It's the year 2000 Dot Com bubble with a twist. Instead of huge prices for Pets.com and 5000 other "companies" we have a smaller number of giants which are rising too fast. Then we get to add the next BTC bubble into the mix, as the Dollar is collapsing, and the possibilities are Mind Blowing. May you live in interesting times.  I definitely can see that... Global economy's already fragile, and decreased unemployment rates and increased wages in US barely match official cost inflation numbers in the "recovery." I wonder why Google is priced so relatively low by P/E. They're in practically everything and expanding into recently-unknown markets (while entering old markets, too) at unreasonable speed - seems like what you'd want to be in if you're going to throw money at "technology." It's such a diversified conglomerate (rather than being a mere product like some others), it's practically a mutual fund - it has plays for all spans of time for virtually everyone, and is already quite profitable compared to other web 2.0 plays (or 3.0? Idunno if that argument was settled, yet). Twitter's a flat-out money-hole, Facebook's latest earnings have it making <1% of current market price per quarter, Netflix is making well under half a percent of price per quarter, and Google's making just under 3% price per quarter. I guess I just don't understand the thinking going on when you have "3x normalized EPS, high diversity, and a 'true,' older company" vs "1/3 normalized EPS, little diversity, relatively new, mostly one product [soon to be two]" and someone would pick the latter. I don't have a stake in any of this, obviously -- I don't even understand the mindset of spending a year's earnings to buy .0005% of something and only being able to get company updates from the news and mass mailers or looking at a company's sterile stockholders' webpage. Guess I need to study the Dot Com bubble more. Recommended reading? |
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Title cut off... *lack of good ideas for institutional investors to throw their money at?
I just look at these two and think end-of-life (if you're barely profitable now that you're mainstream and established, where do you go?), but the P/E ratios on these just keep climbing at ridiculous rates. I'm trying to figure out where the logic bottleneck is (maybe within me?), and I can't help but think it's dumb money telling their fund manager to invest in "technology," but not wanting to get into the higher risk of ventures which haven't yet proven a massive market and are a household name, or maybe they only pay their employees in stock. I'm not even thinking about Bitcoin here, just wondering what on Earth's going through these folks' minds. If someone could explain it to me, I'd be appreciative.
(heading to sleep, so won't immediately respond - not trolling)
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Fungibility isn't really limited since the limits can be easily reversed once you arrive home.
But fungibility IS limited while you are not at home. No buying a hotdog from the street corner vendor that doesn't have the approved limited-fungibility-bitcoin terminal, or the girl scout selling girl scout cookies until after you get back home and convert it. There is really no need to have such a system until bitcoin becomes the only form of payment. In spite of anarcho-libertarian wishing for this in the near future, it's not gonna happen for a long, long, time. VISA/Mastercard's legacy system would be sufficient, but I'm sure they would rather have your money under their control (as a demand deposit or credit) as it would be currently than sharing partial control with them. I don't disagree (and I was definitely fantasizing), but we will have local anomaly cases where BTC acceptance is strangely high, maybe not always German in the future. Better calmly prepare for the future than scramble to fix the past, yeah? |
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I haven't heard of any attacks resulting from this, but you probably don't want to be the first. You'd probably be better off trying to tether your laptop to a phone or something along those lines (or if you're using a phone for BTC, use its mobile data connection rather than WiFi).
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I could see a gift card being an okay solution if it were instead, say, redeemable private currencies I could redeem for a currency of my choice, but I was thinking more along the lines of something I could use at any legitimate merchant, but not a fencer, illegal gun salesman, or street-corner drug salesman.
What you are seeking is the current credit/debit card system with reversible transactions an no anonymity. Such as system currently does not allow payments to individual private persons. I normally can't meet with a person that I find on craigslist selling an item I want and pay him with my debit card. When I was thinking about this, I was envisioning a rubber hose kind of scenario, where bitcoins were being demanded of me, but it would be impossible for me to send them to the thief, so threats to make me hand money over to him would be ineffective since I couldn't send money to his address. I could give him the physical wallet hardware and password, but then he'd have to only use it at registered merchants, where the blacklisting and unblinding, as you mention, would come into play.
