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981  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: can a bitcoin 'bank' exist? on: January 02, 2012, 06:26:27 AM

So for the 99% of people who don't even own multiple machines let alone know that they should use them in this manner and least of all even care to use them (laziness etc)... what about them? I think they need a bank. You grandmother would never use multiple machines to store bitcoin, but she can use fiat cash and she can use a bank. Hence, imo, she can't use bitcoin. I think this is a big part of allowing adoption of bitcoin as a currency, and the current attitude of 'its safe as it is' contributes somewhat to the hinderance of uptake.

Does granny have a credit card or bank card? Those now have a computer built in so that they can participate in public key authentication without revealing the private key (to discourage cloning). I currently have my bank card in a aluminum foil faraday cage pending X-ray and Near-feild reader removal. A bitcoin smart-card would likely have a display and keypad built-in, such that you would not have to trust your "normal" computer.
 
I always think to myself, if my boss paid me in hard cash, I would be nervous as hell trying to store that in my house or wherever. But really, this is exactly how bitcoin works, and it seems kinda, not unsafe, just... absurd. It's not right to expect people to put themselves at those sorts of risks.

You can have your boss sent the Bitcoin directly to a paper plastic wallet buried at the bottom of the ocean. That way, you don't have to physically carry the bitcoin at predictable intervals.
982  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Wikipedia's yearly donation campaign; Time to accept Bitcoins? on: December 31, 2011, 04:17:07 PM
I was reading Wikipedia's donation FAQ and found this strange:

Quote from: wikimediafoundation.org
Why is there a minimum donation?
The minimum donation amount is $1. We receive small donations from people who don't have much money, and we are really, really grateful to those donors. Truly, if the gift is meaningful to you, it's meaningful to us. But, it's not uncommon for people to use donation mechanisms such as ours to test stolen credit cards to see if they work. Those people typically use a very small dollar amount for their testing: we find a $1 minimum donation amount seems to deter them.
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_is_there_a_minimum_donation.3F

I mean, other than a potentially low credit limit, what incentive does the thief have for conserving the funds of a stolen credit card? (Edit: I can possibly see it with cloned cards, but a charge of $1.05 is not going to be more obvious than a charge of $0.25.)

Why don't they  just admit that fixed credit card fees become cost-prohibitive for such small donations?

The talk page of that Article has been deleted, so I have no way of knowing if it has been brought up before.
983  Bitcoin / Legal / Re: SOPA and Bitcoin on: December 30, 2011, 08:15:20 AM
At least in Canada (and probably in other countires as well), the devil is in the details. The regulations describing how the law is implemented often don't get written until the law is passed. This serves to make the law more flexible, which can be a good thing.
984  Other / Off-topic / Re: Contest: WTHAI?: Win up to 20 BTC Daily on: December 30, 2011, 07:04:19 AM

Now that you know that WTHAI 1 is located on an island in the Baltic sea, what else can you glean?

~Bruno~


You know I was doing as much as possible without actually firing up Google Maps (which requires enabling JavaScript), right?

I suspect that WTHAI 4 can only be solved using Google, not competitors like Yahoo! or Microsoft. The distinguishing marks (the clouds) are specific to Google's satellite pass. Though, the apparent change in resolution at the border may not be a coincidence.

I am probably going to bed.
985  Other / Off-topic / Re: Contest: WTHAI?: Win up to 20 BTC Daily on: December 30, 2011, 06:24:22 AM
I think your shadow information is irrelevant...can you explain it further?

So far they have been gut feelings. Since my last post, I have been pondering how to get a more precise fix on the latitude of WTHAI1.

For WTHAI 4, I knew it must be about 10 am when the picture was taken because the shadow was almost directly below the fluffy white clouds that typically float at least 1000-2000ft (300-580m) above the surface. Despite this, the shadow is only slightly north of the clouds. That tells me it is near the equator. However, because it is near the equator, I can not tell the season based on the vegetation.

Up here at 55 degrees north, the ground is brown/white in the winter (Google has used winter images in the past).  Not knowing the season is a major source of error since the Earth is tilted on its axis about 22.5 degrees. That means even if I correctly guage the angle of elevation of the sun, the corresponding Latitude can vary by up to 43 degrees.

