gnerd

This sounds like a great approach to the problem but how would one go about finding those people? Were you thinking SME level or street vendor level?

China is the second largest single country economy on earth and growing. They will be completely covered with healthcare in the next 10 years. They are the largest holders of gold on earth, hold the largest amount of debt from the US. They are developing, but as a nation, they are not poor.

> Blaming westernized companies (by which I mean both western companies and local companies like Reliance/Infosys that try to run things in the modern manner) for the problems of the third world is silly.

It is perhaps a bit silly. I mean, there are actual examples of mining rights being held from colonial times, Dutch East India company, Haiti being forced to pay for slaves freedom from rebellion for 140 years etc. and some of those do still have influences, but I don't think they are the primary ones. I don't, however, think all of these values are always exclusively western though. Japan has worker rights, as far as I can tell from a cursory glance on Wikipedia.

Assuming India wants, or needs foreign influence, Japan is just as good a place to get it.

> But drop me in India and I'm suddenly a crazy feminist ranting against rape culture (FYI India has one, the US doesn't).

So none of those men in US jails and prisons are being raped?

You should enjoy another country without imposing your values on them, it is OK for you to like or love your way of life, you are absolutely allowed to be proud, and so are they. What is not in good taste is assuming your way is always better, assuming they can't solve problems in time as your country has or assuming you or they are their country or responsible for where your/their country currently is economically. When it comes to human rights however, I'm on the same page as you I think, impose away.

I don't eat dogs, some cultures do. I eat beef, some cultures don't. Some eat pork, some don't. Are any of those really ethically wrong, or do we just have different cultures with different reference points? Isn't having different cultures and methods in the world a good thing? You can't always be right, and when you aren't, you might be glad there is another model that exists somewhere in the world. A cultural hedge, if you will.

I look forward to the rise of India in the future, I am sure in time, we will be stealing ideas from there, but perhaps I'm just being naive.

Not mathematically impossible just computationally infeasible, that is assuming a good implementation.

At the state actor level do you really think you will be able to distinguish a stupid bug and an intentional flaw? Its not like they will make it call home with a bunch of code, they would just use a class of attack not well known and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. That's all it takes, one little hole.

I imagine certain organisations knew about buffer overflow bugs long before they were used publicly, so imagine if this was the 70's and you saw some strcpy calls peppered into some useful code, would you really be able to know 1) the class of attack exists and 2) if it was intentional or not?

Thanks very much but I was asking about how any systems we have prevent these things from happening, they don't seems to be your answer. No preventions, just consequences... sometimes, assuming the parties aren't too big for consequences or the issues touch on trade factors. Great, but that's the same deal everyone in a moderately free country has all over the world. Show me the case law for Sweden, the UK, NL, Germany, France being taken to court for collecting and processing information, because some of those countries have been doing this in a public fashion for years.

You don't think handing over EU citizen data to the US is a violation of EU policy? Tell me again about how I'm protected again?

I am protected when it comes to local issues, perhaps, but if Germany, Sweden, France, NL, UK etc. decide they are going to keep tabs on things I do online if my traffic enters their territories then European protections are just fluff. At least that's how it seems to me seeing as none of these things are going to change and there are clear violations with respect to privacy in existing European Law (and I'm not just talking about GCHQ here).

It's a bit like slavery being illegal in just about every single country on earth. What an amazing achievement to have everyone on the same page on something important, except on the ground we have more slaves right now than ever before. Every second chocolate bar you've ever bought was probably tainted in slavery. Those protections don't mean anything unless the stakeholders care and the law is enforced. If it is not enforced, its not really a law.

Explain to me, a European citizen, sitting in Europe how I am protected against any of the same measures in the US? Forget GCHQ for a second, lets pick say... the Swedish FRA law, the Swedish Titan Traffic Database, the Denmark/Sweden DNS filter (some of the systems I mention have had little or delayed scrutiny from the outside). So how does any European court prevent that from happening in practise? How do these systems throw a spanner in the works?

It seems to me, perhaps I am a pessimist, that these EU systems mean about as much as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in principle it should mean everything but in practise it means sweet fuck all. Trade treaties might have more weight but I think the US holds more cards than we do as far as that is concerned.

