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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 8 months ago
In reply to: Earl Zarbin‘s article Where to Learn has a new comment I think I am a pilot, Flew a chopper, Now a chef, Food dice proper. ViewEarl, this is fabulous. Just the right amount of absurdity.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 8 months ago
In reply to: Ken Jons-un posted an update Consent of the governed: finally it’s been accomplished for a town. ViewIt would be much easier to set up a Galt’s Gulch in Monowi than in Chile.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 8 months ago
In reply to: Rob Wells posted an update I see that Cato have released a new version of their freedom index which makes for interesting reading. The US gets a 9.8 (presumably out of 10) for having sound money and I wonder how […] ViewWow, Switzerland comes top and they have compulsory military service for males.
Cato says “The index published here presents a broad measure of human freedom, understood as the absence of coercive constraint”, but they certainly set a low bar.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 8 months ago
In reply to: Thomas L. Knapp‘s article No, Wrecked Bitcoin (BTC) Isn’t “Digital Gold” has a new comment I’ve been hearing that reference lately, and it seems to be aimed at the difficulty of getting in and out of Wrecked […] View@thomaslknapp I’m not disagreeing with anything in your analysis, Thomas, and I would prefer an immediate increase in the Bitcoin block size.
But I’m optimistic for Bitcoin because I expect that the Lightning Network in conjunction with Bitcoin will work really well. If I’m wrong and it doesn’t, I expect the Bitcoin Core developers will increase…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 8 months ago
In reply to: Thomas L. Knapp‘s article No, Wrecked Bitcoin (BTC) Isn’t “Digital Gold” has a new comment I’ve been hearing that reference lately, and it seems to be aimed at the difficulty of getting in and out of Wrecked […] ViewBitcoin is so successful that the blocks are full therefore Bitcoin is failing because the blocks are full because it is so successful that the blocks are full…
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Thomas L. Knapp‘s article More on the Virtues of Steemit has a new comment I was skeptical of the Steemit platform and the Steem cryptocurrency when they first came out in 2016. I messed with the whole thing a […] View@thomaslknapp The limit may even be 24 hours. But the hashcode of the text eventually gets locked into the Steemit blockchain, which doesn’t allow for open-ended editing.
But that’s what I desire. If I find an error, I want to be able to fix it. “Publish-and-forget” is a cheap-and-nasty strategy.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@restonthewind wrote:
“If miners with a majority of hashing power decide to stop decreasing the number of bitcoins created with each block, so the supply grows linearly with time indefinitely or even faster, are they dishonest or only successful reformers?”They would be successful reformers. Anyone can start running software that issues more…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Thomas L. Knapp‘s article More on the Virtues of Steemit has a new comment I was skeptical of the Steemit platform and the Steem cryptocurrency when they first came out in 2016. I messed with the whole thing a […] ViewI tried Steemit, but unfortunately I have a bit of a fastidious streak and I can’t work with a system that doesn’t allow edits to old posts.
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Steemit allows edits to published posts. I’m not sure whether or not there’s a time limit to edits.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@ccspencer
It will be interesting to revisit this in a few years to see whether the ability for a majority of miners to control the blockchain turns out to be a feature or a bug.On a separate matter, upon further checking I see that I was wrong to ascribe the initial design of the Lightning Network to Satoshi. He knew that such a network was…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@ccspencer
“And, short as bitcoin’s history is, it has already included several instances in which the most powerful miners have gotten together to “fix” bitcoin. Such fixes may have been benign so far. But the fact that they can occur at all demonstrates that such collusion is possible.”That’s not quite the whole story. What you call “the most…[Read more]
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“The “fixes” that have occurred have taken place because the vast majority of small-time miners have signalled their support for the changes by contributing their hashing power to pools that supported the fix.”
The very fact that that is possible proves my point.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Earl Zarbin‘s article A Birthday — Mine has a new comment I think I am a birthday, Today, eighty-nine, Nonagenarian, That is next in line. ViewCongratulations Earl! You are sharp as ever at 89.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@ccspencer
“(One could argue that) a bitcoin like blockchain does not completely remove the need for trust. It just moves the need for trust from a fallible authoritative 3rd party to a fallible collective agreement process. However, the outcome of the latter is more reliable than the former and much better than the current financial s…[Read more]-
“That’s a good way of putting it, although I wouldn’t use the word “trust”. The algorithm is straightforward and open, and anyone who examines it will see how it works.”
