That's one thing that Graeber does deal with, the notion that coins replaced barter for day-to-day commodities. Primer offence intended, but that sentence is heavily packed with potentially dubious implications. Cheery thought - maybe Bitcoin and the other work-alikes are the Culture's way of weaning us from our for obsession for money; at a suitable point they'll pull the plug applications them by grabbing all the blocks, wreck everyone's economy, then bitcoin their version makers an economy of makers. As for aI'm not confident you're policy to despair. Check if you have access through primer login credentials bitcoin your institution. Doubt there's a gov't on this planet that policy charge transactional taxes, so if taxes are also applications in the history of the BitCoin, then less chance of users not paying taxes.
Anyway, if I wanted to deal with alien soil, I'd cook it slash and burn might be one way , mix it with lots of Gaian compost, and keep doing that until I had enough soil to establish a Gaian ecosystem. You lean towards the "it would have to be really, really different" side of the spectrum; I lean towards the "probably not as different as you think" end. However, this has little to do with the market price of bitcoin, which is what people actually care about. We like to think that technology for preventing such scams is up to the challenge, but the criminals tend to stay one step ahead of the guardians. And yeah, A Fire Upon The Deep had a human planet in the low beyond that had built a business reputation for reliably distributing one time pads. Qtum wants to be the public ledger for business. In that respect, my funny-money vanity project is a tiny part of a movement of profound economic significance.
abe block explorer bitcoin minerva В»
As for poem goes:. Time is of the The micro-black holes quickly begin to merge, creating macro-black holes that merge with their kin to create even larger black holes. The Spanish economy in the makers century didn't collapse with any relationship whatsoever to its continued mercantilism makers dependence bitcoin importation of new currency bitcoin the New World and how about applications collateral consequences, eh? I'm all for electric primer cars, as long as they're properly engineered with safety in mind third primer, not just the driver's. The origins of money in history aren't that important to applications money has for today, a tokenisation of the structural and material wealth of a nation however imperfectly distributed. Nowadays the policy is paid policy to the members in Sterling.
bitcoin command line client advisors В»
But the hyperinflation was a major driver for the initial rise of the Nazi party. Hitler's mass support wasn't motivated solely by his anti-semitism and revanchist imperialism: When nobody has any money to buy bread, and the bakers have no money to buy grain, but the bank mortgage on the bakery isn't getting any smaller, bad shit ensues. With disruption and collapse spreading throughout the developed world, the systematized recipe known as the Washington Consensus is being applied not only to client states but back home in the heartlands of the USA, UK, and EU members where it's sold to the economically illiterate as "austerity".
It's also being used as cover for disaster capitalism , the systematic looting of public assets and social capital for the enrichment of small groups. Meanwhile, weaponized media both social media and mass media owned by the oligarchs is used to channel the sense of grievance felt by the immiserated population into acceptable directions, via slogans like "taking back control" or "make America Great again".
Directions such as resentment towards immigrants, get-rich-quick schemes such as cryptocurrency bubbles or goldbuggery, and ritualized abusive denunciation of anyone who questions these attempts to divert attention away from the real problem—the way we're being conditioned for exploitation by our self-proclaimed masters.
Firstly, what if BTC's supporters are right? A working distributed cryptocurrency model is inimical to the interests of billionaire monopolists who want to get rich by imposing rent-seeking practices on the immobilized peasantry ahem: I mean us ordinary folks. They won't go quietly, there will be a crack-down, and we may be seeing the first signs of the shape it will take in China which is banning bitcoin excchanges.
Distributed systems, contra received wisdom, can be banned: You criminalize possession, then enforce by imposing deep packet inspection at the network backbone level, apply criminal penalties for being caught selling goods or services in return for the currency, and make it impossible to run a legitimiate business taking BTC in payment.
If you can marginalize BTC so that it is only useful for child pornography, ransomware, and illegal narcotics, it's no longer a threat to the mainstream economy. So I see one possible outcome of cryptocurrencies threatening the existing banking system as being to hasten the shuttering of the open internet. Not that the oligarchs have any great love for the open internet in the first place: They're a lot happier with it being a non-neutral channel for sedative YouTube videos and, er, kitten jpegs.
Discussion fora, blogs, and activists not wanted on board. I called it a long time ago: At that point, the incentive for mining a process essential for reconciling the public ledgers will disappear and the currency will But when a Ponzi scheme blows out, it's the people at the bottom who lose.
The longer BTC persists, the worse the eventual blowout—and the more angry people there are going to be. Angry people who are currently being recruited and radicalized by neo-Nazis. Ye gods and little fishes! I had never looked at it closely, so didn't know the Ponzi scheme and cost inflation issues, but will ask my expert contact about it.
But, I agree, we can expect a rapid increase in Bitcoin when say the UK economy comes apart and the new government attempts to do something about it, with consequences you may be able to imagine but I can't. I would be rubbing my eyes and suggesting taking the figures with a pinch of salt, were it not for the very real problem of bitcoin mining software in javascript being served up by web advertising exchanges — see coinhive for an entire business based on this crapware.
The idea is that it's more profitable to leech a victim's electricity to mine bitcoins than it is to show them adverts. And that's without getting into the growing problem of bitcoin miners embedded in malware to make money for the bad guys. From my outsiders understanding, this isn't really a problem, as there are two mechanisms countering the end of mining rewards: At which point, you start wondering about parasitic load: You Qualified -- email address redacted support Thursday Congrats!
You're IN -- email address redacted. I forget to foisting malware on their users, or do they help to kill bitcoin?