You shouldn't be carrying devices that have access private keys to large amounts of bitcoin, so they can be coerced from you. The average person doesn't carry large amounts of cash so it minimizes the risk. The risk vs. reward ratio should be large enough to deter most criminals. If you are uncomfortable with carrying around a certain amount of cash, you should also be uncomfortable with carrying around the private keys to the same amount of bitcoin. I would really prefer that no amount could be easily coerced from me, and I've never mentioned reversibility, which this scheme would not enable. Fungibility isn't really limited since the limits can be easily reversed once you arrive home. |
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I'm now willing to handle group buys ("no possibly vaporware" rule still in effect) should someone have interest. For group buys, the form at the top of the OP absolutely must be filled out, but you don't need to fill it out for each order (though every buyer needs to explicitly agree to it for me). Alan's suggesting Armory .91 will be released within a couple weeks. Coin Control should be back within a day of that happening, assuming it fixes the issue I've had.
I'm definitely okay with handling crypto exchanges (LTC<->BTC, LTC<->DOGE, etc) so long as the value isn't "too trivial." I currently am equipped to handle BTC, LTC, DOGE, and COYE, but am open to dealing with others on request. I'd prefer the transaction be worth at least $25 to justify my time, or include a tip.
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If anyone is interested, I have provided escrow for a buyer who successfully completed a deal with pcfli and received the miner as promised. Same here. One of the easiest escrow transactions I've handled -- smooth sailing. |
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Anyway, is it possible to create separate "specific-use-only" wallets you could store in, say, your phone or your Trezor, where funds could only be sent to specific whitelisted addresses?
I don't see a reason to create such a thing, there already exist gift cards (as a private payment system) The idea is that the coins in the wallet could only be sent to specific addresses -- legitimate merchants. If a thief demanded your bitcoins, he'd have to steal the entire physical wallet device and could only spend the coins at legitimate merchants. He could not simply transfer coins to his own wallet. If the hardware wallet were stolen, the police can easily put together a database of blacklisted addresses which are pushed to merchants (this could be very effective if bitcoin change could be forced to go into old addresses instead of generating new ones). This DOES NOT affect fungibility.
I image a hardware wallet as a device is a device that can be purchased anonymously. It would be cheap, and designed to cheaply connect to a public network wirelessly to send transactions and monitor the blockchain. You would use it to transfer money to another private person's wallet or the pay terminal of a retailer. It's not designed to hold a lot of money, that is, more money than you are willing to lose. It would be analogous to filling your own wallet with cash for the cash purchases you intend to make for the day. The reason people may want anonymous wallets is the same reason today you would choose to buy something with cash rather than using a credit card. You may not want the receiver to be able to know who you are. Now, if you lose your hardware wallet, you can go home and sweep the addresses that it owns with the optional wallet backup program. Same thing if a thief physically takes your wallet, you can sweep the wallet with the backup program before the thief does, you get your money back. If the thief sweeps the wallet before you do (after cracking or coercing the password on the device such as a 4 digit pin), then the police can track the money until it hits a public address that may unblind the thief (i.e. a retail pay terminal with surveillance.) If you keep a large amount of money in such a wallet, then you may be asking for trouble. There's always a small possibility that manufacturer of the wallet may have inserted or allowed a hack that allows someone else to gain access to the wallet's private keys. The idea of a hardware wallet is that it would become an acceptable risk to carry certain amounts of money, and the device or the money can be lost without causing a catastrophic loss of funds. There's no reason to implement a specialized limited fungibility system for bitcoin, the retailer can just sell you a gift card instead. I could see a gift card