I forked a digression on DRK vs XMR warez to address what the author said about transhumanism.

Terminology notes
1. Transhumanism is more than mind upload - mind upload is only a subset of transhumanism and, as it goes for any complex thinking, not all transhumanists agree with mind upload of even consider it feasible.
2. Transhumanism is about improving human through technology. What defines an improvement is of course a subject of large debate (what defines human also - Juan Enriquez gave a great talk about future speciation of mankind and of course antispecism comes into play too: what about uplifted animals, artificial intelligences and advanced simulations). Usually, improvement is considered as the opposite of medicine: medicine helps someone falling below what the society considers as a standard of performance (mobility, sensing, acting, etc.) to come back to this standard (prosthesis, glasses, psychotherapy, etc.) whereas transhumanism aims to outreach this said level (better, stronger, faster than the average human, but also different, as in being able to enjoy a magnetic sculpture or see the ultraviolet, live more than 120 years, thought access to machines for more than just compensating tetraplegy, adapting to lack of food, extremes in temperature or various (extra-)planetary conditions, like zero-g adaptation and any kind of panspermia)
3. An extended definition of transhumanism deals also with societal consequences of such adaptation. 3D printing, unfriendly AI (read Elon Musk on it and if you want more in-depth material than just a warning,
Eliezer Yudkowsky's, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk as well as http://intelligenceexplosion.com), post-scarcity society (including reputation-as-a-money, a topic where cryptos 2.0 are of great importance)
I wrote a progressive introduction to transhumanism that you may find interesting: progressive introduction to transhumanism… and beyond (English version at the end)

Now that this preamble on terminology is done, let's go to the heart of the topic.

Cloning is done on a daily basis - read about equine cloning (for whole living creatures) or about the future of organ transplants (use sterm cells to clone a healthy version of your liver). The main barrier for human cloning is ethical, not technological (I am not 100% sure, but I think humans embryos have been cloned, then destroyed pretty quickly - the whole thing was illegal, but illegal != technologically impossible)

Perfect copy (including the mind) is another matter. First, we don't know what is the mind, the consciousness. It may be possible that perfect cloning is impossible if the mind is stored at a quantum level, but this also is unknown. Assuming perfectly digitizing a mind and creating a convincing emulation of the body are possible, the issues at hand would be about identity. Two of the most important issues are

• continuation of identity. On this topic, I encourage you to read about the Theseus' paradox (a.k.a. "Ship of Theseus") a question that Ancient Greeks already pondered, and to also watch Vanilla Sky for how continuation of identity is possible as long as it is progressive (which is the whole point of the Theseus' paradox). Or, more simply, consider how you continue to see your desktop PC as "your PC" when you only change one component at a time (this is especially true if your PC has a name, which is a common occurence among real geeks - a category to wich I consider I belong, so this is not derogatory)
• multiple copies. Contrary to the analog world where perfect copy is nigh-impossible, perfect copy is central to the digital world. It is also hugely disruptive for any society as long as more than one is active at the same time (if it is not, this is simply a backup). I recently started a conversation about how the double-spending-proof nature of the blockchain might solve this issue - there is a reason why there are so many h+ in crypto.

You fall to the classical no-growth fallacy (watch AlBartlett on this). That is, not taking into consideration that new resources bring new uses (this also explain why altcoins exist, by the way: since there is a new resource, the "clone" button on Git, then new uses, the altcoins, are possible). We won't sit à 0.0000001% forever.
Horror vacui (nature abbhors vacuum). Like a perfect gas expands untils it fills a container, a digital entity would use its computing power until it reaches 99% (100% being considered impossible). But I grant that we have no idea what it could do with all of this power, much like a dog has no idea how what we can do with your brain power.

I welcome everyone, transhumanist or not, to share his thoughts about these topics and others.

Bobbax, suggestion:
A "summary of profits". For each coins, detail of profits (or losses). Example

Profit since (registration date): +45
Gambling: -3
Investing: +53
Donating: -5

Granted, donating is not morally a loss (one may argue this is a win), but technically, this is still a negative.

Thanks for considering it!

I hope you don't mean all of your XMR are on an exchange.

