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General Software Discussion / Re: How In-app Purchases Has Destroyed The Industry
« Last post by Renegade on February 03, 2014, 09:12 AM »Only shaving the surface... It's much worse than that.
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I'm having the same problem I've had with DOGE... maybe I'm just too impatient. It never syncs... and with DOGE, I gave up after I came back and there were double the blocks to sync that there were before I left.-wraith808 (February 02, 2014, 08:35 PM)
I'm having the same problem I've had with DOGE... maybe I'm just too impatient. It never syncs... and with DOGE, I gave up after I came back and there were double the blocks to sync that there were before I left.-wraith808 (February 02, 2014, 08:35 PM)
Truthfully, I can see why- for the same reason I don't use direct deposit in many cases. Leaves a money trail that can be reversed. Tracing is fine... it's the reversal that alarms me.-wraith808 (January 29, 2014, 02:26 PM)
The Rand is Dying Can Bitcoin Save Us?
A perfect storm has formed and the Rand continues its plummet.
The key factors contributing to the decline: a balance of trade deficit, poor economic data globally and a mining sector hit particularly hard by weak global resource markets.
South Africa, as one of the ‘BRICS’, was often touted as an emerging market to watch. These days it finds itself in less auspicious company; the so-called ‘Fragile Five’ (India, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey).
The economic fundamentals are poor and citizens are left with few options. Most feel powerless. With few options available many are forced to watch their real wealth, denominated in Rand, evaporate.
Head of Russia’s Largest Bank Backs Bitcoin, Again
Sberbank may not be a household name in the west, but it just happens to be the third-largest bank in Europe.
It’s also the biggest bank in Russia and eastern Europe, with nearly half a trillion dollars in assets and a workforce of 300,000.
The bank is owned by the Central Bank of Russia and it is headed by German Gref, who served as the Russian Minister of Economic and Trade from 2000 to 2007. Gref’s tenure was marked by a period of economic reform and liberalization. Judging by his recent statements, he is still open minded when it comes to monetary issues.
^ seems to me you're both agreeing there - just looking at it from different perspectives...-tomos (January 26, 2014, 03:04 PM)
Nothing said? They said they're going to continue.
Nothing done? They stayed the course.
Insubstantial? They affirmed that they're going to continue exactly what they're doing now, but perhaps with a minor tweak here or there.-Renegade (January 20, 2014, 02:40 PM)
The speech was supposed to be about reforms and changes to be made to government surveillance programs.
Therefore: Nothing of substance was said. Nothing of any substance will be done. And whatever else was being offered as a proposed course of 'action' is insubstantial when viewed in that context.
-40hz (January 20, 2014, 03:15 PM)
Andrea Shepard, a Seattle-based core developer for the Tor Project, suspects her recently ordered keyboard may have been intercepted by the NSA.
Following the purchase of a new IBM Thinkpad Keyboard from Amazon.com, Shepard discovered her package to be taking a strange detour to the East Coast, revealed by a screenshot of her shipment tracking information.
You've made some interesting points Ren, but I'm not sure how to square them with the stuff I read.
Here is the (official?) bitcoin faq page (http://bitcoin.org/e...are-bitcoins-created), emphasis mine:
The Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate. This makes Bitcoin mining a very competitive business. When more miners join the network, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a profit and miners must seek efficiency to cut their operating costs. No central authority or developer has any power to control or manipulate the system to increase their profits. Every Bitcoin node in the world will reject anything that does not comply with the rules it expects the system to follow.
Bitcoins are created at a decreasing and predictable rate. The number of new bitcoins created each year is automatically halved over time until bitcoin issuance halts completely with a total of 21 million bitcoins in existence. At this point, Bitcoin miners will probably be supported exclusively by numerous small transaction fees.
Why do bitcoins have value?
Bitcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. Bitcoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies).
To me that (and other discussions i read when searching for "bitcoin + scarcity") seems to confirm my point -- that it is a central element of design that huge amounts of cpu have to be churned through, solely because it is essential that one not be able to quickly mine coins. That's the whole point of the scarcity thing, which still seems key to me. The design of the system simply does not allow allow a situation where mining coins is energy cheap and efficient. By design if someone found a way to mine the coins for half the energy cost, it would simply mean that the next day everyone would be running twice as many computers to mine bitcoins.
