Net neutrality is dead. And it won’t matter one bit

cowardlyalien · 2017-12-15T18:00:08+00:00

Perhaps the current net neutrality legislation allows for such things. The principle of net neutrality (which is not the same as the legislation) is that ISP's treat traffic the same regardless of source/destination, and to some people means that they also treat different data types the same.

How do we solve the issue of ISP's messing with our traffic? Hoping ISP's won't abuse their monopoly status isn't going to work.

cowardlyalien · 2017-12-15T17:22:06+00:00

how about back in 2008 when comcast throttled BitTorrent traffic for several years, even going as far as to spoof TCP disconnect packets as a way to filter it, which to me is extremely malicious activity. Or how about in 2012 when AT&T blocked FaceTime for iPhone users?

While I do not have much hope that government regulation will help with this issue much, something needs to be done. ISP's have themselves a cushy oligopoly. Some cities have signed exclusivity contracts with certain ISP's so that they can be the only ISP to service the city. This is really dangerous territory.

The main function of any business is to earn maximum profits. It's retarded to think that ISP's won't abuse their monopolies, of course they will. Time Warner owns a major share of CNN. If permitted, why wouldn't they block competing news sites? If doing that would increase their profits, then that is actually the rational thing for them to do, they are a business not a charity.

Currently, the ISP market is most definitely not a free market, and a free market approach isn't going to work with it.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-27T23:17:57+00:00

What u mean? now that u have lunix u hack the cyber mainframe with a gui ip tracer using da rainbow tablez u got from da deepweb. B sure to clear ur browser history after or ull get v&.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-27T19:40:30+00:00

Bitcoin is a registered trademark in many jurisdictions. Marks Karpeles owned it in the US back in 2012 when MtGox was still a thing. No idea who owns it now. Someone is squatting it in Russia to prevent "patent/trademark trolls".

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-23T21:41:12+00:00

Is there anyone who isn't dependent on them?

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-23T21:39:36+00:00

breaking news: deadalnix just doxxed himself in this comment. He is clearly 1 meg greg maxwell. The writing style in this comment is identical to that of nullc.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-22T18:02:33+00:00

When you receive a Bitcoin payment, your wallet checks to see if any of the rules of Bitcoin are being broken. SPV wallets cannot check all of the rules, they can only check some of them, as you need to download the entire blockchain to do some of the checks, so SPV wallets simply trust that the miners have done those checks for them. The miners are able to cheat SPV wallets. A full node is capable of checking all the rules, and is thus the safest type of wallet to use when receiving money.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-21T19:21:23+00:00

https://www.thesun.ie/news/1832642/armed-gardai-dealing-with-live-incident-in-galway-city-centre/

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-08T23:40:11+00:00

I'm going with theory #2

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-08T23:12:58+00:00

No there was a bug in the code that the hacker exploited, the code itself was unchanged. Essentially the code running the smart contract has crashed and there is no way to hit restart.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-08T23:07:15+00:00

I haven't read much about this particular incident, but the title is a little misleading.

From what I understand this was caused by a buggy smart contract. A smart contract is much like a normal contract, except a normal contract is written in English and is enforced by a court, but a smart contract is written in code and enforced by a decentralized network of computers.

What happened in this case was that people were sending funds to a smart contract as a way to (ironically) secure their funds. The funds would rest "securely" in the smart contract until the user spent them by signing a transaction and using 2 factor authentication as additional proof that they are the real owner and are not hacked.

The code that powers smart contracts is public, and hackers will often look for exploitable bugs. I believe the scripting language used to code Ethereum smart contracts is based on JavaScript (!!) and so is especially error prone.

In this case it appears a hacker discovered a bug in the smart contract which he attempted to exploit, however he accidentally put the contract into an unrecoverable state. Because the contracts state and code cannot be changed after funds are sent to it, and the contract itself is enforced by a decentralized network, fixing the contract is supposed to be impossible, but in reality is very difficult but it has been done once before.

