Adlai

I was slightly younger than fourteen when my fifth-grade teacher staged a bridge-building competition in the class. She priced the raw materials (mainly toothpicks, glue, and string; I can't recall what the various exotic items were), and graded us based on ineffables such as teamwork and empirical metrics such as how much we spent on materials and how much weight the completed bridge supported.

As is often the case, this review can be recommended instead of the book; anyone who still wants to read the book after the review, is quite likely to enjoy it.

You can restrict the supply within a single system, and value follows the network effect due to fear and greed.

https://coinmarketcap.com/ lists 650 alternate value storages which take up 650 million dollars. Bitcoin alone takes six billion.

No mention of Bitcoin?

Oh right, the experiment failed.

Too bad, too bad.

You just made me laugh out loud :)

Stellar has a consensus protocol?

Last I checked, there's a single blessed node dishing out verifiable data. It's nicer than having a remote API that just hands you a trusted number, but it's a far cry from Nakamoto Consensus.

Bitcoin transactions are much harder to censor than conventional fiat transfers, but the transaction graph is completely transparent.

Check out https://www.walletexplorer.com/

First, the one mentioned in the parent:

  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=26033

And a couple skimmed off the all-time best[1]:

  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=31722 (Nitrous Oxide)
  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=17787 (Mushrooms)
  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=104336 (Ibogaine)
  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=96838 (Methoxetamine)
  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=68367 (Sensory Deprivation)

Obligatory honorary mention:

  https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=68111

[1] - It occurred to me that I selected predominantly positive, or at least 'wonderous', reports. Dig around and you'll find some that are less so.

Seems like a good opportunity for a company that genuinely cares about employee health to make it easier for them to eat well by stocking the kitchen with healthy snacks.

  People asking questions, lost in confusion
  Well, I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
    - John Lennon

The other solutions proposed here work at the wrong level. The approach taken by I2P[1] does away with the concept of globally squattable names[2], leaving public keys as the global identifiers and letting individuals define local nicknames or delegate to trusted lists.

[1] https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming

[2] Even http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko is susceptible to squatting by those who can invest (or rent) computing power.

PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought tens of thousands of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a chumpatron[3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.

[3] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1446

Such scams only raise the price if the fools hold Bitcoin instead of what they most likely do: sell it for local currency. The scam's popularity does boost transaction volume, critical to the emergence of a fee market.

Yet another article about the somethingization of money that doesn't mention decentralized currency, or even plain old digital. I get that people love hating Bitcoin, but isn't it fashionable at the very least to nod at the underlying technology?

Today, Hock is on the advisory board of Xapo, claiming that "Bitcoin is one of the best examples of how a decentralized, peer-to-peer organization can solve problems that these dated organizations cannot." How about that pivot!

https://blog.xapo.com/announcing-xapos-advisory-board/

Your government shouldn't care what form of money you're using, as long as it gets its fair taxes.

Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".

Satoshi published a PGP key, but never signed any of his public communication. Reading the recent email[1] sent under his name suggests why:

Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barack Obama, or Satoshi Nakamoto.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

My favorite perspective on this Tragedy analogizes the Commons in question to a cavern whose acoustics preserve any sound shouted within. We could allow more people to shout at once, but that would increase the number of echos, increasing the total amount of "signal" and effectively decreasing the SNR when all you're interested in is a single signal out of the whole cacophony. As the permitted transmission bandwidth rises, the complexity of making sense out of the received data increases at some sharper rate that I won't just pull from my ass.

The fundamental right that must be preserved - the action that must be kept accessible at minimum price to anybody wishing to perform it - is not that of adding data, but rather verifying and interpreting that which is already present. Shouting should be expensive, because you hurt every other eardrum.

Forth is as high-level as you'd like it to be.

http://www.colorforth.com/POL.htm

Please avoid referring to the language as "CLisp". It's Common Lisp or just CL, of which GNU CLISP[1] is but a single implementation.

[1] http://www.clisp.org/

You missed the recursion:

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

I'm also reminded of an interview with an actor who said that cocaine didn't add much to his life, since he'd get the same rush from walking onstage each night, without having to spend $100 before or suffer a crash after.

I actually look forwards to the ads before movies on the rare occasions that I do attend cinema screenings. Since I watch no TV (and grew up without one) and make a point of minimizing my exposure to online advertising, this serves as an amusing little peek into the current state of pop propaganda.

Wouldn't the individuals behind organizations such as the EFF and ACLU gladly stand behind their message?

Edi Weitz's "Common Lisp Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach", listed on Amazon for December 2015.

There are coinbase flags for neither SPV status, nor honesty.

It's sensationalist to suggest this vulnerability is anything new. The warning is late, indeed... I'd suggest putting it in the Terms of Service of every SPV wallet, but then even fewer people would read it. Maybe a better approach would be a popup each time the wallet blindly trusts a new merkle root?

For the sake of quoting Greg Maxwell, I'd like to pick a nit. Bitcoin has no rules other than those you enforce yourself, and all these pools did was enforce fewer rules of their fellow players, than we assume they do.[4]

Optimize would be less judgmental than cheat and speaks more precisely to the motivations[1]... we do need to be careful about this and make sure we're managing the incentives. Cheating is a moral judgement[2]

Bonus quote, unearthed while digging up the above:

While the identifiable parties in question here were Chinese; the first miners I saw doing this in the pastwere not Chinese-- it's not a Chinese specific issue; its a response to orphan rate. (China just has lots of hash power and poor connectivity).[3]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c305f/if_you_are_...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/3c2jci/dail...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c305f/if_you_are_...

[4] One could interpret the block version increment as a policy advertisement, but you know what they say about assumptions.

The title is a little sensationalist. While the majority of wallets do only have SPV security, and such wallets were vulnerable to double spending during the recent fork event. The fork is over, so the wallets are no more vulnerable now than they were before (this vulnerability is not new).

I hope this incident has convinced other miners that the ~1% profit boost from "SPV Mining" is not worth the fork risk that it enables, although apparently one of the pools (Discus Fish aka F2Pool) has already been warned against SPV Mining in the past. Let's hope that coins lost through this fork event is the sterner warning they needed.

Two mining pools (Discus Fish and Antpool) were engaged in what's called "SPV Mining", where they assume a block broadcast by another miner is valid based solely upon the block header (essentially, just checking that the block was "difficult enough"), without verifying (or downloading!) the transactions in that block. This strategy lowers their orphan rate at the cost of the risk that they'd waste work by mining on an invalid chain. This low risk was increased by the BIP66 enforcement (activation happened once only 75% of the blocks had the version 3 "flag").

"Hey hey hey..." yep, that one doesn't quite work either.

"Do you want to know the secret of life? [I'll] tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have... it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety." - Bardo the Just, Neverness (by David Zindell)