The very essence of bitcoin is peer to peer finance.

Handing over your control of your private keys to a centralized institution goes against the very essence of bitcoin, and defies the whole point of having a blockchain.

Centralized exchanges are the most fragile and non-essential part of the bitcoin ecosystem. They are a necessary evil while bootstrapping the bitcoin economy, but the sooner we stop depending on them, the better.

I am not an anarcho-capitalist and I believe that centralized government has many roles to play.  Interfering in private commerce is not one of them.

"Money laundering" is a crime that didn't even exist 100 years ago. It was invented because the police was too lazy and incompetent to catch wealthy drug dealers. So what did the government do?  Instead of investing in better policing, they basically forced the private sector to do the police's job instead.  It is understandable why they did this.  It is easier to create regulations and offload the cost of policing to the private sector, than to spend taxpayer's money which will have to come from tax hikes or cuts in other departments. But that does not change the fact that AML regulations are horrible.  They are unjustifiable from a cost/benefit perspective.  They are a blunt tool that increases the cost of doing business across entire industries and hurts the economy. They treat honest people as "guilty until proven innocent" and are inefficient at catching the big criminals who will always find holes in the net.

Not every aspect of our lives needs to be regulated.  In fact, some aspects of our private lives remain completely unregulated and the world is not falling apart because of that. I don't need to fill in a mountain of paperwork before I choose to have someone as a friend.  So why should I need to fill in a mountain of paperwork before having someone as a business partner? Both types of relationships are private and to some extent indistinguishable. Also, regulation doesn't need to be top-down.  Cryptocoins not only make it possible to avoid doing businesses with people that you deem immoral, they will also allow this process to be automated.

Hopefully bitcoin and altcoins will convince governments that AML regulation has gone too far, and that there are more effective ways of catching criminals.  Sometimes laws have to adapt to new technologies, not the other way around.

Yes. They just aren't widely implemented yet.

See:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_2:_Escrow_and_dispute_mediation

Bitcoin has the added benefit that both sender and recipient can choose in advance who has the power to reverse a transaction in case of a dispute.




In principle, any bitcoin transaction CAN be reversed by consensus.  Bit since this requires changing the protocol it is unlikely to ever happen for individual transactions.

During the March 2013 fork event transactions were successfully reversed:
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork

More realistically, you could also set up a multisig transaction that requires the consensus of a "committee" of previously selected mediators.

You seem to misunderstand the purpose of DACs. Their purpose is not do take away work from humans, but to take away power from humans.  That is what differentiates them from robots/AI. To achieve this, they don't even need to be exceedingly complicated (not to be confused with complex).

Many organizations in the world are lead by "Monarch CEOs". These are essentially semi-skilled workers whose role is not so much making strategic decisions as acting as an authority figure who encourages unity once a decision has been made.  The problem with putting a human in this role is that power corrupts. A CEO will always be temped to use his power for their personal best interest rather than the interest of the organization. And even an honest CEO is prone to making irrational decisions because he is a slave to emotions like jealousy and pride.

The big innovation here is that the CEO himself can be replaced by an algorithm that is guaranteed to act objectively and in the best interest of whatever "charter" has been hard coded into the DAC.

I don't think something like fully decentralized power has ever existed. Democratic government and certain religions have attempted this, but ultimately they must always rely on some human as a power custodian. If DACs can be pulled off, they will be one of the biggest innovations in social/political organization in hundreds of years.  Buzzword or not.

PS. Daniel Suarez' novel Daemon from 2006 was the first place where I saw this idea explored in detail. Highly recommended!

Good.

People who don't even unterstand the basics of bitcoin should probably not invest in the first place.

A large influx of naive investors, who don't get the concepts behind bitcoin and only buy because "the price is going up", could be very damaging at this stage.

They are going to become panic sellers at the slightest sign of trouble, and we are going to see yet another massive crash.

Growth is good but it should be gradual and organic.

It's not a currency in the same way that email is not mail and html is not text.

Right now most people don't even realize that the basic "currency" function is just a small subset of things that Bitcoin can do.  Once distributed contracts take off,  things are going to get really interesting.  There is nothing even remotely comparable in existence right now. No currency, no commodity, no collectible.

The biggest misconception in Bitcoin is that is fits into some historical asset class.  The truth is that is has created a whole new asset class of its own.

originality: 2/10
style: 3/10

There isn't much room for compression. Hashes and signatures are high entropy data.

So is chess!

And chess was one on the first mental "jobs" to be successfully automated.  Just because something is mentally difficult doesn't mean it's immune to automation.

Why is programming so difficult and time consuming to learn? Because it requires memorizing a huge amount of very dry information, and very exact reasoning skills with a low rate of error. Those are exactly the kind of tasks that computers excel at and humans are terrible at. It is almost a miracle that the human mind can hammered into learning these tasks at all; exactness is not in our nature, we evolved to compute the world intuitively and in terms of rough estimates, not in black and white terms.   That is why good programmers, just like good chess players, are a rare commodity.  For now.

But imagine that 10-20 years from now the "exact" aspect of programming can be outsourced to a machine. Imagine if you could simply tell your computer "Write me a bug free function that does X" and it spits out the code in a matter of seconds.  Of course, programming doesn't just require "left brain" skills, it also requires intuition and creativity, especially for higher level stuff like design and requirements engineering. But anyone reasonably intelligent can now become an expert programmer in a matter of months instead of years.  



I am willing to bet that 90% of the work done by skilled programmers today, will be done by machines before 90% of work of janitors is done by machines.

Just because a worker is less productive than a machine doesn't mean he is out of work.   All it means is that his wage is lower than the machine's "wage".  

