Smart man.  Many have found out the hard way what a mistake that is.


Only config I've ever seen is the modem in the house and what Viasat is calling the TRIA these days out on the dish.  Maybe my credit score is good enough for them.  It's up around 800 IIRC, but I don't pay much attention to it.  Anyway, it would not be a good idea for the maintance dude to come onto my property unannounced and start picking up things.  Or anyone's place in my area.  I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have guns around, and there are a fair number of tweakers.  They are smart enough to stay away from private property for the most part however.  It's kind of a survival of the fittest thing around here.


Oh so that explains my problems.  Thanks for the tip.  I'll borrow my nephew next time I need to requisition services, leave my AK47 at home, and not wear so many hand grenades strapped to my belt.


That's actually one of the main reasons I bought a place in town.  I used to run a server there, but at the end of the day there are still jurisdictional problems which make it somewhat like pissing into the wind.

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If I may beg you to dig deep into your well of knowledge one more time, would you suggest that I tell my 'installer/reseller support channel' that the reason I'd like them to give me a synchronous protocol on my beam is that I wish to run bitcoind?  I ask because my bank told me that they canceled my account because it was hooked to Coinbase and if I did anything Bitcoin related with any other accounts they would cancel those as well and drop me as a customer completely.

I'm thinking perhaps I should just say I wanna run a security cam.  --edit:  ...but I'm a little worried that since they staff their engineering dept with geniuses like yourself who they find on their tech support line, they may have the ability to recognize the port 8333 traffic and slap me for being naughty.

Cypherdoc is a glutton for punishment.  In fairness I should have left him alone and deferred on the last one until he made a another feeble stab at antagonizing me again, but I couldn't help myself.  As has been the case for the last however many years it's all good fun to me.  Hopefully for cypherdoc as well.

Just FYI, the only other option in consumer-land is a POTS modem, and the line is so bad I can barely talk on it half the time.  Never got more than 19,200 IIRC.  No cell tower in range and I'm 8 miles from the CO.  No line-of-sight to set up a radio link to anywhere interesting even from my own ridge line either.  I'd have to have at least one repeater to reach my place in town (about 12 miles away as the crow flys.)  I've got some shotguns though (...and not the old modem ones for anyone who remember's that technology.)


And for anyone who tries it, let us all know how that works out for you.  Even if you have to take some time off your busy schedule after being hired by the provider as senior engineering staff.

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And for those of you who design (or blather on about) two-factor authentication, note that not everyone is always in cell range.  I rarely am.

So, you told your Indian that you know your connection is asymetric and she was so impressed she turned you over to the NOC where you impressed the engineers so much that they hired you as a consulting staff engineer to get better service for the us hicks who have needs better served with symmetric data channels?  Wow.  You da man!

The lady told me that I was not supposed to know about port 80 on the defaultrouter.

You are perfectly correct that I do not know the various (theoretically) possible protocols available various layers on the satellite link.  I've not studied it very hard either because I'm not staying up nights waiting for any of them to be options for me.  Maybe you can work your magic there at headquarters for me?  But be quick because I am greatly looking forward to plain old T1 and have got the hardware upon which to build my router on the bench.

Someone here wanted to know about the dangers of 'centralization' a bit ago.  To me 'centralization' means mostly an investment that one cannot easily walk away from.  Here's why:

  http://insidebitcoins.com/news/btcmiami-regulation-panel-predicts-new-state-law-imminent-and-look-out-for-the-lawsuits/28961

I'll make a bold prediction that if/when these laws go into effect and the brown-shirts knock on Adrian-X's door telling him that they believe he should be mining based on a cleaned up UTXO set (say, from their partners and CoinValidation) his reply will be 'Yes sir.  Right away sir.'  Else he'll power down...if he has not already done so by that time for the more organic fundamental economic reasons I alluded to earlier.

It's undeniably a difficult problem to solve.  One cannot count on being able to just move to Russia, China, etc, since a viable alternate store and transmission of value threatens these guys as much as anyone (as reflected in their laws.)  Smaller sovereign powers can be pressured to enforce things that they otherwise don't care that much about.  The best solution in my opinion is to try to have the support infrastructure for the basic core be such that it can be operated with minimal investment and hope there are jurisdictions where getting caught results in simple confiscation and a minor slap on the wrist.

Alternate solution: embrace whatever the fuck the man tells us to and try to make ourselves believe that it's for our own good.

