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Since I added a Hebrew translation (starting with 0.6.0), I received multiple complaints that the client now defaults to Hebrew and that this is unwanted. There is no clear indication of how to change the language (which I now know to be with the -lang parameter). The default language is decided by the dates format rather than the OS interface language (I would have complained too, if I had bothered to change the format when I installed the OS).
Do similar complaints exist in other languages? Maybe the problem is more pronounced for Hebrew because of the non-latin characters and the right-to-left direction (which QT doesn't handle properly, and even if handled properly doesn't mix well with some technical terms).
How can this problem be resolved? A few possible solutions, which I don't know if are technically possible:
1. Make the default language derive from the OS interface language.
2. Allow choosing the language on installation, and changing it from the GUI.
3. Document the -lang parameter more prominently.
4. Default to English and let the user change it if wanted.
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Very nice. Any opportunity to accurately spread the word of Bitcoin is a good thing. Do you think you can attract a lot of Hebrew people?
That's the plan, we'll just have to see how it works out. I'm not too up-to-date on the Hebrew-speaking populations, which I shall assume for the moment only exist mainly in Israel. What are the demographics of them in terms of technical ability, wealth, etc? It would be interesting to know in what way this could affect Bitcoin adoption, because I know that Israel in general does have many intelligent and skilled people. Yeah, more or less just Israel. Top-notch technical ability and innovation, good wealth, education etc. Often a bit skeptical mindset. There was a widely publicized "social protest" thing here lately which could suggest people are ready for economical change, but not necessarily in a way that would favor Bitcoin (eg, demands for more government intervention in equalizing rich/poor). |
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Very nice. Any opportunity to accurately spread the word of Bitcoin is a good thing. Do you think you can attract a lot of Hebrew people?
That's the plan, we'll just have to see how it works out. |
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Glad this isn't controversial...
Who said so? I basically disagree with your post. While it may be argued that quantitatively, running and using services that accept Bitcoin payments is more effective than donations, donations serve multiple purposes. 1. Even if all the donation amounts to is A buying bitcoins, donating to B, B selling bitcoins, this creates more volume in the market which improves stability. 2. Donating bitcoins encourages organizations to start or continue accepting Bitcoin donations, which in turn has advantages listed below. 3. An organization stating that they accept Bitcoin donations helps more people to learn about Bitcoin. 4. Referring to a popular charity indicating that it accepts Bitcoin donations reinforces the sense of its general acceptance and legitimacy. 5. Donations are a powerful use case for Bitcoin, and actually applying it is a good demonstration for its capabilities. 6. After enough time of receiving Bitcoin donations, the charity might be inclined to take a closer look at Bitcoin, and to start reducing costs by using Bitcoin to pay for goods and services directly. 7. Current possibilities for using Bitcoin are limited, which causes some people to simply sell their bitcoins; a charity accepting Bitcoin gives another option for using them, which may cause some people to donate them (with the above advantages) rather than sell them. This, in turn, increases the confidence that any future bitcoins gained will be useful. tl;dr: The main thing missing for Bitcoin is network effects. Larger network = good. |
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I haven't issued dividends on GLBSE 2.0 yet, is there more than 1 way to do so? I could imagine at least "pay every share I don't own" and "pay every share" to be useful depending on the ownership situation. It might be the case that only payments to shares you don't own yourself get logged though...
There's only an option for "pay every share I don't own", although I've lobbied multiple times for "pay every share" and/or "pay given amount per share". Because of this, I transfer all new bonds to my main account and sell them from there. So it will always look like all bonds were sold, but you can generally determine how many were sold based on the asks. Not entirely sure this table is a fair comparison: some of these things are bonds, other are shares.
For example : a cognitive share encompasses ownership of a bunch of FPGA cards
*and* its hashing power whereas a PURE share entitles you just to the hashing power
and nothing else.
It almost sounds like you're suggesting a share at a given hashrate is superior to a bond, where as far as I can see it's the opposite (though that depends on what factors exactly you take into consideration, fees and elec costs on one hand and optimization on the other). With shares multiple risks are passed on to investors, such as mining variance, downtime, hardware failures, and single-sided liquidation. With a bond the issuer absorbs all risks, so the price should be higher. The ownership of hardware is moot for most companies because they do not offer trading shares for hardware. |
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Even if the total network hashrate remains fixed, difficulty adjustments of ~5% are to be expected simply due to randomness.