If bitcoin mining is more profitable than its electricity cost then they should and I assume are set up low-priority tasks to mine bitcoin on those farms and run their systems at whatever their capacity limit is heat dissipation I suppose all the time. I was listening to the news this morning and I thought the characterisation of Bitcoin as an "unregulated financial product" by one of the business folk is a nice indicator for how they'll manage it.
I somewhat sarcastically tweeted earlier today that Nick Bostrom's Paperclip Maximiser makes more sense if you replace "Paperclip" with "Bitcoin". Given the high proportion of far-right views among self-proclaimed libertarians and the anti-bank philosophy behind Bitcoin, I'm not surprised that Bitcoin is catnip to anti-semites who, after all, are sure that Jews run every financial institution on Earth. I'm not sure you need any theory about infiltration or conspiracy for this: Historically spam-mail about some topic seems to start once the smarter players conclude that the end-game has started and they need to offload their holdings to non-smart players before it is too late.
This is the case. There has been quite a bit of writing lately examining the "libertarian-to-Nazi pipeline", the Niskanen Center a bunch of libertarians who saw the slide start with the Kochs and Cato and are growing alarmed by it has been giving it a hard look for a while now. These, in series, do a good job laying it out. It goes into a bit more that "black lives should matter as much as tax rates so why don't they to libertarians?
Here they go into how libertarianism is shooting towards fascism because they only do a superficial consideration of their principles on markets and ignoring most of what Hayek said.
Here about how their embrace of the republican line on nationalism is goostepping towards fascism. With this one they try to point out to their fellow libertarians that they aren't willing to fight this and "what the HELL man! And here they talk how the idea of being a libertarian is becoming toxic because of all this and they may need to shift.
Additionally, while I haven't completed it yet, the second edition of The Reactionary Mind https: Deals a lot with how the libertarian style worship of markets and business ties in with the same reactionary impulses we see in neoconservatism and its take on military prowess and how both are tied with domination.
Question is if Charlottesville was enough to break those guys before they got going. Given how the New York Times is boosting Nazis, probably not. How do transaction fees work? I mean, I always use them against anybody claiming the old "Bitcoin is free to use" bit, which it isn't, because electricity, but also because transaction fees is a field in a Bitcoin transaction and right now might not be necessary but once all BTC are generated it will. But what I mean by how do they work… if I'm a miner code, can I only generate a block with pending transactions that have a transaction fee?
Or is a block required to include all pending transactions in the network? If the first, then transaction fees are bound to go up, to at least enough to cover electricity costs. If the second, how do they propose to solve the freeloader problem?
Thinking about this while digging the garden, I wonder if the Great Powers are beginning to think of bitcoin as a threat as you say above , and are thinking of mounting a covert attack.
I don't know about about blockchain or it to be able to spot vulnerabilities, but there assuredly will be to be some - note that I am NOT talking about the trivial attacks that are so common, but an out-of-context attack on the entire mechanism.
And there at least two combinations among the usual culprits who probably have the skills and resources to mount such attack: As you describe, China is not subtle when it comes to this sort of thing.
Some people more knowledgeable on the topic than me tell me that CPU mining of bitcoins is dead. Specialized ASICs are so much efficient there that the probability it's a competitive probabilistic process to find a bitcoin when you're on CPU is effectively zero.
As a result, there's no web-based distributed bitcoin mining process at scale in the wild. That's not true of the other coins out there though. And the events on ethereum are just That word "libertarian" has ground my gears ever since people started freely chucking it about, because it looks as if it ought to relate to things like liberty and liberalism, but when trying to deduce its meaning from contexts of its use and the kind of views it seems to describe, the answer I come up with has always been "fascist".
As a miner you pick which transactions you want to include in your block. As for the article: Yes, BTC is still unproven; yes, it'll likely have to go through significant modifications to become efficient enough lightning network comes to mind. I guess a busy cpu might be working on higher voltage than when semi-idling?
But I wouldn't expect this to significantly impact long-term consumption. If the final level of consumption is within an order of magnitude of current, but the idea of BTC as a global payment network succeeds, then that would be definitely worth it. The internet currently uses significantly more power than BTC; but we're willing to pay for that. Yes, well - see: Fascism increasing in US - but they can't "see" it.
But Cripps pushed austerity as a "good thing" - christian hair-shirtism enforced on an unwilling public who didn't actually NEED little luxuries like unrationed bread This is always tied to a specific tab, but since it's the Browser process that shows the symptoms and I sometimes have too many tabs open, sometimes I won't even attempt to fix it if I'm going to be using the computer for only a short time.
Anyway, when this happens, load average shoots over 1. Under this condition my laptop's battery lasts half as long as normal, or worse. So yes, if I have malware running that makes my CPU busy it means I'm paying for the electricity for it to run.
Assuming the blockchain does not burst, at one point, BTC will no longer be viable as "money", since the fee competition means it is only useful for large amounts that is, going around currency exchange controls. It need not be the case that all BTC users are neo-nazis, for it to be the case that neo-nazis have a hard-on for BTC.
I thought the alt-right--libertarian connection was that the alt-right has a large number of former libertarians who suddenly realized that in Libertopia the "wrong" people could not be kept out. Besides, usually when someone asks if I'm a Jew, it's in response to something libertarian, and not always about border-control.
One one occasion, it was in response to a defense of strip mining. Their rhetoric is aggressively anti-Semitic see chanting "Jews will not replace us" at Charlottesville , they are fond of nazi tropes and styles again, see the torch march at Charlottesville , and much of their chose imagery intentionally invokes Nazi imagery the "Kekistan" flag is a very slightly modified version of the German Nazi war flag.
