1381
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 06:17:03 PM
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The CC companies lose money? LOL. You don't think they got rich from writing checks, do you?
They lose money on a specific thing. On aggregate they are making vast profits of course. Some of the fees they charge are spent in refunding and fighting CC fraud, but it is actually very little (0.7% of the total transaction volume, IIRC). As an oligopoly (cartel) they of course make big profits anyway.
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1382
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: The Monero Free For All Thread
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on: September 26, 2014, 06:09:17 PM
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a large NP space can be reduced to P by using localized randomness to act as a proxy for the large search space.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but P and NP are not the right terms. Those concepts are irrelevant for practical cryptography. Going strictly by the definitions, since the output has fixed size, inverting SHA256 is not only P, but actually O(1). Complexity theory (where one defines P and NP) has nothing useful to say about computations in a finite domain, no matter how big. Even the Halting problem is solvable, and O(1), in that setting. The practical robustness of cryptographic tools like SHA is supported only by empirical tests: basically, lots of people try lots of possible attacks; after a few years, if no one finds a weakness, then it is assumed to be robust.
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1383
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 05:53:58 PM
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I bought a takeaway last night from my blockchain.info wallet using my smartphone via bitpay. It was seamless, instantaneous and flawless. That is typical of the average bitcoin transaction in the future.
To be precise, you actually bought the takeaway with dollars that BitPay sent to the merchant, and BitPay will later recover those dollars by selling the bitcoins that you sent to BitPay. How does Bitpay know that you are not double spending your bitcoins?
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1384
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 05:10:32 PM
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These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.
And it is exactly this sort of reply by "bitcoin experts" (the kind who claim that paying with BitPay or Coinbase is "paying with bitcoin") that keeps most people away from bitcoin.
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1385
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 04:42:18 PM
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Iam new here, what is ponzi and burglary?
How could one usefully answer that question without violating the only rule of this thread? This thread has rules? One rule, right? Iam new here, what is ponzi and burglary?
How could one usefully answer that question without violating the only rule of this thread? You can answer a question if you ask a question after, understood? Since the title of the thread is 'answer the question above with a question', wouldn't you agree that the answer must be a question, not merely be followed by a question?
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1386
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 04:36:04 PM
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ok you've got my intention there, this suggest that you have most of the issues figured out, how do you think we will solve: 1-The Block size limit when the number of transaction/minute is 100 times higher than today. 2-The block chain size when it exceeds 200GB or 1TB ? most users or services will have to use clusters of storage, if the adoption rate picks up this has to be fixed really fast. 3-The energy waste, it has been known that when the price goes up mining becomes more profitable and more resources are brought online...resources that most of us consider wasted, as of today the hashrate is more that 250 Petahash/s, assuming that the worst chip on the network consume 0.5w/ghs (which is way too optimistic) this means that at this point miners consume way more than 125 hourly Megawatts... just FYI a typical nuclear plant produce from 500-2000 hourly Megawatts. 4-DDOS attacks: when Bitcoin become bigger, there will be Big services that run the Bitcoind in order to offer their services, organized groups can run denial of service attacks against these services, you can read more about how they can do it in that wiki I provided before. 5-Malleability issue, and don't tell me it is not an issue, because it really is, and it is not fixed yet, they just found some work around it. 6-Double Spending, even if you don't have 51% of the network you can perform double spending with as little as 25% of the network, 7- The 51% attack, we all know what it is, it is achievable, any government can achieve it if they want to kill Bitcoin, even at this point. 8-man in the middle or packet sniffing, also described in that wiki. There many more issues, but these are the one that concerns me for now. now I would like to hear your solutions.
Two more: 9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more. That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.) 10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins. There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there...
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1388
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 12:40:58 PM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? What different thread? You never heard of the totally off topic thread? Does it mean our posts can have parallel lives in parallel threads, like parallel universes? Or perhaps that thread has the answers to all the questions in this thread, in some order? Are there answers to each and every questions that our vain philosophy would ever be able to dream of? Do you demand correct answers, or would any answer do? Do correct answers exist, or everything is but an illusion? Are we making a quote pyramid? Isn't it some kind of quote ponzi? Some people got rich of ponzi. You dont like ponzi? Did you know that some people got rich with burglary, too?
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1389
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 07:09:43 AM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? What different thread? You never heard of the totally off topic thread? Does it mean our posts can have parallel lives in parallel threads, like parallel universes? Or perhaps that thread has the answers to all the questions in this thread, in some order? Are there answers to each and every questions that our vain philosophy would ever be able to dream of? Do you demand correct answers, or would any answer do?
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1391
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 06:52:05 AM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? What different thread? You never heard of the totally off topic thread? Does it mean our posts can have parallel lives in parallel threads, like parallel universes? Or perhaps that thread has the answers to all the questions in this thread, in some order?
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1392
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 06:36:40 AM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? What different thread? You never heard of the totally off topic thread?
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1393
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 06:33:13 AM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? That gives me away, doesn't it? By the way, would you like a bacon sandwich? Was it ever clarified whether that primeval question refers to fried bacon, or to raw bacon?
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1395
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 05:29:43 AM
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You will need to mention the limitation in your research. For instance, many of the posts are created from troll accounts. Most of them do not offer meaningful comments. Look no further than this thread.
Surely... but the distortion caused by trolls should be somewhat lessened by counting recently active threads rather than recent posts. (A trollpost may cause some low-activity thread to show up as active in the sampling window. However, a thread that is heavily "infested" by trolls will still be counted only once.) It can be argued also that even trollposts are evidence of public interest on some broad topic. Anyway, if the proportion of trollposts to good posts in each category is about the same, they will not have much effect on the percentages.