But if automation happens across the board, falling wages will happen in conjunction with falling prices, and most workers will not notice a drop in real wages, except in comparison to things that are naturally scarce such as land, energy, and bitcoin.

Either that, or prices will not fall, since the "Tech Elite" will keep all the fruits of increased productivity to themselves, but in that case ordinary workers will still be able to compete in a parallel society and again not notice much of a difference.

And by the way, forget about the "Tech Elite". They will be the first to suffer from falling wages, since pure knowledge jobs are the easiest to replace with software.  I think we are heading back towards a Medieval-style society where technological innovation is mainly driven by enthusiasts tinkering on open-source projects and a few geniuses sponsored by old money and rich land owners.  

If I were to give career advice to a child born today, I would tell them to forget about science and engineering and become a stand up comedian, since this is the most difficult-to-automate job that I can possibly think of.  

That was just his "FBI appeasement" wallet that he purposefully stored in his home and secured with a weak password.

The other 450,000 coins are still safe in his brain wallet.  But now they are plausibly deniable. 

Get a mortgage and pay it off slowly with your Bitcoins.

Because there is nothing interesting to discover there. x86 is pretty much an open standard.

In contrast, how long did it take until "unbreakable" Blu-Ray encryption was broken?



...or a swarm of thousands of unpaid undergraduate students cranking the ratchet. 

Not that scary. If you backup regularly, then it's a minor inconvenience.   If you don't backup regularly, then this malware is just preponing what would have happened sooner or later anyhow due to hard disk failure.  And even then you pay a much smaller price.

The Achilles heel of autonomous agents is their inability to hide the private key from parasitic hosts.  The Wiki talks about using TPM as a solution, but that is a very weak solution because TPMs can be reverse engineered (dissected in an electron microscope if need be) and simulated in a VM.  Even if the amounts of money are small, hackers are going to attempt this as a matter of honor.

Agents are only going to be truly viable once homomorphic encryption has matured.  But this is still a nascent technology, so it's going to take several years before agents take off.

I don't get it. What is wrong with this photo? How could this photo be used "against him"? All I can see is somewhat unflattering but otherwise utterly mundane photo. You are talking in riddles.

Here's a little rant I want to share because I think it illustrates everything that is wrong with today's AML regulations.

I live in the Netherlands and I am an active user of crowdcube.com - a p2p crowd-financing site based in the UK.

Crowdcube stated on their website that international investors were welcome as long as they didn't break any rules in their home country.  For 2 years, I was able to invest in various pitches without any problems.  Last month, I decided to invest 300 GBP in a UK-based biotech startup.  Then, suddendly, they decide to change the rules right in the middle of my investment and send me this email:


"Anti Money Laundering"  
So sending 300 GBP from the Netherlands to the UK, now automatically makes me suspected drug dealer?  Guilty until proven innocent? WTF?

You don't have to be a libertarian to see that there is something seriously wrong with the system here.  If an ordinary person living in Amsterdam is prohibited from buying a handful shares in a Cambridge-based biotech startup, then what the hell is the European Union good for?  Apparently the "single market" does not apply to the small guy.

Yes, I realize that this is GoCardless' individual decision, and that this does not constitute a universal cross-border investment ban, but what we are seeing here is a chilling effect of excessively complex and draconian AML regulations.  I am sure that there are many other examples of companies simply shutting out foreign investors rather than taking their chances with overzealous regulators.

What makes me really angry is that the damage caused by these regulations is invisible to politicians and voters.  The biotech company will never know that they missed out on foreign investors like me.  Maybe they will fail, and the politicians will never know that this company could have created life saving treatments, had it been only able to raise more starting capital.  The jobless biochemistry graduate will never know that this could have been a great place to work for.  And so on...   So the regulations will only get worse, and the bad guys will simply route around them through the darknet.

I am sad to be expelled from Crowdcube. It was a great concept. But I can take my money elsewhere. It's not like the UK economy needs it or anything.
 

You can't fit "tons of memory" on a single chip, not even an ASIC, since you are fundamentally constrained by transistor size.

So even with an ASIC, more hashpower can only be achieved with more hardware, and not with architecture alone.  For the 10TB of memory mentioned by the OP you would need to manufacture thousands of chips, ASIC or no ASIC.

Sure, an ASIC would be more efficient than a home PC, but in terms of hash per dollar invested it would perhaps only achieve a factor of 2, not a factor of 10,000 like it's the case with the SHA256 algorithm.

Why is it sexist? Being at the extremes does not imply superiority, neither moral nor functional.  For example, well-balanced people tend to do better in the modern workplace than people with extreme personality traits.

"Freakish" people are not better than "average" people, they are just different, that's all.


No, it's equivalent to saying that most women are similar, as are most men.  


The word "excuse" implies that the gender gap is something pathological that needs to be fought.  In fact, it's just a result of fewer women being interested in bitcoin than men.

You know what is really sexist?  Claiming that women ought to be more interested in bitcoin, even after the fact that they have chosen not to. That is basically treating them like children who "don't know what's best for them".

There is no problem.

This is purely an effect of statistics.  Bitcoin is a "weird" and "extreme" technology, therefore it tends to attract people from the extreme tail end of the distribution, whether male or female.  When you look at attributes such as personality, political stance, or intelligence the distribution for women is narrower than the distribution for men.  The further away you go from the mean, the more men outnumber women.  

The reason there are so few female bitcoiners is the same reason there are so few female BASE jumpers, Nobel prize winners, and serial killers.

The more mainstream bitcoin becomes, the more "average" people it will attract, both male and female, and the more this effect will be diluted.