your level of legitimacy is pretty low, bro

After Joey Zasa took out the Commission Michael observed:

Joey Zasa would never pull something like this without backing. He's just muscle, he's an enforcer, he's nothing. He doesn't have the wit for that helicopter attack. He doesn't even have the ambition to wipe out the whole Commission. Certainly not the balls.

So now I put the question to you, gentlemen: Who is backing Mark Krap?

Has anyone tried to contact staff members at Gox other than Crap Karp himself? Surely by now some of them are willing to talk?

This dude needs to wake up and watch out. When Gox goes under, which is inevitable, there will be people who are sufficiently angry at him and will proceed to arrange for him to sleep with the fishes.

a legend...

I think it is the latter

yeah? I am a newbie when it comes to the inner workings of the bitcoin code, but  I am a bit concerned since NIST standard for pseudo-random number generation based on ECC is compromised. Perhaps bitcoin uses an unadulterated version?

I did not read through all the craps above, but why are people talking about elliptic curves? SHA-256 is not based on elliptic curve cryptography, it is simple prime factorisation cryptography, am I mistaken?

I don't know which part the rhetorical question refers to. If it is about the notation then indeed it is standard. If it is about the square root part, then in principle it is OK, although one needs to note that not every element in a finite field is a square (after all this is what Gauss' quadratic reciprocity law is all about) and hence one would implicitly agree that the equation is meaningful if and only if the righthand side is defined. This in math literature is called "abuse of notation".

The list of "advanced math topics" you listed above, well, they are all very advanced for high school kids, but only half of them are advanced in any sense for a math major, and none of them should be advanced for a math graduate. Of course a topic like L-functions really emcompasses a large area of research  and is still ongoing, so some part of it is really advanced. For instance, you favorite Fermat's last theorem is not really considered very advanced anymore these days, but things related to the BSD conjecture (google it) is very advanced even for professionals.

You know I am a professional, don't you?    


 

Demurrage is certainly a step in the right direction, to discourage hoarding and, in the long term, to prevent wealth from being concentrated in a minority of backwards thinking money-mad homo sapiens. But right now the people behind it want a "federal reserve"-like institution, and that is a bad idea.

It is interesting to see that most people here embrace the technical aspects of bitcoin but still hang on to a capitalistic ideology. I think we can do better than that.

"somewhat mysterious region of mathematical knowledge"

no it is not. it might be so 100 years ago but not now. It is a generalization of ordinary arithmetic (ordinary arithmetic is arithmetic on a "flat line") and it is a major branch of present day math.

See a mathematician's take on NSA backdoor

http://jiggerwit.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/the-nsa-back-door-to-nist/

this will appear in AMS Notices.

As a lot of folks have pointed out, it is unlikely that SHA-2 has been compromised, since to compromise it you need genuine breakthrough in math (say, progress towards P vs NP, if you know what it is) not just sloppiness with malicious intentions. I mean if you can crack SHA-2 then getting insanely rich is the least you can do; try domination of the world, dude.



     

I am sure my question has been asked millions of times before, but since I am a newbie I am entitled to newbie questions.

There is this group buy that looks very attractive, I am sure many of you will recognize it, three KNC neptune preorders (so far), each of which is divided into 32 shares, and each share costs .6bt. So the host will make a moderate profit from this. Now what I don't understand is that these machines are to arrive early next year then then the host will make much more money simply by keeping the machines to himself. You know where I am driving at: why does he do this? Altruism is a noble thing and it is important to share in this community, yada yada, I don't buy this. If he uses escrow then I will not be asking the question, but he is not.

Thrill me with your acumen on this one.