Hacker News Reader

unlimited_poweron Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)?

Not necessarily, see my responses to the same question here:

- http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/227t7x/can_name...

unlimited_poweron Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)?

We are still working on the exact mechanics (open to suggestions!), but the simple first model is:

- The price starts at 0 and people bid it up to the market value

- If someone makes a bid B1, then someone makes a next bid B2 = B1 + D, then person 1 receives (B1 + D/2) and the remaining D/2 gets paid as fees to network (and thus become shareholder dividends)

- This incentivizes people to bid up the price to what they consider the market value, because of the extra portion they receive when they are outbid

- This also disincentivizes squatting because you will pay more for buying and selling the domain than you would have received as network dividends had someone else just bought the domain

unlimited_poweron Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)?

I'll plug BitShares DNS--a Namecoin competitor I am working on--here: http://nmushegian.github.io/dns/

Whitepaper and FAQ are not quite up to date but you get the idea. From: https://github.com/nmushegian/dns/blob/master/whitepaper.md#...

- Namecoin issues new coins to miners as a reward for performing merged mining with the Bitcoin network. The namecoin supply is being inflated at nearly 30% per year for several more months, then over 10% for the next several years. Domainshares only ever shrink in supply, when fees are destroyed as implicit dividends.

- Namecoin attempts to service multiple namespaces at once. .p2p is highly specialized for servicing the .p2p TLD namespace. The use case is the same as Namecoin's "d/" namespace, which is used for the .bit TLD.

- Namecoin's name registration price is fixed at any given time and is independent of the name itself. Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to incentivize price discovery for names, making sure the final owner pays what it is actually worth. The majority of the final cost will have gone to the network as dividends by the time the auction is over, with a small fraction having gone to bidders as a reward for price discovery.

- As a result of the fact that domains are expensive and there are dividends on shares but not domains, there is a high opportunity cost to squatting: holding a domain without making good use of it.

unlimited_poweron How Dropbox Knows When You’re Sharing Copyrighted Stuff

I believe they stopped doing multi-user deduplication a while ago.

unlimited_poweron Blocking Google and Facebook using Ad Block Plus and Ghostery

http://www.areweprivateyet.com/

unlimited_poweron An estimate of the real savings for merchants from Bitcoin

Use a service like BitPay and it converts instantly.

unlimited_poweron State of The Union address minute by minute on Twitter

my back button!?

unlimited_poweron Ghash.io very close to 51% of bitcoin pool

I encourage people to look at the paper Transactions as Proof-of-Stake & The End of Mining[0] defining a form of the idea. BitShares[1] (due out in Q2 2014) will implement this.

[0] https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1138.0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BV55IrZi7g

unlimited_poweron Suggest HN: make a separate community just for Bitcoin articles

Already built: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867232

unlimited_poweron Best Firefox Add-ons of 2013

There is also Adblock Edge which is a fork of Adblock Plus without the "acceptable ads" feature:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

unlimited_poweron Bitcoin 0.8.6 Released: Updates Block Size Limits, Free Transactions, OS X Bugs

There are alternative full-node implementations. A couple examples:

https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/btcd

https://darkwallet.unsystem.net/

unlimited_poweron Why being invited to try Circle made me think about a whole load of other stuff

Am the only one who always confuses this with Circle (http://www.circle.com/), a bitcoin-based competitor to Square (presumably).

unlimited_poweron Popular Flashlight App has been secretly sharing your location

I'm not sure how to check the permissions, but I've been using Tiny Flashlight + LED: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devuni.fla...

unlimited_poweron Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren’t Reversible

I believe you can use nLockTime[0] to construct and broadcast a transaction that cannot be accepted into a block at least until a particular time. Before that time is reached, you should be able to broadcast a conflicting transaction if so desired that is included in a block sooner, thus invalidating the previously broadcast transaction.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/NLockTime

unlimited_poweron Shopify accepts Bitcoin

I am not accepting bitcoin or using BitPay but the fees seem to be much lower than any credit card: https://bitpay.com/pricing

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by price fluctuations. BitPay accepts bitcoin from the customer and automatically converts it to the seller's local currency at market price. So the price is always fair and the seller never deals with bitcoin.

unlimited_poweron Shopify accepts Bitcoin

Also take a look at: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adju...