Dark Wallet Will Make Bitcoin Accessible For All — Except the Feds 206
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The group, called UnSystem, are self-proclaimed crypto-anarchists led by Cody Wilson—who you may remember as the creator of the controversial 3D-printed gun. After getting himself in hot water with the government for making the digital files to print an unregulated weapon freely available on the internet, Wilson's now endeavoring to bring Bitcoin back to its anarchist roots. Like other Bitcoin wallets, you'll be able to store, send, and receive coins, and interact with block chain, the Bitcoin public ledger. But Dark Wallet will include extra protections to make sure transactions are secure, anonymous, and hard to trace—including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."
Deceased owners (Score:5, Interesting)
Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors? Without the necessary passwords, what happens to the BitCoins? Are they removed from the system?
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
No, the just remain in the blockchain as unspent outputs.
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Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.
No more inevitable than people having stashed away money that gets destroyed in fires (or other) will result in all money being reduced to nothing.
Personal example (I was not there, my dad was) an old relative died at home after extended illness. He kept saying something about the mattress, but could not speak well. Dad and his brothers took the mattress to the side of the railroad tracks and burned it. That is when they discovered it was stuffed full of cash and they had no way to put it out before it
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It's absolutely more inevitable than that. Non-bitcoin money gets created and destroyed constantly. Part of the point of bitcoin was a limited supply -- just under 21 million can ever be in the supply at most. If you burn the mattress full of USB keys with bitcoin wallets, they will never be replaced (once the last coin is mined, anyway).
Apparently the current limitation on divisibility of bitcoins can technically be worked around, but nobody cares to because it's already divisible to fractions of pennie
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This dividing in ever smaller units is not a solution, it doesn't increase the number of bitcoins in existence. It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.
This until so many bitcoins are lost and being hoarded that there is not enough liquidity left to make it a viable currency.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think Bitcoin has conclusively disproven this myth about deflation: even when Bitcoins were gaining hundreds of percents the economy get going as usual.
The concept of a deflationary spiral is based on a false assumption: specifically, that people prefer long-term gain over short-term one. That's simply not true. And it's pretty obviously untrue, since otherwise no one would buy a computer, pad or smartphone today since you can get a better one tomorrow - technology has a constant deflation, yet that doesn't seem to result in a halt to sales.
Mind you, this has a lot of implications outside of Bitcoin economy, too.
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"an old relative died at home after extended illness."
This does not tell us about bitcoins but about preparing for the inevitable. We should all prepare for our death as we will all die. My oldest son knows how to access my money and how to deal with my demise. You need someone you trust in life and your old relative obviously lacked that. I give a copy of all my keys etc. to my son and I know that the trust is 2 way in that I have access to his. If I had a stock of bitcoins he would have a copy of the
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Dad and his brothers took the mattress to the side of the railroad tracks and burned it.
And that seems like normal behavior...?
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Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.
No more inevitable than people having stashed away money that gets destroyed in fires (or other) will result in all money being reduced to nothing.
The difference is that with a fiat currency, the controlling government just prints more money to replace that which is lost. In fact, in general the controlling governments print *more* than was lost, which leads to inflation (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable - certainly too much inflation is bad, but it can be argued that a small amount of inflation increases liquidity and is therefore good).
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a hard limit whereupon no more bitcoins will ever be produced. Th
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Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very
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Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very few people are right on this one.
Bitcoin is not really being used as a currency - it's largely being used as a security (much the same as shares). The Bitcoin advocates seem to want it to be an actual currency - when you have an entire country using it for every day transactions, using bitcoin wallets instead of a chequing account, etc. rather than continually converting back and forth between bitcoins and a real currency, deflation will become a big problem, just as it has with other real currencies that have suffered deflation.
Karma (Score:2)
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
Factor in eight decimal places worth of divisibility to that 20 million limit. I hope you understand why that's significant.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a bit of a problem with relying on the divisibility of the bitcoin to deal with bitcoins having dropped out of circulation (as opposed to having been definitively destroyed)?
Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?
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Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?
Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.
Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say th
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As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.
No, as hoarding grows, value grows and the incentive to spend DECREASES. It is startling how clueless about macroeconomics most bitcoin proponents are.
