Off the top of my head, this can be achieved relatively easily with a Squid proxy, but I'm assuming you want something that non-tech can roll out to a place like a coffee shop with relative ease. Modifying the firmware on a Linksys/Buffalo router could be the way to go at that point, but setting up the startup script would be the real trick. There's a lot of homebrew apps you can run like that & couple it with some script-fu you could definitely have this.
I imagine this is going to be a big proponent for the Bitcoin. If coffee shops can freely have this as passive income potential, adoption rates go up & Bitcoin exposure goes up. I am keenly interested in developing for this
I don't think most businesses would be interested in a pay portal for their customers, most already offer free internet as a side benefit to being a paying customer. I think that will eventually become the norm, much like being a paying customer entitles you to free use of the bathroom, but it's still rude to walk off of the sidewalk to crap without buying anything. I would find this kind of thing useful at public events, say with a WiMax WAN uplink, some QoS code to keep things even among customers, and a built in Bitcoin client that all attempts to use port 8333 are redirected towards. I don't want those new BitcoinJ clients trying to repeatedly download even the blockchain headers over the WAN when they would be available locally. Put the entire system into a large lunchbox or cooler, with a couple of decent antennas neatly sticking out the top. A decent battery and/or a solar cell on the top of the cooler, and roll it all up to the highest point one can get to early in the day before the (air show, tailgate party, race, outdoor concert, fireworks show, whatever) starts, fire it up and let the crowd discover it. Some people are going to have 4G/wimax accounts anyway and simply won't care, but if the price isn't too high for a day's casual connectivity or a not-to-bad per MB rate, then those who have metered data plans are going to be intrigued. And I know that it's downright painful for some young people to have connectivity problems at any event with long periods of calm before the main event. Sometimes, having it mounted to the top of my minivan would be even better. Another system with just the piratebox, so that both of these things can coexist in the same space, would be ideal. |
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Oh, also, I've always had this hunch that the anti-vaccine movement and global-warming denialism were part of the global banking elite's world population control program. Crazy weather and widespread epidemics could kill off a nice percentage of the little people while the multibillionaires sip human growth hormone in their air-conditioned bunkers.
Come on sheeple, wake up.
Quick question, concerning your population reduction theory. If the super rich are out to kill off the "little people" then who will buy the crap they sell in order to pay for the air-conditioned bunkers? And concerning the bunkers, are they there to protect the super rich from the remnant? And for the record, I'm not anti-vaccine. I'm anti-blindly-accept-the-opinions-of-your-betters-crap. |
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"Statistically and effectively eradicating" a disease is a long way from making it extinct. Rubella, pertussis, mumps etc. are more than "moderately" dangerous. The vaccines for these diseases are less than "moderately" dangerous.
And my kids have had MMR. Again, it was a cost/benefit analysis. If you stop and look at the list of vaccines that many public school districts require, you'll notice that many of those are on there for historical reasons or political ones. Some of them are very expensive, and must be paid for by your medical insurance plan; and then the vaccine company will "donate" those same vaccines to the public clinic in the city so that those who couldn't afford it anyway don't bring attention to the fact that the company is making a fortune for a vaccine with debatable benefits for the public. A perfect example of this kind of boondoggle is Gardasil, the HPC vaccine. It's relatively new, comes with very real risks and very real benefits; but then it only protects against the eight most common forms of this disease, all of which are sexually trasmitted diseases. If it were simply reccommended for teenagers, I'd say it was a great thing. But it's required for public schooled girls as young as eight years old in some districts. Why, exactly? Does the public school system have a free love clinic for eight year olds? When this first came out, my daughter was seven and it is "approved" for as young as six. Our pediatritian, at her checkup, asked us if we wanted to consider it for our daughter. He explained it all to us, and then admitted that his clinic gets a kickback for every one they administer. I think he already knew that he had better come clean with his homeschooled clients, at least. I thought, new vaccine therefore not much data outside of the lab on it's effects when combined with other drugs or conditions; daughter is homeschooled and years from puberty, and is devout Christian to boot; costs $80 per dose. "I think I'll wait a few years and see how things work out, or at least for the price to drop." Turns out to have been a good idea; for it's neither as effective as was claimed nor as safe as believed. It's price is much lower now though. Vaccines are a miracle of human ingenuity.
I agree, but they are just another tool. Choose wisely, they aren't magic. The Unibomber was a terrorist.
The Unibomber was a disgruntled INTP with an ax to grind against former coworkers. I'm also an INTP, and you shouldn't meddle in the affairs of INTP's; for we are (usually) subtle and quick to anger. Can't we all just get along?
Is this your first time on the Internet? |
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Hehe, this author actually got me to stop reading by saying the following: If you honestly believe that abandoning the gold standard was a bad idea - and there are indeed people who believe this - then you might as well stop reading now. Wiser men than I have explained in excruciating detail why you're an idiot. This article will not convince you, it will just make you angry.
Unbelievable, usually an author saying "stop here if xzy" just keeps me going. Did anyone read it to the end. Does it continue like it started off? I kept reading. You've really got to read this part, it's awesome: FAIL #3: The whole technological basis is flawed.
Bitcoin is, fundamentally, a cryptosystem. Some people argue that it's "as strong as SHA256" and that "if someone could break SHA256, then banks would be in trouble as it is."
Wrong on both counts.
First of all, I admit, I don't totally understand the bitcoin algorithms and systems. I don't really need to. I understand only this: the road to crypto hell is paved with the bones of people who thought that a good cryptosystem can be designed by combining proven algorithms in unproven ways. SHA256 may be the strongest part of bitcoin, but a cryptosystem is only as strong as its weakest link.
You want to replace the world economy with a hard-to-guess math formula? Where's your peer review? Where are the hordes of cryptographers who have spent 30+ years trying to break your algorithm and failed? Come talk to me in 30 years. Meanwhile, it's safe to assume that bitcoin has serious flaws that will allow people to manufacture money, duplicate coins, or otherwise make fake transactions. In that way, it's just like real dollars.
But what's *not* like real dollars is the cost of failure. With real dollars, when people figure out how to make counterfeit bills, we find those people and throw them in jail, and eventually we replace our bills with newer-style ones that are more resistant to failure. And the counterfeiters are limited by how many fake bills their printing press can produce.
With bitcoin, a single failure of the cryptosystem could result in an utter collapse of the entire financial network. Unlimited inflation. Fake transactions. People not getting paid when they thought they were getting paid. And the perpetrators of the attack would make so much money, so fast, that they could apply their fraud at Internet Scale on Internet Time.
(Ha, and don't even talk to me about how your world-changing financial system would of course also be protected by anti-fraud laws so we could still punish people for faking it. If we still need the government, what is the point of your currency again?)
The current financial system is slow, and tedious, and old, and in many ways actually broken or flawed. But one thing we know is that it's *resilient*. One single mathematical error will not send the whole thing into a tailspin. With bitcoin, it will.
And no, a break in SHA256 would not break the current financial system or ruin any banks. How could it? What would even be the mechanism for such an attack? How would it make the paper bills in my pocket stop working for buying hot dogs? Can't we just hunt down and arrest the people who forged the fake transactions?
While I don't fully agree with all of his points - he is right in the parts that you bolded. By proving that one part of the Bitcoin protocol is strong you don't prove that it is strong as a whole. And he does not need to know the protocol to find a logical mistake in the reasoning trying to establish that Bitdoin is as strong as SHA256 (if it is not identical to SHA256). "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link" - this is spot on. No, he is still wrong on this point as well because he started by misrepresenting the argument altogether. He simply burned a strawman. Online banking regularly uses 128 bit SSL session encryption,(between the customer and the bank, not between each other) which is different enough from the way Bitcoin works to be apples to ornages, but the argument is usually, "Won't Bitcoin be broken by faster/quantum computers?" "No, because if that were to ever become a problem for bitcoin, encryption for the finance industry would also be under threat long before Bitcoin was, and new algoritims would be found that Bitcoin could use." |
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Vaccination does have some risks, but the benefits are so overwhelming that any reasonable cost/benefit analysis will favour giving them to all the kids who can have them.
And it's also true that not all of them are given to children anymore. One notable example is smallpox: there's no need to vaccinate against it anymore because the vaccination campaigns of the 20th century were so overwhelmingly successful that the disease was eradicated from the face of the earth! Think about this: one the biggest killers in human history goes "poof" thanks to vaccines. Want a better argument in favour of vaccination?
