We don't know if this is true or not. As it is set up now, with just a single website, XRP/ripple has infinite counterparty risk.

Right now we have 168 blocks until difficulty change. (16,128-15,960=168)

If 14 blocks are solved per day that will be 12 days until difficulty change. Its a guess any method you use, and there is no cost to trying. So, why not make a guess?

  

We're perhaps being a little bit too careful in how we are doing this. OpenCoin/Ripple is free to rush into the void our caution has created. I think OpenCoin is acting like a typical startup with nothing to lose.

They seem to have a good web development team. I'm not sure if they have the rest of their bases covered but, we will see.

Hmmm... lets make this easy and fun. Just change the title of the thread to "Freicoin: Guess the difficulty drop, win 5000 FRC" or something similar and we can post our guesses here.

Maybe make the cutoff block 16028 (100 until the change) to give more time to guess. I think there are a lot of things that could happen in a hundred blocks and there's still enough chaos to make it interesting

Please use unix epoch time in GMT from http://www.epochconverter.com/

This is a great idea. I will put 2500 into the pot too because I think I will win

I think it will be easiest to verify by giving times in unix timestamps, you can calculate yours at http://www.epochconverter.com/

This is my bet. Please quote the bets so they cannot be edited.

1362411969 - Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:46:09 GMT

We can check the result at http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/ on the block screen (it has the timestamp number)

Last night gmaxwell's brain had selective reading comprehension. It may be from too much time spent in the custom hardware battlefields. This is a serious problem with Bitcoin:



Maybe mining pools and the resulting centralization of Bitcoin is an example of good centralization? It is, however, less decentralized than other methods which encourage a wider distribution of the coin.

I'm just attempting to understand this issue myself, and I won't get it by incomplete argument like what gmaxwell says above.

By setting aside 15% of the budget for demurrage that would give us 3.25 years until "supernova" when the foundation has to start taking charges to the distribution accounts. This is close to the proposed lifespan of the foundation. The foundation is designed to die. Its sole purpose is to distribute the coins and then to dissolve.

Actually the bold statement is exactly what Freicoin has accomplished -- the "centralized" fund is also subject to demurrage and will be sent to the miners of Freicoin at the rate of 5% per year. This is built into the protocol so there is little incentive to hold onto these funds forever.


The paperwork for the Freicoin Mutual Benefit Corporation has been submitted.

This was publicly disclosed in the 7th weekly meeting on the freenode irc channel (#freicoin)

OpenCoin’s decision to go with an 80%/20% distribution, similar to Freicoin except we give our 20% to the miners, and the discussions which have occurred since have caused me to start thinking about the philosophy of this choice. I have come to the conclusion that a pre-mined distribution, as long as it is done fairly, is more decentralized than Bitcoin’s mining subsidy.

Bitcoin’s mining subsidy guarantees that a very small number people will have Bitcoin: those who are technically capable and have a low self-evaluation of the value of their immediate time. I understand that may seem harsh or a difficult opinion to read. This is not to diminish the efforts of Bitcoin miners, because from the Gold Mines of Alaska to the Oil Fields of Texas some of America’s greatest wealth was made by people fitting this description. However, if your goal is to distribute a new currency to a broad cross-section of the world’s population then this is not the way to do it.

Mining subsidy is a design choice and not a moral certainty. There is no scientific principal by which a person can claim the original design for Bitcoin subsidy is superior to a "premined" coin with a fairly administered initial distribution. A choice to award X units of currency to the person who mines a block is completely arbitrary. The block reward should fundamentally be understood, by all Bitcoin users, to be one of the most obvious and common changes made to a new cryptocurrency. Altering this scheme should not be thought to be fraud unless there is direct proof that the scheme declared is unfair by definition.

Subsidy is so important in mining it promotes the creation of large mining pools which increase the centralization of Bitcoin. It turns out, with the subsidy being the reason for Bitcoin’s existence for many, that the culture around Bitcoin has organized itself around collecting the subsidy and nothing more. I am describing the meta-stable arrangement where all of the mining power is concentrated in the hands of just a few web-savvy administrators, or mining pool operators. With the arrival of ASIC miners this situation is expected to become even worse. Miners are encouraged to pool their computing power for no reason but to lower the variance of the subsidy. There isn't any other technically justifiable reason for pools. For example, we do not see mining pools with protein folding computer services. Clearly this is not a possible end state for Bitcoin and services like p2pool are part of the remedy to this problem. A new definition for cryptocurrency is another possible solution.

Just to be completely clear, Freicoin is not anti-miner: Freicoin's strategy is to initially distribute with low mining subsidy, and to reward miners long-term with a demurrage award of 5% of the currency per year.

