flashmob

For nation-states, nuclear weapons are not hard to do, they are 1940's technology after all. Once a source of uranium is available, the only obstacles are international treaties and countries that enforce them. Iran and Iraq's geopolitical situation makes it less delicate to enforce.

Same with rockets. The technology is basically 1950's and they would also have plenty of samples from the 60's and 70's. These days there are plenty of examples of amateur teams sending things to space and even private companies can build better rockets than nation-states.

Also, to add, I think a lot of the perception that North Korea is technology backwards is thanks to propaganda which is often exaggerated. Having seen a computer science team from there speak about 15 years ago, I was quite impressed by their level and sophistication (it was a presentation about the kwangmyong network) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network) so I'm sure they have many other clever people in other branches that are competent to work on anything the state requires.

If there is a hardfork and you're staking then I'd imagine you'll also be automatically staking on both chains, nothing to do. Hardfork only matter if you're transacting at the time of the fork, your transaction could be replayed on the other chain or if a reorganisation happens, in that case you may want to wait until the fork gets resolved.

Why all this morality police? It's just humorous, and to understand the double meaning, it requires quite a bit of imagination.

To be fair, I think it's more common for security projects to take on more aloof names. Who could forget "John The Ripper" or "back orfice" from the cult of the dead cow? I'm sure there are many more ..

Sure, I can see your point. It's a problem for computer scientists, and good to know as an anecdote. I'm talking about it in practice - when using TypeScript the 'halting problem' has never been an issue. I was joking about the 'kill -9' but also meant it in a half-hearted way!

So, if not turing complete, what kind of automata would you use to accept your language, say if you were designing your own language?

> As far as I can tell you can’t step through tests in the debugger

Actually, you can, if your IDE lets you. Eg. In Intellij if you're using the Go plugin, you will see little green arrow in the margins of your tests. Set a breakpoint and click the little arrow. The new Gogland IDE has this too.

Aha! I had a look to confirm, and you are right! In essence, html + css is not. However if we have a human hitting tabs and spaces for a long enough time, then for all intents and purposes, perhaps it is? Anyhow, it's still very impressive that we can do a lot of complex computations simply by hitting tabs and spaces!

Turing complete means that it's a simulation of a Turing machine, but not actually one. A TM is something purely abstract that was invented to prove the halting problem, and infinity of the tape is arguably the most crucial concept. Computers do not have infinite memory / power / time so the halting problem doesn't really make sense unless you talk about a pure Turing machine with infinite tape.

In most cases, you know something is wrong once your typescript compilation takes more than a few seconds. At most, it could be an interesting DOS attack, but most continuous integration systems should have a limit on how much seconds they can run the compiler for. So it's really not a problem if you have constraints on resources...

> you can write a valid TypeScript program that will never finish compiling

Sure, typescript program may never finish compiling, although it will still halt: Just `kill -9`. The halting problem solved! ;-)

Seriously though, there are many languages / systems that are 'accidentally Turing complete', including CSS + HTML, and it doesn't really impede them. See http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...

There wasn't any competition to mine it for a long time, so post-mining would have been just as effective as pre-mining. We know that Satoshi ended up mining a lot of Bitcoin. Of course, all well deserved. Further reading on this topic: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis-hashra...

Wow, amazing. That's a lot. Is there any reason or incentive why so many names despite not many use it?

Btw, full ENS stats here https://ens.codetract.io

Some recognized projects that didn't have an ICO:

https://etherdelta.github.io - decentralized exchange is getting decent volume. Ironically the hacker dumped the veri tokens there.

https://ethlance.com - freelancer market. Looks like a place where once can earn Ether for coding in Solidity and related gigs.

http://ens.domains - .eth domain registry. