Canada IS taking bitcoin seriously, that is huge ups ... and the whole MintChip thing is so vaguely defined as to be basically vapour-ware at this stage ... they are saying "we know we need to do something and we are prepared to throw out $50k in bullion to devs for good ideas" ...f!, that's all they got? Satoshi is casting a giant shadow when you look at how behind the competition is ... they could do worse than just fork bitcoin call it MintChipCoin, give it some kind of small change convertibility to loonies and marry it up to a hardware device (who knows why are they obsessing over that part of it ??) .... I might just throw that idea in there for a shot at the bullion. Mostly just a gratuitous comment because at last we can ....  |
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Suggestion: stickie this thread.
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Yet another control freak who needs to get over the Internet before it destroys him ....
I liked it when the forum allowed to change PseudoNyms ... that was neat, it stopped presumptions and flame wars continuing on across multiple threads because you never knew who was who exactly so just took the writings on their merits ... and anybody who likes to be identified with some daft pseudonym or another could equally keep their badge. Can we bring that back theymos?
It's all yours if you decide to donate 10 or more BTC to the forum. Huh? is this a pay per extra feature? are you serious? I think we could round up 10btc to bring back variable pseudonyms ... |
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Yet another control freak who needs to get over the Internet before it destroys him ....
I liked it when the forum allowed to change PseudoNyms ... that was neat, it stopped presumptions and flame wars continuing on across multiple threads because you never knew who was who exactly so just took the writings on their merits ... and anybody who likes to be identified with some daft pseudonym or another could equally keep their badge. Can we bring that back theymos?
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"exchange Loonies for MintChips ..." ... cartoon currencies, it's funny if it wasn't tragic
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Some guy called Eric just shot his bolt over how great MintChip is .... http://envelopeeconomics.com/2012/04/11/canada-has-unveiled-the-bitcoin/Small correction: digital Canadian dollars are traceable by design, therefore not fungible. In the same light, until we see Mintchip showing up on SilkRoad as an acceptable means of payment you will know they are less fungible than Bitcoin. As much as society despises illicit or shady activities, they are the acid test for that most essential property of any money, fungibility. As it has been since time immemorable, yet somehow forgotten by modern monetary managers, when rolling out their meglomaniacal financial monitoring and tracking systems. |
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Open Source software, by its design is almost impossible to regulate.
What are you going to write laws directed at, lines of code?
People need to take a step back and realise the ridiculous of what they are talking about. You can't regulate open source software it is an idiocy and will undermine any institution attempting to do so ... legal eagle or not.
As the old adage goes, "laws are for lawyers".
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Bitcoin is Open Source software ... if anybody has a problem with it (legal, regulatory, morally, financially, whatever!), chnage the source code and see if it flies.
There is absolutely no need to regulate a piece of Open Source software ... why haven't the legal eagles picked up on this yet (in their haste to regulate, strangulate)??
If you don't like it, change it and put it out there .... or shut up and get out of the way.
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Could be, I suppose, though you're assuming some civilisation has reason to hide its messages. In our case, "we've seen no aliens, therefore why should we hide". Therefore, anyone hiding themselves would presumably be aware of other aliens. So... either there are no alien civilisations, in which case there are no messages, or there are (at least) two, in which case they are hiding their messages from each other... and from us.
Well, we don't know of any other civ.s out there but we already encrypt signals just to/from each other ... following that tendency along it's current tech. development trajectory leads to more and better encryption, for whatever reasons (mostly because it is a technically superior solution to communicate end-to-end, and thus a default for an advanced civ., and only use broadcast comms. as a poor second best). This is kind of the point in my OP, that encrypted/masked communications is the default as the technically superior form of communication (using simply the current development trajectory of human RF comms.) and unmasked, broadcast signals will be exceedingly rarely used by technically advanced civ.s, as it would be like expecting modern humans to regularly use stone age tools. Obviously though, none of this says anything about the expected rate of occurrence of technically advanced civilisations. |
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I think this discussion is missing something. A broadcast would not be detectable because it says "Hello, we are liitle green men" (plaintext) instead of "sfghkjrtzdfbxcvnbzd,jtsdfò" (ciphertext). It would be detectable because it occurs on a frequency band which does not naturally occur. Anyone scanning the sky for signals would see *a signal* whether they could understand it or not. Suppose your country outlawed encryption - the presence of encrypted data on your computer would incriminate you (unless you can prove you're working on random number generators and need lots of random data). Just because the government could decipher your data wouldn't mean they didn't know it was there.
Yeah, I thought about that, that's why I said or basically any technological equivalent of signal masking ... it's always going to be difficult to get out of an anthropocentric view of other species technologies but we can use laws of physics, as we currently understand them, to place bounds on the possible/impossible. So imagine there is a civ. out there that wants to broadcast interstellar signals (don't know why), and wants to be able to mask that signal in some fashion. The only way to do this to avoid what you are talking about is to produce a radio broadcast signal that appears no different than noise at the RF level ... encryption, but not as we know it. benjamindees: SETI only looks for beacons eh ... didn't know that. What kind of civ. are they expecting to detect that would be willing to advertise itself I wonder? Someone as stupid as humans maybe? Edit: Another thought is that human RF broadcast signals that have gone out there already, beginning in earnest around 1930ish (with strong carrier waves) will have travelled "only" 80 light years so far. Using this, you could then calculate the probability that a light cone 80 light-years in extent, centered on Earth, will have already encountered a habitable planet, given the expected density of habitable planets in our galactic neighbourhood. And you could go on further and do a kind of reverse Drake equation and make a guess at how long we've got before those signals encounter an advanced civ. that maybe listening, and then how long to get response from such a civ. .... or when they might show up here? |
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Boy, does this luck ever suck ....