I hope the discussion in this post has helped to explain why Freicoin, and by extension OpenCoin’s Ripple, has chosen to distribute some of the coins without mining. I believe that Freicoin’s distribution will be done in a fair manner, and believe at the moment that OpenCoin has the same intentions.

"Black box" means you don't know what is inside. It turns out that ExactPower's black box is what I was recommending.

You can get a whole house surge protector and a very good ground installed for ~$300.

Try starting there and see if it solves your problems.

His statistic of 20% of surges start outside the home is likely made up to sell more equipment to audiophiles. I think what he means to say is that surges aren't the only source of power problems. Many more are caused by bad house wiring.

Okay, I got curious as to what this one actually was and found this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrFFk4u_LJM

This guy looked at my list and said "I'll have all three."  

Well close, he used a big transformer, but it doesn't serve the same purpose as the one I listed.

I think your difficulty adjustment is a pretty good demonstration that cryptocurrency is not as delicate as a lot of people claim it is. Also see the 'resurrection' of BBQCoin.

However, I'm not sure if it is a good idea to use your idea for a coin as large as bitcoin. I'm still inclined to think that using a average of many past points is better than an EMA for this application. Who knows, you may be right.

Anyways, congratulations. I haven't had the chance to see what the problem was. Programming is not my background, to be honest.

Yes, but at the same time people can lead dishonest discussions of design decisions to spread uncertainty about new or different ideas. For example here where gmaxwell spreads uncertainty about ripple. Or this thread where I make a dishonest argument against PPCoin to see why Sunny King made some decisions which the Bitcoin developers think is a bad idea. Or the quoted post where the lead developer of Bitcoin spreads uncertainty against an altcoin attempting to fix its problems.



Anyways, congratulations Sunny King. I hope whatever you did fixes the problems you were having.

I see both of you are big fans of black boxes. You may be BFL customers who accidentally wandered into this Avalon thread about electrical power. I think the manufacturer's recommended power conditioning product for BFL is a Bloom Energy box.

This is supposed to be a bite-sized version of this device.

Provided you order this box and it comes with actual electrical components inside I doubt you would be able to detect it doing much of anything to solve your problem.

The point is that I ignored ASICMINER because investing in their option is not possible for me, as a US Citizen. If I did buy ASICMINER I would probably cause them a lot of legal problems as their offering surely needs to be registered with the SEC. So, I didn't ever bother to check into friedcat and others involved in this project because it is a waste of time for US Citizens.

Third World Answer:

The ferroresonant transformer may be what you need. It appears the author of this paper is quite taken with its application to his third world country of Sri Lanka. I'm not sure if the same applies to your third world country.

Another option is the battery bank with Outback, or similar power inverter & battery charger, someone posted above.

The trade-off is maintenance. Lead acid battery maintenance is a full time job. The ferroresonant transformers have a MTBF of 20 years and its not unheard of to see much older ones in service.

I would recommend segregating the protected circuits with expensive equipment versus your connections for lighting and plugging in the vacuum.

Good candidates for a ferroresonant transformer have a defining charactaristic - a constant load matched to the size of the transformer.

In either case with power as bad as you say, you must wonder if the above devices (ferroresonant transformer, inverter/battery charger) will be "popped" by your serious power quality issues.

You will, for sure, want the whole house surge suppressor discussed below.

First World Answer:

So the the basic problem here is that people have a new "baby" and want to protect it. So you proscribe a harmless placebo (plug in surge protector) to protect the baby from harm.

Your question is a different problem entirely, and correct solution is to have a whole house surge protector. You may want to consider this for any conductive utility services which leave your house (power, phone, cable tv coaxial cable, satellite dish coaxial cable) This is just one big MOV (metal oxide varistor).

You can condition and filter everything coming into your house, but your local Homeowner's Association may be concerned with what the installation of this device will do to their property value.

Actually, this is specifically covered under US law.

http://www.dorsey.com/files/Publication/64662e05-576e-4371-b94b-5827513741a1/Presentation/PublicationAttachment/2b9e1e5b-dc4f-4721-9dbf-7b1c26db53b8/Summary_of_SEC_Regulation_S.pdf

Please see the section about how "directed selling efforts" exclude an offering from safe harbor under Regulation S.

The reason for this is that the vast majority of these offerings are scams & frauds.

Are you joking? Is this a joke? Because it sounds like one.

Its actually issuing shares and selling them to the public which is most illegal. The mechanism is irrelevant. Exchanges are subject to regulation, but that's not really why GLBSE was shut down. Selling securities to just one person in the USA means you must register with the SEC.