flashmob

Perhaps you could try creating a struct with just the common properties, then embed the common struct in all your 'extended' structs. Eg. http://www.hydrogen18.com/blog/golang-embedding.html

There you go if you want a list of concrete examples: https://pineapplefund.org/

No problem with that indenting here (personal opinion), I guess makes it easier to read if your editor doesn't have soft-wraps. However, generally, if the parameters list overflow to another line like that, it becomes a good candidate for refactoring!

I wasn't convinced about Stellar in that article. Some arguments given were strawman like, especially when attacking proof of work (PoW) or other things that are irrelevant because Stellar is something completely different. Besides, I found the overall tone to be somewhat condescending, especially due to the Monero snide at the end.

There are plenty of other low-fee, non-PoW coins out there, that the article should have spent more time comparing to instead; So we know that stellar doesn't use PoW - what I want to know is why the Stellar consensus algorithm is better when compared to the other similar alternatives out there, and what makes it faster and more secure. They also leave an elephant in the room - how is Stellar more resistant to censorship? What I'd really be interested in reading is why they chose it based on technical merits, rather than talking down other projects.

I think the opposite is happening thanks to tainted coins, non-tainted become more valuable as they become scarce. Eg. If you Google 'freshly mined bitcoin' you will see they are quite desirable.

After reading this, also checked my writing for Absolutist words, and also will try to consciously avoid them, would be very annoying to see someone replying with "Please seek professional help as soon as possible!" ;-)

Thanks for the explanation. Good point about staking, assuming if the validator is chosen before, then they are certain to get the chance to order the transactions in their favour.

The article, as I understood, the caller predicts the outcome of the 'random' function first, and then calls if the result is favourable. It seems like yours is more efficient, as it relies on using revert() to undo all state changes, if the outcome was unfavourable, so no need to predict anything!

I guess it would be more responsible to report the bug to the contract author first. Perhaps they will let you take it as a reward, and you'll sleep better at night and won't have a moral dilemma ;-)

Seriously though, nice find. What would be a way to defend against this?

Have you heard of Facebook's Aquila drone? Sounds like something you are describing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila Also, Google's project loon comes to mind.

Here's an interesting metric which I think is behind all the support troubles at Coinbase:

Take a look at Coinbase's Alexa ranking: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coinbase.com

220 - up from around 3000 12 months ago! That is simply incredible. A site like that would get buried in support tickets fast, especially after such growth.

Another interesting metric, they are beating Citibank:https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/citi.com

Yes, that's what I meant by "demand for tethers go up". Although at present, there are only two exchanges that offer Tethers/USD market (Kraken & Bitfinex). Eventually, majority of those holding Tether will probably get back in to crypto. Indeed, holding Tethers could be risky, especially if the peg brakes, there are no guarantees that it will always be stable.

> Holy Shit, are they just trying to print out tethers out of thin air right now to pump Bitcoin?

That's the line I often see on Twitter / Reddit and usually gets a lot of upvotes, despite being irrational, with no proof to back it up.

As bitcoin falls, the demand for Tethers goes up. To keep Tethers pegged to, say, $1 USD, they need issue more to meet the demand, which would be a more rational explanation why more were issued.

In the video that you have posted, they do not seem to transfer XRP, but USD. In fact, XRP is not needed to use their products (Assuming the video was about 'Ripple Connect')

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ripple/comments/6jd9w6/this_is_the_...

Thought experiment: Just say Citibank adds the Mexican pesos to their products, USA & international, side by side to all their USD products. If citibank bought pesos before the announcement, would they be engaging in insider trading? (Pesos are just for illustrative purposes, replace with your local currency)

If so, would every bank need to halt trading in a currency before adding it?

Relax. Looking across the sea, Japan has been positive on cryptocurrencies. Japan is always Korea's main rival and influencer when it comes to technology and everything else. This rivalry is deeply embedded in the Korean psyche. Most likely they will follow Japan's lead, they would not risk Japan taking any pieces of the crypto-currency pie from them.

yep, I was just using it as an example to make a general statement that I made in the third paragraph. Do you agree or not? Was wondering what are your thoughts on that

yes, but that's usually the accepted definition in the crypto-currency world (eg. see the source link I've posted where they use it in that context too).

There are different definitions of inflation/deflation, but the price is always a function of supply-and-demand, therefore it all boils down to the supply, where the issuance rate & eventual supply cap is what gives a crypto-currency its inflationary/deflationary properties.

Note that at this time, bitcoin is still very much inflationary, with 1800 new bitcoins being generated every day. This puts the annual inflation rate at 4.01%. Source: http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/

Perhaps real deflationary effects of bitcoin will probably kick in after 3 halvings (about 10 years?), when the number of bitcoin that is being lost naturally becomes greater than the inflation. However, at that stage, bitcoin fees would need to dramatically increase from what they are now.

This is probably a paradox of deflationary crypto-currencies: They need to raise revenue from fees to pay for validation/security, however if there's more incentive to hold rather than spend them, their revenue raising ability becomes constricted. Whenever this is true, I'm excited that we'll find this out in the future.

