The problem's that it can't be legitimately collected by GHash. They can't just take away their clients' funds, so they have to pay out of pocket if the OP or GHash can't successfully petition users to refund the fee. It's a bad situation because either the OP's a victim of himself or GHash is a martyr -- or, the OP accepts a partial refund from GHash miners who happened to stumble across (or were directed to) the news and were kind enough to figure out and return their share of the fee.

Sure, and that's why Silk Road was such a superior alternative to the shady existence of the drug market as-is, both for law enforcement and those directly involved in drug production, distribution, and consumption: you don't have to meet a bunch of weirdos on the street or in their apartment who're wondering whether or not you're about to arrest or shoot them. It's a superior way to interact, whether being "hidden" is stigmatized or not.

Forget the walls and laws, and buy lots of land and a long driveway.

I realized today that all Scribd documents are marked as having a "traditional copyright" claim. As far as I know, that is false. I'm pretty sure neither qwk nor Adam ever requested an IP claim on them, and I obviously have no claim on them. I was a bit unclear about this in an earlier OP edit -- it would be ideologically disagreeable for someone to post transcripts behind some kind of paywall, but there are no legal restrictions against such an act. I'll start sloooowly changing the copyright allegations on Scribd one by one.

Federal government can do what it wants, but I admire sanctuary cities. I don't admire organizations looking to set up those seeking to come for welfare, but for those looking to work so much that they illegally hop the border at risk to their person and have to work under the table, I have nothing but respect for. Anyone looking to break a law with noble intent, I consider a hero, and it's a great world where we come together to help them "launder money" to their families.

Russia is manlier than NYC. In Russia, cursing at people is for old women. In Russia, when you want to make a point, you use your Kalashnikov.

Machines can fix themselves. Printers print repair drones which repair printers. Drones can be salvaged and reprinted if they break down. Drones can cover the most common reasons to fix things, but if they can't fix it, you simply salvage the entire machine and reprint it. Printer self-replication was one of the earliest goals of the industry. Excluding the designers, a new, large factory with unique machinery would take a team of 10 engineers maybe half a year to be finished. After that, you really only need a drone supervisor to have a human determine which trespassers should be immediately incapacitated. Architects will be replaced as soon as resource scarcity is no longer a "problem" (when printed space drones mine and haul resources to space factories and we put ski lodges inside stars because we have nothing better to do).

Prices cut.

Hello. I no longer offer escrow services. No time.

Hello. I no longer offer escrow services. No time.

bump -- soon heading out for work tonight (which carries over to mid-tomorrow), but should reply by Monday.

Here's a more useful tidbit from the info-gathering: spending an hour compressing the blockchain bootstrap torrent once would, assuming an average download speed of 1,100kb/s, with 100k new nodes per month, would save ~2.4 million hours globally in sync times every year. (rather, 274 "years" would be saved every year)

Sorry to've disappeared for nearly a week. Phone died. Will have yours done by end of day, jambola.

Bitcointalk holds an abnormal amount of personal information in PMs, from names and addresses, to bank routing and account numbers. A private message self-destruct option would be reasonable, I think. The sender would tick the option and enter the number of days before the PM is hard-deleted from the server (both in the receiver's inbox and sender's outbox). This would encourage extra caution with sensitive information, where the receiver could copy the data and store it locally only if he really thought he'd need it. In the event of a warrant or community lynch mob, it also takes some of the heat off Bitcointalk given they had an absolutely legitimate reason to delete the info.

Why's that? Charlie wasn't selling drugs, and the case against him was for an inherently victimless money-shuffling crime where he enabled an inherently victimless drug-selling crime. Don't get me wrong - a lot of drug-related sentences are draconian and awful, and Charlie got out very well in that regard, but Charlie was pretty removed from the kinds of crimes they hammer the proles with to move "neighborhood undesirables" (often Black or Mexican) into prisons so the rich don't have to suffer their presence.

System's fucked up, but I'm definitely glad Charlie wasn't subject to the really harsh sentences they sometimes dish out.

