Yeah. That would indeed be quite a machine.

But realistically speaking. Sooner or later SHA256 will be "cracked".(or we will be able to find collisions as pooya87 defined cracking in this case) And it wont require earth sized supercomputer to do it.

If you study the history of cryptography, it is full of examples of ciphers that were "impossible" to break, whose cracking would take longer than the age of the universe etc. And they have all been cracked. And it did not take billions of years to break any of them 
Why would it be different this time?

Substitution cipher was impossible to crack
Enigma was impossible to crack
and many many others.

Yeah. if you have to brute force (almost) anything it takes forever, but there will always be a shortcut. We just don't know it yet.


 

I am an optimist. So to me anything is possible

Physics laws that are proved by noting that no process in the nature has ever been observed to conflict them are not very convincing.
Maybe they are true, maybe not. Nature is quite simple, and humans can be quite ingenious when inventing new things

"laws" that prevent people even trying to invent new things because they are thought "impossible" can be too restricting. What if the law is wrong. Terrible thought.

But yes I agree. there seems to be nothing interesting in the video that was linked in the beginning of the thread. And the same applies to all the other similar videos too.

My vote goes to:
Legalize it, but only for medical use needing a doctors prescription.

Many people say it is harmless, but I have personally seen 2 people, who overused it, probably daily.
First ones behavior changed and he became very lazy and relaxed.  (that's not too bad)

The second one became seriously paranoid. Suspecting everyone including her true friends of planning and doing bad things to her.  Which also made her aggressive. I think that is  rare reaction, but it happens.


 

Interesting 
How does the network work when blocks are found every second?
There has to be crazy amounts of lost blocks.

I don't think blockchain is designed to handle 1s blocktimes very well.

The 10min average block time was among other things set to solve problems that can and do happen when several machines find blocks at the same time.

I have practised several martial arts

-Judo  (3 years)
-Jiu-jitsu (2 years)
-Hapkido (4 months)
-boxing (6 months, no contact, just bags, speed balls etc.)
-Capoeira  (2 years)

Of those, the best for fighting would be boxing, but the one with most fun and good memories is definitely Capoeira.
Our Capoeira teachers motto was:
"It has to be fun. If it is fun, people will come back and when they keep coming back they will learn."
And so it was. I wouldn't have ever stopped Capoeira, but our group was terminated

Currently not doing any martial arts, but it would be fun to start Capoeira again, if I just could find a good group.

Elon plans ahead. I believe he is planning to bore tunnels to Mars and Moon too.
Tunnels would make great safe and shielded living spaces.

That is one reason he converted the boring machines to run on electricity.
And one reason why BFR is so big.

Interesting find 

The "right" way to fix that would be to just add a check. Eg.  If nsubsidy < "than some value", then nSubsidy == 0
With this kind of a check the binary shift would not happen when it is not needed any longer.

Why would this need a hard fork? Couldn't it just be fixed in the next versions of core? After all it is just a bug, and repairing it wouldn't conflict with any other core implementation atleast in the next 250 years or so.

Interesting that all of you seem to agree with this.

I agree only partly. That is: Power can and will corrupt YOUNG people.
Older people who have already developed their personality and morale are a lot harder to corrupt.

I think it is interesting to follow news about people who have gotten money/power in their teens and see what they do and become. Most seem to lose it and maybe rediscover themselves in their thirties or something if ever.

Why would everyone have migrated to using something else, if the BIG break comes unexpectedly. Do you really think  NSA or whoever would publish that they can break a popular encryption.
AND that is of course the reason they would not crack bitcoin, because they would want to keep their ability a secret

Quantum Computer that is large enough would be bad for bitcoin, as it could get private key from your public key. But If you use bitcoin as recommended and you do not re-use your addresses, your public key is not visible, and even a big QC cant get your private key.

So if you use bitcoin as you should, your coins would still be safe.

