Can't believe this hasn't been posted here yet. www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3120/is-bitcoin-the-future-of-moneyBitcoin is a virtual currency, but that’s like saying computers add ones and zeros — you don’t get any sense of the complexity of the thing. I’ll give it a shot below. I should tell you my initial reaction was the bitcoin was an impossible techno fantasy that was certain to ruin anyone foolish enough to put their trust in it. But now I’d say there’s a chance it’ll become the Krugerrand of our times.
Overall, a better-than-average article, though it is surprising that the world's smartest human still believes deflation = evil. |
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Well the system tested over 1 million spins, on average yields a balance of -300,000 units so I would be absolutely delighted to discover that the results are bogus.
I wasn't trying to imply that you are a central banker with an infinite supply of cash, it's just that the application records your gains and losses relative to ZERO rather than having you input your bankroll at the beginning.
Oh, I see what you mean now. I was confused because you said earlier: The application assumes that you have an infinite bankroll
Still, losing 300,000 units over 1 million spins is not exactly what I call a good result. |
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12 measly GB is too much to handle? 1999 called, they want their disk space back.  |
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Fiat move within 24 hours internationally with much lower fees.
Yeah... good luck with that. |
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I don't have voodoo math skills, just regular math skills, but I'll suggest an improvement anyway: Don't gamble, dummy!
The Martingale strategy (and all others like it) do not and cannot alter the expected value of a particular bet. The only difference they make is that instead of having a small chance of winning a large amount and large chance of losing a small amount (as when betting normally), you instead have a very large chance of winning a small amount and a very small chance of losing your entire bankroll, which balances out so that the expected value is exactly the same (the assumption that you have an infinite bankroll does not apply in the real world, and any results you derive from that assumption are bogus). Note that this chance is exactly the same regardless of how long you've been gambling, so you have small chance of going bankrupt on the very first round of betting, before you've even won anything. Whoops.
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Here's a major problem that I can see: Even though nodes can be tricked into forwarding inv messages that it cannot provide the block for, the impact is likely to be small as the inv messages have a small constant size of 61B. Note that the same attack is already possible by creating an arbitrary amount of transactions and announcing them to the network. As the attacking node can provide the matching transaction, it will not be recognized as an attack.
I don't think this is a valid comparison, since this scenario is exactly why nodes verify transactions and check that it pays an appropriate transaction fee before relaying that transaction to other nodes. The transaction fee is what prevents spam (or at least, discourages it). But forwarding block announcements before you have fully verified the block, or worse, when you don't even have the block, could very easily flood the whole network with spam at no cost whatsoever to the attacker. Then there's this gem: The changes may mitigate the problem in the short term, until a scalable long term solution is found.
A scalable long term solution to the problem that transmitting information takes a finite amount of time, resulting in race conditions? Good luck with that. In any case, the problem isn't as bad as it's made out to be, as the whole system was designed with the problem in mind. Orphan blocks due to propagation delays are the reason Satoshi chose 10 minutes as the target block interval. 10 minutes is long enough that only a small fraction of hashing power is wasted on orphan blocks. By comparison, altcoins with super fast block times are at much greater risk of a <50% attack, which is one of the main reasons you'd have to be an idiot to put your money into them. |
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I also asked her if it was deadbolted and she said yes, ... I observed that the deadbolt was retracted--not protruding.
Obviously, the ghost must have had a key. That's how it opened the door. Nothing mysterious about that. But since ghosts aren't known for carrying keys (it's usually gnomes that do that), it is more likely that this particular ghost is in fact a person trying to fuck with your mind, and that this person would strenuously object to having the lock changed and not being given a key, and would unceremoniously kick you off the property for merely suggesting it. That's how these things usually pan out. |
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The library paid for the book and you paid for the library.
'If you read this book without paying for it, you're taking something and giving nothing in return'
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There is nothing scarier about these movies than the fact that people actually believe them to be documentaries. It makes me want to make my own movie documentary, based on the real-life gruesome deaths and mutilations resulting from belief in superstitious and pseudoscientific nonsense. It'd be really educational.
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It already is established, though "forums" is more common and recommended by most style guides.
