Clearly you're looking to fool people who don't, sadly for you I'm not one of them. Though the fact that you don't recognize that I do is odd...

This is exactly the same as what you offered above-- you just offset the starting position of the interior step.

In what you describe, I choose x and y so that their difference is 60-ish bits. Then I give you y and xG.    You would compute yG - xG and begin adding steps of the 2 x table_size * G to it and looking up the result in the table.  Once you find a hit, you add the table position, the loop offset, and the y value to yield x.

What I described to you -- finding a private key whos pubkey begins with a long fixed string is an actual test of performance. To make it a better test, instead of zeros (which you could have precomputed over weeks or months) it would be better to use the hash of a recent block hash to bound the starting time. But zeros would be good enough for the discussion here.

I'm sure if you got anywhere near a 68 bit chosen prefix in two days you'd be setting a world record in "purebasic" computation for sure.

That isn't impressive at all and wouldn't prove your claim.  Because you fix a range, you could simply have a table of 2^31 entries (1G, 2G, 3G) based on X-only, you step by twice the size of your table, checking only the X to get a positive and negative offset, and find the match in one hour at a terribly slow rate of 1.2 million keys a second.

At that speed you are missing even the most basic optimizations.

Go away scammer.

Or come back with a private key who's pubkey x coordinate begins with >=68 zero bits within two days... (other than the one with pubkey 00000000000000000000003b78ce563f89a0ed9414f5aa28ad0d96d6795f9c63).

That CPU cannot do *any* operation at that speed, not even a single 32-bit multiply. Your post is an outright untruth.

My guess is that you intend to trick people into running malware or just rip them off selling them cracking software that lies about its performance.

The best practice is don't.

You can't discuss Bitcoin if you are sick or dead.

I get the impression that the anti-authority streak of many contributors here results in the forum having more than its share of participants who are covid19 deniers.

Just like it's important for the health of a geographic community to be well informed, it's important for the health of an online community to be well informed.  Due to conference and events its even possible for BCT members to transmit the virus to each other! ---- though, I agree that is much less of a concern.


That is a phenomenal piece of misinformation.  Because it's unethical to conduct a randomized-controlled test for live infections, all the studying in actual humans is extremely underpowered-- it's stuck with very few participants, poor compliance, testing too late when they're probably not very contagious, etc.  When you have an underpowed test the most common outcome is that the finding is not statistically significant.

It's like saying that "there is no evidence that parachutes improve survival when jumping out of planes" -- because virtually no one is jumping out of planes without them and some of the few that do survive.

So, instead we get stuff like natural experiments where an aircraft flies from NY to China with a person with swine flu on it, and zero people on board with masks get sick while 47% of the unmasked "control group" people got sick. Was it due to the masks, or was it simply that people with masks were more careful in general? We can't be completely sure.  The purpose of having a randomized control trial is to eliminate issues like that, but we can't go around intentionally infecting people with swine flu.

The particular study you're linking too was frustrated by detecting extremely low levels of viruses in *all* samples. For example for coronavirus (OC43) they  only detected the virus in droplets in the breath of 3 of 10 parties with the virus and no mask, while they detected it in 0 of 11 with the virus and a mask. Yet we *know* these viruses spread via dropplets. Their problem was that they either weren't testing people while they were contagious-- e.g. because the most contagious period was before symptoms showed, as is believed to be the case for sars-cov-2-- or their measurement approach was just busted. But regardless, in every case the mask reduced the levels they detected.

The problem was that their test was so underpowered that even an infinity fold reduction in rate was not statistically significant.

If the same approach study had also tested a six foot thick lead lined concrete wall, it would have also concluded that there was no evidence that it prevented the spread of OC43!  No virus particles would have been detected on the other side of the wall, just like the mask.  It would have been nice if they did include that, because then we could go around saying that there is no evidence that a mask works less well than a six foot thick lead lined concrete wall, and we'd be just as technically correct. And while it would also be a stupid and misleading claim, it would probably be less misleading than the claim that masks are completely ineffective which you've extracted from that paper.

Here is the image you couldn't link:

The worst part is that he has never fully pulled back those claims. Ego is a helluva drug.

