Just a quick update:
I have finally managed to get ahold of a friend for a lenghty conversation who moved to the UAE two years ago. I asked him to help me find the cheapest option for rentable property that one could sublet. He actually had a great idea!
While first moving there he used a storage service provider that specializes in servicing expats. See when you are moving to the UAE in the begining it's hard to get a local postal address that you can have your stuff, personal packages and deliveries shipped to (when you don't have either a permanent residential address yet). For this purpose a lot of expats use a storage service. They rent a storage room that has it's own postal address, receive their deliveries there and pick them up in the next 15 days. Basically you can think of it as a PO box that is (instead of the size of drawer or closet) is the size of an entire room. The service provider he used quoted me AED4100 ($1150/€1000) for a year for their smallest package and they asured me that they do allow subletting for profit. They also seemed really flexible too (they're used to special needs of the expats) as they have bank accounts in both the US and Europe that you can send their fees to (to minimize your transaction costs).
So this confirms that the preliminary numbers I have posted above are in fact the reality: 'So for €1k you get to not pay any taxes on €90k worth of income. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. You can also repeat the thing for family members so €90k/person/year for the cost of €1k/person/year. So you have about 1.1% cost.' (that's $1150 cost for every $102k if you are in usd)
That's smart. It's still tax evasion (+ money laundering) though since while you now have a plausible source of income, it also is not the actual source of income. Whether you'd be caught is a different question of course, but receiving EUR 90k,- worth of income from the UAE for a property that is worth EUR 1k,- in rent may raise some eyebrows and trigger some deeper investigations. |
|
|
|
|
Safe yourself some sanity and ignore the fudsters. Nothing of value will be lost.
Bitcoin has been pronounced dead many times before and will be pronounced dead many times again, yet the network keeps on hashing and the devs keep on improving. Whether the Bitcoin experiment is alive does neither depend on the price, nor on what naysayers may think but only on how the project keeps on growing and developing.
|
|
|
|
|
I'm still convinced that Bitcoin mining mostly uses surplus electricity that currently can't be stored and would go to waste otherwise anyway. Where else would electricity be so cheap?
That being said, I don't think people honestly care otherwise they wouldn't be so wasteful in general. IMO PoW won't receive flak for long. Yesterday it was diesel, today it's mining, tomorrow it's air traffic. Assuming Bitcoin ever comes close to superseding significant parts of the financial system, it will likely be less wasteful in terms of human, physical and energy resources than anything we currently have.
|
|
|
|
|
I voted for keeping the list of casinos since for me personally they are simply part of the ecosystem. Anyone who wants to gamble will do so anyway and a curated list of casinos can be helpful for a newcomer, lest they fall for some random scam site they stumble upon via google.
However I do understand the criticism, as it does detract a bit from the seriousity of the site. I could very well imagine that a newcomer might be put off by the list of casinos since it affirms the "shady" impression some people have of crypto.
In the end I guess it's mostly a question of who your target audience is. If your goal is to reach absolute newcomers and make crypto more accessible to people I'd probably get rid of the casino section. If your main audience is people that already know the basics but want to learn more (or get a good overview of available options in terms of exchanges, wallets, etc) I'd keep it.
|
|
|
|
|
I'm fairly confident that Bitcoin will recover. I wouldn't bet on this happening within the next 2-3 years though. So I'm justing hanging out at Bitcointalk waiting for it all to blow over. I'd advise you to do the same, unless you're in dire need.
|
|
|
|
To be honest I think that these patterns, when they occur --- which seems not to be the case with Bitcoin, according to the post linked above -- are implementation dependent, rather than an inherent property of the hashing algorithm. If the nonces were indeed biased (ie. some nonces having a higher chance of being correct than others) we'd actually look at at a broken cryptographic hashing algorithm, as by definition there should be no bias in its outcome no matter how you look at it. TLDR; Unless SHA256 is inherently broken you will be unable to find a pattern in nonce values that enables you to speed up the mining process. I recently also checked the nonces from block 552,780 to 253,898 of Litecoin.
totally 298,883 blocks.