You just contradicted your first paragraph with the second. Smallpox is a horrible, deadly disease. There were certain (tiny) risks associated with the vaccine, but the disease was so widespread and deadly that the benefits of the vaccine far outweighted the risks. The vaccination campaign was so successful that the disease was eradicated. Since the smallpox virus became extinct in the wild and was never coming back 1, it was no longer necessary to vaccinate children against it, which is why it's no longer done. How is the paragraph above a contradiction? Please explain your reasoning step by step, as I'm curious to see what sort of cognitive mechanisms are responsible for your conclusion. You used the example of a high risk vaccine being used to eradicate a higher risk disease from nature, and the subsequent removal of that vaccine from use; as the support for the ongoing use of moderate risk vaccines intended to prevent moderate risk childhood diseases that have already been (statisticly & effectively) eradicated from the society that my children live in. I shouldn't need to follow any step by step explaination, it's self-evident to anyone that doesn't have your cognative dissonnance. |
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First, what the fuck is "consensus"? I don't remember that word from science class. Is consensus like the last step of the scientific method?
Very few areas in science can advance based solely on deductive reasoning. Often you must rely on triangulation in logic space, or have to contend with error bars so large that multiple competing hypotheses cannot be discarded. Nevertheless, as those error bars get smaller, a consensus among the experts tends to form. This is also the case for global warming. It is in fact very interesting to study the evolution of the IPCC reports through the years: though the first reports only suggested that humans may be involved, as time passed on and more data was collected, those error bars got smaller and the consensus slowly gravitated towards its present position that human beings are most likely to be the main culprit. It's notable that you chose the IPCC reports to make this point, particularly since the vast majority of scientists that contribute to the IPCC reports are not meterologists nor climatologists, and those that are work directly or indirectly for government agencies, not as scientists in research. Using the IPCC as evidence for anything displays either an immediate political bias or an inforgivable ignorance to the politics that contribute towards the IPCC. A couple of years ago, a climatologist had to sue the IPCC for falsely claiming that said climatologist had reviewed and/or contributed to one such report and upon pointing out the "error" the IPCC refused to remove said climatologists name from supporting documents and website pages. Before it was over, there were over 60 scientists who discovered that their professional reputations were being falsely claimed by the IPCC. In short, the IPCC is not a credible source of scientific information, either for or against the debate about climate change. It is only a political action committee cloaked in a false shroud of impartial scientific retoric. |
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I have no idea who Adam Curry is, but if you think that there is anything close to a scientific consensus on the climate, you're deluded.
Thank you creighto for so succinctly illustrating the kooky worldview I was talking about. But next time try not to be so obvious, or people may suspect you're on my payroll... I suspect you may be getting your information concerning climate change from denialist sources, hence your statement rejecting the scientific consensus. But guess what, among climatologists there is near complete consensus that the globe is warming up (I'm talking about figures in the vicinity of 99%), and as the latest IPCC report shows, the error bars suggest human responsibility with about 90% confidence. I know you are likely to invoke some conspiracy theory as a response. That's always the last refuge of the kooks. I didn't mention my own position. There is no such thing as consensus in science, there are respected PhD's in Physics that still doubt that the Big Bang Theory is an accurate discription of the early universe. There may be a majority of climatologists who agree that the climate is warming up, but it's provablely not a consensus. And even then, they don't agree on the root causes of the climate change. Solar cycle theory is still a significant minority position among meterologists and climitologists that can fit the data as well as human causes do. i'm not a master of this field, and I would wager that neither are you, but I would hazard the guess that human activities do play a contributing factor. The question is, how much of one? I think that it's a bit rediculous for us to assume that human activities have a significant role in climate change based on 120 years of records, particularly considering the Earth has been much warmer in the past than it is today or is likely to get in 100 yeras. |
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Children have died because of taking vaccines, which is why not all of them are given to children in developed nations anymore.
Vaccination does have some risks, but the benefits are so overwhelming that any reasonable cost/benefit analysis will favour giving them to all the kids who can have them. And it's also true that not all of them are given to children anymore. One notable example is smallpox: there's no need to vaccinate against it anymore because the vaccination campaigns of the 20th century were so overwhelmingly successful that the disease was eradicated from the face of the earth! Think about this: one the biggest killers in human history goes "poof" thanks to vaccines. Want a better argument in favour of vaccination? You just contradicted your first paragraph with the second. My own children have only had about half of the "reccommended" set for school children, because they are homeschooled and I can do as I want. My wife and I choose between them based on the risks of real harm if infected times the odds of actual infection in the modern world and weigh that against the odds of a particular vaccine causing harm. We live in the US, which means that our children benefit from the 'herd immunity' effect from being in a city wherein most of the other children are vaccinated, and therefore there is no infection vector that could likely reach them anyway.
