sonoffett

Royal with cheese

I’ve done it (years ago). 4 managers fired in 8 months. I had to leave so I could do actual work. Seeing these Twitter reports is giving me flashbacks.

I can't seem to edit my comment, but I'm mistaken. Algorand uses Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) and not VDFs at all.

As an aside, the algorand layer-1 chain uses VDFs to select a validating set per block, weighting member selection by how much crypto each account owns. They call it Pure Proof of Stake. It definitely reduces the energy consumption and increases network throughput, of course with trade offs. See:

https://www.algorand.com/technology/research-innovation/rese...

Sure. But last I checked nobody had more than one.

What do you mean by "people with multiple Turing awards"?

Not exactly what you described, but overviews DoD role in development of internet technologies and SV: https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...

Best coffee in santa cruz IMO, also have an incredibly popular podcast https://catandcloud.com/pages/podcast . Their sister bakery "companion" has best croissants I've had outside of europe.

As related material that folks here might appreciate: Andrew Yang’s (founder of Venture for America) recent book “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future” lays out a compelling argument for UBI, given the rise of automation and AI, as well as current economic and cultural shifts.

Yang is also running for president 2020 on a UBI platform, dubbed the freedom dividend.

You do realize that there are literally people buying coffee in meatspace today using lightning?

https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736

Or asteroid mining

Thanks, the question makes more sense now :)

This sounds like a phone screen--i've never signed an NDA for phone screens or at any stage of the interview process for that matter.

"how do you count the bits most efficiently?"

What does this even mean?

quicksort is O(n^2) which is definitely not the "best big-O" for sorting.

TLSNotary is one approach: https://tlsnotary.org, although I'm not certain it provides trusted timestamps.

Stanford?

Do you have an example where this has happened? (in Bitcoin that is, not Ethereum).

I wonder if a Blockchain system would mitigate the feasibility of this kind of attack and make it easier to trace the destination of the stolen funds?

Beautiful, thank you for sharing your experience.

> I don't think UAVs are the best option for mass surveillance.

I agree for these kinds of UAVs, but ARGUS [1] blimps are probably super effective and worrisome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

I think the consensus protocol is absolutely not under control of 5 maintainers. Convince a few of the miners and exchanges (e.g., f2, ant, bitfury, coinbase, blockchain.info, bitstamp) to actually start running classic and we'll have 2MB blocks on the longest chain in no time. Conversely, suppose those 5 maintainers release a hard fork version of segwit tomorrow without a block size increase--nobody would upgrade.

The consensus protocol is dictated by exactly that, consensus, not this allegedly omnipotent cabal.

Great examples and analysis. I think the IPv6 analogy is spot on--the fear of IPv4 exhaustion (block size limit), the disdain for NAT as an ugly hack (Segwit, LN).

Do you honestly believe that the only way to make consensus changes is via pull requests to Bitcoin core?

XT and classic certainly have different consensus rules from core once their activated, that's the whole point of their existence.

I think you're referencing bip 34, but I don't see how that's relevant.

Which source? Bitcoin is a network of computers speaking a common protocol, not one implementation. Yes Bitcoin core is governed by core. If you're not happy with core then go run a different client or go write your own.

You don't need Bitcoin core's permission to run classic or XT, just go run it. You're not going to be thrown in jail. And convince the miners to run it too. Others have tried and haven't been successful not because of core, but because the majority isn't convinced that the potential advantages outweigh the disadvantages at this point in time.

Or maybe I'm naive and there is some small block conspiracy that runs the show.

It's just a fact? Citation needed.

I'm not saying you don't need consensus. I'm saying anyone can write their own client but the burden is on them to drum up support and achieve consensus if it's going to be useful.

People talk as if there is a Bitcoin conspiracy where some central entity decides all things Bitcoin-- where blockstream is the equivalent of the illuminati. If someone thinks they can do a better job then go fork the source and convince everyone else why it's better.

You don't need a permission slip to write your own client with whatever rules you want. You do need to convince people to use if you want it adopted. What do you mean that it's centrally planned?

AFAIK the intent of segwit is not to reduce overhead but to fix tx malleability. As an consequence of the politicized block size debate a discount was added to increase the number of txs per block--and this was seen as a compromise for the big blocker camp. It turns out you can roll it out with a softfork as well (and provide script versioning), making it a safer alternative to upping the limit with a contentious hardfork.

Can you clarify what you mean by the majority hash rate needs to enforce the new rules?

Luke jr showed how you can implement segwit as a soft fork. The txs look like "anyone can spend" txs and the signatures are excised to the witness data structure (decreasing the tx size). To validate the segwit txs you need to upgrade, but it's not correct to say that a hardfork is needed to increase the number of txs per block.