communication at all - fits well with the avoidance of creating a central authority figure. ... As you've often said, the biggest achievement by Satoshi in the creation of Bitcoin was to create a system where the identity of the creator is a mere historical footnote. We can probably go further, and state that while doing so, Satoshi quite counter-intuitively took steps to avoid even creating a pseudoanonymous identity." - Peter Todd, https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

And of course, the most important sentence is from Satoshi's message itself:

"Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barack Obama, or Satoshi Nakamoto."

So whether it's Satoshi or not, it doesn't matter; Bitcoin was intended to transcend even Satoshi's own influence.

It's just his opinion. His opinion is that Bitcoin should be a single, unified, consensus-driven project - that's what trust in the network is built on. Without people following the same protocol, Bitcoin doesn't work.

> Interviews are weird: the pressure of time, and not being able to look things up, distorts the code.

In the interviews I do, I tell the candidate that:

1. There is no time pressure. Work at a normal pace, as if you were working here. This is not a speed test. I don't expect you to finish. I mainly want to know how you think.

2. You should look things up. Behave the same way you would when coding at home. Use Google, Stack Overflow, documentation, etc.

This probably works better for the interviews I give because the problem is not implementing an existing algorithm. It's a realistic task, something that we've actually built on-the-job.

Braintree recently introduced support for Bitcoin: https://www.braintreepayments.com/features/coinbase

Technically, Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous; they're typically pseudonymous. Braintree requires buyers to use a Coinbase wallet. There are many reasons for this, but refunds is one of them. We enable merchants to easily issue refunds and have a cohesive experience in the Braintree Control Panel, with bitcoin alongside other payment methods like credit cards, Venmo, and Apple Pay. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Agreed, except that we shouldn't ignore network effects. Drivers go for one smartphone-ride-sharing-app over another because it has more riders, and riders likewise: because it has more drivers. That can be very hard to shake.

What's their PayPal identity?

Doesn't seem to match https://gist.github.com/indutny/a11c2568533abcf8b9a1

What potential legal difficulties does the .io domain allow you to avoid?

Unless this has something to do with the lungs, you mean "mnemonics" :)

The human mind can't generate enough entropy to create a secure brainwallet in that way. However, the reverse is permissible: use Bitcoin Armory or Electrum to generate a wallet, and then you should memorize the BIP39 mnemonic: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi...

It's too early for anyone to say whether this concern is a real problem, but here are a few points that you should analyze further:

1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."

With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.

Problem solved.

Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!

2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.

3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"

Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.

Nobody knows how many dollars are still in circulation. They have good guesses, but nobody knows about the millions in cash that was lost/burned/buried in the desert. It doesn't matter. Supply and demand doesn't rely on the total number of bitcoins in existence; only the number that are available on exchanges. And with blockchain analysis, we can have a very clear picture of bitcoin circulation - much better than with traditional currencies.

Even if they were sent into the void, bitcoins are highly divisible. Just shift the decimal point over a few places and you've got convenient units once again.

No. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7296376

Technically speaking, no.

patio11: that is not how the Bitcoin protocol works.

Even if 99% of the Bitcoin miners agree, they cannot create extra bitcoin; it is simply impossible because that is not something that miners control. Every full node (client) on the Bitcoin network verifies the validity of each block. A block that created more bitcoins than allowed by the protocol would be rejected by the clients (and the miners who follow the original rules). The "extra" bitcoins would be on a hard fork and thus invalid to anyone on the main (original) blockchain.

More info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...

Perhaps you mean "cachet" instead of "cache"

Indeed. This problem is caused by the U.S. Government, not Google.

So more accurately: A US Federal Law Made My Daughter Cry

Excellent point. 5 years ago, bitcoin didn't exist. It has come a long way and it has been a long time in Internet Time. Amazon launched in 1994 but it hasn't been very long in Retail Time.

The post office also ought to use this technology to make mail delivery faster. Today, sending a letter across town takes days, but with drones perhaps it could take minutes.

It's possible to sign transactions offline, so that the private key never touches a device that's connected to the internet. Check out http://www.bitcointrezor.com/

Penflip is similar to a project I'm working on. We should talk.

In the spirit of Balaji Srinivasan's talk, how about accepting bitcoin? At the time of this comment, USD $40 = 0.19388 BTC = 193.88 mBTC.