I hope you realise the enormity of what you are confessing to. And pardon me if I'll sound condescending, but your actions show the lack of basic moral behaviour that I would expect from a 5 year-old, not from an adult. Have you considered what would happen to the herd immunity if all parents did as you do? You are basically freeloading on top of the herd immunity created by parents who have acted more responsibly -- you do realise this, don't you? Yes, it's a true "Tragedy of the Commons" situation. Those other parents aren't acting more responsibly, they are largely compelled to vaccinate their children because they send them to government schools. The first responsibility of the parent is to the child, if the conditions of the modern world make the risks of the vaccine equal to that of the benefits, it's irresponsible to give it to one's children.
Moreover, I suspect you may even be putting your kids (or future grandkids) at a higher risk than what you are realising. What if one of those diseases they're not vaccinated against makes a comeback?
That was considered, and if any of these diseases start to make a comeback, odds are very high that we would have time to return to the pediatritian and take care of it. They have had all of the low risk vaccines, it's a risk/reward calculation which is different for a child growing up in the modern world wherein most communicable childhood diseases have been supressed or eradicated. Or suppose your children's children get infected with a disease like pertussis because your children pass it on to them? (I'm only using pertussis as an example -- I don't know which were your actual choices concerning vaccination).
They hav also had all of the diseases that have high long term risks. When I was a child, my mon intentionally expossed my and my sister to chicken pox, because it's less life threatening to a child than an adult. My children have had all of those vaccines. The public school kids bear the risks, while my kids benefit. It's not fair, but that's life.
So you're pretty much confessing to willingly freeloading to the disadvantage of your society. What a fine example! Yes, Thank you! It's good to see that you acknowledge that a parent's first responsibility is to his own children.  |
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I would like have hotspot based on some popular WiFi router, like Linksys or Ubiquiti.
Person pay with BTC and get access to internet.
- Better if hotspot will be self sufficient. Some hardware, like Dlink DIR-320 has USB port. It can be used for USB flashdrive as storage of blocks.
- Better if it will have options, like counting traffic or time, several bandwidth throttling degrees, depending on price.
- Better if hotspot will have 2 SSIDs - one private and one public.
How do you think to start implementing this?
My bounty is small, but I think someone on this forum would need the same and also pay for developer.
Take a look at the Buffalo 'Air Station' 300GN wireless router. It does all that you want except maybe the 2 ssids. It has three independently functioning transceivers, a fully capable usb port, and dd-wrt. |
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I've thought of this one as well, and the simplest way to allow users to pay in bitcoin is to whitelist mybitcoin.com and port 8333, and have a captive portal splash page that is one of those "pay with mybitcoin account or pay with other bitcoin" setups. There is next to nothing else that users could do without first paying you except update their local bitcoin blockchain or send coins to someone else from their local client.
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Bitcoin will be very valuable not because some insider trading on some black market betting services/exchanges. Bitcoin will be very valuable because every freaking single mobile phone on the planet (yes billions and billions of them) will have a bitcoin wallet with a few nanobitcoins in it.
Why would mobile phone users use an alien currency when they could use their native currency tied to their pre-existing checking account? (keeping in mind the average consumer dosen't care much about anonymity or ending the fed) Because other people whom those people want to deal with are already using Bitcoin. |
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Everyone considers themselves to be the rational moderate.
It is true we all have our biases and an over-inflated sense of self-worth. However, it would also be a mistake to assume the relativist position that therefore we are all equally skewed. Different people occupy different positions in the rational-irrational spectrum. Furthermore, our innate biases only reaffirm the need for a method of understanding the world based on empirical observation and logic. This method goes by the name of Science. Hence -- and going back to the original topic of this discussion -- why I strongly discourage donations to people like Adam Curry who wallow in their ignorance and disdain of the scientific consensus. I have no idea who Adam Curry is, but if you think that there is anything close to a scientific consensus on the climate, you're deluded. |
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Bruce is too busy and too public to be Satoshi. Bruce has just too much going on in his life to have the time to come up with groundbreaking cryptocurrency systems  Don't be so sure about that, Satoshi hasn't been very involved for months. |
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I sent Bruce an email about Bitcoin back in September. If he reads his email, he is aware of Bitcoin. I never had any response.