Creating a bigger QC gets exponentially harder as the size increases. That is why building a QC big enough will take a lot of time, if it can ever even be made.
Googles QC was build for single purpose only and it is tiny  compared to what would be needed for cracking bitcoin. And also the calculation it made was quite different. It "proved" that something can't be done. Did it really prove that or were they a little optimistic at google? It is much easier to prove calculation to be correct, when you get a concrete result form it  

Also. QC would be really really bad at mining because SHA256 algorithm is considered quantum safe. Probably your laptop would be faster at mining than a QC

The real threat a large QC poses to bitcoin is the addresses that have their public keys visible. ALL of the big exchanges  keep their coins in addresses that are re-used, with visible public keys. And those addresses have loads of bitcoins. The 4 biggest ones have more than 100000BTC in each of them. That is more than 400000BTC. And lets not forget the 1M coins in Satoshi's addresses.
If someone steals all of them, that would make havoc to the value of bitcoin

Sorry if I understood wrongly, but:
Did you mean complexity of 2^128, as that is the complexity of cracking bitcoin with the best known non QC algorithm. And QC could not use that algorithm, so it would probably need the full 256 qubits to do the calculations.

As adding more qubits to a QC gets exponentially harder, I do not believe we will see a true 256 qubit QC for a long looong time, if ever.

According to what I have read about the subject, sha256 is not vulnerable to quantum computers.

There are many people, who do not trust NSA any longer, so I wouldn't be so sure that bitcoin would move to their quantum "proof" standard when they publish one

You don't need any spare parts. Here is a video showing how to repair laptop hinges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEW6Tw9T8cg

I repaired mine this way and it looks ok and works

and cost about 2$

Yep, OR because google published news about their working quantum computer, which was used to solve a problem that normal computers would take 10000 years to solve.

Yes, I do know it is not even close in being able to crack bitcoin, but such news can be worrying to some bitcoin holders.

Bitcoin value does reach to news as you would expect it to.

Bitcoin has almost always used address space of 2^160, and is still using it.

The only exception are those addresses that were created in 2009 (and 2010), that did have and still have an address space of  2^256.
Those addresses are the P2PK addresses. (P2PK= "pay to public key")

P2PK addresses have address space of 2^256, because there is only one public key that corresponds to one private key.

Raw food diet
When we were in raw food diet, We both lost about 1kg/week, (in the beginning), while eating as much vegetables and salads as we could.(and feeling full) My overall health & well being benefited too.

After a while we started to try to eat foods that had more calories in them, like nuts, bean sprouts and salad sauce with oil, etc.  to NOT lose more weight.

The hardest part was the first week or so, when we still had cravings for sugar and meat, but after that it was easy.

This book started it.
https://www.amazon.com/12-Steps-Raw-Foods-Dependency/dp/1556436513

I was on raw food for a year, but the health benefits lasted much much longer. I got rid of my allergy medication.

The drawbacks were:
 -eating out, where it was hard to get proper food. Raw food is not just salad, and the portions should be large.
 -my teeth did not like eating fruits so often. I had more cavities than normally.
 

That is true. There is no point in using SHA256 any longer, as SHA512 is faster in 64-bit processors

https://medium.com/@davidtstrauss/stop-using-sha-256-6adbb55c608

Even if what you need is 256-bit hash, you can still use the more secure SHA512, and just use the first 256-bits.

But in the end of 2008, when bitcoin was created, SHA256 was a good choise.

In addition to some of the previously mentioned series:

Stargate, Terranova, Jinn and HIMYM

There are no qualifications.
If you are entertaining and funny and make videos of interesting topics you will get viewers.

Sometimes the best teachers are not "experts" in their fields. I remember one really good teacher from school. HE wasn't a professional teacher. Just a sub. And he didn't even know the subject very well.
(he often said that he will check how it really is for the next lecture, which he did)

But he succeeded in making the subject interesting and real. Something other teachers couldn't do. He was a natural teacher.

Brilliant idea 

You do not need to have daily snapshots of it though. Even 6 months old snapshot would speed up the sync considerably.

Would be even better if you could make a pruned and zipped blockchain available, get a hash of it, and some other users verify that the pruned blockchain is correct. (how?)
Then new downloaders can trust with even higher certainty that it has not been tampered with.

 
  You can get only 14 points of activity in a 2 week period.
 
But don't worry your posts are not "gone" your activity will go up by 14 even if you post just one post during the next 2 weeks. (that is until your activity matches your post count.)