For all the complete lack of planning we have witnessed with Gox, Karpeles should be given credit for his foresight of setting up the exchange in Japan. So far the authority there still doesn't seem to know what's going on and why should they care.
Karpeles didn't setup mtgox in japan, he just bought it. As for Japan not knowing what is going on or why they should care, that's naive. If US says jump, Japan will say how high. You're right with Gox, though Karpeles chose to go to Japan to find a job and keep the exchange there, so he played a role. As for japanese authority, I think it's actually naive to believe U.S can just have its way with Japan, or other sovereign nations, things are not as simple as on a high school playground, your alliance complies with your request when it suits their interest, while turns a deaf ear if it doesn't. |
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I'd say the vulnerability of all other mined coins to a 51% attack (or some other type of attack) by Bitcoin miners makes this impossible.
Are you saying that launching a 51% attack on a currency is a perfectly legitimate tactic for advocates of a competing currency to employ? I would say that it does not matter whether it is 'legitimate'. The salient point is that it happens. It's not likely to happen on an organized, large scale through pools and the like if the community considers it an illegitimate tactic. Hence my question. Some might argue that it's theft, fraud, criminal abuse, or the like. I would say it's in no way illegal, at least in its primitive form. You can't accuse me of mining with more than 50% of the network's hashpower, and you can't accuse me of refusing to process other's transactions because I don't want to use my own hardware to do that. |
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I am young, but I am very sure that the Hippies didn't pose a threat to the established at all, unlike us.
* sigh * That's what people see, but it has no bearing - or very, very little - on what those times were actually about. It was the most intense political period the US had seen since the Civil War. We came closer to an actual shooting revolution than you'd believe - after 40-50 years of corporate-owned media pushing all the drugs/sex/rock'n'roll crap that had little to do with what was really going on. Not that that part wasn't fun... Sometime during the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" , a old communist general, after being subjected to intense beating and denunciation by the red guards, told them "Wait and see, after the revolution, those who should be generals will still be generals, those who should be soldiers will still be soldiers." We can't put all blames for the corruption on people in power, if things end up being the same no matter who is in charge, it must be because, things have to work that way because there is no better way until a technical revolution fundamentally transforms the landscape. I did not mean the hippies are incapable or what, it's just the time was not ripe, heck we didn't even have personal computers or asymmetric encryption then, the things we are doing now are unimaginable at that time. |
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I am young, but I am very sure that the Hippies didn't pose a threat to the established at all, unlike us.
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Wait, Jeff needs a job? Isn't his Avalon enough to allow him to retire?  |
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And when they withdraw their money would be caught right by authorities for investigations.
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If your implication is that China will seek to use Bitcoin as a tool against US control and influence, I think you (and many others are wrong).
Even if it were successful, the end-game would be that the US is left in 2nd place due to Bitcoin but now China has a greater problem of having institutionally accepted a currency they ALSO don't control.
Not sure how that would benefit the Chinese authorities in the long run so whilst they're tolerant of it now, I don't see that being the case once it's more widely adopted.
my exact implication! They will believe they can control it. Surely they'll have considered this before using this strategy? Personally, I think they've not yet evaluated the dangers. Once they see what a threat it is to themselves, they'll clamp down on it just like the US is currently doing. Given her cheap mid-level skilled labor force, an nearly unparalleled supply chain, and manufacturing infrastructure, I think if China is into government-sponsored bitcoin mining, no one can challenge her status as the world's biggest supplier of newly mined bitcoins, the government would be much too happy if its production scale can be converted into its financial strength. It's true that no one can control Bitcoin, but China can make sure no nation can put a bigger influence then herself. However, I do agree we could not subject Bitcoin's future to any government's whim, especially if it's China. |
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For all the complete lack of planning we have witnessed with Gox, Karpeles should be given credit for his foresight of setting up the exchange in Japan. So far the authority there still doesn't seem to know what's going on and why should they care.
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I would much rather know why he chose to go by such a name, if it is not his real name, and I guess he is at least somehow related to Japan...  |
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Linus worked in Transmeta for a few years, and the community never had a problem. Conspiracy theorists need to get real.
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Interesting tweet. Nassim N. Taleb @nntaleb18m
For bitcoin to make it it needs to be banned by a few governments and critiqued by policy makers. Otherwise it will fade. #Antifragile.
Taleb is my fav mega-genius Nah, he discovered the black swan, but Satoshi made one. |
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IRS targets Tea Party members....
