Schmidt: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."
and
“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”
Open and transparent is what Google wants. This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't live in a world of corrupt authority, corrupt cops, frame jobs, set ups etc. Julian Assange being accused of rape and it's open so even if he's innocent his reputation is ruined? Transparency helps and hurts depending on who is in law enforcement. |
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It's not illegal now. Let's see Google try to make a rival to Bitcoin, and then eventually end up mining Bitcoin.
Coblee (Google employee I think) already made Litecoin. Well that settles it but Litecoin and any other coin isn't a rival to Bitcoin but an alternative. Competition is good. IE was a rival to Netscape, and Opera a rival to them both and Webkit a rival to them all etc. |
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Sounds like they JA is tossing ideas around very similar to namecoin ... and something like Ricardian contracts (Open Transactions) for important censorship resistant documents. I thought this bit was salient also and should be stashed in memory for later use Eric Schmidt: The average person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful lot of private keys involving commerce were taken. ... right here is all the reason you need to get into bitcoin. talk to me about this more. RSA is still used by banks and other online stores so how could it be that porous? RSA relies on hard large primes and factoring but over time computing power can break certain version of RSA which aren't hard enough. That being said PGP is safe and RSA is safe because if it's 4096bit it's not going to be cracked. |
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Schmidt is the guy who wants to make personal ownership of drones illegal.
Authoritarian from the word go.
Google + Bitcoin is not a good fit. Western Union makes sense - even Amazon. But not Google.
Why is personal ownership of drones good? |
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If you were Satoshi would you tell someone who has a habit of publishing every scrap of information he has to the entire world no matter what the comeback is? He would be the last person on the planet I'd tell. I don't think you understand Assange. Assange didn't publish the identity of the people who left Wikileaks along with Daniel Domscheit-Berg to found OpenLeaks, even through the OpenLeaks folks took a harddrive of valuable data with them that they afterwards deleted. Open leaks was a good idea that failed. Wikileaks was a good idea that failed. Neither are practical for 2013. |
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Doubtful, but he might know who Satoshi (the person or the group) actually is.
agreed. i was wondering how narrow the set of people is. the talent must have shown earlier somewhere. i wonder how much depends on the fact that the inventor is anonymous. if the person would be known, people might think it's a scam or base their decisions on the personality. They both were on the Cypherpunks mailing list. |
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if you do not have a single clue on what to do with the chip better consider buying a complete set..
yeah this is for engineers or people who knows how to follow the DIY guide and put together a system. I already have a few local guys lined up to tackle this. I will let everyone know the progress and if they would like their chips assembled once they arrived and I have some sort of prototype ready. But that's all in the future just planning ahead for now. When can I buy a complete set and for how much? |
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Seems like an impossible deal. They mean $99,000 not $999. |
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------------
So I'd be very interested in the Litecoin mining gear - especially FPGA kit that consumes very little power. I have the risk appetite for this game as I've already shown, but the ASIC situation has me very wary of allocating further capital at Bitcoin mining equipment. I'm bored of GPUs and having my main house sweltering through winter at over 30 deg C with the windows open in winter (!!!!), and whilst a fancy rack of tens of GPUs can be used *right now*, I've also paid the electricity bills for a couple of quarters of constant use of such devices. They have very very substantial operating costs. A fancy FPGA assembly with 25-100 modular boards, whilst fun in terms of geek-appeal, also has the big benefit of not costing significant amounts of money to run.
Finally (phew...) - is there something genuinely innovative and unique to your approach that gives you no competition, so that I should be seriously starting the process of considering allocation in your direction? What is the barrier preventing my existing cluster of Spartan-6 FPGAs being repurposed with cheap plug-in auxiliary boards and a new assembly plus bitstream (I won't play Internet Engineer, I'll simply ask my old college mate who does this for real, at a senior level - but I assume there's *some* hack possible to give additional working memory to my Ztex 1.15x boards... my 1.15d boards already have more resources to begin with though).
Would your boards have fallback value too? Litecoin aren't worth much right now, so if your approach resembles the BTC experience where the FPGA units have around the same performance as a mid-range GPU but consume less than 1/10th the power, but cost more than the GPU up front, as a business case the time horizon is quite far away. This risk becomes more acceptable if the devices have intrinsic value (can be repurposed, or worst case, the chips recycled). Even better would be the ability to mine Bitcoin at low power, when transaction fees are the main mining income from *that* particular currency, if LTC doesn't work out.