number of odds = 42,963 (14.374521%)
number of evens = 255,920 (85.625479%)
Among the evens, the number of multiples of 256 = 225,746
75.529890% of total
therefore after difficulty target, I decided to exclude/enforce some patterns in block header too.. for example, sometime nonce values CAN NOT be even , sometimes nonce values SHOULD be EVEN, etc. and I have called these sort of conditional-nonce-values as BOUNCE.. Even assuming SHA256 (or Scrypt, or the hashing algorithm of your choice) were broken -- how would filtering nonces like this prevent selfish mining? Filtering like this only works if everyone is aware of the rules. If everyone is aware of the rules, so is the selfish miner. If the selfish miner is aware of the rules, he can apply them just as well. But, to reiterate: Unless SHA256 itself is flawed, nonces are statistically random without bias. The only thing one could learn from such a data set, is what bias each respective miner implementation brings. However that doesn't help improving ones own mining performance. |
|
|
|
That sounds like we'd be back to square one though.
How to determine the majority (ie. how to prevent the majority vote from being manipulated)? How to tell "good" AI containers from "bad" AI containers?
The thing is each node makes a decision on it's own and it doesn't know what's happening with the other nodes. It wouldn't even know that there are other nodes. It would just send out it's decision based on the data that is fed into it so i don't see how it would turn bad! But in the end there still needs to be a consensus about the state of the ledger, right? What if you simply flood the network with malicious nodes? There doesn't seem to be any way to prevent sybil attacks in this scheme. If the majority of the network is malicious, there's no way for nodes to know the "correct" behaviour. And flooding a network with malicious nodes is fairly trivial if the economic cost is negligible (unlike proof of resource schemes such as PoW or PoS). Edit: BUT, instead of that, you try to use AI in enhancing the consensus protocol in run time. for example:
[...]
3- HOW we could arrange a format in nonce values that protect the network from selfish miners? statistically analysis of nonce values in
history of blockchains.. [I use this one in introducing BOUNCE value instead of classic nonce]
[...]
Neat examples, especially #3 makes me curious. Could you elaborate on that? How would changing the nonce format help prevent selfish mining? |
|
|
|
That sounds like the end result would be a centralized administrator node run by an AI, rather than a decentralized consensus scheme? Or what am I missing here?
What if we divide the administrator power equally? The decision would go through if only if majority of them accept it's correct. We could also process the data in multiple containers so that not one entity has control over the process. That sounds like we'd be back to square one though. How to determine the majority (ie. how to prevent the majority vote from being manipulated)? How to tell "good" AI containers from "bad" AI containers? |
|
|
|
That's very interesting to hear. How about this?
The neural network takes decision based on weights that is given to each and every input. This is what i was thinking when i posted this. I'll just write it down in steps, Please let me know if i'm correct.
Step 1 : So at the beginning we set the same amount of weight to all the inputs( Taking good nodes and bad nodes as the inputs).
Step 2 : We make this model the administrator of the network which has equal amounts of good nodes and the bad nodes. and there is a pool of other nodes(good) which could be introduced into the network based on the actions in the network.
Step 3 : Now, We just let the network run. The algorithm is written in such a way that once a bad node tries to manipulate some node he's immediately replaced with a good node from the pool.
Step 4 : We could also give weights to attacks. If it's irrelevant and if it's making no much damage let's just keep the node. If it again repeats the same thing the node would be replaced.
Step 5 : For scalability we could just choose a particular set of nodes and simulate a tremendous amount of transactions and pin point to what kind of nodes are causing this and we could drastically reduce or try applying compression algorithms to that particular node.
I don't know if what i'm saying makes sense. This is what i've been trying to build from the past week
That sounds like the end result would be a centralized administrator node run by an AI, rather than a decentralized consensus scheme? Or what am I missing here? |
|
|
|
Solution 2: write your seed in a .txt file, then make an encrypted .7z file with 7Zip. Replicate this file on multiple storage drives, cloud drives, file storage blockchains like SIA or Filecoin.
Maybe hide a few USB thumb drives with that file in it, at different places even outside your house.
Shield the USB drives to not be affected by humidity.
