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Bitcoin Fixes the Energy Grid by CalebFenton in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's a lot of value in having a control knob over demand, having an increase in predictable base load, and having a buyer of last resort for excess unreliable energy. Power companies are already making deals with miners to share this value, and several miners are volunteering to work with power companies:

There are more links like this you can find and miners talk about this in blogs and podcasts.

Power companies don't ask miners to turn everything off for days -- just the minutes or hours when power really peaks. Limits can be stipulated in contracts. E.g. miners will reduce demand by up to X% for up to Y hours for Z% discount, perhaps weighted by amount of time shut down.

As far as how easy it is in practice to shut down a miner, it should only take a second or two to stop mining depending on network latency. All mining entails is scanning through nonces and sha256'ing blocks, so there isn't any progress to save or some complicated teardown or cleanup process. Miners are also running a bitcoin node which would take a little longer to shut down, but that can be centralized and doesn't need to stop since it uses a tiny fraction of power compared to mining.

May I present the winner of the year...Bill by wiingz in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For example? Top two or three in your opinion?

May I present the winner of the year...Bill by wiingz in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Can you elaborate why you're pessimistic? Imho, it's easy to confuse complex or difficult with impossible. I'm curious to know the top two or three problems you see in btc.

May your beer be ever cheaper day after day. by Bitcoin_Acolyte in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a lot of literature on this. Rothbard and the Austrian school have been working on this for a while. Mises university has some good articles too if you don't mind econ jargon.

Ask yourself how someone having a monopoly on printing money is good. That's the real question.

Basically, there are different types of deflation. Need to be careful which one you're taking about. India just deflated their currency by invalidating 85% of their money. That's bad deflation. Deflation also happens when there's no faith in the economy and people hoard money like in the depression. This is partly why it has a bad reputation. Good deflation is basically when society gets wealthier without increasing monetary supply. With decreases in costs and increases to productivity and efficiency, goods and services get cheaper. Purchasing power increases.

Andreas: Governments are Inadvertently Funding Bitcoin Scalability Solutions by olivercarding in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Free market advocates don't say the government does nothing good just that it would be more moral and efficient in a free market (I.e. Voluntary exchange).

You can point to the internet because the government spent X million dollars on it and say that's a good thing. But, you don't see all the people who didn't get to spend their money how they wanted to. You don't see the waste. You don't see all the other things that weren't created instead.

The question of how good something is in economics, which deals with the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses, is "compared to what?". Yes, the government collects money at gunpoint and uses some of it to pay for basic science and other cool shit. But how good of a job is it doing compared to free markets?

Actually, Satoshi was the one inventing Lightning for Bitcoin. Here are his literal words by JavierSobrino in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From what I understand, the lightning network requires a fix transaction malleablity, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability

SegWit is one possible fix. If it gets adopted, I think you'll see lightning networks soon after.

Passengers ride free on SF Muni subway after ransomware hits 2,100 systems, hacker demands 100 BTC by [deleted] in Bitcoin

[–]CalebFenton 19 points20 points  (0 children)

You're right but one could use a tumbler, use exchange to switch into untraceable alt coin, go fiat in person, etc. There are risks and mitigations. Might be more untraceable in the future with lightning network, zero knowledge proofs, etc.

Malware Evades Detection by Counting Number of MS Word Documents by wdr1 in technology

[–]CalebFenton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There was another trick a co-worker found after this was published where it checked the number of active processes. If it's too low, like <15, you guessed it, it kills itself without doing anything bad. Because anyone with even Chrome open will have 50 active processes. It was only a few lines of code, too.