390 karma · joined April 3, 2014
Now, if it was Cookie Clicker (basically the same formula) I wouldn't be surprised - that actually has nice graphics, a broad appeal, lots of dark humor.
This is a great game (the web version, at least) but not at all something I'd expect to go mainstream.
You couldn't ask for a better story - the opposite of what Bitcoin really is when you think of it - finance, computers - stuff that bores the hell out of most people. Instead: drugs! conspiracy! magic internet money! Now, add "Satoshi" - mysterious inventor who's vanished. Seriously, you can't write this stuff!
Now, here is another p2p storage-meets-bitcoin idea that actually has a very informative paper, Permacoin: http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf
Compare the StorJ whitepaper to the above :)
"Who the f*ck are they to send me reliability patches, when they can't even get the basics right?"
I remember reading Microsoft made a push to get hardware vendors to use ECC Ram with Vista - they recognized a lot of crashes were due to this (but XP would get the blame). No go.
I recently bought and returned three(!) 3TB drives because I found they were silently corrupting data every 500GB of writes, or so (verified by testing on multiple systems) - I switched to 2TB from another brand, and had zero issues. I only knew there was a problem because I wrote a burn-in script to copy & verify over and over. File system, OS does not care. It's the drive's job.
Almost every USB stick I've ever used eventually had some small corruption issue - again, no way to catch this unless you are looking for this kind of thing.
Average consumer does not think this is even possible - the idea of your data silently getting scrambled seems impossible, like a car randomly being unable to break - it is just assumed this sort of thing does not happen. But as hard drives get bigger and people put more RAM in their systems I think this will become a huge issue. Of course, consumers will blame "a virus" or something along those lines.
Unlike PythonJS, it does not have the goal of being 100% Python compatible, but instead takes the CoffeeScript approach. So, like Coffeescript, you get (mostly) clean Javascript output, no huge library dependency, runs nearly as fast as Javascript, etc.
Check out the "ants" demo - http://salvatore.pythonanywhere.com/RapydBox/default/editor
I've been playing around with both PythonJS and Rapydscript, and I like both. Different goals. PythonJS can output to Lua, too - so there's the whole Python in LuaJIT angle which could be very interesting as it matures.
There's no reason you couldn't get randomness from the blockchain itself - the act of finding blocks is itself a random number generator. Using an external source is incredibly centralized, and advertising this as decentralized is scammy.
All the alt-coins - even the most legit sounding ones - have this incredibly scammy side to them. Dishonest claims, premines, etc. Yet people pump their money into them anyway. Apparently this coin raised $265,000. All you need to do to get rich in alt-coin land, is come up with a half baked, poorly implemented idea, and ... duck! because people are going to THROW money at you.
edit: their homepage states "There is no central point of failure." -- Uhm, how about violating the NY Lotto's terms of service? The client is just getting a http (not https) feed from nylottery.ny.gov, I wonder how long until they add a captcha? What happens to the value of your chancecoins then? :)
I'm thinking a hybrid console meets explorer: When I type "ls *.png", why don't I get a sortable table? Or, if I mouseover a filename, get a preview?
I remember "type BBSAD.ANS" in the DOS days - you'd see an animated ANSI right in the terminal - but I can't type "view lolcat.png" in 2014 (without shifting focus to the GUI).
Maybe this is overkill and not worth it, but I've always felt there's room to make the CLI a little more GUI-like
Also, in this thread you say "There are proof of storage techniques" - I have seen others talk about this (paying people to store data: StorJ, maidsafe) and it seems flawed - you can never know how many copies of your data are truly floating around. If you give me a financial incentive to store "multiple copies of data" I will do it in the cheapest possible way, which means storing it on 1 machine and lying about it.
There is a big difference between storing 20 copies of a file on 1 hard drive vs 1 copy x 20 hard drives, but there is no algorithm that can tell me (the file owner) which is occurring. How do you plan on monetizing "store other people's data" fairly?