Associated Press has its journalist's phone records seized...
This is not just a war on Bitcoin it is a war on freedom and liberty.
And one of these days everyone has to decide which side they are on. Math wins anyday.  |
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The problem is how can you prove I am trying to be two validators?
I don't care. If you're being two solid, reliable validators, then that's great. That's twice as great. If at least one of them is crappy and unreliable, then why do I care that they're both you? Say I only give one guy a false key, and if he's trying to accuse me then I can say everything including the supposedly signed ledger is made up by him, I can say I never produced such a thing, and the guy trying to accuse me is a fraudster himself. This is actually a theoretically plausible attack currently. Thanks for noticing it. It's not difficult to fix -- we can either check the key with others (so we have others to establish he gave out the key) or we can force him to sign the key with a key traceable to him (say, issued by a CA). It's not really relevant, you have to either trust a authoritative third-party or the people who transmitted this information to you, like the digital certificate of the website(PKI), forum on which your website address is published, or other Ripplers who told you where the validator's website is(web of trust). Most importantly, you can't prove I am cheating if I try to frame someone by claiming I received a copy of ledger signed with a different key from him, especially if I control more nodes than him(nowhere near 51%), which are not known to collude. You're correct. We need an undeniable way to associate keys with the identities you trust. It's not difficult to do, it just needs to be done. Actually, I would not suggest to use more than two identification tokens (a ripple account string, hotwallet address, and a validation key), at least the validation key(or the hash of it) should somehow be made a validating node's unquestionable first identity. |
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OK, rant about Americans here, right?
1. What happened to your math education?
2. What happened to "give me liberty or give me death"? Coz this forum is full of the "Government gonna find troubles with us, better not touch Bitcoin before they say yes" type weaklings.
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The greatest obstacle to Bitcoin widespread adoption: lack of proper math education.
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It's equally possible that I am indeed being framed, and by ostracizing me, you effectively choose to trust the evil guy.
so the worst thing that could happen to me is that my validator needs to run with a smaller list of trusted nodes. As long as the list is sufficiently diverse that doesn't hurt. I can employ this(and other) tactic to eliminate enough validators from your UNL to push my percentage to over 51%, so your "as long as" becomes invalid, consensus should work when I, a malicious guy, controls only 30%(I am sure not going to tell you) of your trusted nodes, gaining 21% more control by eliminating somehow "more susceptible" non-colluding nodes doesn't sound too impractical. Besides, when a Ripple network is at its beginning, how do you decide which nodes are more trustworthy? A botnet may flood the whole network with its sockpuppets which obtain their XRPs through a variety of means, and stay as cooperative and helpful as possible, but after they start gaining people's trust they may start abusing it without even getting noticed, heck, they don't even need to be 51%, just big enough to have a significant number of trustworthy nodes. I suspect maybe Opencoin is now putting a tightened grasp on XRP control just because of this. Don't forget that an OpenCoin Inc employee stated that if BTC gets 51% attacked, you lose all your bitcoins (you don't), but if Ripple gets attacked, you still have your XRPs (that's correct). I hope he's incompetent rather than purposefully misleading. And nobody will still use Bitcoin if it gets perpetually 51% attacked, the attacker will mine 100% of the blocks and it's pointless to mine anymore, while if 51% of the Ripple trusted nodes are controlled by a single entity, it's theoretically possible for the guy to hide the truth for years and abuse his power without being discovered. Not to say that the advantage an early Bitcoin miner builds up when it comes to validating transactions will mean nothing if he can't keep up with his mining infrastructure investment, which will cost him, while the early Ripple trusted nodes can perhaps enjoy their advantage for a long time, as people are inherently distrustful with newcomers. |
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Or buying things with BTCs in general if you can't buy pizza as he was the guy wo kicked-start Bitcoin commerce.
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As mentioned the previous hash needs to be included - the likelihood of SHA256( x ) being identical to SHA256( SHA256( x ) ) (in reality each hash actually being two hashes) is so close to zero as to be only be likely to occur sometime after firm evidence for the existence of the tooth fairy is published in Science magazine.  But as you mentioned before, it could be better if we do SHA256(XOR(SHA256(PubKey),PubKey)) for the address hashing, perhaps we may likely stay largely safe even if practical QC is invented and both the ECDSA and SHA256 are exploited and no patch is immediately available, should we be able to do so? |
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