Hoarding currency is bad because currency itself has no value, it is only valuable as a means of exchange. Monetary policy exists to prevent individuals from hoarding so much in aggregate that it hurts the overall economy (including them). Excessive hoarding causes currency instability. If nobody can buy/sell goods, including food, because the value o
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Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.
I don't think this really answers my question. I understand that people are free not to spend their money.
However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?
The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?
Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say that, because no one will want or suggest for us to decrease the money supply. Frankly, I think a lot of people are just obsessed with it from years of listening to the Fed and politicians talking about influencing the economy, purchasing power, consumer spending, and who-knows-what-other-fancy-measure of the economy that they can pander to the public with.
I don't understand this. That I worry about one aspect of bitcoins doesn't
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However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?
The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?
The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.
But I can't really answer your question without
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The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.
But I can't really answer your question without knowing why you think this sudden jump in money supply is bad. These things happen, have happened, and could happen to a lot of the commodities and currencies out there. The question is, why must there be some sort of mechanism in place to dampen the effects of a sudden increase in money supply. That's why I asked, and eventually went off on a tangent.
I suppose it depends on what role you are imagining for Bitcoins. If they are a way to move money from one currency to another - broadly the role they have now - then maybe it doesn't matter. If your transactions are instantaneous then the value of your "exchange medium" isn't important.
If you are trying to design a currency, however, it's very important.
The direct problems are to things like futures, options and really any investments. Currency volatility makes all these unattractive. I'm sure it's possibl
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The problem is that if someone controls, say, 1/10th of the buying power in the entire economy, any move they make will have an effect on me and thus becomes my problem. The current worldwide economic crisis is an excellent example: most of the people getting hurt had nothing to do with the whole affair but got to suffer the results all the
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Or maybe he's saying that just because there's a finite number of bitcoins, that doesn't mean you can't split them a bajillion ways.
Everyone seems to think that bitcoins can't have inflation.... Every value is based on perception and trust. If I can buy a candy bar for .5 bitcoins today (I made that up), the market may shift and tomorrow it will be 1 bitcoin. Who knows?
Same thing with gold. I listen to all my conservative friends ramble on about gold as if there'd be no inflation if we used it... but it
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I would like to point out Gold goes up whenever the stock market goes down hard. in every recession there is a spike in gold. Smart investors buy gold when the economy is booming and gold is cheap and sell towards the end of a recession when stocks are cheap and gold is high.
But your correct. Cash currency is always being created and destroyed. a destroyed(lost) bit coin is gone forever. In the short term lost bit coins increase the value of the remaining ones, but at one point the amount of bit coins
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... at one point the amount of bit coins lost will be greater than the remaining ones and the value will plummet.
Care to explain your reasoning here? Scarcity would make the value rise, not plummet. And due to unlimited divisibility (assuming appropriate adjustments to the protocol to allow more than eight decimal places) there will always be enough bitcoins to go around, no matter how many are lost.
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When it becomes harder and harder to acquire something it values only increases to a point(a ridiculously high point ) however bit coins have a finite shelf life. when all the coins have been mined, and nothing new is really being added, the amount of lost coins will overtake the value of the remaining coins. Cash currency works because new cash is being generated continuously. Even if the Fed cut back on bond buying, etc. they would still be printing new cash to offset losses of broken. Bitcoins have
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Maybe I'm just dense, but I still don't see anything in your comment to support the idea that increasing scarcity will render bitcoins less valuable. If the divisibility were limited, sure, then I could buy that argument. It would work for gold, for example, because it's hard to handle small quantities (and there is an ultimate limit at one atom). But bitcoins can adjust to work no matter how many or how few there are. For that matter, the idea that the limit is 21 million BTC rather than 1 BTC or 1 uBTC i
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To complexify it for you then...
120 years ago, you could take one ounce of gold, convert it at the "going rate" to your currency of choice and buy a nice suit.
Today, you can take an ounce of gold and convert it at the current rate to your currency of choice and buy a nice suit.
How's that?
