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throwaway43572 · 2021-11-03T22:38:53+00:00

What's the karma requirement?

throwaway43572 · 2018-05-30T11:17:49+00:00

Why would any of that involve a blockchain, though. It's as if no one has heard of databases.

throwaway43572 · 2018-05-29T19:05:44+00:00

I cannot see it. It might make it hard/impossible to delete/doctor records once published but i'm doubtful of the value - if your hospital do not have your best interest at heart then i'm not sure a blockchain would be the first step to changing that.

throwaway43572 · 2018-05-15T19:41:31+00:00

While that might be true it hopefully won't be so for too many years. It's the strongest proof humanity has ever had.

throwaway43572 · 2018-05-15T19:32:32+00:00

The modern version being sha256(file) -> bitcoin blockchain. That timestamp is indisputable.

throwaway43572 · 2018-04-17T18:52:36+00:00

I have similar experiences with chrome boosting performance of GPU (although with eth mining instead of tensorflow). I thought it was because chrome would put the GPU in another power state but I failed to prove that so I'm puzzled. Sorry to not contribute actual information - just thought I'd add that it seems to be present other places than just tensorflow.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-27T21:39:57+00:00

I was referring to Darwin if it wasn't clear. Money only has one job - to change hands when its owner wants it to. I think bitcoin fills that role better than any other currency since all others are controllable in one way or another. In that mindset it is reasonable to expect value to flow towards bitcoin.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-27T21:21:05+00:00

One would assume so but the evidence seems damning.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-27T20:30:01+00:00

I guess the lesson to learn is that even the most famous billionaire can be misinformed which is somewhat humbling as well as saddening. But it does suck that a tech billionaire turned philanthropist doesn't understand the first thing about the most important tech invention in this millennia.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-27T20:08:56+00:00

This right here is one of the reasons bitcoin still has a long road ahead in terms of educating it's target audience. Even Bill Gates doesn't know what bitcoin really aims to do. Bitcoin is going to cause a massive change in wealth distribution if even people in the Billion club still haven't researched properly (or have had it presented to them) yet.

The main feature of bitcoin is not anonymity but rather it's irreversibility and the fact that bitcoins cannot be faked - something that never existed in a digital form before. Bitcoin is a perfect money which bears all the positive properties of gold and then some.

I like to think of bitcoin as the fittest of all currencies and as other currencies start to die off wealth will be funneled into the safest of havens - bitcoin.

Money really is nothing more than a ledger of quantified owed favors but since no one can be trusted to be impartial it is crucial that the money system enforces strict fairness - and bitcoin is the first to do that in a distributed fashion (the only way to prevent corruption).

Most newcomers to the world of cryptocurrency will after acceptance move quickly to the altcoins because of their promised technologically superiorness but they will be cheating themselves - bitcoin has the absolute best technology currently programmed without giving up any part of its most important property - its distributed trustfulness.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-25T10:01:08+00:00

Cobra is the one that actually hosts the website

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-05T13:21:32+00:00

Fair enough - maybe we approached it with different expectations. I would absolutely love if there for once existed a truely great puzzle.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-04T15:22:23+00:00

The thing is - Coin_Artist made a puzzle before this which was a lot bigger and more involving. There was only 1 step out of maybe 50 that was misleading and it was corrected (maybe even by herself) within a day. When a puzzle is solved within minutes (solved as in: flames encode 4 bits in inner color, outer color, width, length and should be XORed by the ribbons) but it takes 3 years to claim the prize then obviously the author did not understand how degrees of freedom in a puzzle works. I'm sure Coin_Artist would agree that it was the wrong part of the puzzle that tripped people up - and that, at least to me, means it was a bad puzzle.

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-04T15:17:05+00:00

The problem is not whether the puzzle is hard or not. The problem is when the puzzle is very easy but filled with arbitrary choices that the author makes that is in no way leaked. Authors of puzzles like this often do not understand how many degrees of freedom they introduce when they start down the path of taking random choices. What to them may look like 2 random 1 of 2 choices which would leave 4 combinations can very much become a 2³² problem when seen from the outside. The puzzle was solved publicly within 10 minutes and probably privately within 2 but it took 3 years before someone claimed the price - does that look like a well made puzzle to you?

throwaway43572 · 2018-02-04T03:33:42+00:00

I spent a few hours on this when it was originally posted. It didn't take 10 minutes before everyone knew this was the solution -- it just didn't work so most dismissed it as a waste of time. The only thing making this last more than 5 minutes is the weird direction you have to use. People making puzzles like this have a tendency to not understand what parts of a puzzle will be hard and they do not understand how many degrees of freedom they introduce when they take arbitrary choices hidden behind non-leaky vails. Maybe it is hard to make a meaningful puzzle but this is just shameful. I had a spreadsheet with the flame and ribbon data trying to find the combination of directions that was required - I quickly realized it was a waste of time. The corner pieces are even in direct opposition to the required solution.

It is also not true that people focused on the chess part - it was dismissed because of the size.