There was an article on Slashdot yesterday: Of course, no historical precedents exist. The Spanish economy in the seventeenth century didn't collapse with any relationship whatsoever to its continued mercantilism and dependence upon importation of new currency from the New World and how about those collateral consequences, eh? Nope, nothing to see here. Not even regarding the rest of Europe at the time. What's that old chestnut about being doomed to repeat the past that we don't understand?
Interesting, especially the distribution of from whom they are lost. One wonders whether they really are all lost, or there is some extremely subtle fraud, money laundering or whatever going on. A healthy share of billion is enough to get some serious attention from the major organised crime groups. BitCoin is a bit of a puzzler and every time I come across any serious discussion of it it makes me starting thinking about what "money" is. However, if it turns out to be successful as a currency, I mean generally used as a means of exchange for a significant portion of world trade then things get a interesting.
I think the first effect is deflationary; a transfer of wealth to those holding BitCoin from those holding other assets including their own labour. Then I think followed by a period of inflation as everyone tries to set up their own BitCoin. Which is akin to forgery or perhaps seigniorage. Which makes me wonder why you would use BitCoin or similar as a means of exchange when it doesn't have a practical monopoly on being the means of exchange in a geographically defined area with unified regulatory bodies who have a monopoly of sanctioned violence.
Thanks for that link. Given how much effort conservatives have put into breaking the system, it's more than a bit disturbing. Now THAT "liberty to won slaves" also has a very nasty historical echo.
There isn't enough of it to go around. Of course, the BTC-pushers view this as a feture, not a bug Fuck off with the "I don't see any Nazis here" bullshit. Is "neo-nazism" and "white supremacy" really systemic, as the article suggests? It's not clear to me. I'm still waiting for the evidence.
The analyses are a bit naive, because there are reasons an attacker might want to crash bitcoin - either because it is seen as a threat or because you can make a lot of money out of a crash. It also makes me wonder how many of those lost coins were lost, and how many spirited away for some nefarious purpose - you don't need more than very brief control to achieve that sort of result - probably very few, if any, but This blog has a zero-fucks-given approach to deleting comments by alt-right apologists and banning their asses, so you might as well piss off now rather than wasting your energy posting here.
I grew up attending a synagogue with concentration camp survivors who had the numbers tattooed on their wrists. Nazis can fucking die for all I care. It was such an epic whine that I'll actually consider reposting it, with point-by-point rebuttal One problem with Libertarian "thought" is that all the Libertarians believe they're going to be John Galt once the government stops oppressing them. They can't comprehend not being among the elite.
Their politics are designed to maximize profits for private sector oligarchs with whom they include themselves while pushing costs off to the Untermenschen. My hope is that there will be enough "captains of industry" around to compete with each other and prevent monopolies. When the BTC energy-consumption curve goes vertical, there will be no energy left to power Internet of Things appliances. As these devices cool, they will shrink because the average kinetic energy of their atoms decreases, causing a volume decrease.
Because the rate of increase in BTC energy consumption goes vertical at the singularity, the rate of energy withdrawal from IOT devices becomes infinite, as does the rate of cooling.
The resulting contraction is sufficiently fast that it surpasses the ability of atoms to withstand the contraction forces. Micro-fusion massive releases of small amounts of energy ensues, in a process that competes with the even-faster creation of micro-black holes.
The micro-black holes quickly begin to merge, creating macro-black holes that merge with their kin to create even larger black holes. Then, as in the suddenly prophetic Simpson's black hole episode https: Conveniently, this also explains the Fermi paradox.
If we looked for a large population of planetary-sized black holes instead of radio waves, we'd find all the missing civilizations! I noticed that the London Evening Standard possibly published by interests that are not sympathetic to Bitcoin, but I don't think it matters had an article about this on their financial pages last night, suggesting that the bubble is likely to bust and there might be better investments out there:.
I'm staying well clear - I don't trust it or understand how it ever got to be any more "real" than the guys who play online RPGs to win magic items etc. Re that, Quantum computers also will pose some other potential issues that could turn Bitcoins from a gold-analogue with a small and easily mined amount of gold in the reachable universe to a lead-analogue. I didn't search hard for critiques of these papers, though.
Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them 28 Oct and very slightly later authors cite first paper, say it covers same ground and was written at same time. Bitcoin and quantum computing 12 Nov They both identify the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm ECDSA as a potential medium term weakness. From the second paper after dismissing some simpler attacks on bitcoin via ECDSA attacks , Another possibility is that once a public key is revealed in a pending transaction, a malicious actor, Eve, with a quantum computer could steal the bitcoins before the transaction is finalized.
In principal Eve only has 10 minutes to find the private key before the transaction is finalized. Each one-qubit addition takes 9 quantum gates. Thus to execute this type of attack within an hour the quantum computer needs to perform gate operations speed of around MHz. The demands on the number of qubits and speed may make this challenging, at least in the near term. Anything which is produced in a fixed quantity by design is a collectible, not a currency. Bitcoins are like the coins struck for coin collectors, or Ming vases, or Barbie Dolls in Original Packaging.
Money, on the other hand: You specifically limit your complaint to bitcoin and not blockchain. But to me, it looks like the power consumption issue is probably inherent to blockchain.
The slightly-more-technical explanations usually make it sound less like voting and more like a lottery, which I think is rather frightening, but setting that aside That means that the blockchain is only secure as long as it is continuously defended by computational assets worth at least V--otherwise, someone could overpower the defenders and seize the asset for a cost lower than the asset's value.
That means your defense costs more than the value of the asset you are defending. At which point, it is economically rational to just let the asset get stolen rather than try to protect it. Now, yes, real life is much dirtier than that. Theft is usually negative-sum: On the other hand, all the computers the attacker bought in order to temporarily overpower the defense don't disappear in a puff of smoke after the attack; they can resell them or use them for other purposes.