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who the hell bothers taking a mattress - a mattress that someone made mentions about - to the tracks to burn it?
the whole story makes no sense at all except as a "don't burn stuff without checking first" warning story.
oh and who does that too? usa army with burn pits.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
That would be deflation, since it's the money supply being reduced.
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(Note that it won't be obvious to everyone else that nobody has the key. It could just as easily be the case that the owner just hasn't made any transactions. They will just sit in the blockchain forever.)
Re:Deceased owners (Score:4, Informative)
Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors?
Until someone can work out what the password / key is, the bitcoins will be unable to be used by anyone else -- the value of the remaining bitcoins will probably increase. If someone *is* able to work out what that password / key is, then the value of all bitcoins will drop.
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To say that Bitcoins will experience a "deflation" is misleading, because although the amount of Bitcoins in circulation might become less and less, the amount in the ledger does not change !
When talking about inflation or deflation, it's more appropriate to reference the amount in circulation than the amount in the ledger. Money which isn't in circulation can't impact prices, and money which has become completely inaccessible might as well not exist at all.
The most likely outcome of Bitcoin is that when the amount in circulation gets down too low, people will abandon Bitcoin and start using other kinds of virtual money....
There is no such thing as "too low". Rather than abandoning Bitcoin, people can just use smaller units (mBTC, uBTC). As the amount in circulation decreases, the value of each unit increases to take up the slack. Bitcoin could work equally we
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Interesting)
At present, every 5-10 years, the Bitcoin protocol will necessarily upgrade its encryption an d hashing routines to keep pace with processor (whether CPU or GPU or "other") speeds.
Dead people will, of course, not ever transfer their balances to the newest version, and as a result, after 10-20 years, their BTC will become trivially crackable.
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Note as an aside, when you see block-0 spent, you can presume the NSA can easily read your old encrypted email.
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I've never heard of this. Source?
As far as I'm aware, once the blocks are found and claimed, the only cryptography that happens in bitcoin is signing messages using your wallet keys.
Old coins in somebody's derelict wallet won't be in "blocks" either (that would be like saying all of the dollar bills in your wallet automatically gain sequential serial numbers once they become yours.)
The original bitcoin creators have said that when it becomes necessary, we can collectively decide to increase the number of bi
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Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.
Imagine keeping money in your pocket was a good investment, because we had an 8% yearly deflation. You'd need very strong reasons to spend the money. Imagine the problems of loans when not loaning the money at all provides such a great rate of return.
The only way to get a working economy using the system Bitcoin has would be to have said economy grow extreme
Deflationary spiral, oh my! (Score:2)
Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.
Heavens, what will we do? (Now grasping at pearls and frantically trying to fan my face.)
It's almost as if... dare I say it... the economy would be based on value instead of money!
No, that can't possibly happen. We have to do exactly what we've been doing - anything else would be unthinkable.
(What you've been taught to believe is not logically consistent. Think it through.)
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Food shelter and heat are very strong reasons to spend money, at least they are to me.
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all you need is to get 50+% of the clients to switch over to your new version with some mechanism or another for added coins.
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No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want.
Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path. But until someone moves "their"coins to a new wallet, the security of the original hash they used provides an upper limit to the CPU time needed to steal their coins.
With current CPUs and algorithms, that amounts to centuries or even millennia. Much
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In other words, you don't understand SHA256.
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, fellow Bitcoin dev - Explain to me what happens when (not "if") someone can generate a given SHA256 hash, and why that doesn't let an attacker write arbitrary transactions into the block chain?
Not talking about actually cracking the ECDSA pair here (though that would certainly satisfy my claim, and it too will eventually become possible) - I just mean the ability to spoof the hash on the PaytoPubkeyHash transaction to match the provided PK. Bam, transaction validates, done.
Or do you base your assertion on merely trusting an NSA-designed hash to remain uncrackable forever? If so, I can't help but notice that not all in the BTC dev community share your optimism, judging by how often the topic "should we switch to SHA3 yet" comes up.
Re:Deceased owners (Score:5, Informative)
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Actually, that ordinarily would be a problem. However, you're not understanding that bitcoin isn't encrypting anything. It's hashing it. The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.
