gnerd

It seems to me the gold analogy is more applicable when storing BTC than the cash one. I might be OK storing my gold with some institutions, especially ones with a proven track record and insurance policy, but other than those few institutions, I'd probably opt for a fire proof safe (a safe rated to protect the amount of money stored).

If one were to use BTC to store vast sums of money, you can store your BTC with a traditional bank. Simply generate a wallet offline on new hardware with a relatively secure USB bootable OS, write the keys down on a piece of old fashioned paper (use carbon paper and store the copy, destroying the original) and cover with some sort of tamper proof seal. Lock inside a lead box and then put it in a safety deposit box.

In BitCoin I do believe the irreversible nature of transactions is seen as a feature, not a flaw. My bank has fraud protection but if I use my debit card and the transaction goes through, it is very unlikely I will ever see those funds again.

Also important to note, the Fed doesn't protect your value or purchasing power, they just insure (to a degree) the balance, but they also have the power to erode purchasing power at will.

A person in a far away land is unlikely to be able to steal funds you put in a physical BitCoin wallet generated offline that has never had any transaction outputs. Less likely than the cash analogy.

They can get my debit card number and steal money remotely though.

So what about if the government decides to devalue the currency by printing more money? Hasn't that 'quantitive easing' eroded your stored value? Your balance might be the same but the purchasing power and thus value isn't. Best bit is you won't know till after its done, way after.

It might be a nice incentive for investing money to keep value ahead of inflation but to the man-on-the-street its a bit like robbery in some sense in that it deprives you of the full expected value of your funds.

The difficulty will increase in response to the hash rate of the network, it doesn't directly correlate to the amount of coins in existence. So when the last BTC is mined, if people stop mining the difficulty will go down (after about 2 weeks I believe) and if more mine, it will still go up.

The difficulty is designed to be at a rate that will see a block mined every 10 minutes. So the ideal max verification time should be about 60 minutes (6 blocks) on average, although you should see your transaction included in the next block mined (in 10 minutes-ish, assuming the miner included your transaction, which they have an incentive to do if you included a fee) but to stop a double spending attack, it would be unwise to consider a transaction verified after 1 block, 6 blocks makes sure your transaction is not lost in a blockchain fork or part of a double spending attack. Some people consider 3 blocks to be enough verification time, it depends on how much money you are dealing with but the recommended amount of 6 blocks is in the original paper.

The last block to generate BTC that will be mined should happen in around 2140 (with the reward halving every 4 years) and then there will be a maximum of 20999999.9769 BTC in existence.

Interestingly enough, if you flooded the network right now with your own transactions and included a higher than normal transaction fee on those transactions, you could conceivably block other transactions from being included in the blockchain, at least for a while. Last time I calculated the cost of such a scheme it was about 72BTC per hour, so even without fixing the scaling issues of transaction volume in BitCoin, the rise in price makes this sort of attack less likely (still theoretically possible).

Except he did make a comment, although not a concrete one:

> However, it is good to note that in my initial review, I believe the paper’s assertion of a fundamental flaw is based on some over-simplified assumptions about how the bitcoin mining market works.

When dealing with an entirely new concept, isn't everyone an amateur?

I may be wrong, but due to the deflationary nature of BTC (limited supply, increasing demand), when that happens, those fees are worth more (in government backed fiat currencies) than they are today.

It's like being upset that the original miners could get a block reward of 50 BTC for mining on a CPU but today you have to use specialized hardware for less BTC. But as competition increased (and difficulty increased), the BTC is worth way more than it was and is less risky (although, still risky).

Profit is profit and some people/organizations will still have incentives to mine. Of course, there are problems that need to be sorted out before then though, like having more transactions included in each block to make it worth while for miners and cheap for users.

Then use Satoshi Dice first, or start your own game of chance with ridiculous odds floated with the stolen coins and exploit peoples natural greed.

If you stay logged in when you read HN, you should use the noprocrast feature in your settings.

And it isn't scrypt :)

> If anything, our drive for beating someone else into space for political or economic reasons has really poisoned the well, so to speak.

I assume you are American. If so, I may be fuzzy on the historical facts, but didn't the Russians beat you guys into space?

Scytale - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale

Got it:

A COMPUTER WOULD DESERVE TO BE CALLED INTELLIGENT IF IT COULD DECEIVE A HUMAN INTO BELIEVING THAT IT WAS HUMAN WWWDOTMETRODOTCODOTUKSLASHTURING

Now onto something a little more productive.

The second I saw the arrow style I thought of Daim and when I scrolled down, sure enough, there was a piece by Daim. Very nicely done. Props.

> Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php#History

Out of interest, was that the ambient temperature or was the thermometer placed above the source of steam?

You're not wrong.

In my opinion, all constitutions suck. They are, after all, the proverbial horse designed by committee. But its better than nothing right?

South Africa probably has the most liberal constitution in the world, that makes sense, it was drafted in modern times so takes into account modern problems like fairness and equality of homosexuals or transgender people. But in practise, I would personally doubt the same constitution is enforced to the same standards as say, Iceland (also a country with a modern constitution).

The US, must have the gold standard of constitutions and there are arguments over if the right to bare arms meant semi-automatic weapons or just muskets. Does the 4th amendment just apply to physical property and letters or digital communications too?

There is no perfect constitution, it is impossible. I don't agree with everything in the EU standards of law, but that's the sad thing, it is better than what we have now. The Germans have more protections than I do, for standards of rights our country authored and pushed on the world (with the US of course) in response to things like WW2. Its unacceptable, I would personally rather have dog shit protections than none at all.

Well I suppose we could start by having a written constitution rather than a uncodified constitution, otherwise, it seems to me, once they bring in legal measures as acts and statutes and then the public gets used to an idea, it is not long before it gets baked into case law and then we're as good as fucked once it is accepted as common law.

Other than that, I suppose we could cross our fingers and hope for the best, like we did in the days before we had a constitutional monarchy, we would cross our fingers and hope we wouldn't get a shitty king. Well we don't need protection from our monarchs (as far as I can tell), we now are in dire need of protection from our government (and other "friendly" governments by extension).

Our customs and traditions have done well for us, its amazing to me we got this far, but maybe its time to get a bit more serious about our protections of rights and have them baked into common law.

I suppose there is a bit of irony that the protections we now seek from those who govern us are actually baked into the EU, but our country seems to be half in and half out (I'm a little angered I have to have cookie warnings on my web properties because of EU directives and yet my basic little right to privacy my grandparents generation helped put into the UN is not even taken seriously, never mind the EU equivalents).

I too like the image of the old Eton boys club handling things smartly and discretely but my gut feeling is that once 100 billion of foreign money is on the table and politicians are involved, things can get a little primitive, very quickly.

My feeling is it's probably more important to certain parties at this point to maintain alliances and justify budgets than to maintain certain civil liberties of the public at large. At least that is the way it seems.