Wouldn't work. The knapsack problem solver user to select coins is stochastic (uses rand()), therefore the coins selected from the wallet are really random for each call.

You can probably propose a change where a rand() is replaced with some pseudo-random algorithm that seeds of some explicit value and therefore is 100% reproducible.

Satoshi bitcoin client is a dream thing to pull the accounting fraud.

No, it doesn't. My short example assumed that the "client" maintains the current integrated architecture. If you want to split it between wallet-less "bitcoind" and block-chain-less "bitcoinui" then you have to explicitly specify which protocol you are going to use between the two halves. You cannot just hide behind a row of dashes. It has to be a two-way communication protocol that handles (a) receiving coins (b) sending coins (c) chain extension (d) chain reorganization (e) all other miscellaneous tasks most importantly "getwork" for mining. So far nobody had made any workable proposal. There is some sketch by Genjix & friends: http://bitcoinconsultancy.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/

I was hoping that someone will critique (or at least criticize) my suggestions. In any case I'm going to try to poke holes in my own arguments:

1) Find how OpenCL deals with recursion manually converted to iterations with continuations and explicit stack.
2) I recall that during Pentium processor recall somebody posted bit-by-bit accurate implementation of Intel floating point in Mathematica, complete with a flag to simulate the Pentium flaw. I'll see if I can port that to OpenCL.

I need to learn a bit of OpenCL and experience its strengths and limitations first hand.

Interesting link, albeit pretty much content-free. I'm going to have to assume two things:

1) "gamers" were actually CS students on the BSc or MSc track.
2) "gamers" didn't have the attitude "lets fuck big pharma if they give us a chance"

Here we have a crowd developing a revolutionary financial solution and the prevailing attitude is: fuck accountants and the GAAP-horse they rode on. I think I know how that is going to end: they lawyer will tell them that the only words they are allowed to speak are: "Yes, your honor!". It is very much similar to the new drivers who only learn how to drive after they had to stand before the judge.

I haven't worked with anyone from entertainment industry background for many years. But from the past I remember well that there were clear distinction between at least two groups:

A) those who could persuasively discuss the drawbacks and benefits of duo-quaternions and 4-by-4 homogenous matrices.
Z) those who had very twitchy fingers and traded rants: "OpenGL rules and you are paid MSFT shill!" vs. "DirectX rules and you are SGI troll!".

Do you (or any one else here) have an idea or suggestion how the game development community separates wheat like (A) from the chaff like (Z)?

I predict that for Bitcoin in the USA (and other countries with adversarial legal system) this is going to be decided by the courts. All it takes is some not-bug-but-feature change in the block acceptance algorithm and somebody with enough bitcoin on the orphaned side of the chain that will get sufficiently pissed off.

My crystal ball shows a lot of billable hours for the vulture lawyer partnerships.

I have a semi-constructive proposal. There has been a lot of whining and quarter-baked proposals floating about changes and improvements to the Satoshi client. It is hard to judge whether these proposals are made by incompetent programmers or just programmers that haven't thoroughly reviewed the code and its architecture.

To save the further anguish I propose that anyone who wants to be treated seriously should explain how his proposed improvement will deal with the following pseudo-code (from wallet.cpp & ui.cpp):

CWallet::SendMoney() {
    grab_the_wallet_lock();
    solve_inverted_knapsack_problem_to_select_the_best_coin_subset();
    fee = compute_the_required_transaction_fee();
    yesno = ::ThreadSafeAskFee(fee);
    commit_transaction_and_release_lock(yesno);
}

Basically, show us that you know how to solve the inversion of control problem that is posed by this code. For extra credit, show us that your modification will deal properly with chain reorganization while waiting inside the UI for the user to accept the fee.

If you don't know how to solve those problems please send your proposal to /dev/null or nul:, as the case may be.

I think John Smith did a feat of software engineering comparable to doing a successful face transplant on a Frankenstein.

JDBound, sorry for the belated post. If you are interested in the countries that descend their legal system from the Roman Law, then you should search the web and book catalogs for the Roman legal term: "depositum irregulare" or with different spelling "depositum irregularae".

Actually the better turn of phrase would probably be: selling "phantom securities" or "ghost securities".

Hi again, SolidCoin developers!

After a dinner I came up with another two ideas:

1) Instead of evaluating a total recursive function over a commutative ring of integers you could try a simpler thing. Require evaluating a specific value of primitive recursive function over the field of reals that has fractional dimension. Good starting example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

just pick the value of r that is in the chaotic region.

Implement reals as long double that is 80-bit (10-bytes) on the Intel/AMD CPUs. Not all the C++ compilers really support long double, but the logistic map function is so trivial that you can include in-line assembly which will be in the order of 10 lines.

2) This is a variant of the above that embraces the enemy instead of fighting it. Implement (1) with reals as cl_double which is supported in OpenCL by NVidia cards but not by AMD cards. Then short AMD stock and go long NVDA for additiona gains.

Again, good luck!

Hi SolidCoin developers!

Take the Gavin Andresen challenge.

