skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technically the only way Bitcoin can threaten the very rich is if it directly undermines the value of their assets. How exactly will it do that if, right now, any one of them can sink a huge amount of USD into amassing a Bitcoin stockpile (either by buying lots of ASICs or buying them directly)? There are literal examples of this already - the Winklevoss twins have claimed to own over 1% of all Bitcoins, effectively converting some of their massive USD wealth into BTC. Even if you were to undermine the existing monetary systems, any rich person that saw it coming would easily be able to amass a giant BTC stockpile and ride it out. In that scenario, they would not stand to lose very much in a BTC transition, as long as they saw it coming before USD's value was completely destroyed.

The 'very rich' can afford to spend extravagantly to acquire bitcoins, and can afford to do so at 'a loss' if they actually have some good reason to convert money from other currencies to BTC. The average poor or middle-class person who has bitcoins to sell will be unlikely to turn down an offer to buy BTC at above market prices or similar other arrangements.

You can argue that Bitcoin is a threat to the revenue streams that the 'very rich' rely on to become wealthy and stay wealthy; however, it is mostly a threat in that it displaces those revenue streams. Speculators that currently work in things tied to USD can just as easily do their speculation against BTC; you do nothing to put those people out of work. Investors, likewise, are not somehow directly threatened by a Bitcoin-based economy. It's just currency to them.
How could Satoshi design Bitcoin to be explicitly deflationary and think that it wouldn't be used as an investment vehicle?
Bitcoin is the new Barter Trade System
That's not a bitcoin question, that's a per-exchange question.

If an exchange gives users an SLA stating "orders will be fulfilled within X business hours" then that's a contract between two parties. If the exchange says "yeah, we'll get around to it someday and you agree to deal with that" which is the usual intent language in the small print then you don't have much to go on if there is a delay, other than trying to raise a public outcry in the hopes they will back down.
That's not the primary intention of the book - the book has intrinsic value that BTC do not.

The value of BTC lies predominantly in the market value.

So the book analogy is ridiculous and patronizing.
From that page:

> [...] the contest is fair because 1) the algorithm is completely specified, 2) there are no arbitrary definition of what winning means, and 3) the algorithm is public domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
Isn't this why people incorporate in Delaware? I don't really see the point of this.
Holiday Curtail Party cartoon
How To Fix Google Drive Sync Issues on OS X 10.9.1
I still don't understand why laptops don't have a physical slider for the webcam that goes overtop. Unless it's open no problem. Sure u still have to deal with audio but at least the video is taken care of...
If the winner prefers regular USD over BTC, we will provide USD.
ifixit has some tutorials on how to remove the monitor glass that I've looked at before. You may need some special tools though and it isn't recommended for the retina displays.
VBScript “shortcuts” virus removal
It might not be NSA itself, but learning that US is willing to implement backdoors in their interest is a big deal - especially in defense industry. You either have the trust or you don't.
Coinbase will close their doors forever before honoring price lock removal. You took a risk, one that is a lot harder to read than the Fed-drunk stock market.

From what I can gather coinbase makes their money by throwing away or backing out transactions they would take a loss on. You sir, gave them $35k for digital beanie babies. You get what you pay for. And you did.

Why aren't you buying btc at an exchange? Were you planning on moving them?
I have a computer without a hdd indicator light and sometimes I miss it (like when I am fullscreened and a sudden lockup caused by unswapping lots of stuff occurs), but ultimately I haven't found it to be a big deal.
No, the goal of these security products is to defend against the government, not a random guy. In that context, it's extremely important that their server undergo the same level of cryptanalysis.
There is no solution to the Byzantine Generals problem. If you control more than one third of the nodes, you can wreak havoc, and likely do what you please with the network.

You know who has that kind of computing power? States.
The technical side of Bitcoin isn't interesting to me, unfortunately. For a programmer, I am woefully cursed with an interest in social issues.

