That's one way to look at it.  However plenty of folks argue convincingly that we have never seen capitalism, seeing as nations exist (well, sorta) and markets are all manipulated, especially if fiat currency is involved.  Some people associate capitalism with "free markets" and "efficient markets"..  one doesn't have to look far to see goods and services which have different values at different places which wouldn't be possible if we did have free and efficient markets.  My point is really just that we should speak specifically about what market conditions, political conditions, or whatever it is - directly and with plenty of words to convey our meanings.  Throwing out a polemic like "capitalism" or "socialism" only puts a damper on effective communication. 

 
 

Yup.  Customers want to use blockchain assets like bitcoin and so financial services providers (aka banks) will need to use a blockchain to enable these services. 

The word is dead.  It has no meaning that people agree on.   

Instead why not use more words to actually describe policy and behavior? 

You could talk about trade practices, motivational factors of organizations, currency issuance, taxation, societal norms, distribution of surplus and management of scarcity; there are many real issues. 

"Capitalism" isn't one of them.  In theory you could make a definition and use it, but in practice It's too polemic a term to save. 

Oh and look at the rate of growth of tech companies, you'll see that intervention by money issuers and folks hiding behind the name of government agencies have played a huge role.  Mostly in a negative sense if you ask me but that's a separate issue.   

Glad to hear it Epsylon3 and many thanks for your work !  Please keep us posted if there are any developments. 

In other news..   only related to woodcoin tangentially through the logarithm function, I made a fun little program to determine your next log-birthday. 

http://github.com/funkshelper/log-birthdays/

Here's a sample output, as applied to woodcoin:

ENTER BIRTHDATE OF OBJECT: (as format Jun 18 2009) > Oct 21 2014
now: 1488400086871
then: 1413864000000
AGE OF OBJECT:
seconds    7.4536088E7
minutes    1242268.0
hours     20704.0
days      862.0
weeks     123.0
months    31.0
years    2.3600042
great-years    9.157594E-5

 LOG AGE OF OBJECT (base e, 2, 10):
seconds  :    18   26   7
minutes  :    14   20   6
hours   :    9   14   4
days    :    6   9   2
weeks   :    4   6   2
months  :    3   4   1
years  :    0   1   0
great-years :    -9   -13   -4


Next Log Birthday Is: hours   turning 10 in 55 days
Next Log2 Birthday Is: months  turning 5 in 11 days
Next Log10 Birthday Is: great-years turning -4 in 78 days

Thanks for bringing this up again Epsylon3.  Yeah these events were disturbing while I watched them go down, and picked through the history, but I don't see anything that made me think "hacked block chains".  

Allow me to clarify the events of several months ago.

What appears to have happened (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that at least two separate miners had very large hash capability, enough to perform effectively a 51% attack on the network.  While one was doing "drive-by-hashing", putting a large amount of work into the network and then leaving (to mine another coin?) after the difficulty went up, another was combating this actor by remining the blocks which took place during the low difficulty and building up a longer chain which eventually removed the rewards of the first attacker.  

According to this theory, the second of these players didn't mean any harm to you but you were caught in the crossfire and blocks that your pool mined were then orphaned when he/she presented the network with a much longer chain.  In some recognition of this the second attacker sent you some of the newly issued LOGs as "rain".  

Clients seeing a much longer chain do what they are supposed to do - they accept the chain which presents the most work.  This is basic blockchain dynamics and although it can be annoying and presents issues I don' t think there is a separate hack or vulnerability at play here.  If there is evidence of one, I would certainly be interested to hear it.  

In any case, the hashpower of the network is now a good factor of 5 or so larger than it was during that era, and I have seen no signs of such behavior recently.  It is still possible however to be overpowered by a large attacker.  We should be aware of this possibility in doing business on any public coin. 

Thanks for clarifying Epsylon3.  Well what happened? 

It appears that yiimp is still solving blocks:
http://yiimp.ccminer.org/explorer/313
http://yiimp.ccminer.org/

The spurnova pool also appears online but I don' t see any hash there:
https://wood.suprnova.cc/

In other news:

https://qz.com/804022/health-benefits-japanese-forest-bathing/?utm_source=qzfbarchive

An Apology

I must apologize for my complete failure of management capability.  The end results are that a few of the informational websites including woodcoin.org and the explorer.woodcoin.org block explorer as well as the frass blog are now down.  Perhaps worse is that tempers flared and personal differences arose among some of my friends that have been contributing to woodcoin related infrastructure.  好丢面子。 The responsibility here is squarely on my shoulders for allowing these issues to come to your attention at a time when there is already so much work to do.  

If you are reading this, your feedback in terms of what you want to see at woodcoin.org or what other resources might help would be highly appreciated at this critical juncture.  A new version is in progress.