For WTHAI1, the long shadows hint at a location close to the poles. The green deciduous trees indicate that it is summer (and not too close to the poles). This means I have the potential to narrow the angle of elevation to within 22 degrees: if I can just measure the angle of elevation of the sun. I can probably determine the time the picture was taken within about 30 minutes (Standard local time). For example, WTHAI1 was taken at 12:30 1300 (Correction: sundials are 24 hour clocks...). The length of the shadow varies throughout the day. It is longest at either midnight or sunrise/sunset; shortest at noon.

The difficulty is that to determine the angle of the sun from objects on the ground, I have to know how tall those objects are. Trees are tricky because their height changes based of how far north they are, as well as with how much water they get. I am assuming that the pictures are taken from directly overhead. This will be true for aerial photos, and likely many of the satellite photos.

Even if I determine how tall an object on the ground is, I still don't know when sunrise is... because I don't know the latitude (or exact day). I have yet to deterime if I can solve a series of equations (with a least 2 unknowns) for elevation of the light source.

TL;DR: I can determine the hemisphere (North vs South) with a high degree of certainty. Other than that, I may be just guessing using other visual cues. Generally, the closer to the poles you go, the longer the shadows at high noon.

 
986  Other / Archival / Re: P equals NP - proof by Ben F Rayfield on: December 29, 2011, 05:57:52 PM
Are you asking us to find obvious flaws in your propsed proof?

There is a $1 million prize for the first correct solution.

I would have to read up on graph theory to see if your claim of being able to represent the the entire set of NP problems on a graph is valid.


You appear to be using "clique finder" edges to model CPU time. Are you also modeling storage requirements which grow just as fast? For example, for  finding prime a number by trial factoring, I only need to divide the candidate by all the prime numbers up to the square-root of that number. However, once the number is over 64bits long, the storage requirements (all 32 bit primes) start to become prohibitive.

Edit: You may also want to examine what Class or proof you are using. Your proof appears to be a "Natural proof" which according to Wikipedia requires the concept of one-way functions to be disproven to prove P=NP.
987  Other / Off-topic / Re: Happy Dump GoDaddy Day! on: December 29, 2011, 05:39:31 PM
A LMGTFY link is inapropriate when you are trying to tell people about something.

Becuase Google appears to be biased towards new results, the results from the search will change over time. This may or may not be your intended effect. You are essentially betting that it becomes a historic event, not one of a series of smaller events.
988  Other / Off-topic / Re: Contest: WTHAI?: Win up to 20 BTC Daily on: December 29, 2011, 05:30:11 PM
I found the shadow detail in WTHAI 3: you can see it around valleys and that depression that may indicate the mountain is a volcano. I now estimate 45 degrees south +-30. If it is in brazil, it would have to be the southern half. My guess: Chile Argentina.

What 4 update: Looking at a globe, the equator actually runs through the middle of africa. Phinnaeus Gage was being nice when he narrowed it to "North Africa".

Edit: Chile appears to be too mountianous for WTHAI3.
989  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: MerkleWeb - statistical Godel-like secure-but-not-perfect global Turing Machine on: December 29, 2011, 06:17:03 AM
I don't know much about homomorphic encryption either.


By the way, can someone explain me how homomorphic encryption can be used to "create secure voting systems"?


That claim in the Wikipedia article was cited:

Quote from: Wikipedia

Even if it does work as described, I would be concerned by the lack of paper-trail. It is very hard to trust that a computer is doing what it says it is doing. Even if the vote tabulation is beyond reproach (thanks to the proposed distributed turing machine), the computer being used for voting may be able to do statistical vote substitution (even in the face of vote reciepts).
990  Other / Off-topic / Re: Contest: WTHAI?: Win up to 20 BTC Daily on: December 29, 2011, 05:35:52 AM
WTHA1: is in the northern hemisphere, likely south of 60 degrees north, north of 22 degrees north. That rules out Africa.

WTHA2: is closer to the equator, the only visible shaddows appear to exgagerated by the nearby creakbed. I Estimate summer, between 0 degrees north and 45 degrees north.

WTHA3: No visible shadow detail, hint given is "south america"

WTHA4: Cloud shadows suggest morning near the equator, likey between 30 degrees south/north. Hint was "Africa", my analysis narrows it to north Africa.

