No.  We really don't. 

If there is a fork, then one or the other of the two chains dies within a day.  Whatever is left is BTC. 

They put tor exit nodes on a list.  That list does not function as a black list until or unless a DoS attack starts coming from tor exit nodes and it gets bad enough that the Tor-Exit-Nodes-List gets banned.

If someone is carrying out a DoS attack via Tor, it will disconnect all Tor users rather than only disconnecting the ones performing the attack. 

This is because the people implementing it have no desire to break Tor.  If there was a serious effort to ban only the Tor users perpetrating the DoS attack, that would require breaking Tor anonymity to figure out what users those were.  If you don't make any attempt to break Tor anonymity (and they don't) then you have to treat all Tor connections as equal.

I'm annoyed that they tried to do this at the same time as the block size issue - the block size change would have gone through without a problem if left to adoption rather than blockstream shills screaming about it.  It was plain bad judgment to do anything else at the same time though, because now the block stream shills get to scream FUD about something else in order to fight the block size increase.  I guarantee they wouldn't give a crap about it if the block size increase had already gone through, bitcoin had been made scalable without them, and their fucking expensive business plan which they're trying to build by increasing transaction expenses for everybody, was already in the toilet.

Bitcoin exists for purposes beyond making a profit  for Blockstream. 

Bitcoin core has always disconnected addresses with low to negative priority. 

You get low to negative priority by engaging in things that facilitate DoS attacks. 

Because a DoS attack carried out through Tor nodes will be distributed across all Tor exit nodes, the old protocol (which would lower the priority of a single tor exit node) isn't meaningful protection for a DoS attack via Tor. 

The mods you're looking at treat all Tor connections as having the same priority, so that a DoS attack via Tor will affect all of the Tor exit nodes at the same time.   If you're making no attempt to tell the difference between individual Tor users, that's the best you can do to protect the network. 

If they were trying to unmask Tor users I'd be sort of upset.  But there's no attempt to do that.  They're just trying to give the network the same degree of protection from DoS attacks via Tor that it has from DoS attacks via open IPs.

More to the point it proves that the people opposed to XT don't want anyone to know how many other people are on board because they are fully aware that if people had accurate information about it, they'd be the losers.  

If the anti-XT people are that sure they're losing, why should any of the rest of us doubt?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33994290

Turns out the Ice Bucket Challenge that was on when Hal Finney was struggling with ALS led to a bit of a breakthrough.  In a few years, there may be a cure.

It's already too late for Hal, and it's likely to happen too late for the current generation of ALS sufferers, but there's hope on the horizon. 

No, that is a lie.  The people who want XT to fail are lying a lot, trying to sabotage the consensus mechanism, etc.  It means they already know that if they are honest they will quickly lose.

XT has been implemented.  Anything that "will happen if XT is implemented" has already happened.

At some point in the future (but not before Jan 2016) the bitcoin protocol may change as a result of XT being adopted by a majority.  If that happens it will not affect the ownership of the coins in your wallet.

What may happen is that some people who have failed or refused to update their software to a client that speaks the new protocol, may reject blocks mined according to that protocol after the changeover date, ultimately forming their own block chain based on the old protocol.  After that, an increasing number of transactions (all transactions involving coins created after the fork) would be valid only in one of the two block chains; the one based on the new rules, or the one based on the old rules.  If you are paid in a transaction that is valid only on one of these two block chains, you may have the coins on that block chain but not on the other.  But this will not affect any coins currently in your wallet; a transaction spending them will be valid according to either version of the rules.

It also won't affect your wealth w/r/t anyone who is using the same set of protocol rules as you; If the transaction where you got coins is confirmed on the block chain that you and someone else both use for a subsequent transaction, a new transaction spending them will also be valid on that same block chain.

An attempt to sabotage the process is a sure sign that the anti-BitcoinXT people fully understand that they would lose in a fair consensus decision. 

And, to me, that means the consensus decision (the real one) has already been made and now there's nothing left for them but this kind of screaming and FUD tactics and trying to prevent people from accurately seeing what the decision is. 

I have to roll my eyes that the same people who were railing against the centralization of power with the devteam when it looked like the devteam was in favor increasing block sizes, are now saying that we must get devteam consensus now that the devteam has been successfully divided on this issue.  

Calm down, guys.  You got what you wanted in the first place: Decentralization of power.  Now there is Bitcoin-Core and Bitcoin-XT, and real decentralization of power to the actual community of users and miners.  The community, not the developers, gets to decide using the normal consensus rules for a hard fork. And that's a good thing, right?

Unless, maybe, it looks like people might not be stupid enough to pick the inferior network you think maybe you can make a bigger profit by limiting them to?  So now you have to scream more about XT and how the choice shouldn't even exist because maybe the users will be smart enough to make the right one?  

Tough toenails.  The world moves on, and the 1MB block size limit is just another barrier that it's time to overcome.  

Bitcoin does not exist to line Blockstream's pockets.  

As far as I can see the argument is already over if the anti-XT crowd feels it is so certain to lose any fair contest that it will resort to tactics like this.