being an okay solution if it were instead, say, redeemable private currencies I could redeem for a currency of my choice, but I was thinking more along the lines of something I could use at any legitimate merchant, but not a fencer, illegal gun salesman, or street-corner drug salesman. When I was thinking about this, I was envisioning a rubber hose kind of scenario, where bitcoins were being demanded of me, but it would be impossible for me to send them to the thief, so threats to make me hand money over to him would be ineffective since I couldn't send money to his address. I could give him the physical wallet hardware and password, but then he'd have to only use it at registered merchants, where the blacklisting and unblinding, as you mention, would come into play. I'd guess this solution, if feasible, would permit conversion of the "specific use" keys/funds back into "true bitcoins" (thus not really impacting fungibility except while you're away from your cold storage device) while still allowing you to use the bitcoins at almost all merchants which accept BTC, which I definitely can't do with gift cards. It's also trustless insofar as BitPay (or whoever organizes the theoretical system) doesn't control funds -- they'd need my keyparts for each expenditure, which I'd hold. Idunno, though. It does all sound very complicated with fairly little reward. Hopefully, there're better ideas out there which I like from a security:convenience perspective. |
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I honestly haven't noticed a change (outside of less threads complaining about newbie restrictions), but I often frequented the newbies subforum, so I'm totally fine with keeping the restrictions lift in place.
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Euros are being used by children to buy AK47s. What the Hell, VICE?
They did a fantastic video miniseries on various places you want to see but not physically visit, though, which I recommend to everyone. I'm now starting to doubt whether there was any factual accuracy and even wondering if they went to places they claimed, but it's still entertaining.
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There will be lots of stales as the slower machines will be much too late. It works, thats correct, but it is not the optimal way.. It is not the way I would take  Maybe I'm misunderstanding how stratum works (not trying to be an asshole doing a "gotcha" or something, just curious). Won't all miners, slow or fast, switch to new non-stale work at the same time? I thought stales only occurred due to network or server lag, where old work is completed before the server pushes new work. Statistically, then, shouldn't they have the same % of stales? To make it easy: No :-) Very short description: Stratum pushes a "template" for the current block to the client with a given Difficulty. So a R290X with massive power as for example Diff 500. This client now "crunches numbers" until it finds a (possible) positive number for the template and sends it back to the (stratum) server. Now comes the trick, with vardiff, the server decides on the number of shares per second PER WORKER how high the diff of this template is. So even if there 1000 servers behind one WORKER, every worker gets now diff 500, even if there is only a CPU mining. Now the R290X already found a candidate, and sends it back to the server as the CPU is still crunching. Lets now say the R290X delivers this Share every 10 seconds but the CPU needs 5 minute for the share (at least) because it is the same high diff. Until the share from the CPU gets submitted, there is already a new block in the network and so a new Block Template, meaning the share submitted from the CPU will be a stale share. This was a very easy and rough description of things going on, there are million other gings goin on in parallel but this should at least give you an idea why it is NOT good to use multiple/different machines under one worker. oc Thanks. That seems fairly insane. It didn't used to work this way pre-stratum, did it? It seems like if the server detects a new block, it'd be in everyone's best interest to immediately push out new work. |
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OMG, you guys are so crazy.. Its fucking him. He was confronted by one nice, cute looking blonde reporter and he spilled the beans. Then the whole world shows up on his door step and he said hes not the guy. You cant actually believe that do you?
Andreas and Gavin are in the know.
I am in the know, and soon you guys will realize that Satoshi loves trains, lives in CA has a few kids and drives a corolla.