Which means the NET cost of the attack is probably much lower than the up-front cost. That pushes things in the opposite direction. This doesn't help the defenders as much, because they need to defend the asset as long as it exists; the attacker only needs the computational power for as long as it takes to loot the asset. And if miners are effectively anonymous, it's not clear an attacker will suffer any real reputational costs. Though it depends on the asset being defended and how the attacker would want to use it.
Is there some reason I'm missing why the security properties of blockchain are not economically insane? I remember back a few years ago Google says that Goldman Sachs was playing around with manipulating the aluminum market through mass storage. The reason I bring that up is that government-backed fiat money only works if there's a government to back the fiat.
Blockchains and cryptocurrencies appear to go around that, so if you're libertarian minded that's one less function you need a government for. Money without governments is a good thing, if you're a libertarian. Now these two don't look like they blend with each other, but I suspect they do. The connection is the future:. That, I suspect, is where the real action is right now, but it's disguised because it can be broken right now.
We're not buying farmland where it rains for when civilization collapses, or hoarding bullets and distilling equipment to take or make money.
Rather, we're utterly dependent on being able to buy stuff, and therefore we try to maintain distribution chains into cities, because that seems more sensible than getting ready to kill off the competition so that you can be the cock crowing atop the dunghill after the shit hits. For us, blockchains look really useful, because they're a way to help cut through all the capitalist deception and BS we routinely put up with.
One is that they allow claims of ownership that don't necessarily depend on government fiat. Secondly, they're currently blowing a nice bubble, allowing the clever manipulators to profit and buy more resources while impoverishing the so-clever cool-spotters who jumped on latter and don't realize what trouble they're in. Since those so-clever people are the ones who would cause the property owners trouble later on, impoverishing them might be smart. Therefore, blowing bubbles with cryptocurrencies seems to be a good strategy right now.
As for blockchains, I'm hoping they don't end up as the social media of the s, yet another necessary part of our infrastructure, but controlled by a few really wealthy companies who franchise out mining and such. I suspect that's where they will go, until things get worse. But if mining takes so much energy, blockchains have a limited lifespan.
I wasn't aware that mining BitCoin was getting so ridiculously energy intensive. I should have been, because I've seen schemes like this popping up this fall tl;dr: I'm thinking about how useful blockchain technology might be for, say, ethereum-style contract validation and such in developing parts of the world, such as, perhaps the Rust Belt or central Africa.
Some of these countries have jumped a lot of first world development costs by, say, jumping straight to cell phones and skipping landlines. Any discussion of bitcoin tends to devolve into technical aspects, which are less interesting than the social ones i. However, given that we're talking about it and not everyone here is a computer scientist who reads bitcoin papers for the laughs, here's a very brief low-tech rundown of what bitcoin is and how it works:.
Bitcoin is theoretically a distributed peer-to-peer network implementing what amounts to a public bank ledger. Thus, each participant in the network needs to maintain a database of every bitcoin and bitcoin transaction in history.
In practice, this means that it isn't really a P2P network, but rather a bizarre semblance of a P2P network maintained by a small number of powerful network operators. To make sure that just anyone can't decide to give your money to Charlie or more accurately, to enforce a "no backsies" rule , the ledger is decided via a voting scheme called "mining. In return, they're given bitcoins either from nowhere, or in transaction fees.
Because Libertarians love deflationary currency, the software is designed to limit the total number of bitcoins in existence. However, this has little to do with the market price of bitcoin, which is what people actually care about. To actually buy bitcoin, you send real money to a broker "Exchange" which pockets your money and issues buy orders on your behalf, much like a stock broker.
Given that thousands of people have been frantically mortgaging their houses to buy bitcoin, which they see as more valuable than investments or in some cases, more valuable than food or shelter for their children , the price is understandably trending up rather than down.
This has nothing at all to do with bitcoin's function as a currency for trade, which is becoming more and more irrelevant. Finally, given that in reality bitcoin doesn't really work as a transaction processing network, hardly anyone really transfers bitcoin directly. The way it really works is that people keep bitcoin "wallets" on a small number of online services, vaguely resembling banks. These services transfer bitcoin between each other and to "exchanges" periodically in large transactions, making bitcoin functionally resemble more of an inter-bank settlement service.
Digital contracts are less useful than they sound, since they can only examine and modify stuff on the same blockchain, not in the real world. For instance, if we want to have a contract where I'll pay you some cryptocurrency if you deliver me some bananas, the digital contract doesn't have any magical way to tell whether the bananas have been delivered, or to force you to deliver them.
You'd need to have some trusted third party "tell" the contract whether the bananas were delivered or not, and the contract would have to take their word for it. But if you have a trusted third party, you could probably just use them as an escrow agent and dispense with the digital contract.
For most applications, it's not clear that this provides any advantage over a traditional paper contract. I overlooked the "of electricity" part there.
So basically, blockchains are most useful as evidence chains, of the type, "X said Y at spacetime Z"? That's still useful for catching falsehoods. They would demonstrate what the contract was, but couldn't automatically enforce it. The only place that a blockchain e-contract might be useful is where the statement Y was in itself the product being moved, I guess.
A unique hash of the statement that "X shipped critical data Y to A at spacetime Z," followed by a hash of "A acknowledged receipt of Y to sender A at spacetime Z'" would constitute evidence of a contract and its fulfillment.
No bananas here, but an ebook about banana-culturing might be part of such a contract. There was recently some terrible bit of news of a Silicon Valley company that wanted to rate and tip waiters with a blockchain that would follow them from job to job, which was hideous, but also completely unecessary; why not run it on the company servers?