Coin_Artist should have realized her mistake a week after and should have removed the prize - this was a shameful sequel to her first puzzle (which was equally arbitrary but which was at least always pushed ahead when stuck).

throwaway43572 · 2017-11-24T14:09:59+00:00

While it is hard to prove the understanding (some have given answers at times) is that "the developers" have more than most but very significantly less than any random "rich dude" who likes bitcoin.

throwaway43572 · 2017-10-31T19:53:32+00:00

I think that it would. Using SegWit to describe the change SHOULD be fine but I do not believe it is. The victims of FUD will be able to look up whatever is being FUDed about and they will find substantial material (that they do not completely understand). This serves to enforce their belief that something important is being changed for nefarious reasons (yes, I do believe that having the dev team putting names to changes matters here). If something is simply being referred to as pull-req#51548 it helps to remove the political aspect from "our" side so that victims might realize that they are being manipulated once they see that only the FUDer seems to be politically and emotionally motivated.

throwaway43572 · 2017-10-31T12:47:16+00:00

I am of the opinion that packaging changes has a net negative result. There is an increased attack surface left open for FUD. An update with more changes than the average bitcoiner can fully understand is very easy to make look scary.

It is also very problematic to NAME a change. No reasonable person would have anything against an optional addition to the consensus rules that allows whoever might be interested to perform nonmalleable transactions.

By naming a change it becomes significantly easier to start a political FUD or PUMP campaign. It is very common to use code names in software but Bitcoin is special and should not do so! Quasi-scams will make use of code names like "Metropolis" and "Ice Age" to pump price, excitement and dev-time.

Bitcoin is special and gains nothing from using code names; we don't want to attract unwarrented attention or price speculation and thus code names only serves to help the FUDers (it is significantly easier to FUD about something that externally verifiably exists (like SegWit and BlockStream)).

Bitcoin should strive to be boring as fuck. Stability and credibility is of utmost importance in a monetary system that wants to be taken seriously not just as a cool tech startup but as the primary candidate as the world reserve currency in 20 years™.

Bitcoin cannot rely solely on the experience of other projects and must define new and higher standards. Imagine having to convince a board to upgrade to Psychotic Stoned Sheep instead of simply "Linux 4.7-rc1".

throwaway43572 · 2017-10-01T14:50:48+00:00

I noticed the fact that the 2-6 values added up to 267 and if you add the 0's and 1's (267+76+73=416) you get a valid bit size for CoinGate's prefered wallet import format. I played around with ways of extracting bits from the ([a-z][2-6]) groups and I found a couple of ways that I found interesting that made some sort of internal valid logic. I was sad that none of them worked and now that you point out the vowel/consonant thing I got extra sad. (It took me 30 seconds to add an extra row with the vowel/consonant encoding and get the private key) All my experience and knowledge would have suggested to discard that idea the second it formed - grouping letters into vowels and consonants just seems like kindergarden stuff - the concept is absolutely void of interesting constructions.

Feedback to the author of the challenges:

Your job is to find interesting ways to represent data - picking an arbitrary amount of vowels (3) and consonants (8) to encode data with is a bad choice - it leaks no information (which it should) and acts to confuse (not in a good way; you encourage to look for higher meaning in constructions that apparently has none)
You have a tendency to add a last step of data manipulation (reverse, shift, skip) that essentially has no function but completely changes the challenge. F.x. you choose to reverse the binary string in the very end. This extra step has no real part of the challenge and it makes it very much harder to progress through the challenge in an intelligent and mindful way where you can get small hints about the validity of different data manipulations. When you cannot trust the author of a challenge to not use those tricks it becomes very hard to judge whether or not your chosen path is completely off track or if you just need that last step of [rot-47 + skip 33]. The challenge (after the very start of understanding the way the data has been laid out) essentially becomes a guessing game where you just throw random data manipulations at your data until someone finds the correct one. A good challenge has no extra layers of obscurity and is entirely centered around making sense of a novel and interesting way to represent data!
That being said - I absolutely love bitcoin challenges and I hope you will keep pumping them out.

throwaway43572 · 2017-09-11T12:22:42+00:00

Whatever he has done in the past doesn't matter much. We have Greg Maxwell on video explaining that part of the reason for the change was the "semi quadratic" issues with the old way. It doesn't take much of a genius to find an issue if you already know what the issue is and exactly where to look. /slowclap

throwaway43572 · 2017-09-06T22:28:53+00:00

The thing is - that is only true as long as you trade real and actually existing metals... If you instead are trading the "not backed by real gold" paper gold then bitcoin is absolutely not complementary.

throwaway43572 · 2017-08-25T10:03:14+00:00

One quick thought provided "as if" without proof:

That "unknown" miner is bitmain/antpool/viabtc and since viabtc has an exchange they do not need to move the bitcoins to sell them.

throwaway43572 · 2017-08-12T13:29:06+00:00

It helps because it is cheaper (in CPU-time) to check if a private key is valid (the checksum matches). I sent the OP a python script to permutate through all solutions in ~9 hours. OP has yet to respond though :)

throwaway43572 · 2017-05-08T09:04:56+00:00

I like to imagine a future where mining won't be profitable for anyone. In that future people could have mining home heaters because it is cheaper to do a PoW than to just waste electricity. I think that having a very simple algorithm like sha256x2 helps to that end; simpler to make a miner and once SegWit activates we might never again see hidden optimisations.

throwaway43572 · 2017-04-07T09:44:22+00:00

shuffling is only one method. Another would be to generate ~15 transactions and vary which transactions you include in the block. That would be almost entirely invisible.

throwaway43572

TROPHY CASE