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I will issue 2000 new bonds later this week.
I've also updated the asset details, and poked Nefario wrt identification.
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The above is a translation of an article I wrote for the occasion of launching the Israel Bitcoin community website. I thought it was pretty good, so I made it available here as a resource for anyone looking for ways how to present Bitcoin to newcomers. |
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Have you ever gone abroad and had to mess with exchanging money to the local currency?
Have you faced bureaucracy and headaches dealing with banks over relatively simple operations?
Did it ever happen that you needed to send someone money, but had no simple way to do it?
Do you find it wrong that when you buy online, the amount the seller receives is significantly lower than what you pay?
Have your credit card details been stolen as a result of breaking into businesses to which you had paid in the past?
If you answered yes to any one of these questions, or one of many similar questions, you may realize that the existing systems for managing funds and payments are far from perfection. If there exists a system with the potential to solve many of these problems, you will surely be happy to hear about it.
Such a system exists. Introducing - Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. Currency, because it is a medium of exchange - you can work or offer goods and services to receive bitcoins in return, and in turn pay bitcoins for goods and services in which you are interested. Digital, because it needs no representation as a tangible object - its natural habitat is computers and the internet. Decentralized, because there is no central body that issues it, controls it or is in charge of supporting it - all of these are done collectively by a peer-to-peer computer network that anyone can be a part of.
What is so great about that? Merely being digital solves many of the difficulties in holding it and transferring it. One can store bitcoins on his personal computer, thus obviating the need to deal with clumsy financial institutions, and one can back it up to prevent loss, or encrypt it to prevent theft. One can pay using it to anywhere in the world through the internet, with minimal fees determined on a competitive market, which are comparable to the low cost of the computational resources required to process the transaction. Since Bitcoin is secure by its nature, there is no need to pay for expensive systems to secure the transfer, or to give personal details (which could be stolen) to make a payment.
Since it is decentralized, there is no necessity to rely completely on one entity to do its job faithfully, and there is no danger that negligence or malice on its part will cause harm to the users of the currency. There is no worry that a technical problem will suspend activity, or that the issuer will decide to charge extortionate fees for the service that everyone depends on. In addition to the practical advantages, there is an ideology behind the personal empowerment derived from the ability to manage one's funds independently, without being absolutely dependent on any bank, government or payment company.
These advantages, and in particular the lack of need to deal with the question of "who will be the one to control the world's one currency", gives Bitcoin the ability to be an international currency with widespread use all over the world, and then it is no longer needed to exchange currency to conduct international business. Even if there are several digital currencies, converting between them will be simpler than with today's prevalent currencies.
Bitcoin has much more to offer, but here we should simply refer to the article dedicated to this topic, "Why do we need this, anyway?".
When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It's no wonder, then, that enthusiastically explaining the revolution Bitcoin is to bring often leads to suspicion. How does this work anyway? Can it really live up to all it promises? Is it a scam? Is it a fad? Is it really different from everything that existed so far? Why did it only recently come into being? Why would a virtual item with no official backing have value?
It is worth noting that the reason there was never something like Bitcoin so far (as opposed to many centralized digital currencies), is that no technical means was known to solve in a distributed way the "double-spending" (using the same coin to pay twice) problem of digital currencies. The first such solution was conceived in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (pen name), who also wrote the original paper presenting the system (also available translated to Hebrew) and the first version of the Bitcoin software.
Bitcoin has existed for over three years. It's working, and you can install an open source software to receive and send bitcoins. The total value of all existing bitcoins, at the time of this writing, is 42 million US dollars, and there are hundreds of businesses in all domains accepting Bitcoin payments. Many professionals with the skills to analyze the system believe it can live up to the expectations, and entrepreneurs are working on varied projects in the new economy forming. Many of the alleged problems are easily debunked myths.
Bitcoin is far from being a finished project. It is a very flexible system with the potential to serve many needs, but there is still much work to be done to build the infrastructures that will allow fulfilling it (and there are people doing this work). It is not yet certain what is the optimal way for the system to overcome the challenges that lie ahead, but many ideas exist to upgrade Bitcoin's way of operation that will be examined as required, and there is no reason to think that Bitcoin will not continue to work successfully. That said, the main challenges are not technical, but rather have to do with the undefined legal status resulting from its revolutionary nature, and resistance by interested parties who have roots in the current financial system.