> What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?

Use that knowledge to peddle bad information to diametrically opposed nation states to further their own interest? Use that information to further secure their systems they previously thought were secure? That's what everyone else would do.

Its not like the US aren't spied on. If anything, there is probably more intense interest in the US operations from various nation states than anywhere else on earth. I was watching a documentary on UK/US spying (both human and communication intelligence, I believe it was called Modern Spies and from the BBC) and it was suggested from commentators from the CIA as well as Her Majesty's Secret Service that the Chinese have stolen the largest mass of nuclear secrets and have even managed to copy some top secret technology in their fighter jets etc. The commentators also seemed to suggest that nobody is clear how it was done yet. Maybe that was scare tactics to make the Chinese seem scary, but on the assumption that it wasn't, why wouldn't that be considered an act of war? I think that is because the nations who are the most competent at spying are also the same nations you can't beat in a 2 week war or nations that can impact heavily in an economic war and so the word isn't chucked around as quickly.

I suppose one man's act of war is another man's act of diplomacy that can avoid war.

George Orwell wrote my favourite piece on this issue in his essay, Notes on Nationalism[1].

[1] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

So then show us so we can take your conclusions seriously.

> because education in some Nigerian cities is far superior to most U.S. high schools.

Do you know that for sure though? Isn't it possible that you are drawing a conclusion on a far away place based on some events/cultural ideas that are provocative enough to make it to your screen as a topic of interest?

Isn't that the same thing you are complaining about, just in reverse?

Are people still trying to push the phrase "Silicon Roundabout" for Old Street roundabout and the Shoreditch triangle? It is probably just me, but nothing makes me cringe harder.

This is the way I use the word too.

Out of interest, could you enlighten me as to why the word "retard" is a slur but "dumb" isn't?

Putting colloquial use aside, both are valid words that describe conditions, so if one is a slur, isn't the other? Where is the line?

Well that's just not cricket.

So then isn't this (or satoshi dice) the sort of thing the limit is trying to create a disincentive for?

1) AFAIK BitCoin doesn't have comments[1]. When people have stored data in the blockchain in the past, it was by making a series of transactions in order so later those markers could be decoded to represent something else. Some services allow comments to be layered on top of transactions but that doesn't exist in the blockchain.

2) Money is sent and is rendered unspendable[2] afterwards, so I assume the idea is to send the smallest amount possible (although it seems the service takes a fee).

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block#Block_structure [2] http://www.proofofexistence.com/about

> The limit is there to create a market with transaction fees, so it's not just going to be "removed" any time soon.

The limit is actually there to limit the size of a block. It has nothing to do with transaction fees. Click the link I posted: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Current_bottlenecks

It used to be 250K and then this year was raised to 1M so it probably will get lifted again. That is the goal of the project, to allow it to scale to at least PayPal numbers (46 transfers per second).

Well I was expecting there would be a significant jump in transaction volume as news spreads, prices rise, more services were offered in BTC and more countries get local exchanges. You also seem to miss that its not the total number of transactions per day you need to worry about, its the transactions per second.

There are surely periods of frenzy in the day where we cannot support 7 transactions per second as more economic activity takes place, even if the total transactions for the day is well under 600000. Its not like the transactions are neatly distributed on a flat line throughout the day.

There must also be some consideration that each time this is done, the BTC in the transaction is rendered unspendable and so it is taken out of the market. So I guess its not good if something like this could scale on top of BitCoin.

Why did the author of that article have a different title when the same article was posted on the Reuters blog? [1] Over there the article headline is: "Bitcoin is a step back not forward"

Is that his choice or the editors?

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/edward-hadas/2013/11/27/edward-hada...

The idea is cool but it might be too early for people to use the blockchain like this as right now BitCoin can support 7 transactions per second.

Once that hard limit is lifted, and things like this can scale and support demand, applications like this could be very interesting.