Think of it this way: It will always be hard (hopefully too hard) to undo, invalidate, or duplicate a transaction; The older it is, the more secure it becomes. But let's remove the idea of a bitcoin for the moment and instead say that everyone has a user account in this 'BT' system, and after supplying their login and password, can trade any coins they have with anyone else. Any transaction made is secure; until and unless you lose your password or someone else gets it. Then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, the end. But they cannot unspend your coins; they cannot change the transactions. They can only spend what's in your wallet now.
So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.
The bit coin system is not secured against theft of coins. That's your job (either to steal or to protect)... all it guarantees is that transactions are permanent (and public).
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The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.
So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.
Lets assume for a minute that someone dies and their wallet is destroyed. Cracking the encryption on their *wallet* isn't possible because the wallet has been destroyed. But, their bitcoins still "exist" by virtue of the global ledger showing that they were transferred to that wallet and were never transferred from that wallet to anywhere else. It's just that without that wallet, no one can create new entries on the ledger regarding those coins.
[Many years pass.]
So now, with enough computational grunt, y
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I don't think you are correct. A bitcoin address has an associated public and private key. The hashing algorithm is a part of the standard. So someone could theoretically take a bitcoin address on the block chain and try to brute force solve for the private key. Right now it costs more to break than to generate a new coin so why do it? Also in the future the encryption will get more difficult. Finally you can always break up the amount you store in any address which makes it not cost effective to break.
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Ignorant and Stupid (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Ignorant and Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable
I don't think government thugs harassing people is at all "reasonable."
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You're the guy who was arguing in the other thread today that government workers are literally subhuman and deserving of death.
Are you positive that that's what I was actually arguing?
And the joke wasn't about government workers in general, but those who violate our rights.
But I am very, very glad to have them monitoring you.
Looks like we have a principled lover of freedom here!
You might find, if you're sufficiently honest with yourself
"Honest" meaning "Anything that artor3 agrees with."
that you're the one who is being "unreasonable".
I'm not even entirely sure what you're talking about. What I think is unreasonable is when government thugs are harassing people; surely you don't object to that? Your reply seems offtopic to me.
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Are you positive that that's what I was actually arguing?
Your response to hearing that a man died was to claim he wasn't a person and that he deserved what he got. So yeah, I'm pretty sure you were saying he was subhuman and deserved to die.
I'm sure you'll get modded insightful again here, and I'll be modded troll or whatever. But that's because Slashdot has become a cesspool of hatred and extremism. That story was tagged "hero". A man walks into a crowd and starts shooting, and you people consider him a hero, and talk about how his victims deserve it.
So yeah
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Your response to hearing that a man died was to claim he wasn't a person and that he deserved what he got.
Really? Was that truly what happened, or will I have to spell it out for you?
And the latter part wasn't even part of my comment; I said that I felt sorry for the six people who got injured, not that the TSA agent "deserved what he got."
So yeah, I'm glad to have the law enforcement agencies keep an eye on you.
Either I was joking, or I was stating an opinion that I have. If you seriously support government thugs violating people's rights because they hold opinions that you find disagreeable or make jokes that you find distasteful, then I think you need to be a bit more principled w
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You said, and I quote:
"I feel for the six people who were injured."
Emphasis yours, and that's the important bit. The implication, clear as day, is that the seventh person, the man who died, doesn't count as a person and doesn't get your sympathy. It seems that you're now ashamed of what you said and unwilling to own up to it, but you DID say it, so stop trying to pretend otherwise.
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The implication, clear as day, is that the seventh person, the man who died, doesn't count as a person and doesn't get your sympathy.
Exactly; I never said anything about him 'deserving' it, just that I didn't care.
The fact that you're taking that comment literally (or trying) and seriously is rather odd to me.
It seems that you're now ashamed of what you said and unwilling to own up to it
I don't think that's a proper interpretation of my reply.
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You said he wasn't a person. Do you stand by that?
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Yes; I think that TSA worker was an alien. Clearly that comment was meant to be taken seriously, and not just a jab at the TSA.
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You're just deflecting now.
You're just deflecting now. It is easy to make such statements. Now, stop trying to 'rationalize' the garbage you spewed forth and just admit the truth!