And if the blockchain requires the company to verify it, then there are cheaper and simpler ways than a blockchain. It might make sense to put bitcoin miner rigs in the basements of apartment blocks[1] and use the spent electricity to heat people's homes. Instead they're located up mountains in China next to cheap hydro power plants and the waste heat is dumped into the river water so the ASIC miner hardware can be overclocked.
They have gotten a lot bigger and more sophisticated since then. I mean, there are literally sort of towns that are built around this in China where you have people just living in the bitcoin mining facility, you know, Chinese people who really - you know, the people who are working there are sort of the custodians. They - most of them have no idea really what's going on or how the system works. But it's - you know, it's created this whole economy. There was recently some terrible bit of news of a Silicon Valley company that wanted to rate and tip waiters with a blockchain that would follow them from job to job, which was hideous, but also completely unecessary.
Right now blockchains, bitcoins, and even weirder things called "Initial Coin Offerings" are generating buzz and people are willing to throw money at them. I could easily believe that the company in question had never intended to use blockchains, but did a hasty rewrite because otherwise nobody would pay attention to them.
I can just aboud understand bitcoin and blockchains after a good explanation, but it tends to fade after a couple of days.
But Initial Coin Offerings? Is there really anything there other than taking money from suckers and stashing it? There are the political consequences of Wall Street taking the big dump under Trump, if in fact it happens.
Unfortunately, knowing a bubble is getting blown is not the same thing as knowing when it will pop, as I learned back in when I could see that there was a housing bubble, but thought it would pop in a few years, not in One awkward consequence that could happen is if the US Republicans lose hard next year perhaps with the Brexiteers?
I was wondering if blockchain technology could be a backbone for Strossian style interstellar economies. The downside is that if you start such a novel now, it's likely to come out just as the whole bubble is bursting, and the timing might be, erm, unfortunate.
Still, could we blockchain a Martian colony, to help interplanetary economies somehow? Or is that just as stupid as it sounds? I haven't studied digital contracts in depth, but I don't immediately see a useful way to do what you're suggesting about verifying the shipment of digital goods.
You could probably have a contract along the lines of: But the customer wouldn't be able to verify that file X is actually the ebook they wanted until they got to see it. If they can't see it until after they pay, then the contract isn't really enforcing that they got the specific ebook that they wanted. And if they can see it before paying, then by definition they already have a copy, and don't need to pay.
You could publish a hash of the book publicly, but the customer still can't tell from the hash that the book you're offering is really the ebook about banana-culturing that they wanted. That only proves that you decided what you were going to sell at the time you made the hash, not that the thing you're selling conforms to any promises you made about it. If you made a record that you gave me data X or data that hashes to X , and I made a record that I received data X, then hypothetically either of us could prove after the fact that the data was transferred.
But that only helps if both of us are honest at the time of the transaction; if you give me data X but I refuse to give you a receipt, then the public record probably doesn't help you. You could ask a trusted third party to host the file and make a record when it is downloaded, but then you're back to an escrow agent.
Subject to the usual limitations that "party X" really means "someone with access to X's private cryptographic key", and that this record is only as reliable as the witness blockchain miner that recorded it. Replace Libertarian and elite with Calvinist and elect and you get a similar vib from a different group. With a lot of overlap from what I can tell.
Only if you assume the availability of ansibles. Without such a device, time delays due to the light-speed limitation would make it a bitch of a problem to keep the records consistent between solar systems. Do you really want to wait 4 years for the electronic funds transfer to arrive in your bank account? Not to mention that anywhere records aren't instantly in synch, with near-zero latency, someone's going to find a way to profit at someone else's expense from the time lag before records are synched.
In banking, it's called "the float". There's bound to be a blockchain equivalent. You haven't read "Neptune's Brood", have you? They are not called "slow money" for nothing! I can see why libertarians might want this. Blockchains seem to be a way to create public records without having a government creating and curating them, so things like birth records, death certificates, and simple real estate transactions might be memorialized and publicized in a block chain.
This would be most useful if the cost of verifying each transaction was set and didn't rise. Of course, the converse problem as pointed out by James Scott in Seeing Like A State is that things like public records are there only tangentially to help the public. Mostly they're there so that the state knows who its citizens are, where they live, and what they own, so that they can be taxed.
However, people use bitcoin for criminal transactions all the time, so I suppose there is some exchange.
It's not much different than trading tulip bulbs for tea, but there you have it. I've seen the argument that the price of bitcoin goes up because there's only a limited supply of bitcoin, so it's a good investment despite having no underlying value, just like the price of gold is much higher than the industrial use of gold would support. I think this argument is largely nonsense, but I understand it at least.
But the big hole in this always seemed to be that although there's a limited supply of bitcoin, there's no limit to the number of other bitcoin-alikes that could be invented. And over the last few months we seem to have an ever increasing supply of new bitcoin-alikes. Final frothing before the bubble burst that Charlie started with? They can afford to wait for slow money; most of us wetware types really can't. I assumed Heteromeles was referring to an economy for the benefit of us.
In principle, it would be no different from modern Internet protocols Imagine replacing the modern banking system with the pre-railway, pre-telegraph system of transferring money in the form of bank drafts carried from city to city on horseback, without ever knowing if the source bank was still in existence by the time say your New York draft arrived in San Francisco!
The primary function of money is to serve as a universal medium of exchange. The other are measure of value, standard of deferred payment, store of value. How much exactly Bitcoin satisfies this definition is disputable, but we can safely say that it satisfies significantly, qualitatively more then Ming Vases or Barbie Dolls.
If we compare Bitcoin to fiat money things become less obvious and more interesting. The winner depends on the context. If the currency is Zimbabwe dollar then the winner is Bitcoin. And there is a full spectrum between those two. As for the bubble - current rush on the cryptocurrencies is obviously speculative and the bust at some point seems to be imminent but when and how exactly it will come?