One thing though, it says the BTC involved in the transaction is unspendable, isn't that a bad thing? I imagine an idea like this that didn't render any amount of BTC unspendable would be ideal.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Current_bottlenecks

It's like taking a fingerprint of a file and then storing it in a public and distributed database (so it is out of any single parties control). Basically you can prove something existed at a certain time (since if I take a fingerprint of that thing in the future, it will match the record in the distributed database). If the thing changes, so does the fingerprint.

It could be used as a form of "poor mans copyright", where people would send a book manuscript, or whatever, to themselves through registered post and keep the envelope intact so they could use it, if need be, in a court. There could be other uses, you could verify that picture was taken when you said it was etc.

> Until then, understand one thing. People want STABILITY in their currencies, at least if they are going to spend it.

Agreed. People are less likely to spend as the price climbs quickly. This can be mitigated with a viable options market, it would provide a hedge against bad movement and it would increase liquidity significantly which would lead to more stable growth.

It does seem unfair but that's just how it goes. For instance consider that a third of the worlds gold ever mined comes from one country, South Africa. That's a bit geographically unfair. Since South Africa was in the empire (and now still in the CommonWealth), it means the mining rights for that gold went to Britain and other friendly countries. That's a bit politically unfair.

Or consider when gold became the gold standard in the 19th century, a lot of that gold was controlled by a single family, the Rothschild's because of success 100 years earlier though Mayer Amschel Rothschild. That is a bit unfair.

Economics has never been fair. Say you bootstrapped a new digital currency and gave it out to all the people in the world evenly and they all recognised it as holding value, eventually through luck, and intention, some people will have more of that currency than others.

The way BitCoin was bootstrapped took into account that the earlier someone got on board, the higher the risk they took. So if you think of it that way, its not completely unfair.

> People want BTC to be a currency.

It is a currency. It satisfies the Coincidence of Wants, it is used as a means of exchange, that makes it a currency. Cigarettes have been used as a currency (in WW2 concentration camps, prison, times of famine or war etc.). But nobody suggested cigarettes or tobacco be the thing we pegged our national currencies on, its just a thing that represented value that people traded for goods and services. That's a currency, not a national currency though (because as you mentioned earlier, that's probably a bad idea which we know from history with gold).

> Bitcoin is a great electronic currency, and a real challenge to money transmitters like Western Union, but it is not a store of wealth (in my opinion).

You can store your wealth in any commodity. I can store my value in stocks, gold or BitCoin to hedge against inflation. Just because something doesn't have physical intrinsic properties does not mean it somehow stops being a store of value.

Anything that someone wants to buy and someone wants to sell, that can be stored and transferred, can be a store of value.

Did someone propose that BitCoin serve as the peg for a national currency? I must have missed that part.

Deflation is bad, we know its bad and when its bad. So should you peg a national currency to a deflationary commodity like BitCoin or gold? No. Can I use gold right now as a means of exchange? Yes. Does it happen all the time in regular life? No, because that would be a pain in the ass but if it were more convenient, it might. Well that is what BitCoin is, its gold but convenient to transfer.

Stop thinking of BitCoin as a national currency or a replacement for a national currency. It is a commodity like gold which can serve as a supranational currency or store of value, your national economy can still be inflationary.

> The same problems it has had for the last 10000 years. You can't seriously expect these "realizations" to have an effect on Gold prices.

Supply and demand have an effect on the gold price. Markets go up, markets go down.

The price going up or down is not success or failure of gold, it's the nature of supply and demand. Gold is used to store value as a hedge against inflation, so people investing in lots of gold would probably expect gold goes up when things are rough in the economy and goes down as things get better.

That's the investment function of gold and other precious metals. That's why big financial organisations keep gold.

It is bad for a national currency, but that is not what I was talking about. I was talking about a reserve currency, like gold represents in our world economy (which is also deflationary).

When a country wants to buy oil for its economy, the oil price is set in the worlds reserve currency, USD. So the fluctuations between the USD and some given country, or the inflation of the USD will either hurt or help that country (but is always good for the US as the demand is high for that currency, keeping the demand strong). This is why countries/companies buy oil with gold sometimes, this is why countries hold gold to hedge inflation in a foreign currency they must rely on.

National currency (eg. USD) => Inflation bad.

Supranational currency (eg. gold) => Deflation good.