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Why would it matter? BitCoin is the only financial system I know of that cares about wire-size. Any serious processing company just builds a few datacenters and you're done. They don't even have to be very big.
And the only reason BitCoin cares about wire-size is that we're afraid of scaling up the system, pretty much.
Wire-size? Scaling isn't really an issue if the system is suited to compensate the network for the resources, that 's what I'm concerned about. If we choose an algorithim that just permits limitless growth, then we might as well just remove the blocksize limit altogether and cross our fingers, because the result is the same. We don't have the option of "just build a few datacenters" because this is the method by which we must pay for those datacenters, and ours need to be bigger and faster than any others. |
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Personally, I don't see the value of a headers-only smartphone client in places that most users have nearly continuous Internet access on those smartphones; because those who can't stand to let their app update can just use a smartphone client that can remotely control a full client at home or their Mybitcoin account. The real value in a headers'-only smartphone client is to be able to spend coins from that smartphone in places that the sender does not have (secure and/or reliable) Internet access at all,(think blackout) by directly communicating with the vendor via some ad-hoc method. (ad-hoc wifi, bluetooth, near-field, Dash7, whatever) Such headers-only clients don't necessarily need transaction discovery, if whenever the client is 'connected' to another client (full or light) transactions to the headers-only client are 'pushed' to the client and the blocks that support the inputs. Say you have a full client at home (or are at a Bitcoin bank branch) and want an amount available on your home client (bank account) onto your phone's light client. You connect via some ad-hoc method (or simply over a wireless router in infrastructure mode) and the full client 'pushes' the transaction and supporting blocks to the light client, and the client can still verify that it's extremely unlikely that the data is either false or corrupted. Then when it's time to spend those coins, the light client can likewise 'push' the new transaction, the old transaction and the supporting blocks to the next client. If the next client is also light, it can also verify that it's very unlikely that it's being defrauded by checking those blocks against the matching headers, and a full client can simply check the transaction against it's full blockchain.
This does not require a 'trusted' node in any case, but still requires that the 'pushing' client know at least one of your phone's account numbers, and in practice requires a 'trusted' node, even if it's your own at home. Once the light client has spent all of the funds, it simply no longer needs those blocks, and discards them. Such a client functionally does not participate in the p2p network at all, excepting to fetch the most recent headers; and does not forward any transactions or blocks except for it's own.
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Visa handles around 8,000 transactions per second during holiday shopping and has burst capacity up to 10,000tps.
What's the average size of a simple transaction? |
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How does this do anything but grow?
Not sure if I am answering your question but y=mx + b is a high school algebra equation for a line on a graph. Using this equation or some other polynomial equation to predict the size of the next block shouldn't be too hard. Just plug in values for m, x, and b and solve for y. That wasn't really what I was asking. I'm not a math geek, I'm an econo-geek (and a radio geek, but that's not relevant). I think that a simple equation to predict the trend in order to set a blocksize has the incentives wrong, and almost certainly trends toward infinity because both those paying for transactions to be processed and miners have an incentive for every transaction to be included in every block, and then we truly do have a 'tragedy of the commons' situation as the blocksize shoots to the moon, senders no longer have an encentive to pay anything over a token fee, and miners start dropping out because the fees can't cover the cost of bandwidth and electric; resulting in a difficulty level that is too low to defend itself as the block reward is reduced. There needs to be some mechanisim that resists arbitrary growth of the blocksize, even if only a little. Tying the max blocksize to the difficulty in some linear fashion is a smooth way to do this. I'm not married to the details, but the implementation just seems smooth to me. Although I have no concept of how difficult that would be to impliment into the code, because I'm not a coder, but I imagine that it would still be easier than a rolling average or a predictive algorithim, because it's just linear math. |
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What would be the most secure way to use bitcoin, or a way which is reasonably secure without becoming too inconvenient. A bitcoin bank. |
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You could not pay me to live in California.
At one time, I was paid to live in California. Southern California is a continuous slum. I lived near Oceanside, and it costs a fortune to live anywhere within walking distance of the ocean, and the water is freezing. The best views are from the "Coaster" commuter train, but if you get off and walk over the berm from the tracks, nothing but slum. |
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