A man died and you went out of your way to refer to him as subhuman.
I don't care. The fact that you're taking this seriously is simply amusing. Do you make a habit out of taking everything other people say literally?
And if such a short, silly comment actually offended you (assuming it even did), then I have to say that that's rather... weak.
Think about that, and try to remember that even people who disagree with you are still people.
Really!? I had no idea.
And it's a bit more serious than mere disagreement, I would sa
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I asked if you stood by your claim that this man is subhuman. It's apparent now that you have no intention of answering one way or the other, so I'll stop asking.
I really do hope that you think about what you're becoming. Such a cavalier disregard for the lives of people viewed as "other" is at the core of many atrocities, large and small. Just stop and think, next time you're about to dehumanize someone.
Since you've talked with me this long, I'm sure you want the last word. If so, go ahead and take it.
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It's apparent now that you have no intention of answering one way or the other, so I'll stop asking.
I did answer, but for some reason, you don't seem to notice such things unless they're explicitly spelled out for you.
I really do hope that you think about what you're becoming. Such a cavalier disregard for the lives of people viewed as "other" is at the core of many atrocities, large and small.
I have to admit... that is impressive.
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And here's the thing that really pisses most people off: You aren't so different.
It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.
(oh I know, you believe you do)
So... you say that I--someone you don't know--don't care about whether someone is innocent, but then go on to say that some people do care. Even if it didn't refer to me specifically, it still wouldn't make much sense to me.
While we're telling other people how they think or feel,
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It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.
And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice. Government needs to be bigger than any individual or group that can be a source of injustice, or it will be powerless to prevent it. This argument is as old as civilization. Without laws, there would be chaos. So we struggle eternally with finding a way of balancing perfect order -- which is synonymous with tyranny and oppression, and perfect chaos -- which is mob rule and violence.
It's counterintuitive, but for a group of humans to b
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And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice.
And yet, you failed to read the very thing you quoted. "if you can help it" implies that you should only do so when absolutely necessary for society to function.
That's the interesting thing about beliefs though.
What's with this garbage? It doesn't even seem relevant to my original point.
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Except of course, when traffic lights stop working, people still navigate intersections just fine without them. They don't degenerate into car chaos...
What you're missing is that order is a prerequisite for law and government. You can't form a government unless people have already created social order. It's not the other way around.
People create order in society. Society doesn't create order among people. "Society" isn't a thing with an existence and will outside of the individuals within it.
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Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable and shows to me the taxpayer that they are at least trying to do their job, even if the methods aren't reasonable for the average or the peoples of interest.
Similarly, understanding the development of the human genome, it is reasonable for 22 year olds to want to sleep with 17 year olds. Being good members of society, however, they do not. It is that restraint of our baser instincts in service of the common good that elevates us above the anim
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Being good members of society, however, they do not.
How does that make one a "good" member of society? Abiding by silly, arbitrary rules automatically makes you "good"?
The NSA is garbage, however.
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Get a teenage girl pregnant and that drasticly changes the options of how she's going to live her life
You mentioned nothing of pregnancy, and the same is true for people above 17. The mere fact that you sleep with someone does not mean they're going to get pregnant; there are ways to prevent that from happening.
You don't go around fucking what society sees as children without fucking up their lives if society finds out what that child was doing.
Society has many arbitrary, illogical rules. And by the way you made that sound, it's society that fucks up the lives of the 'children,' not the sex.
I don't care what anyone says; it's not as if people below 18 are innocent little snowflakes and that it's magically 'wrong' to have sexual intercourse
Or the C.I.A. method. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cash In Advance.
Secure, anonymous, and hard to trace - including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together.
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Bad news. (Score:5, Interesting)
including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."
I got some bad news; The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed. But I mean, whadda expect... the government likes getting paid. Kindof a lot. And so they have entire divisions of the government setup to make sure they can track down people who try to hide money from them and, well, make them pay.
But for the moment, let's ignore all that. Some crypto-anarchist hacked something together over the course of a few weekends and that's all solved. Great!
