Yes, its all been obviously photoshopped.  The lengths these scammers go to

Maybe because Apple can't take a cut of the profits? Or maybe just because Apple are bastards.

We are expecting a large amount of media attention as the first customer passes through the doors of the branch. If anyone camps outside then I am sure we can help sort them a little reward 

Very nice photos. Congratulations to Danny and team.

Do we think we'll have claims this is all CGI? 

Is this really how it works in the US?

What a broken system. With this almost everyone would confess. I mean even I would confess if I where charged for laundering US$, if I had to choose between 15 days and maybe 25 Years, even though I never touched a US$ in my whole live and could basically proof my innocence.

What does anti-gay stance have to do with accepting or not btc?

Wattage is impresive indeed. But it's still 5W to dissipate from small 8x8 mm package. At least make it flip chip that most of heat can go thru top not bottom and PCB that is poor heat conductor.

EDIT: And please consider possibility of selling small batches of sample chips, like 10 chips.

NanoAkron, those are things I've thought of, too. but there is no way that such schemes can be implemented in bitcoin itself. The protocol can't change arbitrarily. what you're suggesting is at odds with TCP/IP. TCP/IP deals with unreliable communication over a scale free network (all nodes are equal). bitcoin depends crucially on long block times. Send some packets over random locations over the globe and you will see there will be a lot of statistical variance. Which is the reason why blocks exist (one can imagine geographically distributed blocks). TCP/IP only knows of nodes with IP addresses. You don't know where the node is (exact for datamining through approximation). For example people suggested changing the chain selection rule (GHOST). but all of the elements are carefully balanced, which makes the invention so ingenious.

That's true, they do. It's like a bigger variant of the hotel attack. So maybe the "reveal country and play geopolitics" wouldn't work well.

I thought of a couple of countermeasures but they decrease convenience a lot. One would be to find a way to do the time-spacing trick, perhaps by committing to a hash of some (derived?) data in the block chain, and then incorporating that and a block hash from N days later into the proof. However in the absence of AA it doesn't work, and most passports don't do AA, so that seems like a dead end.

The second is to have some random/semi/low trusted third party do a match between face and passport photo data (it can be extracted independently from the rest), in such a way that it's clear the owner of the passport is consenting to creating the fresh identity. That way attacks based on just grabbing someones data wouldn't work. Because matching two photos together perhaps with a MySpace style "salute" (write a code on a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera), is very easy, it could be a Mechanical Turk style microwork scheme. There's no need for the face-matching-person to know anything about who they are seeing. Accuracy could be measured and enforced by having other low-trusted third parties do random audits.

But that's very complicated and would take a lot of effort to set up. If Tor strongly suspected it was really being infiltrated by a lot of intelligence agency controlled nodes, it might become worth it. But otherwise I doubt it's worth it.

Note that ZKPOPs have use cases outside "how do we beat the government at sybil attacks". For instance, one reason porn sites hestitate to use Bitcoin is that they use credit cards as a form of age verification. Anonymous age verification, anti-spam systems, helping manage identities in end-to-end encrypted email ... there's lots of places where selectively revealed yet hard-to-forge identities would be useful.

How do you know your OS is not rooted? perfect backdoors are invisible. its hard to write a rootkit, but as they propagate its impossible to stop them. for example Zeus was a well-known Win rootkit. black hats can earn a lot of money (I assume), so there is the incentive. for the attacker it takes only one exploit, but the defenders have to cover all exploits. its not possible to write programs which defend all possible attacks. there is the idea you could use BTC in connection to compute cycles, but it seems unlikely that is workable in the near term. You can't write programs that prove that other programs are not malicious, which is connected to Turing's halting problem [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Great presentation. Thank you for sharing.

People need to realize that proof of work is a means to an end. A better system is possible if nodes are connected to identities.

It seems to me very unlikely than there will be an establishment of a global identity system which can't be corrupted. You might be able to prove you own a passport, but you can't prove you haven't stolen the passport. There is no key testing. Human markers (fingerprints, eye scan, genetic information) are unique and testable. Other information usually used to create a map person => identity are physical addresses and bank accounts

I believe the idea is that the ZKPOP can reveal the country that issued the passport, so when setting up your Tor circuit, you'd select relays from distinct countries.  Then a sybil attack against Tor would require international coordination of governments.

Though don't governments generally have access to lots of foreign passport scans from border crossings, airport, etc.?

Nope. A "confirmation" is a valid block with the transaction included, and a valid block includes a proof of work. The proof of work is far too valuable to waste trying to double spend in a bar.

Well, basically one creates 10^15 atoms, 10^6 atoms represent 1 share. (That's simply a display convention, for convenience.)

OBC represents 1 atom with 1 satoshi. But ITOG does not.


M. Sc. in applied math.

Its not how bitcoin works, but its an interesting concept. Instead of having the whole world verify blocks, one could somehow use nodes in some proximity. One could call it local web of trust.