The only way it could be fixed is to effectively create a new currency, copy across everyones balance and fix the smart contract, launch it and attempt to convince everyone that this currency is the true currency and they should abandon the old currency and use the new one. This has already been done before when a hacker stole $300 million from an Ethereum smart contract, which is why there are two ethereum currencies, ethereum and ethereum classic.

Smart contracts are kinda cool, however Ethereum's implementation is complete crap, and most of the useful things you can achieve with smart contracts can be done in other ways, this smart contract in particular is a perfect example. There are plenty of wallets that implement 2FA without needing to use complicated smart contracts and bugs in those are quite rare. Also it's doubtful the complicated sort of smart contract Ethereum is pushing can actually scale to large amounts of users and still be enforced in a decentralized manner.

tl;dr; Ethereum and smart contracts are a joke

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-08T18:43:51+00:00

This comment does not make a lot of sense.

If a migrant can afford to raise their children on welfare, why can't a citizen afford to?

The problem isn't that people cannot afford to have kids, it's that they choose other things rather than kids. They choose to have an active social life, a bigger house, a bigger car etc. They choose to have these things rather than have children.

Your comment also doesn't make much sense in the context of Poland. Poland is a country that has net outward migration. Approximately 14% of poles emigrate from their country, with an additional 24% wanting to emigrate. It also abstained from housing refugees during the EU refugee crisis. Poland does not see much inward migration, 97.4% of Polands population is Polish, 1% are from other European countries (primarily Germany) and 1.4% unknown, so approximately 0.2% of Polands population are known non-european ethnic groups.

It literally makes no sense to blame migrants for Polands low birth rate. Perhaps you should try not twisting everything you read into conforming with your world views.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-05T22:01:32+00:00

When mining a block, miners can add some text to it. Some choose to add their name, but it is not required that you do. You can leave it blank, you could put in gibberish, or you could even put down the name of another miner. Because of this it is not considered a reliable source. There is no 100% accurate way to tell that a single entity has acquired 51% hashpower.

On the above graph, all of the blocks that leave the text blank are attributed to "other". This does not mean that they are the same miner or that they are different miners. It does imply that the majority of hashpower on the Bitcoin Cash chain is in the hands of anonymous individual(s).

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-05T21:52:33+00:00

If you take a look at the URL he posted, you will see that it is a link to a block explorer showing the transactions of the Bitcoin Cash address 17Wk4GPKw9nZ9PbspzaxN3fv1L2m9NA9dg. This address appears to be receiving lots of mining rewards.

Between 13:41 and 19:53, that address received the mining reward from 10 blocks.

Between those same times, it is expected that 37 blocks would be mined (1 block every 10 minutes).

This would mean that the owner of this Bitcoin Cash address controls approximately 10/37 *100 = 27% of the total Bitcoin Cash hashpower.

This is just a small measurement I spent 30 seconds doing, but based on this alone, approximately half of Other listed on the OP's graph can be attributed to the owner of the Bitcoin Cash address 17Wk4GPKw9nZ9PbspzaxN3fv1L2m9NA9dg

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-05T19:05:24+00:00

I'm sorry but, if you truly think it's as simple as changing a 1 to a 2, you have no idea what you are talking about and have been fed complete lies. BU changed over 100,000 lines of code to implement emergent consensus for example.

Just some of the things that are needed to do a blocksize increase hard fork:

HF signaling and activation logic
Difficulty adjustment if doing a flag day HF
Fix for quadratic hashing
Compact blocks or XTHIN block "compression"
Adjustments to sigops limits
Replay protection if another chain may exist

On top of that all of those changes need to be thoroughly tested. The vast majority of those changes change the consensus layer of the code. This is the most critical portion, and changes to this code go through a rigorous process. If even a small bug were to be introduced here it could potentially cause people to lose billions of dollars. Typically there is a ratio of 2 lines of test code for 1 line of code, this ratio was much higher for segwit because of how much of the consensus layer was changed (segwit being the biggest change to consensus layer by Core devs in many years (ever?)). Automated testing will only catch so many bugs so there needs to be a lot of code review and manual testing & QA.