I kinda wish we had a Castronova-style petri dish virtual world to experiment with, but that still doesn't isolate variables well enough, nor would it be quite inclusive enough, to form conclusions I'd accept as legitimate.
I got the impression it was a designer job. The work she did made sense in that context.
Not quite 2.5 months.
No I think this is cute but it is just hyperbolic.
If you find this idea interesting, you may want to check Greer's online sci-fi novel: Star's Reach - A Novel on the Deindustrial Future. http://starsreach.blogspot.com/

The idea is, agrarian societies 300-odd years ago were very "evolved" forms of human environments. Current industrial civilization is the first raw, buggy attempt of a different kind of human ecology... and we have a bumpy ride ahead of us (much like men after the latest Ice Age had to learn this agriculture thing over centuries/milenia to get it right)
This contest isn't a great example of the kind of contests he is talking about.

1) They are giving you the source code, protocol, and a tcpdump of all traffic between the chatters. You can even send messages via the protocol to one of the participants. Its not just here is some encrypted data, decrypt it.

2) They are offering a significant amount of money.
But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.
The code is open. It's more or less the same if you tell us your address.
White House to NSA: Cool it with the spying
Well, one potential advantage: Bitcoin removes consumer protection, which allows an exchange to operate at much lower rates. Part of PayPal's difficulty as a business is dealing with the constant amount of fraud. With BTC, the consumer bears the problems.

However, the remittance industry makes an obscene amount of money mainly because it's about marketing services in a retail place to unsophisticated consumers. Once you start trying to compete with retail stores, and comply with regulations, it won't be as competitive.
Of course. As bitcoin isn't a viable currency and no one is really conducting btc->btc transactions, paying salaries in btc or anything else, the only method of utilizing them is going through the traditional, already existing banking infrastructure.

The only part that I may slightly disagree with is that unlike the case of denim or Che shirts, there is at least a theoretical endgame that escapes the traditional framework.

Note that I don't think bitcoin will reach that endgame, but I think that is a slight distinction.
There are only a few companies which are viewed as more "American" than Boeing or GE. MacDonalds and CocaCola maybe.
Introducing Advanced Search
Silicon Valley VC Almanac
[OP] I saw this going around the mainstream social web and was surprised that people seem not to know about building houses out of trash in suburban and rural areas, since we have been doing this for many years and even written books about it (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship). Of course, what would actually be exciting is if folks were to build skyscrapers and other urban infrastructure out of trash.
They are providing the entire log of the protocol communication
any.do does not have lists of lists of lists of lists . . . . I use any.do, but sparingly. Mostly for shopping lists or short to-do lists.

I do a lot of project planning and design. It's hard for me to write this all out in paragraph form so I create lists with many sublists. Workflowy has a simple export feature to text. I give it to the PM and he can write functional specs from it or I give it to a dev to work off of.
"Wet"?
That's fine as long as we keep Lockheed planes to ourselves. Nothing beats the F22.
> 100% FREE & NO ADS: Telegram is free and will always be free. We do not plan to sell ads or introduce subscription fees.

how you are then going to make a money ?
Built With Bootstrap: Review My App
> the gotchas very rarely get me. I found the same with Javascript. The inconsistent and odd data conversions make fun slides to denigrate the language, but in practise they seem to be easily avoided.

They don't tend to actually "get" me, but I feel like they're always there in the back of my mind, taking up space that could be used for something more useful. It's not a huge difference, but it's there.

> I definitely feel super productive in PHP. I've been able to knock out a new app feature in 1 day, which to build the equivalent in Java would have been at least 5.

Well sure, we're talking about a very different style of language. But I think Ruby or Python get you the same thing. Certainly you have map/reduce/filter (and Python's for comprehensions go one step further), and dynamic typing.

> with PHP I find things are either working or completely broken with not much in-between.

Interesting; what bothers me the most when using PHP is that it feels easier to introduce security flaws than other languages. Not that it's hard to code safely, but sometimes the most obvious way to e.g. access a database is the unsafe way (which is partly just because there're a lot of old libraries and bad advice floating around). Charset handling is a similar area; I've seen lots of PHP code that appears to work fine but goes wrong when given non-ascii characters. It wouldn't surprise me if there were similar issues with timezones, though I haven't dealt with them enough in PHP to be sure.
BTW, https://blockchain.info/stats is off by several orders of magnitude about mining cost and power. It's now about $3/GH/s and 1W/GH/s.
We already know the system is hopelessly vulnerable to server side MITM attacks, it makes no effort to defend against that attack model. It's mentioned in the comments that they might do manual key verification in the future, but that doesn't happen now. Compromise is silent.
The problem with this test is that there are many encryption systems I would consider fundamentally broken where I could not claim this prize.

