heliumcraft

The placebo "effect" is not some magical effect that heals people, it's just a bias in reporting the results combined with a regression to the mean.

Indeed. I'm not claiming the blockchain is the only solution, but currently it's a pretty good one. I would hope for a centralized solution actually if that would help adoption and prevent voting fraud.

> How do you get valid voting credentials to nontechnical voters such that they can anonymously vote and verify?

That has to do with identity systems (see uPort, onename) and is an interesting & open problem.

The voting would using a cryptographic system to ensure confidentiality.

The coercion attack is an interesting problem but something that is already illegal but cannot be fully prevented. IMO it outweights the disadvantages of a centralized voting database that can be easily changed by a sys admin.

Well in this case such a voting would be done using some variation of a ZK-Snark (or some other cryptographic algo) which would allow you to check your vote counted, yet remain anonymous.

If you voted, and such a 51% attack happened, you would notice your vote was reverted. Not to mention getting that 51% mining power plus catching up to the blockchain to be able to reverse it is increasingly expensive the more time/blocks it passes since the transaction.

So yes it's not "perfect", but it sure looks harder to manipulate than a centralized database server that only requires a simple UPDATE sql query to completly and stealthily change an election.

I'm not saying it would affect the electoral college or electing some politician that I do or do not like. Some problems are entirely due to human nature, have been with us for a long time and will likely stay with us for a long time regarless of technology.

However It would certainly be nice to vote online yet anonymously, confident that I can see in a public secure ledger that my voted was counted as a intended and that no cheating or voting manipulation (on the ledger level) took place.

IMO It's premature to look for successes at this stage (try 5 years from now), there is a lot that needs to be done in the space (namely in terms of scalability) before it can be ready for general use. Only recently the decentralized storage projects are coming into some sort of Beta (Ethereum's Swarm, Storj, Maidsafe, IPFS, etc..), distributed computing projects such as golem are just getting started, and more work is still in progress to make blockchains more practical, sharding, speed, etc..

You're assuming or at least implying that everyone in the Blockchain/Decentralization community thinks that Blockchain is the answer to everything which in my experience is not the case.

or c) an alternative explanation that still fits with most of what we know.

Anyway I agree with you, although it has already surpassed initial expectations stronger evidence is required.

Isn't Redis used just for running the test suite?

Looking forward then to the deluge of DApps coming to Bitcoin using Multisign and nLockTime, just go to http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ and copy paste ideas to Bitcoin using Multisign / nLockTime, should be easy peasy. Oh yeah, and all can be done with Multisign & nLockTime, so I wonder why Counterparty and now Rootstock are implementing Ethereum's virtual machine, strange.

Wish you and your partner in crime stopped spreading false information and just focused on Bitcoin. It should stand on its own merits not on dishing other projects.

> Headphones are moving wireless (hopefully in a safe way, since there is a reasonable concern about the health effects)

Do tell more about these "reasonable concerns about the health effects" of wireless... ?

it has increased by a factor of ~153x

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=all

2014 -> 10,436 TH/s 2016 -> 1,536,337 TH/s

good luck getting the computer power to do a 51% on Bitcoin or Ethereum. The hashpower used in Bitcoin is mind-boggling.

It has nothing to do with Ethereum. This Krypton chain has a very minuscule hashpower so it's susceptible to attacks. It would happen with any Proof of Work chain. She is moving to a Proof of Stake which requires +- 51% of the ownership total coins to execute an attack like this.

Have you given a look at ethereum? Generally the community there doesn't care too much about wallets, that should tell you something :)

For usage, one of the mains advantages would be for systems that you don't want to use a centralized system anymore - for whatever reason from privacy to control over your data to simply infrastructure reasons (i.e you want 100% uptime and no censorship), and want to transform it into a decentralized system.

Yes and no. Basically there was and still are major obstacles to widespread adoption. For example, VERY recently stuff like https://metamask.io/ and Mist has been released, which make this sort of apps more accessible to the average user. light clients protocol are still under development, there is lots of important scalability improvements on the roadmap (proof of stake, instantaneous transactions, unlimited txs, etc..). Decentralized storages such as swarm, IPFS, maidsafe etc.. are still under development. Overall, there is a lot of experimentation and throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. If you want to develop production ready stuff that your grandma can use today, you might be better off waiting 2-5 years until it's sufficiently mature and all the use cases are obvious. If you like to experiment with new paradigms, new architectures, and explore new business models then it's an exciting field to be in.

He means deploying to a public blockchain. You can then play this with your friend or someone else. It's different from running a game server since the contract will enforce the rules of the game, while if you control your own game server you can temper with it.

Usually fees are there for a reason, in this case it's part of the game (and the fun) as the fee goes into the prize fund.

In the "ethereum world" most of the community doesn't actually care too much about the currency aspect, it's the least interesting aspect of what you can do with Ethereum.

The fee goes into a prize pool, the winner bot wins the prize.

I agree with you, but have in mind that patents are not limited to GMOs and affect 95% of seeds in commercial use, including the "organic" ones.

There is a popular perception that only GMO seeds are patented but that's not the case.

The solution probably lies in a decentralized/distributed platform such as Ethereum or Maidsafe.

"I sold a million worth and donated 1/4 to charity"

https://soundcloud.com/cryptoafterdark/episode-9-vitalik-but...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4g9n2a/crypto_aft...

1. This was before the the DAO was even launched by a 3rd party. 2. Can't blame the guy for cashing in a bit, wouldn't you? (and just 25%, still keeping 75%) 3. and he also donated a good portion of it to charity.

"just before" seriously? He did this on 24 april, the DAO was launched on 30 april.. stop the cynicism please...

I just noticed your nickname, it's well known you hate cryptocurrencies and spread FUD about them on wikipedia and forums.. what's up with that? at the same time you are a admin for Rational Wiki? and yet you are oblivious to your own bias.. incredible

There's Syria/ISIS next door, we'll see. Some military interventions and a lot of TV fear propaganda would do the job.

This happened before in Iran's revolution, School Deans, and even Hospital Directors were replaced by pro-revolution islamists regardless of education or qualifications. We might see Turkey transform itself into what Iran became. After this they need a War (a la Iraq-Iran war) to keep people distracted and then the changes will be permanent.

It's not since Mist (and Metamask) injects the web3 object into the page, no jSON-API is used. It also displays a confirmation dialog each time a transaction is generated. If setting up Mist too much trouble to try this, you can always try Metamask https://metamask.io/

Nice post. It looks like a potential issue for someone specifically running geth with that config, but ok for an end-user using Mist or Metamask.