That would explain why/if they stay the hell away from this one.  Same bad tastes in their mouths.

OK, OK, I don't totally believe this and am being more negative than I probably should be just for shits-n-giggles.  I actually did pick up some useful and interesting things as SJ but I stuck mostly to the tech stuff.

If you have more details about the 'spawning' there at SJ, it would be interesting and entertaining to know of them, but not critical.

Have you ever tried to talk to a satellite network provider for consumer class connectivity and got farther than some Indian telling you to re-boot your modem for the 15th time and clear your browser cache again?  Viasat had some horrible DHCP issues with very common routers when I first got the service some years ago.  I did packet captures and showed the problem on a forum, but that is as close as I was able to get to talking tech to anyone.  And it was mainly one other ordinary user who had some skilz.

I'll be switching to T1 this fall.  The phone company says they can do it.  We'll see.

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BTW, it occurs to me that if an Indian costs Hughes $0.50 and hour and I'm paying them $80/mo, they could keep me on the support line for literally days and still make a profit.  This is not unlike tossing rings at a carnival.  The amount you pay for a chance to win is more than the cost of the prize that you might get.

I looked up the schedule on-line a few days ago and didn't notice anything scheduled from Blockstream at all.  The web site which contained a lot of logos was terribly slow to load so I canceled it, but I didn't notice Blockstream popping up by the time I did.

Frankly, after the 2013 conference in San Jose, I sort of feel that these trade show things are mainly a venue for bad ideas to be sprouted and grow so Blockstream being a no-show (if they actually are) is kind of a positive to my way of thinking.  Bad ideas like how do we get coin tainting going, and since almost everyone on some supposedly important panel seems to think its a no-brainier it must be a good idea.

Dunno if it would help you or not, but I seem to be able to spend my BTC when the blockchain catches up to the point where the wallet was created and funded.  2011 in my cases, and of course the blockchain was much smaller at that point.  Then I can shut the client down.  The blockchain is now three times my total monthly data allowance on my satellite connection so being an actual useful participant in the so-called P2P solution is not very practical.

Some people think that satellite links add some magic diversity to the transmission backbone.  I happen to think this is nonsense given how tightly satellite connections are controlled (even though they are remarkably functional these days though fairly expensive) but whatever the case, you can at best run something like Multibit behind one which makes you more akin to headcount in a herd of sheep than an active participant in supporting the network.  As I see it.

BTW, I asked on another thread but nobody really knew the answer:  If there was a block chain fork and a war broke out between miners, could one make their own choices about which chain to follow in some way with Multibit?  Or is it just sort of hard coded that transaction attempts go into a nebulous cloud and results are put on whatever fork the server decides?  In other words, if there was a fork with unlimited block size and it formed the longest chain (for a while at least), could most Multibit transactions just get slapped on it without the user upgrading or being aware of what is happening?

Classic cypherdoc.  Used to be he'd counter if called out on such things with 'well, my readers know...'.  I'm dunno if he even has a 'newsletter' any more, but that probably was the primary usefulness of the thing.  Some months ago he tried to pull some shit saying that his secrets were buried in his newsletter but some former subscriber came out of the woodwork and totally called bullshit.  It was very funny.

Cypherdoc knows that he can now appropriate your USD call and within a few months most people will dimly remember him as being totally right and brilliant where the opposite is closer to the truth.  That's not so much a reflection on his sliminess...lots of people do such things...but more a reflection on the mental capacity of much of the community here.

Link?  It's a subject which interests me lately and I didn't see a detailed exploration of it by him.

In fact, I see most people who start to glimpse the horrible truth trying their best to look the other way.  The truth is that stand-alone native Bitcoin support is fundamentally economically broken.  The only hope is to trash some aspects of the standard sales pitch marketing points.  It's just a matter of choosing which ones.

Some vultures around here probably do see the disease that the animal has and are looking forward to picking it's eyes out when it finally falls.  Already they are jockeying for position.

I think that Blockstream is no different with respect to seeing the disease, but the participants are more close to veterinarians who wish to give the beast a shot of antibiotics and back on it's feet again.  This is why Blockstream is composed of people who have undeniably put huge amounts of effort into Bitcoin already and obviously care deeply about it.  We don't see this in the vulture groups at all.

Most people probably conceive of merged mining as a means for other efforts to make use of the strong hand that Bitcoin has.  Merged mining at the two-way-peg nexus with sidechains is the other way around I believe.  That is, to support Bitcoin in it's present sha256 POW form even at a 'loss'.

Every third post from this guy is a call for some form of censorship it seems.  There are doubtless a lot like him but normally his type are not attracted to such things as distributed cryto-currencies.  Thankfully.  He'll probably find a nice niche as some type of bureaucrat or law enforcement guy when he gets to be working age would be my guess.

When I was taking a position I was not either bullish or bearish exactly.  I just noticed you are Edward50 who I remember from back in those days.  Hiya!  How did you make out?

Anyway, although I changed my numbers on occasion, I mostly picked an amount of USD I planned to put in.  I'd buy, say, 25% of that number then pick a lower target for the next tranche.  Yes, I missed my last target ($1.65-ish as I recall), but I ended up with many many more BTC in the long run considering I started at about $15.

Times are a little different now.  The details of development and ecosystem are different, but they are just as important to keep an eye on.  If I had no BTC now and some money I could afford to lose, I very possibly would be a buyer at this point to sit on just in case there is a big win.  No different than when I started out though I ended up buying a lot more than I had initially planned.  And I'd be employing the same buying strategy that I did back in the day.

I'd say it's more likely that the former would need to be underway (visibly or otherwise) before the latter can be scheduled.  Unless dispatching Bitcoin and annoying peer2peer issues more generally is such a triviality that it doesn't warrant much consideration.  That's possible.

Hey guys!  Let's have a robust and disruptive monetary system that challenges the state sponsored fiat mess...all we need is State Department approval.  Brilliant!

Hey!  How's my favorite hypno-toad?  How's the Instawallet investigation coming along?  Did Inspector Clouseau catch the baddie who hacked you 'military grade' hardware?  Did you or anyone you know do anything fun with Phin's (one time) million dollars worth of BTC?

Well, it _is_ a way to turn a certain loss into a possible gain.  Ask me how I know.

(In reality in my case, I always did consider my long-shot bet on Bitcoin to be fairly long-term, and from day one I had in my mind converted from the time domain into the...well...profit/loss domain I guess on would say.  And I was always comfortable to lose everything I have in Bitcoin in a split second.  Would not be exactly overjoyed to do so, of course, but it would't be the end of the world either.)

The Bitcoiners don't need you Wobbler:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEnoofPhBtE

I like it better this way, Wubya;  I get to see you run.

As I said to NewLiberty, I'm not talking about Bitcoin.  My thoughts are flights of fancy with maybe and idea or two worth integrating into some future solution or another depending on how things go.

At this point I favor trying to make Bitcoin be what it needs to be to withstand the types of attacks which are theoretically possible and thus retain a degree of confidence among people like me who's confidence is hard to earn.  Again, Blockstream and sidechains are the most promising thing I've seen in a long time.  I'd rank the development up there in importance with the moment Hal first read Satoshi's mailing list post.

I might add that I see relatively little value in 'the power of our numbers using it.'  Most users are sheep and use Bitcoin as sheep.  They would be more useful in destroying the solution than preserving it.  Development under Gavin's watch could have focused on making the story be different but they didn't.  Closer to just the opposite.

To be clear, I'm not talking about Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is what we've got and it is what it is.  I think it has the potential be be a solid foundation if the planets align correctly, but it is not on a good trajectory in my opinion.  Hopefully Blockstream will turn things around.

I consider that if 1 of 100 nodes and interconnects were 'unconsolidated' and active and integrated, that is a big step toward providing resiliency.  This because if the 99% were put out of action, the 1% could support the system sort of and provide a tested path forward toward recovery.

One solution I considered would be to have a fairly cheap but specialized device which would be useful as both a transfer and mining node.  It would contain an FPGA and a TPM with Peter Todd's 'break glass' one-time keygen initiation scheme.  The 'testing and validation mesh' that I touched on would blacklist any device which was found to be cheating.  The FPGA could adapt to yet-to-be-described algorithms making it possible to stay ahead of ASIC producers (and run cheap.)  I like some of the concepts Dan Kaminski used for nooter in order to probe for general location and situation, and doing so from multiple points (other nodes in a mesh) might be able to root out cheaters.  Such a device could have multiple functions over and above supporting a P2P currency solution making it a nice thing to own, and probably could be made for not very much money.  Probably also not necessary in order to participate, but a value-add which would be rewarded.