I once had a couple of thousand LTC floating around before my pool arranged auto-trade for BTC, and now the pool has stopped merged mining I've renewed my interest in LTC and have set up a few test rigs for 400-500khash. However, with the price of electricity, I want to be 100% FPGA and ASIC by the end of Q2. It's only a small operation after all, and I don't want the significant ongoing cost, heat and noise of GPU rigs.
Seems though I have a choice - stick to Bitcoin, big risk, 'pre-order' nonsense with ASICs... or consider the first application of FPGA tech for the LTC blockchain. The fact that I've already lost on an ASIC 'pre-order' makes the BFL option rather unpalatable. But I'd like to keep mining - on a socioeconomic level, cryptocurrencies are a big deal to me philosophically, and part of me (less rationally) likes the 'silver to BTC gold' analogy of LTC. I'll be keeping an eye on this - when you're ready to take beta-level investors then I'd be interested. I'm no VHDL guru but I ported Stefan's (Ztex) toolchain to Mac OS X 64-bit 10.6.8 a while back, so am competent hacking the software side of things.
I am not the dev for the vhdl, but my understanding (although probably limited obviously) is that the boards you referenced do not have enough LE's ALM's and are not fast enough. You could use them but you would be getting 20kh/s or less each board. Which depending on the amount of them you have available and the fact that they are paid for, it may actually be worth using them. As for modular, that is one of our goals, but that will come around when we finish the production units. As for the being burned by the ASICs, that really sucks, and was our motivation to not mislabel our investors as preorders. Its unethical. As for porting to mac, we may take you up on that, none of our devs really like dealing with apple  How about Linux? I'll be one of your first customers. |
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This is true. I've seen all bitcoin related service suffer the same fate in the last few days, including Rugatu, and I don't seem to understand what is the purpose of this sustained attack. The purpose is to kill off Bitcoin as a currency and as a community. |
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This page ( https://blockchain.info/) is currently offline. However, because the site uses CloudFlare's Always Online™ technology you can continue to surf a snapshot of the site. We will keep checking in the background and, as soon as the site comes back, you will automatically be served the live version. Always Online™ is powered by CloudFlare | Hide this Alert To mitigate these types of attacks you just run multiple versions of the site in multiple virtual machines and simple pause one of them, take a snapshot, make the snapshot live. The data can be migrated in the background. Basically the way to defeat the DDOS is by cloud based migration. |
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Let me explain about DDoS (I know many here know). The problem is it's like standing in the middle of a clear field against an unseen army in the forest. You have to stand in the field so people can find you, but you're completely exposed to attack. You just have to be able to take everything that comes your way. Translated to Web technology this means most sites exposed to significant DDoS attack are effectively disabled. There are mitigation techniques/software to reduce the effectiveness of attacks, but as the link provided above, which gives good information, points out even spending thousands of dollars on expert defenses is not always enough. The only real answer, like standing in that field, is to be big enough and bad enough to take it, having loads of bandwidth, servers, software etc. to ride the attack out. Cloudflare is something that helps the issue greatly, because they take the expensive problem many have independently and address it with consolidated resources. Still, it's an underdog fight to start with. So how to effectively address DDoS? You might try finding the attacker(s) using social means as mentioned. The problem there is you'll never find everyone if anyone. Pooling resources, money, brain power, etc. in the style of Cloudflare in more organized ways might help. The problem is more systemic. For example, there are DDoS extortion cases where it's less costly for a victim site, like a profitable gambling one, to pay a ransom then suffer extended downtime. I'd say you really have to take away the main weapon which is botnets. To do that you have to provided better security against computer sheeple allowing their computers to be used unwittingly. I actually had a business idea which was a computer that was virus proof (it basically stored files in a compartmentalized way, and clean re-installed the OS with a click or on automated schedule) but never developed it. All you would have to do is build an OS which runs each file in a separate virtual machine instance. This would be equal to compartmentalizing on the file level. So the browser would run in a virtual machine, but so would every other piece of software and all of it in individual sandboxes. |
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How exactly do large scale companies deal with DDOS?