7zip's encryption is supposedly fairly solid but I definitely would not trust it with any significant amount of money. Moreso if I plan on storing the file online and who knows where. Even trusting 7zip's encryption you'd still need a fairly strong password to protect it from a would-be online attacker. Might as well just memorize a BIP seed or use a wallet that allows for a custom additional seed word (e.g. Trezor, Ledger, Wasabi). During your trip, suppose a cop stops you for a security check ( in Europe, they do that all the time even to pedestrians ).
The cop may find your paper and start asking questions about that strange encoded message.
Where do you live? The only time I was ever stopped by the police as a pedestrian was when I crossed a red light. And even then they didn't require any papers. And I'm a guy that used to get mistaken for a dealer more often than not. |
|
|
|
Won't forking the chain randomly decrease the value of a particular asset? Why? If it's hard fork no one cares about the market impact is close to nil. If there's a market impact then people care about the hard fork, in which case we can assume that there's likely some merit to their approach. Historically speaking hard forks caused price increases at least as often as they lead to price deprecation, if not moreso (e.g. the impending BCH and B2X hard forks lead to a run up on BTC's price, the impending BSV BCH hard fork... not so much). In conclusion the market impact is pretty much unpredictable, if there is one (which in the case of the numerous Bitcoin hard forks was relatively seldom). Don't you think we should have like a committee of people who gets to decide if a blockchain has to be forked or not?
If a committee of people could decide on who forks off and who doesn't we'd lose a major aspect of the freedom and permissionlessness of cryptocurrencies. No one is in control, and that's the whole point of it. In practice it's the free market as an extension of our community that decides which fork becomes successful and which doesn't. You don't need a committee for that. Note that I'm talking about "independent" hard forks. "Sanctioned" upgrade hard forks are a wholly different thing (e.g. the one that Vitalik has in store for Ethereum). In this case you don't just "randomly hard fork" off the main chain but rather have a developer team that orderly decides on a course of action (e.g. the switch from PoW to PoS) and -- optimally -- a community that supports this decision. Or not, in which case parts of the community can fork off and see whether their approach is more viable. |
|
|
|
Of course, but the bottom line is this. "Spreadsheet entries" in the form of Dollar or Euro are created for the borrowing of goods and services from the general population and returning them back later. On the other hand, "spreadsheet entries" in the form of Bitcoin and Crypto are created for extracting goods and services from the general population without returning them back later. And that's the difference between a legitimate business and a scam.
If you are referring to the circular flow of income -- that applies to Bitcoin as well, not just fiat currencies. You can get paid in Bitcoin for goods and services and you can in turn use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services yourself. You can buy mining hardware using Bitcoin, pay your electricty bill using bitcoins you mined and spend the remaining bitcoins on Pizzas or whatever else you need. Granted, there's friction with the classical banking system (ie. when converting to fiat) but if you stay within a closed circuit of crypto it's rather frictionless, especially globally speaking (anyone who ever sent money abroad will know, as well as anyone who ever ran a small online business with international customers). |
|
|
|
Ability to transfer something (money, bitcoin, text, picture or whatever) is indeed - utility. But this ability belongs to the transferring system, and not the thing that is transferred. Everything can be transferred via some transferring system but that doesn't mean everything has utility. Bitcoin is a spreadsheet entry and it has zero utility.
Bitcoin the network can not function without Bitcoin the currency. These "spreadsheet entries" are what pays the miners, similar to how other "spreadsheet entries" pay bankers, marketers, developers, etc. These "spreadsheet entries" pay the transferring system. You can't have one without the other. |
|
|
|
Using a hard fork (as mentioned in ETFbitcoin's brackets).
So it's not impossible, but very hard and risky, depending on the size and activity of the network (both from a technical and a social point of view, ie. the larger the community the harder it is to consent on upgrades via hard fork).
Can anyone hard fork the network? Or you need certain requirements to do it? Anyone can. Which is why we got this clusterfuck of Bitcoin hard forks after Bitcoin Cash caused a Bitcoin hard fork hype: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2597083.0Ethereum Classic also forked off Ethereum without requiring any "permissions" -- that's the beauty of an open system like cryptocurrencies. (sidenote: Technically Ethereum forked off, with Ethereum Classic following the original blockchain while Ethereum reverted the transactions caused by the DAO attack) Whether your hard fork would be successful is a different question however. |
|
|
|
|
A cryptographic hash acts like a one-way encryption, meaning while you can't derive the input (eg. password) from the output (ie. hash) you can be sure that the same input will always lead to the same output.