Next question: The NSA is evil and watching everything, except of course this, which is totally impregnable and would be pretty much the terrorist currency of choice... what compelling moral, ethical, or technical arguments can you provide that dropping my "money" into a e-blender and setting it to frappe will result in delicious privacy juices coming out in the same quantity as I put in, and is totally resistant to attack? I've learned in security that you can get either tamper-evident, or tamper-resistant... but trying to get both is enormously difficult. So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on having the necessary robust auditing and controls necessary to ensure that transactions are fair and correctly executed, while at the same time dropping the ledgers into your e-blender... while trusting the now-anonymized agents utilizing such a thing not to find some way to exploit the system... using the system itself to cover their tracks?
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So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on...
Supposedly, like this [bitcointalk.org]. It has its limitations, of course, but it's pretty neat.
The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed.
Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.
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Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.
More to the point.. coin mixing did not prevent the Feds from identifying thousands of people who used the service and were able to match realworld transactions to their bitcoin equivalents. In fact, from what I can tell... it wasn't much more than a slight irritation to their forensic accountants.
The fact is that crypto-anarchists may be very good at code, but they're very bad at high level analysis. You (and the crypto people too) need to understand that if you take a hundred people, walk them into a room
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Yeah, this is often true. However, there are some counterexamples, e.g. virtual goods and services. The point of the coin mixers is to disassociate all illicit activity from all legitimate activity, such that any real world names, addresses, or other PII are tied purely to legitimate accounts.
The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex. And real world names, addresses, etc., are all what you need to complete a transaction for virtual goods and services. There is not a lot that you can do online that at some point doesn't require some form of identification. It may just be a username and password, or a cookie, or a data file somewhere that just points to an ip address... but
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A very vocal part of the bitcoin community would disagree with you there. The idea of calculating a "taint" value for coins (based on whether they were involved in any undesirable/shady activities) and refusing to accept highly tainted coins seems to be a pretty popular idea.
Let us hope then they never discover that almost all of the money they've ever handled contains detectable quantities of cocaine and other drugs. In other words, almost every dollar in circulation has been used to buy drugs.
I love anarchists... they rail against rules but then were they to ever try and live up to their whacky ideas, they'd quickly all die of starvation or similar.
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Silk Road failed through secondary methods. The actual mechanism was solid, it's just that DPR was sloppy while setting it up, enabling regular investigative work to find him. I will note that we haven't heard of Silk Road clients being arrested en masse, which means they probably haven't been able to track down many of them. They caught the operator, shut down the site, and seized a large amount of money, but the fact that they haven't been arresting left and right the drug dealers who used it means they a
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I will note that we haven't heard of Silk Road clients being arrested en masse, which means they probably haven't been able to track down many of them.
You're making at least two mistakes. The first is believing that the government really cares about tracking these guys down. That's not the case. They would like to track down enough of them to look like they care. The second mistake is believing that they work that fast. They don't. They work inexorably, but slowly, dire need aside.
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The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed.
The Silk Road didn't do trustless mixing. They did run a mixing service, though it was successful at that. DPR got caught because he advertised The Silk Road on an account that was publicly linked to his personal email address that had his full name in it.
Unless you use your real e-mail address (Score:5, Insightful)
Or use your real name in the Word file metadata that you attach... I love it when smart people do dumb things.
So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ... (Score:3)
How much attention should we really be expending on this guy? Is he just an attention seeker? He obviously knew fuckall about guns or 3D printing, how much does he know about the bitcoin pyramid scam? Does he even spot it as a scam or does he really think it's the fictional currency from Cryptonomicon come to life?
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The mechanical properties of many types of wood are indeed superior for the purpose than the plastic used in 3D printing.
Cite?
The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin (Score:3)
There's been a huge change in the Bitcoin world recently. There are now exchanges in China where you can buy Bitcoins for yuan very easily. This is a big deal, because exchanging yuan for other currencies is tightly restricted by the Peoples Bank of China via the State Administration of Exchange Control. Bitcoin provides a way around those restrictions.