Your weapon against OpenCL will be recursion. Implement something along the suggestions of JoelKatz where MESS() is a highly recursive function. I don't have my textbooks of the computability theory anywhere near, but I would suggest to start your search for an appropriate candidate with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_function

In the worst case the OpenCL vendors will come up with greatly improved implementations.

Good luck!

Reading this thread it occured to me that bitcoin already has one killer application: Satoshi bitcoin client can be an excellent way to judge the competence of the applicants for a C++ programming job.

It is open source and it is fairly short. Yet its architecture is such convoluted that can be an excellent means of judging the advanced programming skills. Example: just ask an applicant what would it take to convert the wxWidgets/QT user interface to a http+ajax one. Or ask what would be required to implement a multiple wallets. Or ask to estimate the time required to replace BerkeleyDB with say Oracle.

Mad props to John Smith for having enough understanding of both UI toolkits to execute this change single-handedly.

Look, there's no polite way of telling someone that they are loosing touch with reality.


I only wrote about inconsistent use of big-endian and little-endian values in the protocol. This is pretty much it. It is a non-controversial issue, core developers pretty much agree with it, but consider it very low priority.

Perhaps if you sit with a friend and read the history of my posts, you'll understand that.

Perhaps you won't do anything like that, and you will continue seeing the world as filled with two kind of people: good (bitcoin supporters) and bad (attackers of bitcoin).

I feel that you are on your way to become another logansryche.

I'm not aware of anything like this. Fuckedcompany.com was a prominent fixture of the first dot-com buble. This is where I first read John Nagle's analyses. Its maintainer Phillip "Pud" Kaplan made a number of technical errors and all the archives are lost forever. I'm afraid that simply you had to be there or you had to know somebody who was there. Only a lore remains, you could probably search for mentions of "Bay Aryan", the premier satirist in that community.

It is probably a little bit of each. Please bear in mind that my personal slant is European Union and non-English languages, not the USA and other English-speaking countries. As far as fraud the cases I know were settled under civil law, not criminal, and as such are under seal.

I mean, I fully agree with Chodpaba that bitcoin isn't a "blue chip stock" nor it is "noble metal commodity". It is some sort of synthetic security that could be tradable (and probably will be traded) using the OTC BB rules (or their equivalent). But I don't see this happening under the stewardship of the current "core development group".

Weird. The whole first page of Google search about "probability mechanics" is related to Star Trek and some conspiracy theory blog Above Top Secret.

Chodpaba, have you warped or wormholed to our universe from some other one?

Or is the "probability mechanics" a title of some discontinued elementary statistics textbook?

No, actually I'm speaking mathematically.

What you call "rhetorical correlation", I'll call correlation to the events that are assigned "tail" probability in your models (2% 5%). In other words, your model is 98% or 95% of the time correct. When it isn't correct it will create loses on the same order of magnitude like the profits you are creating.

Price of BTC in USD simply doesn't obey the assumptions of "law of large numbers". This is the common fallacy of using linear statistics in finance.

And I'm with John Nagle. The security itself is provably quite uncorrelated. But the promotional activities that sorround it are highly correlated with the "caveat emptor" section of pink sheets.

http://www.otcmarkets.com/otc-101/otc-market-tiers
http://www.otcmarkets.com/otc-101/caveat-emptor

I particularly like that they have a special logo for that tier of securities:
I edited to correct the links.

This is exactly what I'm talking about:


The emotions inhibit understanding. I haven't met you nor anyone else on this forum.

This whole fracas reminds me of the good old days of fuckedcompany.com. I remember marketing executives making emotional pleas in the same style as yours: intentionally distorting their mother's tongue. Commenters were joking "shiftless!", "undercapitalized!". After months of back and forth the dirty laundry was finally taken out for everyone to see. The public psychoanalysis of those well-known executives was really interesting and educational: this is an early warning sign.

The whole psychology of this is really worth studying.

I've met investors, I've met gamblers and I've met investors who occasionally liked to gamble. Your way of arguing puts you in my opinion clearly in the gambler group. It is hard to argue with somebody, whose emotions are so tightly wrapped up that his heart aches anytime somebody says something unfavorable about your beloved bitcoins.

If you maybe try to untangle your emotions a bit you'll notice that when people talk about bitcoins, they actually talk about different things:

1) bitcoin as an abstract idea and its current valuation in terms of FIAT currencies: I talked next to nothing about this
2) bitcoin as implemented by the "Satoshi client": I talked a lot about this, I consider this implementation very bad, and the sooner somebody else implements full bitcoin protocol in a clear, modular and understandable way, the better it will be for everyone with exception of scammers and various guerilla-job-safety-C++-programmer types.
3) bitcoin as represented by its promoters and supporters: I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.
4) something other that I neglected to think of.

Anyway, the Bitcoin Disneyland is now open: https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/ . There the threads that may hurt your feelings are clearly marked ATTACK ON BITCOIN. Bitcoin enthusiasts and supporters have now option to play amongst themselves in a safe environment that is professionally moderated by one of its own.

I think blkindex.dat already contains something close to what you are describing. The internal structure used is a B-tree (if I recall correctly, the Oracle DB Documentation website is down at the moment). As you can see the blkindex.dat is about 1/3 of the size of the raw blockchain.