To make this a slightly fair challenge, we should at least be allowed to get the clear text of our choice also encrypted with the same key.
Inflation is not caused by greed. The us had a deflationary economy between 1860 and 1920 and you would be hard pressed to argue there wasn't greed then. But the standard of living improved and the wealth gap slowly closed.

If there is any greed in inflation, its the politicians channeling assets to the already wealthy, which is what inflation does. The us inflation went haywire after 1970 when Nixon went off the gold standard and not surprisingly 1973 is when the closing of the poverty gap turned a corner and the rich started getting richer and the poor started getting poorer again.
Paid features, like stickers and etc.
That's even harder than banning BitCoin.
Fair enough, I see your point and completely agree that all currencies are based on belief. I guess that why I am all over the internet all day long trying to convince bitcoin is worth a shot.
Yes. It is still in regular use on ios7. I have recently got a 5s and while it's better, the regular safari crashes/quit to home screen aren't great.
Right, except for

2) there are no arbitrary definition of what winning means

The definition of winning in this contest creates a large class of potential vulnerabilities that would be paid $0.
+1.

Seems like, at worst, any sort of manufacturing inflexibility is solved the same way they usually deal with this stuff: A ribbon cable. Then you just have to worry about the physical security of the machine which is its own independent issue regardless.

Personally, I assumed they did it this way since it seems obvious (that's what I do in my own electronics projects) and much simpler than using a microcontroller to do it. I forwarded this idea to concerned friends. Looks like I'm eating my own words.
Reputations are rarely staked on predicting the future in tech. You need a rather precise balance of prestige, wrongness, and volume of other work to have your reputation damaged in any significant way by being wrong.

Even cmdrtaco didn't really have his reputation trashed by "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
i have a day job and i'm not going to drop everything for the chance i won't make any money at all... told-you-so factor or not.
I'm afraid breaking into Telegram's central server (by the way, there is no such thing) will hardly enable you to decipher end-to-end encrypted secret chats. But certainly worth trying anyway.
Someone will probably break an employee's computer and will just access private information, good game 200k. And then they will say it's unfair and I'm not paying you. And then HN will go crazy. Mark my word HN.
Another interesting political debate killed off by the flamewar detector. Alas.
See, to me, "freedom" from a democratically elected government (which is by no definition authoritarian) sounds more like good-old oppressive feudalism. It was far worse than anything a democratic government has ever done. I see a strong, regulating, democratic government as liberating me from oppressive corporations. And we're not talking about the middle ages. The US suffered greatly under the oppressive power of the robber barons only 100 years ago. People like Carnegie, Frick, Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller ruthlessly exploited an entire country, and it took a lot of effort and the courage of Teddy Roosevelt to free America from those people through regulation.

I don't understand how people in a country freed from corporate oppression by government regulation a mere century ago can think that doing away with regulation can "free" you from anything.
The problem with such a test is that it is a limited attack surface compared with the real app in use. There is a log of messages that are encrypted but there are no possibilities of active attacks such as man in the middle attacks and others that attack the protocol rather than the encryption.
>he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking.

... for Christ's sake. Give it a rest, he's not a mustache-twiddling dastardly capitalist and the banking system is not trying to keep Bitcoin down.

The banking system is ignoring you.

I'm not talking about Winklevii clowns or a few comments from a few figures or a Senate hearing.

I'm talking about the corporations for whom 8 billion ('market cap' for Bitcoin) is pennies. Chase has 2.5 trillion in assets. It does not care about Bitcoin.

More importantly, no one in Bitcoinland seems to realize that Bitcoin is re-implementing our financial system, and doing it badly--perhaps because when they do, they realize how silly it all is.
> People tend to think that some level of taxation is necessary, because they think that some government functions are necessary. That's different than "lving taxes" in a general sense.

I simply disagree. I think most people believe that without taxation (i.e. without forcefully taking funds from people who aren't willing to give, even if that's only a small portion of the tax base), many things which are generally considered good (like care for the poor, infrastructure, public defense, etc.) simply cannot exist. To me, that is equivalent to "loving taxes."