In fact, the scarcity-by-design and spread-of-mining-over-all-miners nature means that that the amount of cpu resources and energy costs will ALWAYS rise to a cost near the expected value of the coins. If you think that a coin will be worth $1000 then you would be willing to spend a little less than $1000 on your energy bills and hardware costs to mine a coin (or spent that much money infecting people's computers with bots to do so). The system is designed to force people to churn through that cpu time and energy cost because by design it must -- those extra cpu cycles are not benefiting anyone they are simply there to impose an (artificial) cost on users in order to enforce a limited supply.
My point was that it doesn't have to be that way. You could find a way to keep exactly the same properties (of scarcity, limited supply, protection against attack, etc.) but have the cpu work required for mining actually be useful, in-and-of-itself, for other purposes.
Thanks for the links to primecoin -- i look forward to reading about it.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 08:42 PM)
It's almost impossible. Chances are you can pre-order, but you can't just get hardware easily. You can get obsolete hardware though. ...
Dogecoin attempts to buy the first round, when the bartender says "No need. Cody Coin has already paid for the first round and has been sitting at the end of the bar waiting, for the last 7 years!"-app103 (January 23, 2014, 06:09 PM)
Interesting because this just popped up to Slashdot:
" Does Anyone Make a Photo De-Duplicator For Linux? Something That Reads EXIF?
Posted by timothy on 05:32 PM January 23rd, 2014
from the which-ones-are-not-like-the-others? dept.
postbigbang writes "Imagine having thousands of images on disparate machines. many are dupes, even among the disparate machines. It's impossible to delete all the dupes manually and create a singular, accurate photo image base? Is there an app out there that can scan a file system, perhaps a target sub-folder system, and suck in the images-- WITHOUT creating duplicates? Perhaps by reading EXIF info or hashes? I have eleven file systems saved, and the task of eliminating dupes seems impossible."
http://linux.slashdo...hing-that-reads-exif
From Renny's description:
"Lets you choose an "original" and "duplicate" folder to search in
Finds duplicates by file size, file signature (file hash), or photo signature (pixel data hash)
Lets you delete individual photos or many photos at once"
So while a couple of the Slashdot Poster's desired features may be missing, the pattern match was too good to ignore.
Heh "Monetization Opportunity"!-TaoPhoenix (January 24, 2014, 07:06 AM)
Hey Ren,
Looks like the download link is offline, can we get an updated download link? (or just attach to forum post?)-mouser (January 24, 2014, 04:29 AM)
I try to avoid this bitcoin stuff because the whole world of finance seems completely insane and make-believe to me.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
However, i am somewhat interested in the technology issues.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
But what I think eleman touched on which is odd about bitcoin is that, if i'm understanding it correctly, one of the key ideas of bitcoin is that by design it MUST require huge amounts of otherwise-useless cpu cycles, in order to simulate/create scarcity.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
It's a key property you have to have scores of high-powered computers doing nothing but churning through useless operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to do "work" that is of no value other than to purposefully slow down the generation of these digital tokens.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
But now the interesting technological question that comes to mind is, could you flip that?-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
Could you make a new crypto/digital currency where the work required to virtually "mine" such things was actually PRODUCTIVE USEFUL work?-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
First non-hashcash proof-of-work in cryptocurrency, pure prime number based proof-of-work
Abstract
A new type of proof-of-work based on searching for prime numbers is introduced in peer-to-peer cryptocurrency designs. Three types of prime chains known as Cunningham chain of first kind, Cunningham chain of second kind and bi-twin chain are qualified as proof-of-work. Prime chain is linked to block hash to preserve the security property of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin, while a continuous difficulty evaluation scheme is designed to allow prime chain to act as adjustable-difficulty proof-of-work in a Bitcoin like cryptocurrency.
...
Primecoin is the first cryptocurrency on the market with non-hashcash proof-of-work, generating additional potential scientific value from the mining work. This research is meant to pave the way for other proof-of-work types with diverse scientific computing values to emerge.
Like a crypto/digital coin which was generated by successfully solving protein folding problems, etc.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
Such a thing would still enforce rarity/scarcity by requiring massive cpu cycles -- but those cycles themselves would be producing useful work.-mouser (January 24, 2014, 07:32 AM)
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