Like Banks, Ebay, US Gov sites, etc?
Clound computing and virtual machines. Also some kind of intrusion detection system. |
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just an idea
i have no interest in being in charge of this so perhaps find someone who will want to organize that can be trusted
how about they set up an account for donations
what will these donations be used for
some ideas include giving all of it to an accredited institution of higher learning (university) that's first to be interested in accepting this donation under the terms of not being able to "cash out" for a minimum of a year
The donations should only be given to organizations which agree to accept Bitcoin otherwise they don't deserve Bitcoin donations. By the way, it's better to use stock than donate. Let people invest and make a profit if possible and more people will cough up Bitcoins but most people dont have enough Bitcoins to donate. |
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Satoshi called bitcoin "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" which is true but right now bitcoin is mostly used for speculation in the price of Bitcoin vs Fiat currencies. Bitcoin has a dilemma - its hard to be both a currency and a payment system when the price of bitcoin is so volatile. If I want to send a friend 100$ via bitcoin the value of the sent bitcoins might have changed from 100$ to 150$ or to 50$ during the time the blockchain is confirmed. Satoshi: "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party."Satoshi is technically correct in saying that we don't need a third party in the transactions, but in real life he is wrong, we need third parties absorbing the currency risk so they can promise me and my friend that 100$ sent is 100$ received. What the third parties needs in order to operate is trustworthy and stable exchanges between bitcoin and fiat so they can hedge transactions. When many parties hedge their positions the result will be a more stable price of BTC/USD which actually makes the need of such third parties less important in the future. I believe the purpose of bitcoin is much greater than just the speculation between fiat and bitcoin, the purpose should be to actually abandon fiat in the long term but to do so we need to enable markets where liquidity is created and where everyone is able to hedge risks. Therefore we as a community need to come with ideas on how to create a free, stable and secure p2p bitcoin exchange between bitcoin and fiat where everyone can buy, sell and hedge bitcoins. The exchange system created could also be used for other kinds of exchanges, such as bartering, which would reduce the need of fiat currency conversions. References [1] S. Nakamoto "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, 2009. It needs to be a complete full spectrum virtual value exchange. Emphasis on VIRTUAL VALUE. This way people can trade virtual value items of all sorts for virtual value items of all sorts. This means WoW items exchanged for Bitcoins would be fair as well. |
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"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." ― Warren Buffett I used to be a huge bull up until the crash. I am no longer trading due to personal circumstances. But in general, I think that to be successful you have to know when to adjust your views. Those who are stubborn get burned. This is how I see it:  Exploit the greed. Sell high buy low. Repeat over and over. Double, triple your profit. |
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Oh the ignominy of it - stuck in the newbie bin after 24 years of internet use, 18 years of linux, 30 years of programming from z80 assembler and up, debating C++ template semantics with Stroustrupp while I was writing a parallelizing C++ source to source translator (before I evolved into a philosophically an anti-C++ person preferring C), enjoying USENET flame wars in the old days and tittering about newbies ineptitude  So anyway hi I am Adam Back, inventor of hashcash (the bitcoin mining function... all those mining cores and ASICs are grinding away producing hashcash). So yep I contributed to the environmental crime of so far 40MW continuous mining. We installed a 3.5kW solar installation but it seems like a small offset :| I also implemented the opensource library credlib which implements Chaum and Brands ecash. And actually reinvented offline multiple transfer Brands ecash (turns out someone else already figured it out when I asked Stefan). I consulted for Nokia on ecash crypto back in 2002. I worked at Zero-Knowledge Systems from 2000-2003. So anyway I know a few things about ecash, privacy tech, crypto, distributed systems (my comp sci PhD is in distributed systems) and I guess I was one of the moderately early people to read about and try to comprehend the p2p crypto cleverness that is bitcoin. In fact I believe it was me who got Wei Dai's b-money reference added to Satoshi's bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008. If like Hal Finney I'd actually tried to run the miner back then, I may too be sitting on some genesis/bootstrap era coins. Alas I own not a single bitcoin which is kind of ironic as the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention. (The only difference being a double hash for a bit of added design paranoia, the switch from SHA1 to SHA256 and defining fractional bits - hashcash difficulty can only double or halve - just count leading bits - bitcoin variant of hashcash defines the challenge as to find hashes < 2^x where x is the log2(difficulty)+32 in bits which is the same when there is no fractional part). I am a strong believer in distributed trust models. I was one of the early and vocal technical voices on the cypherpunks list. Worked on distributed trust privacy tech and anonymity designs at ZKS (ToR is a newer re-implementation of their freedom network which includes my forward anonymity contribution), understand the risks of centralization, vocalized concerns about the risks of CA model, decade before we saw diginotar and others bring those predictions to fruition with Iranians and other CA operators issuing rogue sub-CA certificates for gmail. I broke a number of crypto deployed systems most of which under NDA. I have some concerns about centralization trends and how to avoid them on bitcoin. Oh yeah I proposed something namecoin like also a decade or so back. But for now I, just gotta get out of the newbie trap. Ignominy, my word for the day  Adam You're one of the Cypherpunk Gods. I admire your work. I hope you can help solve some of the problems with the exchanges and infrastructure or just contribute some of your ideas. |
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This is actually what I'm doing.