Granted, the word "love" is a very complex and vague one, so perhaps I should have phrased it differently, like "people are intensely thankful for government."

> but I've never encountered anyone that both viewed themselves as completely dependent on government for anything that did not resent that complete dependence, nor have I seen many people that show any signs of feeling completely dependent on government for welfare or security.

I hear it quite often. My father believes very sincerely that military conscription is a great thing, because without it no region of people could hope to survive due to the threat of invasion and attack. People are also gratefully dependent on simpler things like food and drug regulations, public transportation, and even government postal services. I think most people sincerely believe that, without government, there is no way to have a stable, thriving, "civilized" society. I have even often heard people say things like "without government, we are just apes beating each other to death with sticks."

Honestly, apart from the people I have met (mostly online) who are explicitly against the existence of the state (who are obviously in a tiny minority), I don't know of anyone who doesn't think of government as the most fundamental and primary cause for the enjoyability of modern society.
Note to everyone in technology...Hacker News isn't the crowd that you need to impress.

The cryptanalysis community, in particular, has a small group of experts that can credibly critique your ideas. They would probably love to pick apart a new system...seriously in the hopes that it advances the art, but critically in the case that it doesn't.

Claims of some kind of "tightly knit" cabal of closed minded people excluding you would be a warning sign. (It sounds like creationism. Not that this is what these guys did. I'm just saying.)

Maybe instead of a competition they could have just approached some of the cryptanalysis community for an early look? Those guys could kick the tires and pass it on to others that they know. That really seems to be how this area works.
Their "dealing" with it was "oops, we rebooted a server and forgot to make sure transactions were run, here's $50 and enjoy your delayed trade".

After screwing up that badly they should have cancelled the order. Instead, they delivered coins paid for at $800+ at today's prices (~$500). I would be surprised, if BTC had jumped to $5000, if they'd have honored the $800 buy price.

The $50 credit is just inane, too. It's more of an insult to offer $50 than to offer no $ and a good apology. I'm not sure how they came to that decision.

Given their funding, they should have immediately taken full responsibility (let's be clear: a financial company's transactions didn't run cause they rebooted something...) and then offered to complete at the original price, or cancel the transaction - truly make the buyer whole. It'd be totally fine for them to do so, because if they fix their stuff, they won't need to worry about "jobs not running". So in this case, even giving the guy a 10% bonus would engender goodwill, as well as show the world they are serious about handling transactions.

I'll resist any snide remarks about Coinbase using MongoDB.

Edit: It seems after further consideration, they decided to give him today's price since it was their mistake.
Replying to the reply to my parent comment, since I seem to have reached HN's nesting limit.

Forms of control are not always very direct. Let us, hypothetically, say the big state actors jump in to take control of 80% of the available bitcoins available, under various entities, they have control and authority and little accountability.

This is already a reality in some equity markets, where retail investors are under 20% and rest of the players are institutional players. It will take much lesser than what it takes to move a large equity market, to move BT.

There is a good reason why there is no global barter system. It simply won't work at that scale. A global barter system -- that would be truly subversive.
A worse ratio of uses, but a much smaller total magnitude.
I am not an electrical engineer, I can't really judge the appropriateness or feasibility of various solutions.

But in the research paper cited by the Wash Post[1], there's a whole section where the authors discuss their recommendations, see under "VIII. SECURE CAMERA DESIGNS". Including some specific suggestions of how you would implement this design in hardware.

[1] https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...
If other people have a problem with the fact that I made money---and they shouldn't---that is their problem.

But I made my point: it's unjust to claim that everyone who made money on bitcon just got lucky and to therefore condemn them.
It's not really the camera controller that can be reprogrammed, it's the USB controller - there is a setting that the USB controller changes in the camera chip, but there is a nontrivial amount of logic done on the USB controller.

Still, it's a very, very cool hack: they reprogram a microprocessor to send commands to another microprocessor and configure it in such a way that it enters a state where the pin that the LED is connected to is irrelevant.
There have been various tools which have done this. And a lot had huge security bugs. Despite what you claim, this is also easily doable with journal plus similar solutions are available for journal.
It's interesting that you point to music, one of the most subjective and deeply personal areas of human culture, as your analogy for supposed objective qualities of Bitcoin.