This has caused a huge run-up in the price of Bitcoins. That could change at any moment if the People's Bank of China issues "guidance" on Bitcoin. There are comments from Bitcoin users in China that the acceptance of Bitcoins by a small subunit of Baidu was incorrectly interpreted as a signal from the government of China that buying Bitcoins was now OK.
"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."
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"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."
That's a saying typically heard in Guangdong. Didn't know Baidu is from there. I do know there are for a long time already plenty of "underground banks" (more accurately: money exchangers) that make moving money between the mainland and Hong Kong fairly easy. And that's from well before Bitcoin made it possibly even easier.
However the fact that the is quite little liquidity in bitcoin (as proven by the volatile price) means that this bitcoin channel has highly limited capacity.
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Right. China is sure to be fair and even handed when dealing with bitcoin...
Logical Flaw in Headline (Score:2)
Money for the State (Score:2, Insightful)
It looks like many of the slashdotters have a problem with the federal state or states in general. They are seen as an unnecessary obstacle to freedom. They seek freedom as in anarchy where there is no government and of course no rules. You could state that people could still agree on rules, but in any case these rules deteriorate over time, as some people do not follow them. Furthermore, rules are not really part of an anarchy. Therefore, losing them is not a problem. But the end would be very unorganized.
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What don't you understand? The state can ask for taxes in the state currency. I can keep track of my finances, and pay them. Regardless of what currency or investment my wealth is in. This is the current system. Bitcoin changes nothing. True, the government needs to trust me to file my taxes honestly, but that isn't any different than currently. Audits Exist.
Now, the main problem I have with states and governments in general is that they're fucking bogus! Seriously. No Scientist would agree to be
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Seriously. No Scientist would agree to be ruled the way governments want to rule: Let's just roll out some country wide plan with zero evidence it'll be successful based on the speculations of ideologues?! Fuck That! Get me a government that incrementally rolls out changes and evaluates the effects at each stage, making adjustments or halting if detrimental. Get me some Scientists and Engineers in power. Then you'll have a legitimate government. Until then, the government is NOT BENEFICIAL. Any who posit otherwise: PROVE IT. Oh, that would require applying science? EXACTLY.
Beneficial to whom? to the largest number of citizens? to the median citizen? to those who are worst off (Rawls)? ...
Already you are talking ideology - unless you stick to strict Pareto improvements which will not allow you to take any actions in the real world.
Once you allow for trade-offs ("this guy is worse off, but those guys are better off and they clearly outweigh his loss of utility") you enter ideological hell as there is no sound basis for comparing utility between persons. Public economics likes t
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I'm pretty sure that "trustless mixing" is the very same method as described here [bitcointalk.org]. This method requires no changes to the bitcoin protocol and I'm fairly certain is in at least limited use today, given that there's been software released to facilitate it.
You're ruining someone's troll post by bringing facts into the conversation.
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The whole project is secretly run by the feds?
Shush! We aren't supposed to talk about that!
Re:So.... (Score:4, Funny)
No it is run my the illumina arrrrgh.... askldfjgieh
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It Should.
At this point it seems to run on dark matter, so that helmet would be a good fit.
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You have everyone put the same amount of money in, and they all take it out into brand new addresses. Anyone trying to trace the money will see X bitcoins go into the pool along with N-1 other people's X bitcoins, and then N new addresses each take X bitcoins out. Now you have to investigate N addresses instead of 1 address to figure out which owner used to own the original X bitcoins you were tracing.
Bitcoin's transaction history across addresses is very public, so this isn't just about privacy from law en
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I'm probably one of the few people on slashdot who have never actually done any illegal drugs in my life (it's extremely rare that I even drink) yet I think drugs of any kind should be legal.
That said, even if bitcoin were created just for the drug folks, more power to them, and more power to bitcoin. Drugs being exchanged for real dollars can and have resulted in decapitations, sometimes with innocent bystanders being hit. With bitcoins the buyer and seller never meet, so it is much safer.
Indeed, bitcoins
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Uh, what do you expect them to use online besides internet protocols? Magical protocols?
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I think you're mixing up secure with secret.
if you want to keep it secret, then you need to mix up it enough to make it unfeasible to prove that you used some coins that you put into the system... which is sort of the point in this here thing this article is about.