I tend to need actual evidence to believe things. If you like to believe everything "nice, cute looking blonde reporter"s say... well... you might be in for a shock some time in your future. I like proof too, but the proof in the case is in the pudding. Do you think people would be offering charter jets, donations ect if this was not Satoshi. The heat would die down instantly and he would go back to real life. NO NEED TO SPEND TENS OF THOUSANDS ON A GUY WHO IS NOT SATOSHI. Hes Satoshi, Gavin knows it and so do I. He even spent bitcoins in a F2F transaction and that person remembers how he looked. Its him, we'll all know soon enough once he has time to get some fiat together, get his family safe and have a much needed beer with Gavin. As soon as I see some actual evidence I will be able to make a decision. You're not really "making a decision" if you have more evidence than that. It's like taking a rock to thirty geologists who assert it is indeed a rock and then saying "I've made a decision; it's a rock."  |
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There will be lots of stales as the slower machines will be much too late. It works, thats correct, but it is not the optimal way.. It is not the way I would take Maybe I'm misunderstanding how stratum works (not trying to be an asshole doing a "gotcha" or something, just curious). Won't all miners, slow or fast, switch to new non-stale work at the same time? I thought stales only occurred due to network or server lag, where old work is completed before the server pushes new work. Statistically, then, shouldn't they have the same % of stales? |
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Thats not correct, as most pools use variable difficulty, when you use the same worker account for all your workers (even small/slow) ones, the smaller ones will get "overloaded" with too high difficulty shares as the Pool is trying to throttle the max shares per second from you.
Best thing is to use a stratum proxy for this and THEN connect to the pool.
It'd more or less still be the same payout. Less powerful rigs will just submit more-valuable shares less often. Doesn't really matter if they miss a few rounds so long as they eventually make it up. |
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Like... can you force the mobile phone keypart to be required, and then require either the cold storage device keypart or a Bitpay keypart with a merchant keypart? I guess you could kludge something together where there are many multi-sigs and multiple ways to unlock the "master" multi-sig....?
2 out of 3 Shamir Secret Sharing with {phone, cold storage, bitpay}? This does not implicitly trust bitpay, but does trust it to spend funds to the "appropriate location". Alternatively, several sets of {phone, cold storage, merchant(n)} Most workable approach so far. I'm unsure if multisig may support (or may eventually support) conditional "n"s. Maybe you need: Phone + Cold Storage. If no Cold Storage, then both Merchant + Bitpay. (Bitpay's sign-off by providing a keypart helps verify the merchant hasn't been compromised) Bitpay would also refuse a sign-off if the customer claimed his keys were stolen and could sign that claim with the cold storage device's keypart, so it'd require the cold storage device's sign-off to move. |
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I'm specifically talking about English vs. American spelling. I.e. words like flavour vs. flavor, colour vs. color etc. We already know that Nakamoto used English spelling in his personal communication, so unless you believe this was a deliberate setup, we can pretty much exclude all U.S. born citizens.
Edit: and I also believe the general consensus was that English was Nakamoto's native language.
So he could be Canadian as well is what you just said. Right. That's what I was trying to get at. He could be Nigerian and UK English would still fit. |
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UK English is spoken and written by almost everyone who isn't American, fwiw.
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There's no problem doing that. "Workers" only exist so you can see which miners are on and mining - it's not pools trying to enforce some type of "one computer per worker" deal. You can point as many computers there and on the same worker credentials as you want, all over the world, and the pool server will still send them all work as normal and output the correct stats for work solved by all the computers.
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Yep. BFX is pretty old. I use them when I can't find someone local.
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@Jim - Multisig approach makes sense The cold storage device has two parts (its own part and the mobile phone's part), and the mobile device has just one, so you could still "unlimit" your bitcoins if you want, but the thief still would be limited to merchants on the whitelist if he only had the mobile phone. Can you force certain parts of keys to be required instead of a blanket "m of n"? Like... can you force the mobile phone keypart to be required, and then require either the cold storage device keypart or a Bitpay keypart with a merchant keypart? I guess you could kludge something together where there are many multi-sigs and multiple ways to unlock the "master" multi-sig....? The thief would then purchase Gold from a legitimate seller and then resell it for fiat or plain BTC?
If the thief can get there before a blacklist request is pushed from the list organizer (police, Bitpay, whoever) to the compliant merchants at the request of full-wallet owner and/or before the person who was stolen from moves the funds. |
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