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So your account was sold/hacked/whatever and you blame theymos.
wat ._.
No, he bought the account and used it to scam people, and he's telling his victims to blame theymos, under the theory that "it's not my fault that I did bad things, it's theymos' fault for not stopping me". |
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- snip -
I'm going to have to assume you're either an idiot or a troll, if you still don't understand why I chose those examples after I explained it three times, and especially if you seriously think that a "random" sample means excluding only the most extreme members of a set. Either way, it's not worth my time to continue trying to educate you. |
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What makes you think Avalon started this rumour?
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Well they strategically place spam bets which just coincidentally aligns with low numbers. It eliminates a person having the ability to get consecutive (or near consecutive ) numbers, thereby decreasing the chance of winning. ard to explain but I watched this betting sequence for a couple of hours. Here is a small example. they used less than 4000 as the bet.
ails 2013-08-08 17:58:41 lessthan 4000 b6585165 0 9d24eb03 12UaSo3 CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 27158
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:40 lessthan 4000 b6fd1b3b 0 459f90be 1uiAadT CONFIRMED 0.01000000 WIN 0.15995784 1104
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:40 lessthan 6000 42fd91d9 0 c69308dc 162Ufky CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 19605
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:39 lessthan 12000 acefc60f 1 336e14b9 1NgipR5 CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 46335
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:38 lessthan 8000 e9cdffaf 0 ddced5b9 17iDZbL CONFIRMED 0.50000000 LOSE 0.00250000 60001
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:36 lessthan 4000 09f95c07 0 f9d8da6c 1TxnzeV CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 29423
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:35 lessthan 4000 a7164ef5 1 74e1a3a2 1H7XReS CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 22068
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:34 lessthan 4000 f87219eb 1 7790151c 18HnVmZ CONFIRMED 0.01000000 WIN 0.15995784 1859
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:32 lessthan 4000 dbf54d3a 1 7d783f73 1D9noRn CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 59897
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:31 lessthan 4000 946d1ed7 0 99804b0b 1FCwi44 CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 47640
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:30 lessthan 4000 41403405 0 22765c43 1AmJVM5 CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 20278
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:30 lessthan 4000 012a1cb2 0 26e41133 1JiFJGv CONFIRMED 0.01000000 LOSE 0.00005460 30792
Details 2013-08-08 17:58:29 lessthan 4000 ac98ec05 0 c6fe6b97 1KxQ9qb CONFIRMED 0.01000000 WIN 0.15995784 131
I mean how many times do you see 4000 win consecutively in a short space of time. And it happened all day.
Hope that makes a bit more sense, but why else would you place bets on your game as an owner?
These three wins out of ten are neither consecutive nor particularly improbable (indeed, not seeing several runs like this during the day would be extremely improbable). Incidentally, lucky streaks such as this do not affect the probably of winning any future bets (including bets made by the same player, so this lucky person is just as likely to hit a losing streak and lose all his winnings). There's no cheating going on, just ordinary luck. I can also find absolutely no evidence that suggests this address belongs SatoshiDICE. I really don't understand what you think is going on. |
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I think I do understand what standard deviation is... After all, somehow I was able to calculate it.
Your ability to press a single button on a calculator neither impresses me nor convinces me that you know what that button does. Let's say you have this set of numbers, which represents IQ in the total population. You have someone who's braindead, a bunch of people in the middle, and a genius.
1, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 300
There is a big difference between the highest and lowest. The mean is 116.375 and the deviation is 84.14. The overall difference is obviously 299.
Your ability to press the correct button on your calculator doesn't impress me either. The standard deviation of this population is actually 78.71. Take Bitcointalk. We have no genius, and no idiot.
80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130
The average drops to 105. The deviation drops to 18.70.
Let's say bitcointalk has an idiot, and has a genius. But they cannot possibly be the dumbest or the smartest in the total population. This is a sample.
2, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 299
That is not a sample. A sample is a subset of the population. That means that every member of the sample must also be a member of the population. Let's start by taking the superset of your group and the original population: 1, 2, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 299, 300. The standard deviation is 97.74. Now, my point, in case your reading skills are as bad as your math skills, was that the forum contains fewer near-average members. Of course the standard deviation is going to be lower if you remove the extremes but don't remove the near-average values. So let's try that: 2, 80, 90, 120, 130, 299. We've removed the minimum and maximum, and also a couple near the average. The standard deviation of this sample is 98.56, higher than the population. It is higher than the population despite having a smaller range because it has fewer near-average members. If you can't understand that, then there's no hope for you. Standard deviation is obviously going to be lower when you have less of a range. And bitcointalk cannot possibly have a lower range of values than the population. That is impossible.
Any sample, whether its bitcointalk, NASA, your town, whatever will always have a lower deviation than the general population. Your mistake was assuming that the dumbest person and the smartest are on this forum. They aren't.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get this idea that a smaller range necessarily implies a lower standard deviation? Are schools in the U.S. really that bad? |
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But in the actual population, there is a greater difference between the lowest and the highest. In your example, the second set of numbers is the bitcointalk population, correct? You're wrong to assume that there is a "1" here or a "49". The smartest person on Earth and the dumbest are not on these forums. Bitcointalk is more "average" than the entire population, simply because it will lack extremes. It would make more sense to not include the 1 and 49. Instead the set should be 4, 9, 25, 36 which has a deviation of 14.71 (rounded). Of course, these are just random numbers, and that's not how the actual population is distributed. But you should still see the main point of how bitcointalk cannot possibly have a greater difference between the highest and lowest than any other population.
I don't think you understand what standard deviation means. It is not the difference between the minimum and maximum values. It is simply a measure of the average variance from the mean. A random sample of a population will theoretically have exactly the same standard deviation as the population, even though it will have a smaller range between the minimum and maximum, since you're removing just as many near-average members as extreme ones, so it balances out. But this forum is not a random sample. Nor does it require the smartest and dumbest people on the planet in order to have a higher standard deviation than average. A higher standard deviation just means there is more variation than average, not that the variation is the greatest range possible. |
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The judge isn't saying Bitcoin should be regulated as a currency, he's saying it always was regulated, hence the validity of the SEC's case and the bogosity of Trendon Shavers' defence that "if it's not real money, it's not illegal". The SEC already knew that Bitcoin investments were subject to their regulation (they wouldn't have charged Shavers in the first place if they didn't), this court ruling merely confirms that fact. The saner folks on this forum also already knew that, and have trying for ages to get it through everyone else's thick skulls that just because you use Bitcoin, that doesn't mean the laws regarding monetary transactions don't apply to you. Some people insist on learning the hard way. |
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I don't think the standard deviation of a sample group can be higher than that of a population group. The population would cover many more people, while the sample only covers a portion. The sample would be equal to or less than the population standard deviation.
Wrong. Consider a population consisting of square numbers less than 50: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49. The mean is 20 and the standard deviation is 16.37. Now let's take a sample consisting of the odd numbers in this population: 1, 9, 25, 49. The mean is 21 and the standard deviation is 21.17. That's higher than the standard deviation of the population! Why? Because this particular sample contains the most extreme numbers of the population (1 and 49) but the number closest to the mean of the population (16) is not present. By containing more "extreme" members and fewer "average" ones, the standard deviation is higher. The point I was making in my post is that this forum contains fewer "average" members than the rest of the population, ie, most people here are either really smart, or really stupid. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if IQs on this forum follow a bimodal distribution. |
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All ATMs internally keep track of how much cash is loaded and how much cash is dispensed, the people refilling the ATMs also record how much cash goes in and out, and the bank records how much they're paying to fill the machines and the total amount withdrawn. If an ATM is dispensing more cash than it's actually deducting from customer's accounts, these records won't match up, and the bank will find out about it sooner rather than later. At that point, it's not hard for the bank to check if anyone's been making more withdrawals than usual from that particular ATM and begin fraud investigations. Depending on which records are still accurate, they may even know exactly who's been receiving too much money and how much, without having to resort to such guesswork. Either way, if you haven't reported the error, you can expect your accounts to be frozen and possibly be arrested for fraud. Given that the bank would have to be grossly incompetent for you to not get caught, it's not worth it.
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