Some very good points. I recall that the mainnet once had a gas per block limit of 4.7 mil before it was increased. The increase is something that is voted on by the miners, and has been fluid over the years. (Btw, it is something very similar to a block size limit in BTC, although it limits the storage + CPU usage, rather than just storage like in BTC)

About the point on using floats, one should never use floats when working with money, this is because floats are not precise and result in rounding errors (eg. 0.1 + 0.2 results 0.30000000000000004, see for details http://0.30000000000000004.com ). One of the simplest approaches to solve it is to work with the smallest units, so if working with dollars then you can use cents and that means you can use integers which give more precision, which is how Solidity currently deals with it, by working with the smallest unit of Ether which is 'wei'. Some of the units listed here https://etherconverter.online

citing reddit? I'm guessing you'd like to point out the commit history table. Nice.

You might notice that the table (conveniently) starts from 2010, after a good chunk of coins already has been mined. 2011-2012 is when a lot of the new devs came in which is the new generation, but it was getting much more difficult to mine then.

There's also so many problems with git commit history, so let's be honest here, ie. How many commits doesn't tell the whole story.

Hey, btw, my comments are just observations & not meant to criticize, sorry if you think I'm attacking you. I'm pretty positive about bitcoin and I think it's good that it can re-invent itself and find a good niche (the b2b / institutional market could be huge and certainly would see Bitcoin really growing up). The direction that the current team has chosen to lead it to has certainly paid off well. I sincerely wish the project more success in the future!

Oh, I was referring to bitpay, which probably will not last long unless it pivots into b2b or altcoins.

It's also hard to tell if Bitcoin developers are all in or not. Note that developers can have different interests than holders (eg. The want to get control of the codebase in order to get status and recognition & hopefully future consulting contracts). Note that the current bitcoin devs are mostly a new generation that got later in the game. Source & analysis about this point here http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/08/26/whos-your-crypto-bu...

Both Brian & Jeff are still both heavily invested in businesses that rely on Bitcoin, they are not just speculators who simply buy and hold.

Their business plans are ruined if Bitcoin fees get too high. Note that 'extremely low fees' was the original selling point of Bitcoin which now has been ruined. So they were simply defending their businesses.

That is not a very distinctive difference. Note that it's also not that easy, at least in the developed world, for a Reserve Bank to change the issuance because it has to make sure that the inflation is under control to ensure financial stability, plus there are many other checks and balances in place including legal & regulatory policy, input from economists / researchers, ...

The interesting part of the Bitcoin experiment is that so far it has had a very large inflation. This has been decreasing, and the critical part of the experiment will determine if a deflationary currency will work or not. My guess is that it might be in danger of collapse as miners will not want to mine it due to lack of incentive, meanwhile users would not want to transact since most will be hoarding it. Which is when the issuance rate might need to be fixed just to keep the miners rewards going...at least, it's one of the scenarios to consider...

Facebook's hidden service address is particularly impressive: https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

It seems like everything except the 'i' is a prefix, a lot of computing must have went in to generating it.

One tool to do it is called 'Shallot' https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot

The readme includes a table of estimated computing time required. A 15 char prefix like Facebook's is not even on the table, and a 14 char prefix is estimated to take 2.6 million years. There is also a GPU version which should be an order of magnitude faster: https://github.com/lachesis/scallion/blob/gpg/README.md

Also, technically. the onion addresses not public keys, but derived from a public key. It's actually a hash of the public key.

It appears that the hashing algorithm used is SHA1. Source: The last few lines of the easygen function https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot/blob/master/src/math.c

Agreed. Although in this case it would seem like it was increase on the astronaut's workload, having to load each program from tape. Also the article mentioned that they were using outdated software development methods and tools, whatever they were it didn't mention.

Btw, found my answer after some googling, they were upgraded in the early 90's then again in early 2000's http://www.aviationtoday.com/1999/11/01/the-space-shuttle-mo...

quote "In addition to 11 MDUs in the shuttle, MEDS has four integrated display processors (IDPs) that contain 386DX computers and a 300-megabyte hard disc."

MDU - multiple display unit.

Quote "There is not enough room in the memory of the main line computers for all the programs of ascent, descent, and payload programs in flight, so the memory is loaded about four time from tapes, by the astronauts."

Woah. Did they do this right until 2011, or were their systems upgraded?

Ignore? No. I found the story interesting myself & there's some nice discussion on here.

News would be boring if it wasn't for the negative stuff.

All I'm saying that one should always question the motives of the media & not necessarily conclude a general opinion just by reading a bunch of articles that landed on the front page.

As for the exploit itself, it's hard to believe that in this day and age XSS is still a problem despite so many solutions & fixes for it.

Media coverage is negative only because that's what people like to click on. I think government regulation will only legitimize it and bring it to the masses.

Morality police strikes again! (edit: what I mean hopefully doesn't offend the mods, what I mean is the general 'hive mind' behaviour that occurred, judging from some of the comments posted & the heavy downvoting that followed)

NK is mostly mountains, it has plenty of potential hydro-electricity available. The hard part is building / maintaining the infrastructure and logistics required to get the electricity to each and every building, that's the hard part.