No, we're working in a finite field. And in this field there are non-trivial cube roots of unity:


sage: F=FiniteField(2^256 - 2^32 - 2^9 - 2^8 - 2^7 - 2^6 - 2^4 - 1)
sage: F(1)^3
1
sage: F(55594575648329892869085402983802832744385952214688224221778511981742606582254)^3
1
sage: F(60197513588986302554485582024885075108884032450952339817679072026166228089408)^3
1


Did you compute efficient power ladders for each value? There is a factor of 100 difference in speed between e.g. a hamming weight 1 256-bit exponent and a hamming 128 256-bit exponent. It won't be that big a difference, but you can't assume the speed is similar just because the process is similar.

I know people who are sick with sars-cov-2 and whom have had family members die.

Sure, in plenty of places, there aren't many sick yet-- just because of there hasn't yet been enough time and/or because they started up distancing early enough relative to their infection to stop the spread there. This is especially the case in less dense locations because with less personal contact the disease naturally spreads more slowly. In other places-- dense places with lots of international travel-- a tremendous number are already very sick.

We have these great big brains so that we don't need to personally get sick to understand there is a disease spreading.  

With exponential processes the rate of increase also grows exponentially.  On the first day, 1 person is infected. One person per day? It would take 6 billion years to infect everyone! On the second day, three people are infected... Who cares, at that rate it would take 2 billion years to infect everyone. On day three nine people... day four 27 people... by day 20 (in this example) a million people per day are infected, and so on.

So an exponential process tends to look like irrelevant nonsense until it suddenly eats your fucking lunch.

This is why a few weeks ago people were saying crap like "this has only made 50 people in the US sick who cares". ... and now in NYC alone there are now more than 10,500 hospitalized and 1562 dead. Many who are currently hospitalized will die-- the disease takes a little while to kill. It's now guaranteed that more people in NYC will die then died in the 2001 WTC collapse-- which everyone accepts was a huge freaking tragedy.  Weeks ago this outcome was obvious and inevitable to anyone who did the math.

Virus spreading in susceptible populations behave exponentially until around 40% have been infected, and then they stop looking exponential because they start to run out of new victims.

Back on Feb 28 when it was clear by the first couple cases that there was uncontrolled spread in the US, I sent out an analysis to a number of friends predicting hundreds of thousands to millions dead, depending on how quickly we react... recommending that they stock up on supplies so that they can reduce their exposure risk until we've better at treating it and in case hospitals in their area overload.  The disease has tracked very close to my projections, and unfortunately many places did not react particularly quickly.

But if you're so confident that this is all outright fake,  I'm willing to make an enormous bet with you... care to suggest some terms?

For the reasons mentioned above, testing generally for any coronavirus would be pretty useless because there are many coronaviruses that humans commonly get which cause few to no symptoms and aren't any big risk.  I mean, if you're going to scam people might as well just throw the swab out and totally make up a fake result.

That's the same as anything else in the news, people call it all sorts of things-- like the telephone game.  The media doesn't mind just telling outright lies when they feel like it,  why would they start now bothering to cover their ass?

Back in 2011 (or 2012? I forget) we tried doing releases with trackerless torrents and found that they essentially didn't work.  The trackerless stuff works well enough to make DOS attacking trackers somewhat ineffective for extremely popular torrents, but for niche torrents they mostly didn't work at all (partially due to the background DDOS level against the bittorrent DHT stuff).  I don't think anything has changed regarding this.

In addition to the other excellent responses you've received here, SPV nodes (lite clients) also know the height even without BIP34 because they process all the prior headers too.  If they didn't they'd have no clue about the appropriate difficulty or total work in the chain, and so they couldn't validate the header.

Nope, there are three solutions to the cuberoot. Which is also an answer to your question: there are more possibilities.

(I haven't checked for this post but the cuberoot is also likely more expensive to calculate).

This is misinformation, the test they are administering for covid19 is absolutely specific to the RNA of sars-cov-2. So much so, there have even been problems with false negatives from tests in some countries because some have been mistakenly checking parts that have genetic variation in the population.  Some really good engineering is required to avoid making the test too specific.


Absolutely true! These rt-pcr tests work by amplifying the RNA (genetic code) in a sample and then searching for template matches with prepared chunks of genetic code specific to the virus being tested for.

The reason this is high is because most of the tests are being used on people with symptoms. Unfortunately, even when you have the sars-cov-2 virus the tests are sometimes negative too, because the sample didn't manage to collect enough virus.

The latest whitehouse briefing extended measures for another 30 days and the president was quite emphatic about the importance of not prematurely declaring victory.  I'm happy to have had my expectations confirmed here.

A vaccine is not effective on someone who is infected (or about to be infected). But it's going to take a long time to have a vaccine because vaccines are administered to healthy people so they must be very safe, so the fact that they don't help the currently infected isn't much of a concern.

I think it's much more likely that we'll have effective anti-viral and/or clonal antibody treatments long before effective vaccines. There are a half dozen trials ongoing now for various new and existing anti-viral compounds.   Clonal antibody treatments don't even require any research breakthroughs, just the time it takes to isolate and clone cells that produce effective antibodies.

Both anti-virals and antibody treatments are used to treat sick people, so they don't have to be very safe-- they only have to be safer than the virus. If they're highly effective they only need to be slightly safer than the virus.  Because they don't need to be very safe, we don't need to do much testing before widely deploying them.

If we find anti-viral treatments which are highly effective against sars-cov-2 and are fairly safe then in the developed world the issue will largely be resolved.  You get symptoms... you visit a doctor and get an anti-viral shot (maybe even a pill, though rapid development might skip the restriction that compounds need to work orally). Done, no need for a disruptive response because people won't die, at least not in large numbers. (The situation in less developed parts of the world might not be quite so good).  In the long run, a vaccine  can eliminate the issue when one is finally ready (hopefully-- for some human coronaviruses immunity doesn't last very long).

Places with larger numbers of infections and already straining hospitals like New York and California just won't. If other places do, in a week or two after they will see increasing hospitilizations, panic, and shut things down. Worse, because of the lag they'll continue to see increasing numbers after the shutdown and we'll potentially see even more panic, harsher lockdown mechanisms, etc.

In an exponential process the derivative is also an exponential... meaning that the more people are infected, the faster the rate of growth. Interventions like shutdowns and distancing temporarily change the exponent. An effective 'shutdown' must have a period of low contagion long enough to substantially lower the amount of infections in the population, or otherwise when you drop the shutdown you immediately jump to a tremendous infection rate when the original exponent is restored.  Like "lasing a stick of dynamite".  It certainly seems like in many places in the US where the infection started later people are taking shutdowns far less seriously then they are in (say) California-- instead of learning from earlier examples they look at them and say "well good thing its not so bad here, we can still go party", so it's quite plausible that there is still significant amounts of ongoing spread in these locations, many new infections, primed for an explosive outcome if there is a premature "all clear" sent by the whitehouse.  

The only way an early back-to-work works out well is if some of the more fringe epidemiology theories circulating hold and that the virus really has a R0 of 23 and a very low hospitalization rate and in fact a huge number of people have already been infected.  Existing data doesn't completely disprove this theory as far as I know but the growth rates of hospitalizations we've seen are pretty strong evidence against it. (If it were really the case that the virus was ludicrously infectious but just hospitalized very few people we would have seen the hospitalization rates spike much faster and everywhere almost at once).  I think these sorts of high R0 low-hospitalization rate theories are just hopeful fantasy.  There has been a lot of hopeful fantasy being thrown about by people who really don't want to face the reality-- this one is just a little less innumerate than most of them.

It's also absurd that a significant percentage of our testing capacity isn't being directed to sampling instead of obviously symptomatic people which would help us better understand and prepare for the spread and avoid making a costly mistake like prematurely reducing countermeasures (or keeping them around too long, for that matter).

Personally, I don't expect them the administration do anything that stupid-- though they might talk about it for the sake of encouraging hope. But then again, I also didn't expect them to respond so slowly to begin with...