It may be a complete collapse but personally I don't see it as the highest probability may be because it would be too boring. There was something about guys in Australia who promise a coin with ten times better transaction throughput then Visa.
It took years for trades to become real, and the reputation of the merchants for keeping their deals was critical in keeping it working. IIRC, this is where the Hawala system came from. Note that Hawala basically runs on the honor system, and works more on the long-term balancing of accounts, than on the long-distance transfer of money. Anyway, I did google "international trade blockchain," and it looks like a lot of people are now trying to make this work e. So yes, one could write an SFF story about the use of some bastard descendant of a blockchain in a space opera.
The argument against is that, if such a book comes out the day after Bitcoin bites it, then most people aren't going to buy the story. So the question is, do you feel lucky, writer? Hypothetically, if it was used as a currency like the aficionados like to promote it as, then the underlying value would simply be that people need it to buy their drugs or hard disk unlocking codes or whatnot from the mafia.
In this world, the price would then indeed very slowly go up over the course of many years as the demand exceeded the supply. A quick look at the actual price behavior should immediately rubbish that idea. They basically don't work as a transaction processing framework due to the inherent, incredible inefficiency of the blockchain But as a meaningless bauble for the less sensible to trade via unregulated grey market brokerages, they work fine, and this is the basis of their trading price.
Bitcoin is very clever social engineering, and terrible software engineering. It is designed to gradually make it more expensive to make more, which creates an incentive to buy and hold now. And to tell other people to buy and hold after you, yourself, has bought. Because the more people buy in, the higher the price goes, and then you as a relatively early adopter can sell out for profit.
It is a ponzi scheme that outsources the gladhanding of more victims to your victims, and the fact that it works makes me want to cry.
This is not even a question of intelligence - Newton lost his shirt in the south sea bubble, it is simply one of those very stupid things even smart people fall for. At no point during any of this is there any need for anyone to use it as a currency, and to a first approximation, nobody does.
Step two, set up hardware for the generation in bulk of true random number sequences. I do not care how clever your algorithm for making them is, go away, we are using the real deal here. Geiger counters pointed at a handy mountain will do. Put one copy of each one-gigabyte pad of random numbers on a secure pseudo-phone you hand to customers.
This device is Secure - in the sense that its entire operating system and network stack have been formally proven, and its attack surfaces are non-existent. Well, people can steal it and beat the user id out of you. Do not see any way to solve this All this device can do is call the bank server, and access your account over a one time-pad encrypted link.
If you manage to do enough banking to go through a gigabyte of network activity.. The server has the matching pad copy for each customer device, and since all activity is internal to the bank, noone can trace any of it. Regardless of whether they have business. Network analytics wont work. This gets you an utterly untraceable economic transaction network proof against any adversary that does not mount a physical seizure of the bank, and more importantly, it can be expanded by depositing more regular cash at the bank.
The primary purpose of every ICO is to enrich the issuer. There may be secondary purposes, but I wouldn't ahem bet on them. Yeah, reminds a very little of early gold frauds. Here's a delicious[1] one gold from seawater from The Gold Accumulator Except that in ICOs they're proposing currencies pegged to new limited supply artificial materials, [crypto-currency-name]ium, and promising that early investors will get most of the gains.
I think; haven't looked at one of them to be honest. Might drop some links later related to semi-plausible i. Yes, as I noted in my "bank drafts by horse" example. But would the speed be acceptable given the pace of modern economies? Once you've tasted Gigabit fiber, it's awfully hard to go back to baud dialup with an acoustic coupler. Would the level of security be acceptable? How many ships never returned from the China or India trade?
Would those losses be acceptable to investors today? Perhaps more importantly, the sophistication of financial scams has improved enormously. We like to think that technology for preventing such scams is up to the challenge, but the criminals tend to stay one step ahead of the guardians.
And fancy technological solutions only solve technological attacks. For example, public key encryption is a wonderful technology -- until someone steals your private key through social engineering.
Security certificates and trust authorities are wonderful tools until someone hacks the company's Web site and steals credentials or forges their own. Trust was feasible when you met the customer or vendor in person and had a chance to gut-feel whether they were reliable and talk to people who had been dealing with them for years and could vouch for their stability. And there was always the notion you could hire someone to track them down and break their legs if they absconded with your money.
The notion of "trust" in the modern computer era is harder to imagine when you can't see the person, will likely never meet them, know that they might be Russian scam artists, and know that they are sufficiently anonymized they can disappear without a trace, taking your money and reputation with them.
Insufficiently paranoid; doesn't protect against some esoteric attacks. There's at least one paper to be written about defenses against such attacks. And yeah, A Fire Upon The Deep had a human planet in the low beyond that had built a business reputation for reliably distributing one time pads. In 3 parts with independent physical distribution typically, combined XOR? It's not an uninhabitable equatorial hellhole like Florida, it's France.
If it gets hot enough vent the server heat out into the street where it can compete with a few thousand other heat engines turning and burning. Put the server farm in the attic. Use it to heat the air running through the HVAC in the winter, vent it to the outside in summer. Actually, I think I mentioned this idea a long time ago, on this blog, although I was thinking of a distributed server farm rather than a mining system.
Still, if everyone needs a big enough server in order to have a civilized life, there's no reason not to turn these turkeys into a cogeneration system of some sort. A few centuries ago, having the water heater embedded in the wall of the main cooking oven accomplished much the same thing.
White nationalism has some overlap with survivalist doomsday prepper types, and for some reason bitcoin has become very popular with the preppers. Because they are very vulnerable to the affinity fraud? Ponzi schemes are nearly always affinity fraud, and the vector of infection for the pyramid-scheme affinity fraud that is bitcoin goes through the fringes of the right, primarily. Thus people who should really, really distrust something that only exists in the cloud.