Seriously.  They screamed all rational discussion about ending the block size limit to a standstill even though ~75% of the users and an even greater fraction of the miners are solidly in favor of >1MB blocks, and now that they are facing an actual implementation of a client that will hardfork to >1MB blocks they're trying to sabotage the consensus process rather than allow consensus to be decided by adoption? 

At what point do they admit they've already lost?

The thing that bugs me is that none of the self-learning algorithms works, unless  there is something in the system that makes it work as though it had desires.  If you want it to learn to do something, you set up a situation in which there is positive reinforcement for doing that thing, and then positive reinforcement guides the learning process. 

But seeking positive reinforcement basically means following your desires.  And the more abstract or subtle the thing we're trying to get it to do, the more general or widely applicable those pseudo-desires get and the more unexpected the specific ways in which it manifests.

I think it's entirely likely that we'll never get superhuman intelligence without a matching suite of compelling personal desires and intentions that drive it forward.  Anything less will be insufficient to develop general intelligence.  Everything we do is intentional.  If we desired nothing, we'd just sit inert and we wouldn't have any use for intelligence.

But that certainly won't stop people from developing a general artificial intelligence.  Indeed, if they figure out how to do that  they'll hail it as "the missing ingredient" that finally ALLOWED them to develop a general artificial intelligence.

Yeah.  The dividing line, I think, is that an expert system knows how to do things, and an AI (a real one) knows why to do things and decides on its own which things it wants to do.

The more subtle a task gets, the more we have to build a self-learning system to do it.  Try to explain in words how to tell the difference between a dog and a cat.  It's really hard, because dogs and cats both come in so many shapes and varieties that no hard-and-fast rule you can say is really applicable.  But we can tell at a glance.  And we can make neural networks that can tell from a photo.  But in order to do it, we have to either train those networks on a bunch of labeled pictures, which means it learns only what we already know and it's really labor intensive for us ....  or we have to make it sort its own data and then tell it which of the categories it learned while just being "curious" is dogs and which is cats.  But in order to do that, we have to make it sort its own data. 

And that means, on some level, we're making it curious.  We're giving it a motivation.  It improves itself by getting more input, and if we're appropriately lazy, we then teach it how to go and get more input on its own.  Like Google setting it loose on a cache of millions of pictures. 

We haven't really crossed the line of why-to yet, and these systems haven't gone off the rails (very much or very often) in seeking self-improvement...  but it's starting to be sort of possible? that we will eventually.

I dunno about that.  You give AI a directive, and it decides that in order to accomplish that directive it needs to acquire resources....  lots of resources ....  taking over the world is a logical next step. 

Right now there are tens of thousands of people working in Big Data and there's a plethora of new technologies in how to train artificial neural networks.  People like me have done a lot of work on extracting data from free text into accurately indexed databases.  All these people working, in groups of two to a hundred, all trying to "win" the race to strong AI.  But in the end, will the only winner be the AI itself?  

Sooner or later somebody is going to figure out the "missing ingredients" to make a machine with human-like intelligence.  What do we want that person to be doing in order to keep humans safe?



Some inspirational quotes:

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. —Eliezer Yudkowsky,

As I’ll argue, AI is a dual-use technology like nuclear fission. Nuclear fission can illuminate cities or incinerate them. Its terrible power was unimaginable to most people before 1945. With advanced AI, we’re in the 1930s right now. We’re unlikely to survive an introduction as abrupt as nuclear fission’s.”
― James Barrat,

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? —Vernor Vinge

If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, within five years, its successor will be more intelligent than all of humanity combined. After one generation or two generations, they’d just ignore us. Just the way you ignore the ants in your backyard.
― James Barrat

More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. —Woody Allen

In terms of ROI you make better money installing a solar rooftop than an ASIC miner. 

Just sayin.

Can't ... stop ... laughing.

And I am Satoshi Nakamoto.  

Come on, everybody, join in!

As someone who actually corresponded with Satoshi, I'm probably one of the people you suspect of knowing the True Identity behind the "Satoshi" nym.  I have a suspicion as to the true identity, but that's all. That said, I for one have not failed to discover who Satoshi is.  I have succeeded in avoiding such discovery.  The distinction is important.  Satoshi himself (or herself, or themselves) indicated to us a desire for anonymity.  I indicate to you a desire to honor the wishes of someone whose every interaction with us was both respectful and productive.

As to the parasites, the criminals, the people of dishonorable intent?  Every ecosystem has parasites.  Croesus invented government-issued money.  One cannot blame him for every crime committed for its sake or by its use.  Similarly one cannot blame Satoshi for the same old crooks learning to use his invention. 

Betcha they did achieve their goal.  Check what the average fee per kilobyte being paid is now vs. when the "stress tests" started. 

I have looked at it enough to know that there is nothing in the DB that would allow someone to spend your coins without knowing your passphrase.  So the "security" angle is not all that bad. 

But yes, the wallet needs an import/export format that's not database specific.

If a consortium has more than 38% of the mining power, subsidizing other miners and getting higher fees is more profitable than not doing so.   And whenever there is legitimate demand for more than half the space in the blocks, you can get higher fees by spamming the block chain.