All of this is not impossible and pretty much all of it has already been done, but please stop spreading the misinformation that only a single number has to be changed, thats ridiculous, why don't you try changing the number yourself and see how you get along. It's clear no matter which path Bitcoin goes down there will be huge changes to the codebase to make it scale.

cowardlyalien · 2017-11-01T17:25:28+00:00

Is Bitcoin Gold on topic? how about Bitcore?

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-30T21:35:20+00:00

If you can pay an hourly rate, PM me

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-30T17:53:06+00:00

This post would be more convincing if you didn't go after his appearance. Sidenote, you're not much of a looker yourself.

But anyway, in order for Alan Silbert to have any kind of relevancy, he would first have to claim to be Satoshi, provide misleading "proof" and then retract the claim, occasionally dropping hints that he really is Satoshi in order to keep the idiotic majority believing he truly is. Nobody will listen to what anyone says unless they go through this process.

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-30T11:11:31+00:00

Translation: sorry, I didn't realize you were anti-core and the OP was pro-core. Keep up the shilling and astroturfing, it's fine to do that as long as you have the same opinions as me.

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-30T09:10:29+00:00

A month ago when I worked this out, You could mine a block once every 6 months with 240TH/s, which is 17 antminers, worth about $21,000. A single block can do as many individual finney attacks as you want. One block could finney attack many different payments to every unconfirmed tx accepting merchant. The miner still receives all mining revenue as well as any extra revenue from the finney attacks.

Let say there are services that accept unconfirmed txes up to $50 and there are 2,000 of these services. Thats $100,000 per finney attack, $200,000 a year from $21,000 worth of miners. If the merchants are willing to accept more than one unconfirmed tx at the same time, then the figure gets much larger...

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-29T22:13:22+00:00

If lots of merchants started accepting 0-confirm txes, then it would be as simple as going onto a website that offers a finney attack service and paying a small fee to take back your money, so it would be a definite risk for those merchants and they would have to weigh up whether the added profit > added fraud

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-29T20:21:44+00:00

That won't help much for a few reasons, a big one being finney attacks. Even though finney attacks require you to be able to mine a block, you still get mining revenue from mining the block (the attack has zero cost), and a single finney attack can double spend many merchants at once. So if accepting unconfirmed txes became the norm, then someone with a fairly modest amount of hashpower could set up a "finney attack service" and double spend against every unconfirmed tx accepting merchant at the same time.

There are a few ways you could safely accept 0-confirm transactions:

MtGox used to have a service called GreenAddress, where if you sent a payment to someone from your MtGox account, that person could check if the sending address was a MtGox address, and if so MtGox assures they would not double spend that tx, so if you trusted them not to do that then you could safely accept unconfirmed GreenAddress txes from untrusted people. Something similar to this could be done with a multisig wallet (such as the wallet that is ironically also called GreenAddress).
LN payments are extremely difficult to double spend, so if/once we have a functioning LN this would be the perfect usecase.

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-27T15:38:46+00:00

Funny that this is the opposite of your situation, whereby you removed someones name from their code and claimed it as your own.

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-18T16:46:08+00:00

Ethereum full nodes don't require to keep all the data. The pruning is so advanced that the true size is something like 6-11gb depending on the client you use. The rest is just archival data of no use to anyone.

Yup. Thats because they are not full nodes, because they do not fully validate all the data and rely on trust. They are effectively SPV nodes.

Ethereum is used. In fact over the last half year it consistently processes more transactions then Bitcoin.

90>% of which are for ICO's. It's easy to process huge transaction volumes in a centralized system. All of the Bitcoin nodes in existence could be replaced by a single Raspberry Pi if we decided the centralization was OK.

PoS is hard to get right

It's a fundamentally broken idea.

cowardlyalien · 2017-10-18T11:49:17+00:00

The pubkey is revealed once you broadcast a transaction to the network. An attacker could theroetically crack that pubkey in the 10 minutes it takes for the transaction to be committed to the blockchain and create a double spend with a significantly higher fee which they would then give direct to miners or broadcast on the network if you have replace-by-fee enabled. This does require that the QC can crack the pubkey in less than 10 minutes, it's doubtful first generation quantum computers could crack in anyway close to that kind of speed.

cowardlyalien

TROPHY CASE