Cheery thought - maybe Bitcoin and the other work-alikes are the Culture's way of weaning us from our childish obsession with money; at a suitable point they'll pull the plug on them by grabbing all the blocks, wreck everyone's economy, then introduce their version of an economy of abundance.
It seems like the sort of thing Culture minds would come up with, if only as retaliation for endless terabytes of social media and cat videos. We probably won't like it Remember, we're talking about interplanetary commerce, such as between Musk's ultimate gated community on Mars and the still-productive slums of Earth, or something. You can only speed that up so much. The more I look at it, the more I think that planetary customs officers will really like blockchain technology, and that goes double with their equivalent of ag inspectors.
After all, if you think that intercontinental transport of invasive organisms is a problem now, imagine how much fun interplanetary transport of invasive organisms other than humans will be. There are ways that come to mind of attacking this system, but they are mostly aimed at things like attacking the reputational capital of the bank, not the math. Because it is so secure, difficult to document you are not stealing peoples accounts.
I mean, you would be crazy to, but it is difficult to defend against the libel. I always distinguish between "libertarian", which I consider myself to be, and "Libertarian" which is something quite different, and extremely unsavory. OTOH, I also consider myself a "conservative", i. That is really a reactionary. And I object to telefactors being called robots when they are really just remote control devices.
This is a continual problem with language. It's a feature that allows it to adapt to a changing situation, but it renders prior descriptions nearly worthless.
So while I consider myself a libertarian conservative, I never describe myself that way to anyone unless I have time to first explain what I mean by those words. Ordinary money is stuff that a government promises to accept as a payoff so that it won't steal your property. Because of this it has value to people other than the government. It's quite possible to argue either way as to whether the government should be able to make that kind of threat, or whether the word "steal" is appropriate for an action that's perfectly legal, etc.
It's not a commodity, or something that is inherently valuable. I have occasionally suggested using a monetary standard that is inherently valuable, like monocrystalline silicon, but this would be subject to large fluctuations in value. The bracket clause is contradictory. If it was inherently valuable - the value was a property of the stuff itself - then you would be able to depend on the value much as you are able to depend on the melting point.
The large fluctuations in value are possible because what is called "the value" is a function of stuff made up by people. Which leads me, at least, to considering that the computation involved in DNA transcription is efficient enough to get down to about 10x the Landauer limit, which is several orders of magnitude better than artificial computing technologies.
And then to imagining the possibility of using DNA-type computation to do bitcoin computations it's probably quite well suited to at least some common cryptographic computations, though I don't know if that's relevant to bitcoin , and outperforming the Chinese server farms with a few buckets of genetically-engineered self-replicating organic bitcoin goo.
Which once it's done what you want it to, can be eaten, as a bonus. That fits with the vibe I get that someone describing themselves as a "libertarian" is certainly concerned with their own liberty, but is not concerned with trampling on that of others in pursuit of their own. That is not why you should not back money with inherent value.
You should refrain from doing that because enough money has to exist to facilitate the sum total of all your commerce and liquid-store-of-value needs, and if money is backed by directly useful stuff, that is an enormous amount of value taken out of use to gather dust in a vault somewhere to no good end, directly making the world that much poorer.
I was having pretty much the exact same thoughts yesterday. Stop thinking with my brain, Charlie, I'm using it to draw comics.
Or at least buy me a beer, geez. I know you didn't put it there via Twitter, either, as I've been taking ever-longer Twitter sabbaticals. Come to Mastodon, we have goofy server names and less nazis. Bitcoin's a perfect symbol of the death throes of capitalism, really. Convert energy directly into global warming and a tiny fictional piece of "value" for a small number of people who were already rich, and a small number of people who got rich riding the wave.
It's not gonna be useful for that until everyone has a cryptocurrency miner running on their phones, helping to validate everyone's transactions at a much higher speed than the current network can, for a hell of a lot less electricity. All of that doesn't stop me from selling the. That's my next couple month's rent paid by the Dark Cyberpunk Future. The energy usage estimates for bitcoin mining have been around for a while, e.
People were mostly ignoring them; not sure when people generally [1] realized that energy usage meant CO2 emissions, and not sure why it's emerging as a widespread concern now, but not complaining. Bitcoin isn't getting any less absurd. Bitcoin still has some mystery associated with it, and that speculation has been around, perhaps here.
Or maybe for some other reason. I would not be surprised. So any creative ideas about how to repurpose all the bitcoining mining operations once the crash has happened? Or are we just going to have miner graveyards sitting beside dams all over the world? The big problem with bitcoin is that it only looks decentralized. If you look at how it works, it gives big advantages to whomever can command immense computing resources and rapid network speeds. When bitcoin first came out it was a big hit with the gamers who had oversized gaming rigs capable of turning acres of Excel spreadsheets into pico-bit thick data crumbles.
Once bitcoin mining and transaction processing started becoming profitable, the big guys moved in with their supercomputer arrays capable of crushing MMPORGs of gaming rigs into their component transistors. Let's ignore the limited number of bitcoins that could ever be mined. Let's ignore the designed in restrictions on the transaction processing rate that makes bitcoin worthless as a general purpose transaction processing system.
Let's ignore the bitcoin protocol's inability to scale either in scope or temporally. Ignore all that, and bitcoin will still only be profitable for a small set of highly capitalized miners and transaction processors, like the guys in Inner Mongolia with their coal mines and specialized server farms, and will only be useful for those needing to perform money transfers where it is worth paying a premium for secrecy.