WTHA5: Shadow detail is hard to see; appears to be another morning image. Hint was Asia. I think I can narrow it to between 22 south and 45 north, which eliminates most of Russia.

PS: voted both "Yes" and "No" in the poll Smiley
991  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: MerkleWeb - statistical Godel-like secure-but-not-perfect global Turing Machine on: December 27, 2011, 05:43:20 AM
What I think what jtimon getting at using the Socratic method is that the data is secret, not the algorithm. That probably has all kinds of interesting implications for data leakage or separating data and executable code.
992  Economy / Marketplace / Re: Bitcoin-accepting organizations' acceptance/usage of GoDaddy which supports SOPA on: December 27, 2011, 05:29:17 AM
You divide you page rank by the links on the page. More links means less weight per link. Being targeted matters.

This assumes that Google does not lower the ranking of pages appearing to participate in a "google bomb".
993  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: MerkleWeb - statistical Godel-like secure-but-not-perfect global Turing Machine on: December 27, 2011, 05:00:48 AM
...the faster algorithm only has to be written once (unless encrypted).

Wait a minute...You mean the network can run programs without knowing what they do?
I don't get it. Can you explain it?


It is possible that I made a slight cognitive leap based on my limited understanding of Homomorphic Encryption.

In practice, (depressingly) few file formats clearly distinguish between executable code and data. Often due to programmer laziness or feature creep from management[Citation Needed].

I was making the apparently false assumption that the key-renewal algortihm described in the Damien Stehle and Ron Steinfeld paper was Turing-complete and encrypted. However, skimming the paper without understanding most of the math, it looks like the renewal algorithm is known, but additional "hints" are stored with the public key. This extra information is used to reencrypt/error-correct the private key stored with the encrypted data.

Edit: the one time I don't check links... or were you concerned by the lack of peer review?
994  Economy / Marketplace / Re: Bitcoin-accepting organizations' acceptance/usage of GoDaddy which supports SOPA on: December 23, 2011, 06:44:18 PM
I don't believe SOPA will be an effective method in censoring the internet. Every time a gov wants to censor something they would have to tie it up with piracy or counter-fitting, other than cases such as wikileaks it will be very hard for them to justify and prosecute a censorship case with SOPA. and people will take notice and react if it occurs, so I'm not really worried about SOPA censoring anything effectively. but the issue with piracy remains...

How SOPA's 'circumvention' ban could put a target on Tor

I'm sure the same reasoning could be used for bitcoin when it is used to circumvent payment processor blockades to controversial sites.
995  Other / Politics & Society / Re: Boycott: GoDaddy (domains By Proxy owner) supports SOPA on: December 23, 2011, 06:35:15 PM
Mm, actually, I didn't even bother searching and assumed that nobody else had put forth effort to verify all the domains listed at bitcoin.it wiki for all bitcoin-related organizations/businesses/operations/communities.  And so I did just that and viola, discussion!  Anyhow, I quoted your comment in my original post.

in your post: s/effect/affect/

I was using this as a guide. Re-reading it, it appears you are correct.

Edit: Looks like This thread is where all the discussion is happening. They also pulled their public statement within 24 hours, but refuse to retract testimony made to congress as I understand it.
996  Economy / Marketplace / Re: Bitcoin-accepting organizations' acceptance/usage of GoDaddy which supports SOPA on: December 23, 2011, 06:01:34 PM
My thread wins by about 4 hours. You didn't see it because I decided to be "good" and put it in the  "Politics & Society" sub-forum.

As I point out in that post, Godaddy goes by many names, including "Domains By Proxy" "Wild West Domains". The most highly rated comment of this reddit thread explains how to avoid such pitfalls. In general, watch for the star trademark* in the logo and avoiding any registrar making use of "SECURESERVER.NET."

As any government censorship, sopa will only hurt honest ppl. Pirates are already doing illegal things, one more won't stop them. Pirates will probably keep doing what they are already doing

Not true!

Due to the SOPA, the Pirate Party of Canada has moved from GoDaddy to NameCheap for their domain hosting.

Quote from: Serge
if someone want's to share their work it is their choice right as it is their right if they want to sell or license their work. presently, piracy unpunishably undermines abilities of those who wish to offer their works on limited terms. that is the issue.