I think it's really unfortunate that to prevent mask shortages the surgeon general and the CDC have materially mislead the public about the efficacy of masks.  The obvious way to phase out shutdowns would be to massively manufacture masks (even just surgical masks) and make wearing them in public mandatory for everyone.  There is significant evidence that population scale use of masks significantly lowers contagion for similar diseases and for sars-cov-2 in particular, and it would be a great way to reduce the unacceptable spike in additional hospitalizations a couple weeks after reducing distancing measures. In addition to the direct effect of reducing the spread, masks serve as a reminder of the risk (improving compliance with handwashing and distance keeping), discourage touching the face (for most people), and would be a visual identifier for idiots who are out without taking the pandemic seriously and whom should be avoided as a result. At this point, however, I think it would be politically impossible to go that route because it would require politicians to admit that they mislead the public, and it would require convincing the public to wear masks when many people now believe they don't work.

The relationship between the change in prices and the supply of money is complicated.  The classic econ-101 equation is MV=PQ-- you can inject arbitrarily large amounts of money without increasing prices, so long as the money doesn't circulate (or offsets a loss of circulation elsewhere).

Personally I wouldn't expect immediate inflation from the stimulus as it's being injected into a massively slowed economy. Longer term? interesting question.

There is just as much to ask about the effect of low interest rates on velocity... An additional 6 trillion dollars has an additive effect on the MV side of the equation, interest rates have an inversely multiplicative effect.

 

Ehh.

Okay, so first off-- you're absolutely right on one point: Even the real Satoshi wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. But not because there is no one to sue... but because there is nothing valid to sue over.

But not having a legal leg to stand on doesn't matter that much if you have a supply of money to keep litigating.  You can sue anyone at any time for essentially any reason. Your lawsuit, if frivolous, will eventually fail but not after costing the victim a lot of time and money.

Wright has already filed a pile of frivolous lawsuits, -- he keeps losing them but they still cost their targets money.

Wright could sue anyone, he could sue you.   If he was effective he'd manage to use the publicity of doing so to bring more victims into his fold and make more money out of it than the cost of the lawsuit,  but presumably even if he's not effective he could keep it up for a while on the largess of his existing victims.

Now, none of this would stop Bitcoin itself.  ... But on the other hand, if he kept suing anyone that does anything important for Bitcoin and as a result scared off people it could still have a negative effect.   Unfortunately, the legal systems in the developed world seem ill prepared to handle a lot of the fraud in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and Wright is a great example of that.

Wright's frivolous litigation probably won't stop anyone that has a healthy business-- if you're making money you can afford to swat the wright-fly as a cost of doing business.  But enthusiasts that participate because they love Bitcoins social or technological implications? Journalists that have razor thin margins?  Some of them-- perhaps many-- will find other things to do rather than be targeted.

I've already heard from a number of people, including fairly high profile journalists, that they're avoiding saying anything about wright (or, even, avoiding retracting stuff they previously published which they now know to be false) because they're concerned about frivolous litigation by wright.

And that is, of course, exactly what he wants. It's expensive for him to sue people,  so much better if he can spend a few minutes throwing around a bunch of baseless threats and then a large number of people well self censor.

Cross-currency atomic swaps have problems with volatility: abusers can treat them as call options on the exchange rate by setting one up but backing out if the exchange rate doesn't move favourably in their direction.  (The same problem exists for lightning payments that cross currencies.)

It's sad to see another perfectly fine thread wreaked by someone who can't control themselves and stay on topic.

Your confusion comes from the belief that he isn't broke.  He likely is, except for the funding he's slowly extracting from his victims-- which is why you see him making so may posts faking wealth (e.g. claims to have a lambo, but people googled the tags and found it was a one day rental, same with the boat and the plane, and his 'supercomputer' didn't even exist at all).  The page you're linking to makes its analysis assuming that he's Satoshi lol (eyeroll).

When he stops scamming the money will dry up and if that's all that happens its a best case scenario. More likely, all the people that he's ripped off with promises of access to Satoshi's coins will come after him and he'll end up in jail.  He might even be murdered --- I get the impression that some of the people he's scammed are the sort that you don't scam and live to tell the tale.  Plenty of reason to keep the lies coming even without speculating about the possibility of serious mental illness.