List should be current up to this point (fwiw)

blk compression testing is done "good enough." Thanks to deslok for hassling me throughout. GoogleDocs has decided to suddenly stop publishing notes in their latest mandatory upgrade of spreadsheets because they're assholes, so I'll have to manually list notes here...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NmgCVnLI8WBEdzjQvMhoe64LGXp23XiMGZU8Syz0lAI/pubhtml

Specs -
Phenom II x4 (965) 3.4GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM
7200RPM HDD
Win7 x64

blk00000
Nanozip 1 - .09a x86: optimum2, 512mb RAM allocated
Nanozip 2 - .09a x86: CM, 512mb RAM allocated
Nanozip 3 - .09a x64: optimum2, 4096mb RAM allocated
7zip 1 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 1024MB dic. size (word size 273), 3 threads
7zip 2 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 512MB dic. size (word size 192), 4 threads
7zip 3 - 9.2 x64: LZMA, ultra, 1024MB dic. size (word size 273), 2 threads
7zip 4 - 9.2 x64: BZip2, ultra, 900KB dic. size, 4 threads
7zip exe 1 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 512MB dic. size (word size 192), 4 threads, put into SFX

blk00000 + blk00001
7zip exe 2 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 512MB dic. size (word size 192), 4 threads, put into SFX

entire "blocks" folder
7zip 1 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 512MB dic. size (word size 192), 4 threads
7zip 2 - 9.2 x64: LZMA2, ultra, 1024MB dic. size (word size 273), 3 threads
nanozip 1 - .09a x64: optimum2, 7500mb RAM allocated


Overall, nothing particularly exciting discovered. 40-45% compression is to be expected (I never saw 45%, but I'm kind'a dumm), which is pretty critical for initial sync (for anyone using cable or worse as ISP) and makes a solid case for compressing bootstrap files, but not very useful outside. Unsure why nanozip's "optimum2" algorithm did so poorly with the extra blocks when they contain so much repeated info.

I'm working on that last 7zip archive, but it shouldn't be thrilling. With the test I did do for the "blocks" folder, assuming you have a 3200kb/s cable connection, even after a ~13 1/2 minute decompression time, you, overall, save about a half-hour in time, don't have to use up unnecessary bandwidth from your monthly allotment, and stress the infrastructure a solid deal less. With DSL, all those benefits are greater and you'd be saving a good many hours. With satellite ISP, you'd be able to download the entire blockchain in one billing cycle without buying ultra-expensive pay-as-you-go bandwidth. In "US average" conditions, the benefits are significant, too, and it'd also save hours of time.

Assuming an "average GB cost" of $.10 and 100,000 new full nodes per month, the monthly cost savings of compressing blocks for the initial sync would be right around $85k, or ~$1M annually. That's a pretty BS statistic, so fwiw. Additional RAM, CPU, and HDD load are all too minimal to really make a difference compared to that (and you may get a net save in electricity costs by not needing to have the PC running as long just to download the blockchain).

Cheddar and butter. All you need now are some potatoes.

It's definitely him.

Coindesk recently intercepted an email from Charlie to his parole officer. It simply stated "Beer run."

Thanks. Back at you.

Shipping tomorrow. Only have one more properly-sized cardboard box left! (ETA: separating mobo/CPU from GPUs & PSU is fine)

I remember seeing someone actually talking about launching a "bitcoin satellite" (maybe it was you). Cost is a crapshoot which could go into the tens of $millions annually if the company's feeling mean/"smart"... it's not like there are many companies you can talk to, so I'd be surprised if they even talked to anyone about it without first being bribed with a suitcase of money.

I'm unsure if centralization's really a worry... I've never heard of issues with any coins' bootstrap torrents when they're signed by the devs (though BTC's obviously much smaller than where it could go in the moon-future). Incidentally, I recently talked with a major pirate scene group about what they do to protect against impersonated scene releases, and they say it's really never been an issue even though they don't even sign what they push and actual publication of torrent files and magnet links are usually distributed via third-party sites like ThePirateBay. The only problem they have, and it's really just an "eyeroll problem," is when other people copy their work-arounds to DRM and claim it as their own. That's not "money," but an infected impersonation under the right circumstances could result in the creation of a massive infection of hundreds of thousands of computers, which can certainly cause $millions in damages. I don't think we should just wait for a problem to arise, but I don't see much issue trusting a blockchain maybe three devs have had verified against the "current majority blockchain" and sign; I think that's enough. I think it's either Jeff or Greg who maintain the current bootstrap torrent, so that person'd obviously be a good pick...

ETA: Wait... how are people supposed to pick the satellite signal up?