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage(Essay by Richard M. Stallman)

The problem is that the "Intellectual Property" narrative is fiction. You can't transfer ideas, only share them. You can't destroy ideas, only suppress them. One thig I found disappointing about that essay is that RMS did not make it clear that "Intellectual Property" does have a technical legal meaning, related to the GATT treaty forming WIPO. Recent treaties such as ACTA repeat the same language.

The biggest problem with "Intellectual Property" is that it tramples property rights. I can no longer easily buy a "general Purpose" computer: they are being increasingly locked down so as to resemble consoles or cell-phones. Speaking of consoles, Sony remote revoked "Other OS" functionality on the FAT PS3's at the mere hint that somebody may be able to break out of the hypervisor. That is, millions of comsumers have had their property tampered with in the name of protecting "Intellectual Property" like copyrighted games.


*I have not verified that it is a registered trademark.
997  Bitcoin / Legal / Re: Proof of author rights with time from blockchain on: December 23, 2011, 08:45:33 AM
Excellent idea, but I'm not sure whether a cryptographic hash (instead of the full text) would stand up in court. Are there any precedents for this?

I don't know the caselaw, but it is a variation on the old "mail yourself the transcript" (which can be cheated by mailing an unsealed envelope for later use).

The correct way to prove authorship is to register the work with the copyright office in your jurisdiction. Such registration still has the problem that registration only proves access to the transcript, not authorship. Cryptographic hashes do not improve on the process.

998  Other / Politics & Society / Boycott: GoDaddy (domains By Proxy owner) supports SOPA on: December 23, 2011, 08:34:06 AM
Many bitcoin businesses seem to use Domains By Proxy, which is owned by GoDaddy. If they want to boycott SOPA supporters, they will have to change registrars.

Go Daddy’s Position on SOPA [Godaddy.com]

GoDaddy supports SOPA, I'm transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day [reddit.com]

GoDaddy Backs SOPA [SlashDot.com]

I feel that SOPA may be used against bitcoin businesses because it tragets finacial support of websites outside normal US jurisdiction. If you have a bitcoin business, you should probably consider setting up a .bit domain with namecoin as well.

Be aware that GoDaddy sells domains under many names including "wild West Domains". The Reddit thread contains a comment explaining tips for avoiding such pitfalls (best rated comment at time of this writing).

PS: I decided to register a Canadian domain name with a Canadian registrar from the start; so this does not affect me directly.
999  Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: MerkleWeb - statistical Godel-like secure-but-not-perfect global Turing Machine on: December 22, 2011, 06:22:40 PM
Testing on a LAN should be possible, but there will be so much overhead that it would only work as a proof-of-concept.

One thing that needs to be clarified is how do you force poeple to write using "intelligent programming" rather than "brute force"? I think it is obvious that injecting "choice bits" into the system will be more expensive than spending bitcoin. Brute-force algorithms may even involve fewer "choice bits" than a much faster algorithms. Though, you pointed out, the faster algorithm only has to be written once (unless encrypted).

I have no opinion about the viability of Homomorphic encryption. I expect for many public-interest calculations, keeping them public may be a good thing. For example, climate modeling: Critics would be able to see exactly how much the data was "fudged."

1000  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Canada, the ignored on: December 22, 2011, 05:59:55 PM
It is possible that Canadians are more risk-adverse. During a cold snap, you can die within about 2 hours if you don't plan ahead. During the world financial crisis, our more conservative banking laws saved our banks.

When I first heard about bitcoin, each bitcoin was worth fractions of a penny. I dismissed is as something that would never take off. I revisited bitcoin after getting paid in USD and was looking for the best way to unload such a "worthless" currency. I still don't have any bitcoin because I want to have my computer(s) secured, with verified off-site backups first.

I don't really trust CaVirtex  because their Terms Of Service says that I agree that Bitcoins are worthless with no inherent value. They also require you to use online banking, which I don't use because I would be required to install anti-virus software as a condition of banking online (bank's Terms of Service).

I may not be typical, but I think my insights are still valid.

PS: After geting bitcoin, and looking into Money Service Business requirements, I may start selling small bitcoin quatities in person for CAD.


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