Bitcoin is a currency standing on its own and is not tied to the traditional currencies. Due to this, the value of each bitcoin, originating from the quantity of Bitcoin usage in commerce, changes according to the market conditions. The uncertainty about future trends creates significant volatility, which could make it harder to trade using this currency. As Bitcoin becomes more established, these fluctuations will become milder.
If this catches your interest, all that is left to learn about Bitcoin more, and more and more - there is a lot to learn. In English there are many resources, including the project's main site, a wiki, a forum and a Q&A site. In Hebrew there is content on this site and much more will be written, including:
Why do we need this, anyway?
Why you should invest in Bitcoin
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Yes, this is known.
Buys and sells are symmetrical, and the fee is 0.6% for each side for each operation. Why would you assume the fee is only for buying?
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I guess that's one way to look at it. To me a bonus implies that every share I mine during the bonus period gives me on average 101.25% PPS.
it also makes implementation easier since no rescaling would be required whenever they decide to change their donation %. You can parametrize the calculation in a way that will not require an explicit rescaling when changing the average fee to do what I described. |
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Hm. Money may not have been considered in the original design, but motivated attackers were. A volunteer platform is different to a monetized platform, but I don't think introducing money changes the threat model for existing components, or at least not in the way you seem to think it would.
The question is, motivated to do which attack? I can understand protection of the secrecy of the data. But without consideration of money, I don't see how protection against faking work would be up to snuff. But as I said before, I know very little about Tahoe-LAFS. I described the kind of issues it will have to deal with, if it's up to the task, more power to it. |
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I'd not thought of looking at the expectation of the average maturity time over N. Does it make sense to graph it as a function of N? I want to use whichever measure will be the most intuitive to understand.
Yes. I guess "average maturity time at round N" will be simpler. |
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You are assuming that the miner and the double-spender are not the same person. I send payment to a merchant; I make a double-spend transaction and keep it to myself; I try to mine a block (using my own or rented hashrate) with both transactions. If I'm not the first to find a block I end up paying normally, but if I am, I get to keep the sent amount. This exploit can be used in conjunction with the Finney attack (waiting until I have a block before sending payment). Even if the idea has merit, it is a fundamental change to the design principles of Bitcoin. A potential solution for "limbo" tx in general is a kill or fill value. If not included by block x, the tx is void.
Theymos said (and I'm sure he didn't make that up) that it is impossible to make transactions that are only valid if included up to block x, because this is not invariant to reorgs. A transaction can be included and the receiver thinks his payment is secure, then there is a reorg where this transaction doesn't appear, and it can't be added to a new block because it's too late. |
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I don't think the rescaling is required. The bonuses were meant to be applied for the rounds mined in. So, if you were going to get 1 BTC with DGM, you'd get 1.0125 BTC instead. It was easily accomplished with DGM without having to add any extra bonus code by increasing f by that amount, which would be the same as increasing the DGM payout by that amount since f isn't involved in calculating the score payout = (exp(lS-ls)*(r-1)*(1-f))/p.
The bonus you're referring to is for the lifetime of the share, which isn't how we're defining bonus (and I don't think most people would define it that way either), though what you're referring to is probably more fair and isn't exploitable.
I guess that's one way to look at it. To me a bonus implies that every share I mine during the bonus period gives me on average 101.25% PPS. |
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Hmm, I think the change combined with the earlier lucky blocks probably made the payment less than it would have been than if nothing had been changed? Wouldn't it cause the lucky blocks to stick around for longer when otherwise they may have been "passed" by the share count?
It would be the other way around. Increasing c should make for a more rapid recovery from previous luck. |
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Finding the expected maturity time at round N is easy enough - as you say with a normal approximation (equivalent to a Brownian motion model) it's simply sqrt (N/(2Pi)), and the graphs match that. I thought it would be interesting to look at the expectation of the average maturity time in rounds 1 to N, but that's harder so the former would suffice.
(Edit: Actually, since expectation is linear, the expected average over 1-N is just the average of the expectation over 1-N, which is roughly 2/3 of the expectation at N. The pmf, though, is probably difficult.)
I think the explanation could use some more detail.
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