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Been watching out for something along these lines.
Taking the first step is half the journey ... good stuff.
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In what country are you considering to base your server?
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At the same time, you would think there would be a few super advanced civilizations that would setup beacons just to announce their existence. Not on their home world, of course.
Good point. Probably safe to assume then that there are no super-advanced civs. who have set-up "here we are beacons" away from their home world, in our light cone at least. I wonder though when a civ. would ever feel confident enough to know that once you put that beacon up there is not another bigger, badder threat now looking in your direction? |
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Toot, toot ... mighty fine sounding horn you got there ... and what exactly are you saying because you have been involved with some of the biggest software disaster's ever you can recognise Bitcoin as one? You know I don't really care what you think, believe, know, or think you believe you know but let's just say you don't strike me as a Satoshi .... sooo ... saying stuff like below just smells like a big bunch sour grapes ... or I don't know what. It's evident that this "odd assortment of uber-geeks, anarchists, libertarians, scammers and forex traders"1 have little to offer or to inspire folks who would just like to pay for an ice cream cone using their phone, |
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Not sure how many people have heard of Fermi's paradox, the famous quote is "if there are aliens out there, why haven't we heard them?" or something to that effect. The density of exo-planets now in evidence from recent observations is strongly bringing this question to the fore again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Overviewhttp://fermisparadox.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drake_EquationIt is something I've been pondering on and off for quite a while. There is a large effort SETI searching for alien signals, to date fruitlessly. Recently, (bitcoin!) I began looking at the rate of progress of encryption of human radio communications since radio comms. began and wondered what would be effect of this for alien civilisations listening in on Earth in the future (say in 100 or 200 years time). So, now I come to the conclusion that cryptography, or basically any technological equivalent of signal masking, is a probable solution to the Fermi paradox, and ultimately means most SETI efforts are useless or will only succeed in the very rare occasion when a civilisation goes through the "unmasked radio communication" phase soon after discovering EM radio waves, like humanity is going through at present. Basically, if cryptography proceeds at the same rate of progress as it is moving now, combined with the effect of more directed radio transmissions and less broadcast, then anybody listening towards Earth will not see anything large different from noise. It kind of fits into the following classification but with the advance of cryptographic technology and signal masking being the major player. "Civilizations only broadcast detectable radio signals for a brief period of time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Civilizations_only_broadcast_detectable_radio_signals_for_a_brief_period_of_timeAnd it may not be bad thing to have all outbound radio signals masked, who knows what nasties are waiting out there that have awoken now that our naked naive signals have been blurted out across the galaxy? Maybe it is actually mark of a sophisticated, advanced civilisations that they are unobservable (unless they choose to reveal themselves)? Edit: tl;dr Cryptography is the Great Filter in the Drake equation |
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It's evident that this "odd assortment of uber-geeks, anarchists, libertarians, scammers and forex traders"1 have little to offer or to inspire folks who would just like to pay for an ice cream cone using their phone, nor to folks who would just like to sell one that way. What I have seen instead is a loss of momentum towards using bitcoins for normal everyday aboveground transactions since 3rd quarter 2011.
Six months of at best sitting dead in the water is a long time, enough to give the competition a significant lead, particularly given the competition does not carry the reputation risk of bitcoin and is focused on the payment system application Pretty negative view on all the dev. work that has gone on .... just what have you done to further buying your precious MintChip ice-cream with your phone? (sounds kind of irrelevant to me in the big scheme but if that's what twists your knobs ... ) Did you see there is a tenative iPhone app for Bitcoin ... ? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75673.0Discussing interesting topics is not mutually exclusive to "inspiring folk who want to buy ice-creams using their phone" .... but I'm not going to go out of my way. You'll get the money you deserve methinks. |
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Well technicalities or not the point is that when User A is paying user B, user B is relying on the fact that user A "can't" break the chip. The chip ensures security. If User A has extracted private keys and can generate thousands or millions of duplicate tx at will there is nothing user B can do to detect that. To user B chip the tx looks as valid as any other valid tx.
I would expect someone who gets a chip's private key could just mint their own money without needing to double spend. Afaik when a chip signs a message to transfer value, it has no burden of proof that it ever received that value from somewhere else, it is simply trusted to only sign payments out of its balance and to not sign payments without sufficient funds. With a hacked chip or compromised private key, one could simply issue new transactions without limit, they wouldn't need to be double spends. Such fake transactions could be used to top up real non-hacked cards. This seams plausible, I wish they would issue some detailed information about how it works so that we could determine the actual failure modes of the setup. Open Source it and let's see how "great" it really is ..... if it can't survive in the free market for ideas it probably can't survive long term. |
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Wouldn't that be "got Dwollared"
as in "Trade Hill got Dwollared when their merchant account containing hundreds of thousands was frozen"
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This sounds like a desperation move as the RCM monetary overlords (and other CB's no doubt) have fully realised the implications Bitcoin has for their monopoly power over money and are mounting an unseemly, hasty effort to outflank. Maybe Canada is a test case for global designs?
It is half-baked, ill-informed and vague, desperate even. Gold bounties for developers to join their forces reeks of kitschy imitation of the organic bitcoin bounty system for devs. It is something they would dearly love to have but can never grasp .... with all the 'money' in the world.
I would say this move is definitely prompted by the advent of Bitcoin but it has inevitable and epic fail written all over it ... steer clear.
Also it means Bitcoin has progressed to the third stage of Ghandi's conflict maxim: "First they ignore, then they ridicule, then THEY FIGHT ....."
Edit: the big lose for me though was they named it after an ice cream flavour
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