Already happened

The concept of gauging you opponents' level and to avoid being "so smart that you fail" is more generic than poker. That was my concern by then: pretending to make a dumb move so that the opponent gets worried because it is so dumb that there must be a catch; but if your opponent did not even realised you are smart enough to not commit such a dumb move and simply think you are dumb, then your strategy falls flat. Try to explain that when you are 8-9 years old.

Exactement "Is it true?" is on old joke of us, back when Bytecoin was still a (semi-)thing. BCN shills where using this phrase to FUD ("I heard that Monero is a scam... is it true?" - that sort of thing).
Thanks to you, cAPSLOCK, I learnt a word. Even today, almost 30 years after the facts, I remember how I was trying to explain what I now know is levelling to my schoolmates, when I was at the primary school (and at that time, it was not poker, it was marbles. Good old time...

Either or 1) he is afraid 3) he just have a personality disorder https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-online-secrets/201409/internet-trolls-are-narcissists-psychopaths-and-sadists

I like the idea and expanded upon it on the official forum: xmr.to in the wallet.

I wrote a feature request on the official forum. Out of the feature itself, I believe it could foster innovation and help unofficial wallet differenciate themselves from the official wallet (in more than "just" having a GUI).

The post is here: https://forum.monero.cc/6/ideas/175/subaccount.

In order to both raise interest and encourage to post on the official forum instead of bitcointroll.org, I provide only an except:

Read more at subaccount

I was level 24 (I donated XMR). How did I went down level 18?


Update: it may be because of a change in calculation in 1.1.6 (Points level table)

Suggestion: automatically adjust COIN_BTC_VALUE according to weight average on a 1 month period.

Crypto-Kingdom's logo, by fluffypony and his designer



You can also comment on it on the moneroeconomy forum
http://moneroeconomy.com/forum/crypto-kingdom-logo

True to my importance policy, a dedicated ck subforum will be created (and existing threads move to it) if there is enough demands (read: threads). Until then, you can create ck-related threads on the general discussions forum.

As a remainder moneroeconomy is the site for every ventures related to monero and his handled by the Monero Economy Workgroup (whereas getmonero.org is the official website and deals with the cryptocurrency itself and his handled by the core team).

And Kudos to to still be here too

Seven core team members, 3 academic cryptographers and mathematicians, half-a-dozen deeply involved coders - consider 15. No one is fulltime, most are not even paid at all. No stated release date, by design, although we hinted during the http://dogecoindark.net/radio/ interview at "before the end of 2015" for the GUI wallet (some other things will be released in between, and not only the DB).

Marketing is done slowly because marketing a command line utility with few B2B solutions at present is an exercice in futility. Main marketing for now is word-of-mouth, which is the most realiable way to avoid disappointment (one only makes one first impression).

Also, we are trying to transition to http://forum.monero.cc for this reason:


The 4.5 (!) hours-long interview for Dogecoindark Radio was great but also extenuating. A summary will be available as soon as Rick (from Dogecoindark Radio) edits it (this week-end). Also, once the organisator of CoinFest 2015 have released the video of our talk there, we will publish some additional promotional material.

HyperLoan round 6: My mistake, I did not send the HyperLoan for quite some time. I will resume soon and everyone on the waiting list will have his.

Hyper number 5 (dedicated to Lou Presstab): HyperDigest #5

A lot at happened since last entry in the HyperStake Development journal. A bit too much, I do not know where to start.
 
The price of stability
Price is stable which is good - of course those who bought much higher would prefer a higher price to recoup their losses, but the general interest is for stable price: less pain and you can still benefit but selling your stake, which encourage keepin in your wallet, thus strentghtening the network.
 
Enter the multisend
Multisend is finally here and it rocks.
 
Multisend http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC is the next step in HyperSend and the natural evolution of Stake4Charity. You can now send your stake to more than one address. Also, you are not limited to 50% or your stake anymore - all of it can be sent.
Remember to frequently sell to ensure liquidity (as well as profit) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.msg8905328#msg8905328
 
Multisend for the moment is only accessible though RPC calls. For more information, read hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki/Multisend
 
If you experience heavy CPU or bandwith usage, you now have two RPC calls (accessible from the debug console): strictprotocol and strictincoming. Information on how to use them on the wiki: http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC
 
HYP is government-immune
Speaking of that, I realised that HYP is protected against a menace that threatens most PoS, particularly non high-PoS: a government could subpoena exchanges and get the hold on the network. Subpoena can have "gag orders" which prohibits the said exchange to even say they received a subpoena, which would make the action completely unnoticed. In the end, the government would control the coin, because in most case, exchanges as a whole have more than 50% of the coins.
 
