They may not be able to run off with your money, but they can control other things such as prior restraint.
I don't understand this question in this context. It's a statement, I would be interested in your opinion of its validity. Try restating it so that I can parse it. Whats to stop them from blocking my account, or anything else that's not in my best interest? Who is 'them' in this context? If you mean the bitcoin bank, then the answer is nothing. Excepting, of course, that they lose a customer & they have no access to your funds, so there is no incentive for them to do so. |
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They may not be able to run off with your money, but they can control other things such as prior restraint.
I don't understand this question in this context. It's a statement, I would be interested in your opinion of its validity. Try restating it so that I can parse it. |
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Ok, so off-the-chain transactions is when Bob & Alice both use the same centralized third party but third party can't run off with money because of some multi-sig trickery.
Quiet nice, but its still centralization.
It's not really centralization because there can be many such third parties. The barrier to entry is low and the trust required is low. So resuming what i got from the Gavin's blog post: bitcoin developers don't know how to scale the project and Gavin proposes making off-the-blockchain tx's with the help of p2sh. Is this true? That's just one proposal. Basicly it's the same as what I proposed about a 'paypal' type company serving many members and keeping a single collective wallet, but in my case one has to trust the company that you are using to not be doing anything with the funds without your concent. In Gavin's proposal, they can't do anything with the funds without your consent, but neither can you without their's. I think that there are better ways, but this one would work. It would likely also permit bitcoin banking while also prohibiting fractional reserve bs. Ok, i get it, what i'm interested to know if a true p2p proposal exists. Someone must be working on it, or not?A solution will come, I'm sure about that. Bitcoin is the true p2p solution. If most people choose to use services to cut their own costs, this still will not prevent you or anyone else from starting their own client and running directly upon the main bitcoin network, or using an overlya such as Stratum. It's not an all or nothing system. You can favor p2p privacy and control and I can favor convience, speed & lower costs of transactions; and we don't affect one anothers' choices and we can still exchange with each other using bitcoin in many flavors. |
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Ok, so off-the-chain transactions is when Bob & Alice both use the same centralized third party but third party can't run off with money because of some multi-sig trickery.
Quiet nice, but its still centralization.
It's a matter of degree. Central banking today is what we're trying to avoid, and that is easily avoidable under bitcoin; no matter how many or how large a bitcoin banking cartel may grow in the future. |
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So, as long as there is more than one It's not centralization?
Whats to stop them colluding?
The threat of getting caught, mostly. If your customer base even starts to suspect you're doing strange things with their funds, one of them is going to start another server and your base is going to abandon you. They may not be able to run off with your money, but they can control other things such as prior restraint.
I don't understand this question in this context. |
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Ok, so off-the-chain transactions is when Bob & Alice both use the same centralized third party but third party can't run off with money because of some multi-sig trickery.
Quiet nice, but its still centralization.
It's not really centralization because there can be many such third parties. The barrier to entry is low and the trust required is low. So resuming what i got from the Gavin's blog post: bitcoin developers don't know how to scale the project and Gavin proposes making off-the-blockchain tx's with the help of p2sh. Is this true? That's just one proposal. Basicly it's the same as what I proposed about a 'paypal' type company serving many members and keeping a single collective wallet, but in my case one has to trust the company that you are using to not be doing anything with the funds without your concent. In Gavin's proposal, they can't do anything with the funds without your consent, but neither can you without their's. I think that there are better ways, but this one would work. It would likely also permit bitcoin banking while also prohibiting fractional reserve bs. |
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Ok, this is going beyond my understanding, sorry but let me go back a bit and noob ask...
So if the half+1 part of the nodes would still be active and unsplited, there would be no problems, but if it's the half-1 part is the one which stays active, when the other half+1 turns on it would invalidate the blocks generated during their blackout...? But if the machines regain electricity at different moments, the half-1 might overcome the other part?
Besides, please explain me how does the transactions embeded into the finally rejected blocks, get embeded in the new validated blocks? If so, this is awesome!
No, it has zero to do with the number of actual nodes. Yes, transactions that were orphaned by a split remerge will be reincorporated into a later block automagicly. |
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I would expect that both sides of the network would compute the next block with different difficulties, and when they reconverge,
1) Why just "both"? Consider a multi-way split. Nothing changes about the mathmatics in a more than 2 way split, beyond the odds of this actually occuring.
