martin1975

In other words, proof-of-stake is the future. Legacy PoW coins will stick around, but they will not be dominant.

I don't use Google Hangouts, Allo or whatever else they produced since GTalk.

WhatsApp, Signal and Viber are the only ones I use and can reach most anyone worldwide.

Google screwed the pooch on their IM strategy long time ago and there's no coming back. Kind of like screwing the Google Pixel 2 by removing the 3.5 mm aux jack.

Only temporarily. Without true job creation to sustain things like UBI, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc - you're just living on borrowed dollars and hoping for a better future. Of course, we could always print some dollars and quantitatively ease them into the economy ;)

good point. maybe an outright ban on small vehicles and mandate public, driver-less, mass transit for everyone in a city like NY. Everyone walk the last mile or two - we're all fat anyway.

Airplanes do in fact have the capability to complete a flight from point A to point B without a pilot. Yet, we still embed pilots in the cockpit. Cars might be simpler, but there's way too many gotchas while driving a computer cannot be programmed to handle that a human driver can intuit or defend against.

A completely driver-less future might happen, but it won't be with the current infrastructure. IMHO, you'd need to isolate self-driving lanes from human driver lanes completely before it can become a reality, and slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes. Even at that rate, I'm still not certain it would work better than what we have now...

Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.

I feel like this clock has been asymptotically reaching midnight now for the last several decades and will do so for at least several more decades if not longer. In other words, it's about as accurate as predictions of the second coming of Jesus Christ.

I see pain and suffering as the necessary tools for carving out meaning in our own lives.

Like adultery, for instance, right?

What evidence of corruption does anyone have that could put him away in jail for a long time?

It's more like their tech I'm shilling. But hey, you're welcome to downvote me.

No legacy ever really goes away. However it slips into irrelevance unless it's built on sound foundations that can be evolved. Sad to say, no PoW currency has a sound foundation that can be expanded and evolved... like tcp/ip has been able to evolve over the last 40-50 years.

1) Bitcoin becomes too expensive to mine or even sustain due to energy prices

2) Bitcoin's blockchain grows to petabytes or exabytes in size thus becoming horrendously slow to both replicate or even host

3) Bitcoin is surpassed by a better technology, such as Cardano or IOTA. This won't kill it but it will stunt/cap its growth indefinitely.

4) Bitcoin fails to integrate into the legacy world fully by remaining pseudonymous, reluctant or refusing to comply with AML/KYC regulations everywhere in the world, developed or not. It then maxes out in growth. Again, not a failure case, as whatever value was there will probably still remain, but it will be dwindled down significantly.

I'm sure there's more but I can't think of all of them...

The answer to the fundamental ills of both Ethereum and Bitcoin is addressed in Cardano, which has been hard at work for 2+ years to create Ada and the first formally verified PoS type algorithm, Ouroboros.

I wish more people would wrap their heads around the rigid approach to developing Ada that Cardano's taken so the light will come on... sort of like seasoned imperative language programmers who get bitten by the FP bug, the same kind of cathartic effect is achieved once you begin to understand the fundamentals of what Cardano is doing.

Visit CardanoHub.org for more info and get ready to be processing new info for at least a week to begin to understand it.

Don't forget EFF also gave it high grades. What I also would like to see is meta-data eliminated in chat, without having to bring up a Tor server on your phone. Build it into the client/software, make it invisible.

Damn...reading this was difficult. Her shame - rather than her guilt, which was absolved the minute she confessed to her being a cause for the boy's death - went on for too long. Glad she didn't take her own life. Heaven's forbid, if this ever happened to me, I'm not sure I could live with myself. It is such a punishing, harrowing ordeal for anyone to go through.... whew.

cool .. I think I get it. It's like compiler/instruction based DRM ... CPU specific permission to run code. Maybe they can leverage existing TPM chips to do this...

I just don't want to see performance being decimated as a trade off for security, if at all possible.

and what if I wrote a compiler that doesn't heed any of your security concerns? It would still compile to machine code and continue to be able to exploit things Spectre/Meltdown style? Or am I off here?

so run everything in a VM?

the first approach sounds kind of expensive to be done at the cpu level. I like your second one better. thank you!

I'm curious if someone can point me to any source that discusses how the next generation of CPUs that Intel, AMD, ARM might be working on is actually going to address this & the Spectre issue architecturally.. It's great that we have a potentially performance killing fix but the real "fix" or rather, solution, is to alter the architecture. Since I'm not an EE/CE dude... is anyone aware of where such discussions on the WWW might be taking place?

by the way, that PoC was intense. Makes you wonder if the NSA knew about it all along :)

It is, at least on face value. However gathering enough evidence to show some relationship or cause... that's a whole different ballgame that we probably won't get to ever watch.

Slightly ignorant comment from a Haskell n00b - how does Agda play into this?

So could MS-DOS ;)

Even the roll of a die could be called non-random, since the numbers that come up are actually the result of a number of forces acting together on the die, including the force of the rollers hand, gravity, air gusts, the surface they fall on, etc.

Same principle would apply to all the other methods you mentioned since there's always a definite seed value, regardless of how difficult it is for you or another observer to capture it.

All the approaches you listed would result in quality pseudo-random numbers, however, a genuine random number at the source has no apparent cause or series of events leading up to it. Cesium is one such source of genuine, uninspired and uninfluenced source of randomness. Cosmic radiation is probably another although that's probably a lot harder to capture.

Here's a more detailed explanation of why radiation from radioactive decay is bona fide random.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/03/30/real-ra...

https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-a-com...

The NeuG is best described as a high quality PRNG as are most others unless they truly capture some random, cosmic phenomena, like echoes from the big bang detectable as cosmic background radiation.. Allegedly nothing tops the big bang as a random number generator.

I like how they call it a 'true' RNG... unless it's got a cesium core and a Geiger counter mounted on the USB, I'd hardly call it 'true' :). At best, it's good enough.

It sure would be nice if someone like dell could at least insert Coreboot, or preferably Libreboot on these babies. They probably have enough heft to make such a change (I hope :).

Nicely done. Words like 'is' incur liability because it can be interpreted as making factual statements that you could be held accountable for. Hurry, get your law degree so you can skin Intel alive ;)

Bet you a dollar some lawyer had to vet that three times over before they published it.

This isn't pure academics. It's applied and constrained by time and resources. 2020 is when IOHK's funding contract expires and renewal is contingent on performance. They've already proven Ouroboros as valid - I bought ADA, it's running. Can someone find a hole in it? Sure. The world could also come to an end tomorrow. Anything's possible. As it is, they've put more rigor than any coin so far run by "gut feeling" (e.g. testing but without formal proofs) rather than formal proofs and verification.

IOHK/Charles is pushing for performance, it's not just academic showboating.

Some of the greatest things ever were created when academic minds and experience were fused with strong business and leadership ethics.. Qualcomm for example - started out with a bunch of Ph.D.'s and a grand idea - CDMA, or rather power control and new modulation and coding schemes applied on CDMA, which is what their invention was (CDMA had existed since WW2 I think, commercially Qualcomm made it happen).

What bothers people is that most of the stuff Charles is talking about is flying way over most people's heads...so instead of sucking it up and learning about it, it's easier to just dismiss him, IOHK, Cardano, etc.

Since I don't know the future anymore than anyone else, you could be right too. Just in case, I put some money down on Cardano/ADA. So maybe I'll be right. If I'm not, feel free to gloat.