The good news is that the woodcoin network itself is completely unaffected by my failures here, and continues to show steadily increasing hash rate and transaction activity.  I am hopeful we can move past these issues quickly and get on to more interesting concerns in the evolution of the codebases that power the network.              

Yours in the realm of the publicly issued coin -  

Not to be a broken record here or anything but 5 times as many people use CNY than USD.  Just saying, not exactly the top currency is it. 

Graphene ribbons might do the trick, sure.  Might.  But do you know how to make them?  Can you make them well enough to do so - to deploy them from a geostationary platform?  5000 miles of ribbon and have it hold not only its own weight but all the friction of the atmospheric drag?  I don't think we are to the point yet where a cost could be put on this.  That fact that people are trying to put "dollar" figures on the costs here kinda proves this point - they aren't talking sense.



 

Absolutely true.  Instead of prohibition and so-called profiteering from these dangers, we should be pursuing education and treatment.  Prohibition says "we don't care about you - we just want to pretend we are profiting from your troubles by institutionalizing fascism".  Don't put up with it.  Speak out against it and pursue the rational course suggested by religious leaders, law enforcement, and really anybody who is literate:  end drug prohibition. 

 

 

It's hard to put a cost estimate on something that doesn't exist.  No material has been found which has anywhere near the required strength to weight ratio. 

He who supports prohibition is fascist corrupt scum, always and everywhere.  Ignorance is no excuse. 

Drugs are too dangerous to put in the hands of criminals. 

This is quite an outlier case.  I've never seen a client wish to return to a windows environment after having a non-backdoored system, mostly just because it winds up being faster and easier to use.  This is for folks of little to no technical ability. 

People "choose" windows because it comes preinstalled and nobody has told them a much easier and more functional option exists.  Who would tell them?  There's no advertising or company to say anything.  You have to be lucky enough to have somebody in your life who knows something about computers. 

Take a look at the costs, you'll find it's absurd. 

Going up and down the gravity well is expensive as all hell.  You'll never make that back no matter what you find on Ceres or the Moon.  Even if it were already stacked in refined bars waiting for you to pick them up!! 

OK as a fully subsidized mission with no profitability other than a technology subsidy, sure.  But as a proper business?  No way. 

At least not until we get that space elevator built  

Hey mate, just trying to make a point, sorry. 

We might as well ask - which is better, dollars or western union? 

Actually a far better comparison would be Bitpay and Western Unioin, as both are third party payment providers. 

Of course if we can use dollars or bitcoin directly, we don't need either of these companies and will do better without them.  Their niche is for when we are dealing in situations in which we can't do so directly, for whatever reason (such as the recipient is in police custody). 

Cheers - 

OK so how can we compare a money transfer company to a peer-to-peer decentralized currency? 

I mean, western union could also transfer bitcoins if they chose.  The comparison is like saying what's better: fruit or wall-mart? 

I still can't find the western union coin on any exchange.  How many BTC is it worth?  Is it publicly or privately issued?  There must be some comparison here, a lot of people have opinions on it, yet I can't find the thing.  

新年快乐！

A happy and successful year of the Chikun to all woodcutters, stackers, and interested persons.

The network has been very stable in the last few weeks, thanks to all participants.  We recently hit a new all time high difficulty above 400.  Exchange prices remains remarkably stable.
   
Let's focus on a few things in the coming year:

1)  Maintaining and growing community of woodcoin users interested in doing something useful in a broader sense, not just "making money"  as a goal on its own. 
We wish to educate and promote publicly issued currency of a stable and longlived variety because we care about the people, we care about protecting the living things, and we wish to pursue lofty goals which take place on time scales longer than our lifetimes.  A major goal is eliminating corruption that leads to waste and devastation.  OK maybe you aren't a treehugger but perhaps you can get on board with this anyway. 

2) Educational websites.  We are working on better efforts here to show people how to use this technology.  First round should be out within a month. 

3) Wallets.  We are working on better looking wallets for Windows and Android platforms at the moment.  We aim to have versions in English and 中文 added to app stores in this quarter. 

We also keep a special eye on litecoin in this year to see what we can learn.  Some decisions about scaling will have to be made eventually.   

Remember we are on a long term path here, so 慢走 ， take it easy, and enjoy the ride.  It won't be for another 15 years that the economics of a logarithmic supply release forces itself upon the bitcoin issuance plan of geometric release supply in a way that nobody can ignore.

So to sum up, I didn't have much to report, but happy new year! 

Lol, and the moon is made of fish eggs.  Balloons will never deflate and we know nobody ever eats without a spoon carved in the shape of Qetzlcoatl.