But I will probably start cashing out 1/3 of my coins at $200 in the short(er) term, whenever it gets back up there, and hold the others for a very long time (years).
I actually cashed out a little into gold, but gold is a HORRIBLE investment, at least in Massachusetts where I live. First, it is always taxed as a short-term gain, so that means 28% tax (my tax bracket) PLUS 12% state tax (MA short term capital gains). Also gold is in a bubble right now and has been dropping. Finally, coinabul charges you about 8% over spot for gold so you lose money right off the bat.
The only reason to buy gold is if you expect it to help you evade taxes (it won't).
Aren't Bitcoins taxed at 40% as capital gains when you try to cash them out? That would be higher than gold. |
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tcio and caiaphas - I think we are confusing the issue here. First, I really doubt that any bitcoin proponent would say that bitcoin is ready to be a stable currency, for many reasons. But key word is "stable". As you said caiaphas, it is too volatile. But the reasons it is volatile are because it is new, the currency markets all over the world are a mess (as are the bond markets), etc. In a sense bitcoin is reflecting that uncertainty (and there isn't a military behind it.  ) The confusion arises in misplacing our saying whether or not it is ready NOW as a currency/commodity/trade unit, with where it will be once things settle down. It is in the EARLY, very early stages. Think back to the internet when Amazon was $5 a share. That is where we are now. Maybe even more like .20 being that this is a currency and doesn't "split" to allow for growth and liquidity. Our liquidity is in decimal places. And caiaphas, most merchants dealing with bitcoins immediately trade them for dollars/Euros/etc. and don't hold them as bitcoins. Now, once it does develop into a currency and is stable, relatively so, then that will change. For now, this is a part of the process. With Bitcoins small float, if it is successful, YOU WILL NEED JUST ONE. Think about what I mean by that. A thousand dollar valuation when there are only 11 million shares right now is nothing, absolutely nothing. We can't look at it as worth $1000, but rather do the math. There just aren't enough of them to be that "cheap". We will definitely be trading bitcoins in fractions. Now, at this time there is speculation and that is partially why the price is where it is. But the coming collapse of many global currencies along with what looks like near hyperinflation, means that saying bitcoin is worth $1000 is not really saying much. Once that inflation starts hitting us, then you will see the price explode, but it won't be as meaningful, it will be like the 1920's level inflation in Germany. (e.g. - Coins worth 1DM were then minted to be 500 or more!) IMS You're thinking 5 years from now in 2020. |
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Agree with tclo Bitcoin's current utility does not justify a high valuation and volatility makes it a sucky currency. If you were a vendor, would you accept bitcoins in exchange for real goods knowing the value can drop 50% overnight? I wouldn't. Look at http://bitcoinstore.com. Prices are simply USD converted to BTC every time you refresh the page. So any orders taken when price was $270 robbed this vendor big time. Current utility is based on gambling services, illegal products and a handful of legitimate uses. The only reason we're above $10 is pure speculation on future value which can't be sustained. Bitpay cashes out Bitcoin payments instantly. Read about it. |
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