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1396
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Other / Meta / Bitcointalk.org activity statistics by broad category
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on: September 26, 2014, 05:10:38 AM
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Bitcointalk.org posts by topic, updatedBelow is a breakdown of the 239 recently most active threads in this forum, captured a few hours ago. For comparison, I copied the similar statistics tallied on June/21 and July/25: 2014-06-21 ! 2014-07-25 ! 2014-09-25 ! --------------+---------------+---------------+ Posts ! % ! Posts ! % ! Posts ! % ! Category ------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------- 8 | 6.7 | 14 | 12.6 | 28 | 11.7 | Off-topic 4 | 3.3 | 7 | 6.3 | 15 | 6.3 | Gambling 18 | 15.0 | 12 | 10.8 | 58 | 24.3 | Bitcoin mining 37 | 30.8 | 22 | 19.8 | 23 | 9.6 | Bitcoin non-mining 53 | 44.2 | 56 | 50.5 | 115 | 48.1 | Altcoins (including mining) ------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------- 120 | 100.0 | 111 | 100.0 | 239 | 100.0 | TOTAL
ExplanationTo create the last table, I quickly copied the first 6 pages of the list of most recent topics posted to, spanning about 1 hour, and manually classified the 240 threads listed there (minus one repeated entry) in the above categories. (This is not quite a sample of the recent posts, since each thread was counted only once even if it had several posts within that interval. So the most active threads are under-represented.) CommentsIn all three epochs, about half of the activity seemed to be related to altcoins. Activity about bitcoin proper (mining and non-mining) was 46%, 31% , and 34% in the three samples; the difference was taken over by gambling and other threads unrelated to cryptocoins. Among the posts about bitcoin proper, the fraction about mining seems to be increasing. In June, of 37 posts about bitcoin proper, excluding mining, 18 (49%) were in Chinese language. This time, the proportion was 9 out of 49 (16%) only. (However, this proportion is likely to vary a lot along the day. The last sample was taken at about 02:00--03:00 UTC, which is 10:00--11:00 am in China. I did not record the hour of the previous two samples.) EDIT: Here are the samples of thread headers used to make those tables: 2014-06-212014-07-252014-09-25The headers were edited to remove funny characters and indicate the language (with [CN] or [Chinese], [RU], [DE] etc.). Titles in some foreign languages were translated through Google.
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1397
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: September 26, 2014, 04:53:47 AM
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Bitcointalk.org posts by topic, updatedBelow is a breakdown of the 239 recently most active threads in this forum, captured a few hours ago. For comparison, I copied the similar statistics for June/21 and July/25: 2014-06-21 ! 2014-07-25 ! 2014-09-25 ! --------------+---------------+---------------+ Posts ! % ! Posts ! % ! Posts ! % ! Category ------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------- 8 | 6.7 | 14 | 12.6 | 28 | 11.7 | Off-topic 4 | 3.3 | 7 | 6.3 | 15 | 6.3 | Gambling 18 | 15.0 | 12 | 10.8 | 58 | 24.3 | Bitcoin mining 37 | 30.8 | 22 | 19.8 | 23 | 9.6 | Bitcoin non-mining 53 | 44.2 | 56 | 50.5 | 115 | 48.1 | Altcoins (including mining) ------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------- 120 | 100.0 | 111 | 100.0 | 239 | 100.0 | TOTAL
ExplanationTo create the last table, I copied the first 6 pages of the list of most recent topics posted to, spanning about 1 hour, and manually classified the threads in the above categories. (This is not quite a sample of the recent posts, since each thread was counted only once even if it had several posts within that interval. So the most active threads are under-represented.) CommentsAs in the previous samples, about half of the activity seems to be related to altcoins. Activity about bitcoin (mining and non-mining) was 46%, 31% , and 34% in the three samples; the difference was taken over by gambling and other threads unrelated to cryptocoins. Among the posts about bitcoin proper, there seems to be an increasing fraction about mining. This time, 9 of the 58 posts about bitcoin (15.5%) were in Chinese. (This proportion may vary along the day; the sample was taken at about 02:00--03:00 UTC, which is 10:00--11:00 am in China.) EDIT: Here are the samples of thread headers used to make those tables: 2014-06-21 2014-07-25 2014-09-25 . The headers were edited to remove funny characters and indicate the language (with [CN] or [Chinese], [RU], [DE] etc.). Titles in some foreign languages were translated through Google.
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1398
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 26, 2014, 01:38:04 AM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question? Is that why you asked that exact same question in a different thread? That gives me away, doesn't it?
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1399
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
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on: September 25, 2014, 09:26:12 PM
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There is no topic, do you not understand that?
You mean, I could even ask whether the Eastern mistletoe of North America has sticky pulp inside its berries, like the European mistletoe? You definitely could do that. The problem is do you think you would get an answer? It would be very naive of me to expect that, wouldn't it? But was that a real reason of your naiveness? Hm... could it be that, sub-consciously, I was expecting an aswer to that question?
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1400
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Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: Your opinion: Is mining still profitable?
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on: September 25, 2014, 09:20:41 PM
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So your air conditioner will have to pump ~57'000 BTU/hour out of your house. [ ... ] I suppose that the capacity of an air conditioner depends on the temperature outside and the temperature that you want to keep inside the house.
So i am good with three units the give me 72,000 BTU. You should ask an air conditioning technician, I have no idea. For one thing, even if your miners are turned off, the AC would have to pump some heat out, in order to keep the temperature inside lower than that outside. That is the heat that seeps into the house through walls, roof, doors, windows, etc., driven by the temperature difference.
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