This is not the case with HYP. A very large majority of HYP is held in wallet. So HYP is effectively immune from governement-seizing thanks to the economical incentive to keep the coin in the wallet - which by the way means that cold staking could be a bad idea, security-wise.
 
OpenAlias comes to HYP
HyperStake is the very first Bitcoin-based coin that implements OpenAlias (only with a bot for the moment). OpenAlias is a neat feature that make sending coin easier. This is a originally a Monero development and it is a big deal. Yesterday, Bitcoin become the second coin to accept it, since the PR for Electrum had been accepted (Electrum is a Bitcoin wallet which doesn't require to download the blockchain - it also has mnemonic seed, another neat feature I expect to see on HyperStake one day) More information about OpenAlias here: https://monero.cc/talks/monerotalks-whatisopenalias.html
 
You can already donate to the development fund by going on IRC and either joinin #hyppero or contacting hyppero and use the following address: donate.hyperstake.com (no www, no http, just this)
 
HYP saves they day
Presstab discovered an exploit that affect most PoS coins. Despite the tremendous security of HYP, it was still possible to use a "timedrift" (different from timewarp) to generate more coins than allowed. It was solved in a matter of day but unfortunately required a hard fork, so we are still recovering since not everyone is on the right chain at the moment. Still, it had been solve very fast. As someone wrote:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.msg10492461#msg10492461
 
A potential bad salad situation was handled well.
 
A article was published on bitcoinist.net: http://bitcoinist.net/interview-presstab-pos-vulnerabilities/
 
Going testnet
We learnt from this lesson. We decided to create a testnet and now HYP has its own testnet to evaluate new features or anticipate exploit. This is a big step, because most coin do not have a testnet. To move to testnet, you should open a second wallet with the following instructions:
 
Reduce your load
If you experience heavy CPU or bandwith usage, you now have two RPC calls (accessible from the debug console): strictprotocol and strictincoming. Information on how to use them on the wiki: http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC
 
We also have, in beta, a feature called liteStake:
"liteStake beta: Previously the staking process would continuosly rehash the same hashes over and over, needlessly taking up valuable CPU power. HYP added a std::map that tracks the block height and the last time the wallet hashed on this height. Depending on your staking settings, the wallet will not begin a new round of hashing until after a certain amount of time has passed, or a new block is accepted. This means that there will be 1-5 seconds of CPU hashing once every minute, compared to continuous CPU hashing."
 
We at a time considering change some algo for a lighter one. Eventually, we decided not to, because the most significant one was already SHA256, which is particularly light. So this would have been a lot of work for only a low return.
 
There is too much to summarize here. That's the price of not updating the HDJ often enough. So browser the ANN https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849 and scan ##hyperstake and ##hyperstake-dev for latest info!

Pre-ann for CKG. The same week as we release the 23rd missive, publish the website and have our first physical talk about Monero (at Coinfest Estonia 2015), which material coming soon.

Hold on to your XMR... and your CKG.

A summary of wallets
(took several hours to get something remotely usable)

For those for prefer some no-nosense HTML: https://xmrmonero.com/news/choose-your-wallet

Detailled summary of the Missive #23 on the official forum

Some things I did not understand - make sure to correct.

A bug on the forum prevents me to add it, I already created a bug report

For closed-source, I will add a column (this is only for mymonero so far and I will add a mention that it will ultimately be open-sourced). I won't do it with the present BBCode, because this is horrible to edit, Markdown is much better (essentially because you can insert HTML in Markdown)

API/RPC column: it would require more than a yes/no, right? Because not every software would accept any API/RPC

Similarly, I will add an OpenAlias column

Since this is a lot of colum, I will pivot the table, with one column per wallet (instead of one row, presently)

I will correct for cryptonote - mere oversight, when copying/pasting, thanks

Volunteers needed to create subtitles and summary. Effort go here: https://forum.monero.cc/1/news-and-announcements/161/monday-monero-missives-23-february-23rd-2015 (let's make this "moving away from bitcointalk" a reality)

Updated. Thanks Quicken.