Edit: even in the 2-way split the majority can get unlucky and minority lucky. The difficulty doesn't simply follow the majority after the split.
The two sids would have to be very well balanced for the minority to come out ahead, and such an even split is unlikely. Even if such an astronomically unlikely event were to occur, nothing about the analysis changes except which side is the majority.
2) Game theoretic issues are: when building next block do I trust myself or do I trust the blocks of unknown provenance after the split?
This is decided by the network protocol, and it doesnt much matter which you 'trust' Whcich banch is going to be more profitable? Is there a profitable way of feeding "bait" blocks to the split-off portions of the network?
Sure, by double spending on both sides of the split. But splits can be detected, particularly if you are on the minority side, so wise vendors don't sell large ticket items during a network split. 3) Control theoretic issue is: reconvergence may take very long time, more than the default 6 dekaminutes and involve oscillations (flapping in the terminology of BGP route convergence).
You don't really understand what's happing here, do you? Do you even understand what you just wrote? |
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I wonder what America will have first, the metric system, high speed trains, a manned rocket space program, a tall skyscraper, or an economy that is built on industry rather than gambling? Because I know for sure we'll never have a NHS.
My money is on an economy built on industry, the 'Audit The Fed' bill passed out of committee... ...unanimously. |
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If the 10-minute gap is carefully synchronized to occur just before a retarget then we will have interesting problem in both game theory and control theory.
Could you elaborate on this point? I'm not too familiar with the intracacies of retargeting. I would expect that both sides of the network would compute the next block with different difficulties, and when they reconverge, the chain with the maximum cumulative difficulty would "win" and nodes would switch to that chain with that new difficulty (thus, if both chains have the same number of blocks generated since the split, the one with higher difficulty will win when they reconverge). You are correct. Such an attack is no more risky during a retarget. The simple result would be that the majority split would simply have a slightly higher difficulty, which is considering in the system's determination of which split in the chain has the greater total "length". |
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No. This, rather rediculous, scenario is functionally the same as a network split. The network protocol is quite 'split tolerant' and self healing upon reconnection. The only lasting risk of harm would be if the split lasted for more than 120 blocks, which after a split would take twice as long to occur, and even then the damage would be localized to those miners who managed to 'win' block solutions on the minority side of the split; because their blocks would be considered invalid by the majority chain and destroyed. Any valid transactions that were included into a minority side block would just be re-released into the newly reformed network as recent transactions, revalidated and put into a new block later.
Honestly, such network splits occur occasionally at random, and most people never notice.
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I'm European and as far as i know current USA health system is fail, if you can pay and you have an insurance then you are fine but if you are poor and without insurance then you can happily die that more or less no one care about you.
My mother-in-law needed a heart bypass a few years ago, and since she has been disabled since birth (blind) and not yet 55, she is not eligble for medicare or medicaid. She's covered under a SSI (Social Security Income, it's a seperate program) but they don't cover life threatening issues like that. Don't ask me why a government funded program for the health of disabled people wouldn't cover life threatening issues, but it didn't. She got the bypass, paid for by a charity that the heart surgen belonged to. The heart surgen did it for free, while the charity paid for everything else in the surgery room. The only thing that she has to pay for is her follow up visits, because the SSI won't even cover that. My wife & I paid for those ourselves. So even under federally funded social health care, the poor could happily die and the government not care about it; but a private charity ran by actual doctors will make up the slack for government fail. I have no faith that Obamacare will be better, or cheaper. Well here she would go to the hospital and they would just get everything she need. Heart bypass and whatelse, without she having to pay for that. We already pay taxes after all. I'm sorry that in USA the system sucks so much, i don't know if the "obamacare" would be better or not, but it can hardly be worse than the current system You also have wait times. The time interval between my Mil's diagnosis and actual surgery was three days. The intervel between seeing her genprac and being referred to a heart specialist was about a week. This was for someone with literally no money to spend on any of this, and it wasn't beause of any government payment scheme. The fact is that the real issue isn't the method of payment, but actuall access to quality health care; which is excellent in the US. In government mandated systems, the governmenet is the gatekeeper. This can be good or bad, but can only be bad in the US. The fact that many Americans consider health care to be an industry that governments should not be involved in notwithstanding. If you live in Europe and like what you have, good for you. But I don't think that it can ever fly here, if for no other reason than many Americans simply don't want governments into thier private business. |
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I'm European and as far as i know current USA health system is fail, if you can pay and you have an insurance then you are fine but if you are poor and without insurance then you can happily die that more or less no one care about you.