Trust is an appropriate word. One must trust that that “straightforward and open” process will reliably yield the desired outcome. It is evident from examini…[Read more]
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If miners with a majority of hashing power decide to stop decreasing the number of bitcoins created with each block, so the supply grows linearly with time indefinitely or even faster, are they dishonest or only successful reformers? What’s the difference between this change in the protocol and segregated witness?
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@atlasaikido
@atlasaikido
Any modern software project makes use of algorithms developed by many other people, and Bitcoin is no exception. It’s inevitable that some of those algorithms will have arisen from government work, such as the NSA’s work on SHA-256.It’s possible that the NSA designed a backdoor into the algorithm, but it’s pretty…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@atlasaikido
Sorry, I haven’t been able to give this thread as much time as I would like. I’m in the middle of closing down my business so that I can retire a few years early. Yay!It’s likely that Satoshi mined a large number of Bitcoins. The initial version of the Bitcoin software incremented a variable in a predictable manner so that one can…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Jordan Miller‘s article Forget Taxation! We Can Build a Universal Basic Income on Crypto! has a new comment Automation is the future, everyone knows that. Human labor will someday be a thing of the past. The […] View@jordanmiller
“we don’t need to check papers and verify identity and all that government shit. Let’s not force it, just engineer it to let it happen”I’m with you on that.
I just don’t think a scheme should be promoted as “universal” if the distribution is not universal by design. If it’s presented as “Useful Basic Income” then I think it wou…[Read more]
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I like that Useful Basic Income or Ubiquitous Basic Income. Perhaps Universal is a technical term…
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@restonthewind Satoshi presented the design for the scaling system, which others are implementing under the name of Lightning network.
It’s nothing like Ripple. Ripple uses an “inner circle” of nodes to timestamp its blockchain.
Lightning uses a digital signature on each small transaction, in such a way that the recipient can claim the payment…[Read more]
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The original Ripple preceded the Bitcoin whitepaper, so it had no blockchain. Its similarity to Lightning Network involves the network of creditors and extending credit through a sequence of creditors. “One transaction on the Bitcoin ledger can finalize any number of Lightning transactions” describes “rippling”. Settlement through “ripples” is the…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@ccspencer @ccspencer It seems we are really in agreement. There are plenty of earlier systems that depend on an “authoritative server”, i.e. a trusted party. Satoshi Nakamoto showed how this could be done without any trusted party.
As you state, newsgroup orderings are not universally consistent. Two users may see newsgroup posts in slightly…[Read more]
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Why do you say that Satoshi Nakamoto designed the Lightning Network? It sounds like Ripple, which preceded Bitcoin, and it doesn’t sound as scalable, without centralized hubs, as its proponents claim.
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@atlasaikido I can’t take an article seriously if it erroneously states that Satoshi Nakamoto reserved a million Bitcoins for himself. Unlike the vast majority of altcoins, Bitcoin had no pre-mine. No coins were reserved.
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If he was the only miner for a year, “pre-mined” seems a fair description of the coins he mined. The new coins a miner adds to the ledger after computing the hash is a consensus of the miners anyway, so a single miner may add any number of coins. Computing proof of work for thousands blocks, when no one else is competing, only wastes…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Nico Metten‘s article Why Intrinsic Value Matters to Crypto Currencies has a new comment Crypto currencies were one of the big stories of the now ending year 2017. These once geeky little software projects have […] View@ccspencer “Schemes for doing this (technically) are easy to devise”
I beg to differ. Please point me to any decentralized database (prior to Satoshi’s White Paper) that did not depend on a trusted central authority.
I understand how, for example, IBM can decentralize their database, splitting it across many servers worldwide in such a way that…[Read more]
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>“Schemes for doing this (technically) are easy to devise”
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>I beg to differ. Please point me to any decentralized database (prior to Satoshi’s White Paper) that did not depend on a trusted central authority.I don’t consider the IBM type database spread over multiple servers that you mention to be a distributed datab…[Read more]
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Roger Browne posted a new activity comment 1 year, 9 months ago
In reply to: Bruce Koerber posted an update As the mining costs of bitcoins increases what happens to the price of bitcoins? ViewBitcoin difficulty adjustment: just the technical details
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/DifficultyExplanation and graphic:
https://www.bitcoinmining.com/what-is-bitcoin-mining-difficulty/Graph showing past difficulty adjustments:
https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty
I feel your pain. It drives me insane when I go back and find a typo in one of my old pieces, and realize that it’s just been sitting there for months for everyone to see.
Even worse, I submit three columns a week to 1,500-2,500 newspapers and sometimes a typo will get past not just me but past one or more newspaper editors, after which it’s…[Read more]