The security of this however strongly depends on the used cryptographic hash. Also you can't "decrypt" a hash, if that's your next question.
What are you trying to do?
|
|
|
|
What i meant was it's possible to combine multiple consensus algorithm before the cryptocurrency is released, but it's not possible to add/remove consensus method on running network (at least without hard-fork)
But Vitalik is incorporating a new consensus algorithm right? So he's actually changing the consensus algorithm on a running network right? Using a hard fork (as mentioned in ETFbitcoin's brackets). So it's not impossible, but very hard and risky, depending on the size and activity of the network (both from a technical and a social point of view, ie. the larger the community the harder it is to consent on upgrades via hard fork). |
|
|
|
Monetary transactions are enabled by internet and miners equipment, not by Bitcoin. The internet alone, by itself, does not enable monetary transactions. What do you think pays for the mining infrastructure? Transaction is an instance of buying or selling something. Of course, the internet alone does not enable the buying or selling of something, but what that has to do with the topic at hand? Because you stated above that transactions are enabled by the internet and miners. Obviously the internet by itself can't enable transactions, so in this case miners are required. But what do you think pays for mining? (spoiler alert: Bitcoin does. No native token, no mining, no permissionless monetary transactions via the internet) To repeat: The utility of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is monetary transactions. Whether Bitcoin is overpriced or undervalued is a different question, of course. But if you accept that banks, credit card companies and money transmitters (and by extension their respective stocks and bonds) have utility, you also have to accept that cryptocurrencies do. Everything else is just cherry picking. |
|
|
|
Monetary transactions are enabled by internet and miners equipment, not by Bitcoin. The internet alone, by itself, does not enable monetary transactions. What do you think pays for the mining infrastructure? |
|
|
|
Goldbars can not be faked against any serious security check and can be sold to total morons only.
Same is true forks, so what's your point? And my arguments dont contradict, because You refuse to read them correctly. [...]
Hence my request for clarification. Let me rephrase your statements the way I understood them: First: no other mining includes precious "deflationary" mechanism, that does nothing but lessens reward for same task exponentially. That is nothing else than pyramid, doesnt matter how You name it. It would be same, if Goldakatoshi somehow set, that after too years gold miners will harvest 2 times less than today, after 4 years 4 times less, then 8, then 16. You see how quickly it grows. So its fraudulent in its core.
1. Bitcoin's supply is limited, which is bad. The supply of precious metals is not limited, which is good. Second: Gold can not be forked. There are reserves to mine, or there a not. Simple. Forking, segwit and lightning network are nothing but delay mechanism for winning time for scammers (mostly early whales) to cash their early free coins in. No body know ratio of produced coins and those which are cashed in permanently, because of very low transfer fees, whales can trade coins between their own wallets and give impression of any "market price" which they can find idiots at.
2. Bitcoin's supply is not limited, which is bad. The supply of precious metals is limited, which is good. Broken down like that, those statements are contradictory. Kindly point out the nuances that I missed. Millions upon millions of men and women use gold daily to adorn their bodies. We all use electronics that have trace amounts of gold in them. Gold is used in dentistry, medicine, aerospace, and elsewhere. More than two-thirds of newly produced gold is utilized this way. Meaning, gold has utilization capacity and we can use gold to compare it with other goods or services. In that way we can determine whether gold is overpriced or underpriced. For example, we empirically know that a gram of gold has lower utilization capacity than a car, and higher utilization capacity than an egg. So if it is priced above a car, we would immediately know it is overpriced. If it is priced below an egg, we would immediately know it is underpriced. In short, things with utilization capacity are not scams.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have utility as well though. Monetary transactions, as enabled by Bitcoin, have utility, otherwise we would have neither banks nor credit card companies nor remittance services. On the other side if you look at gold purely from a utility perspective, we are looking at a clearly over-valued asset. If industrial (and cosmetic) utility were the only determining factors, gold would (1) be less over-priced in comparison to other metals that see comparable practical use and (2) not run counter-cyclical to economic growth (unlike platinum, for example). |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