My mother-in-law needed a heart bypass a few years ago, and since she has been disabled since birth (blind) and not yet 55, she is not eligble for medicare or medicaid. She's covered under a SSI (Social Security Income, it's a seperate program) but they don't cover life threatening issues like that. Don't ask me why a government funded program for the health of disabled people wouldn't cover life threatening issues, but it didn't. She got the bypass, paid for by a charity that the heart surgen belonged to. The heart surgen did it for free, while the charity paid for everything else in the surgery room. The only thing that she has to pay for is her follow up visits, because the SSI won't even cover that. My wife & I paid for those ourselves. So even under federally funded social health care, the poor could happily die and the government not care about it; but a private charity ran by actual doctors will make up the slack for government fail. I have no faith that Obamacare will be better, or cheaper. |
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And how do you expect to hide any land and buildings you might own? If you don't pay property taxes, they can just seize your property. Likewise with VAT, they can monitor where natural resources are being extracted and refined.
The same way the rich do, with a tiny corporation trust and a good corporate lawyer. Of course, that generally costs more than paying the fine. |
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No. Doctors make their medical decisions based on how much money they can squeeze out of the insurance, not the health of the human. Which won't change under Obamacare. That's right. But it will force insurance companies to be more competitive. Forcing people to buy car insurance, health insurance, or anything for that matter is unethical unless it is all run as non-profit. Then Obamacare is also unethical. I have already pointed out those non-profit health care cost sharing programs, which under Obamacare do not count as 'coverage' and thus all members who make over $22K per year are subject to the penalty 'tax'. |
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Does that $20-$30 include a contract? Because if so, I know plenty of people who are unwilling to tag an extra $15-$30 on to their cell plan for data.
If Google is selling these for $20-$30 without a contract, then color me surprised!
Neither would I, and I already own an android smartphone. I use a prepaid service for $25 per month, paid mostly in bitcoins. They were talking about reselling for $20-30. This means used. I don't think that used phones usually come with a contract, do they? I wouldn't know. Do they? A quick google search showed lots of sites selling used phones without contracts. Most looked like $50-100, so a year from now will be cheaper and likely on track with google's estimates. I'm still interested in the ellet, but I definitely see cheap smartphones with apps as major competition. Maybe. Still think that the contract thing is a red herring. I don't have a contract, but still pay a monthly fee for data access. I suppose that I could just stop using the thing as a phone altogether and simply use the wifi radio for access, and I would have a pretty good mini-tablet computer to do such things with, but that doesn't mean that I predict that we will start seening used android phones being used as bitcoin clients in Africa anytime soon. |
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Go Obama. A single payer system will be best in my book. Less doctors on yachts, more doctors that want to help people. The rich doctors can go be bankers if they want to get rich.
Less doctors on yachts, yes. Less competent doctors, overall. There is a reason that one quarter of the general practicioners that I've seen in my adult life have accents, and it's not because their nation of origin was big on paying for their education. |
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When I tried to get coverage in the US between jobs I was screwed. The rates I was being quoted were in the lines of what you could make doing a minimum wage job.
I explained why this is a while back in this thread. The law prohibits the insurance company that provides your employer's plan from allowing you to pay to continue your own coverage, so if you are without an employer, you're a mark. What law? I couldn't find it. In fact it looks like COBRA is a law that forces them to let you do it. COBRA is how they stick it to you, it's nothing like what you had before and costs at least twice as much. |
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Does that $20-$30 include a contract? Because if so, I know plenty of people who are unwilling to tag an extra $15-$30 on to their cell plan for data.
If Google is selling these for $20-$30 without a contract, then color me surprised!
Neither would I, and I already own an android smartphone. I use a prepaid service for $25 per month, paid mostly in bitcoins. They were talking about reselling for $20-30. This means used. I don't think that used phones usually come with a contract, do they? I wouldn't know. Do they? |
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Aren't change addresses supposed to be used only once, by default?
Some of my change addresses have been re-used many times (see screenshot) - not sure why.
Beyond SatoshiDice, there are some reasons why one might want to reuse an address. It compromises anonimity, but some light clients will still do it. |
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