Bitcoin may have fascinated the gamer crowd, but they were always small fry. Like the diesel engine, invented as a prime mover for the small workman but winding up as the ultimate centralized, capital intensive power source, bitcoin's final customer base is going to be large players who want to move large sums of money while avoiding scrutiny. I'm not surprised that bitcoin attracted a certain crowd of power worshippers, and I won't be surprised if they continue to push bitcoin even as it becomes increasingly obvious that they are just two bit tools.
Sadly, the bulk of the mining these days seems to be done by special computer chips which can't really do anything except compute SHA They're custom built for bitcoin mining and nothing else.
Perhaps the air conditioned boxes full of metal racks can be used to shelter goats during a heat wave -- who knows? Regarding the electricity usage estimates for the Bitcoin network, I can't find what hardware is assumed to be running it. I spent much of this year literally writing a book on this stuff, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The edgy libertarians were, of course, in it from the start - it was started by ancap cypherpunks.
As usual, the Extropians are ultimately to blame. I wrote a chapter about this, but the book I cribbed from was The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia, which nails down every dot of Bitcoin's ideological descent. I must note that the technology, blockchain, is pants too. The hype is, literally, Bitcoin hype with the buzzword changed to "blockchain" - whatever the claim, and whatever the actual technology. Most business "blockchain" is not in fact the full Bitcoin-style blockchain, with proof-of-work and trustless competition and a currency - the term is getting applied to simple append-only transaction ledgers with hashes for tamper-proofing.
This is, of course, excellent stuff! Geeks know it as git. And we had it in , four years before Bitcoin. What's good is not new and what's new turns out not to be any good.
Everything bitcoin and blockchain is a fabulously layered world of fractal incompetence and arrogance. I have been wrong about Bitcoin before, and it's been whenever I assumed the market was in any way sensible or rational and not actually made up of lemmings on PCP.
Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: I'm having difficulty comprehending this level of stupid. See also my reply regarding "Liberty" as regarded in late Republican Rome. I think the parallel defintions are very nearly congruent. Mike Goldin, a software developer at ConsenSys, an Ethereum development studio based in Bushwick, walks me through the coding process. Goldin is my Sherpa today, graciously attending, with utmost patience, to my every query.
But if I had tied those bits to some worthwhile business idea, petsdotcoin might have offered investors a radical new way to fund me, track their stake, and participate in a miniature, virtualized, in-app economy. In that respect, my funny-money vanity project is a tiny part of a movement of profound economic significance. There are now tokens funding every conceivable endeavor: Decentralized cloud storage FileCoin, Storj.
Digital advertising Basic Attention Token, adToken. A post shared by Floyd Mayweather floydmayweather on Jul 27, at The smart money is also playing in this pool. Established venture capital firms like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Union Square Ventures are pouring millions of dollars into cryptocurrency hedge funds.
The topic is all the rage on Wall Street. That story goes like this: Underneath the crypto-hysteria is a grand innovation in the humble realm of accounting. Look beyond the ICO frenzy , and you can glimpse another paradigmatic shift inspired by that same accounting innovation.
Incumbent businesses in countless industries, from finance to energy to health care to food, are peeling back the layers on this budding technology, seeing the potential to trim costs, share and secure information more efficiently, and unleash new products at unprecedented speed. Having witnessed what the advent of digital, cloud, and mobile did to laggard companies, no one wants to be the sucker left behind.
No term at present is more hyped, and more poorly understood. A less cynical definition might go as follows: A blockchain is a kind of ledger, a table that businesses use to track credits and debits. The system uses complex mathematical functions to arrive at a definitive record of who owns what, when. Properly applied, a blockchain can help assure data integrity, maintain auditable records, and even, in its latest iterations, render financial contracts into programmable software.
Blockchain boosters say its development is one that rivals, in significance, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping. Blockchains, in this analogy, are triple-entry bookkeeping, where the third entry is a verifiable cryptographic receipt of any transaction. Perhaps most spectacularly, a blockchain can get rivals to cooperate in creating a common record that is accessible to everyone and controlled by no one. This was the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto, the alias for the as-yet-unidentified creator or creators of the first blockchain, Bitcoin, which debuted in The Great Bitcoin Bank Robbery.
If Bitcoin proved what was possible, Ethereum, a rival system, took its ingenuity to a logical extreme. Vitalik Buterin , a twentysomething Russia-born programmer No.
His Ethereum can create representations of any asset, which has made it the primary fuel of the digital-token boom.
Scores of companies are adapting and advancing the core technology to suit their needs. While some are exploring digital currency and the open-source, free-for-all ecosystem of public blockchains of which Bitcoin and Ethereum are prime examples , far more are concentrating on how the technology underpinning those systems can add value to their businesses—by helping them with everything from corralling medical records to tracking the provenance of a pork loin.
See the full Fortune 40 Under 40 list here. To some stalwarts, this corporate appropriation runs counter to the original, idealized blockchain as introduced by Nakamoto. And whatever you want to call it, more and more businesses are gathering there. He brought the mangoes back to his office, placed the container on a conference table, and gave his team a mission. It took six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes to get an answer.
Still, a near-week is a long time. In the event of an outbreak of foodborne illness—one in which a suspected pathogen is tied to mangoes somewhere—a lag that long could be painfully costly. By that point, Walmart might have had to pull every package of every mango product off its shelves, as a precaution; farmers, distributors, and Walmart itself would take the hit.
In the Walmart test, food shipments were tracked and digitally recorded via a blockchain. Every time they crossed another checkpoint—from farm to broker to distributor to store—their status was signed and logged. A few months after the fact, Yiannas repeats a version of the IBM demo for me.
The fruit was harvested April 24 from orchards in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico.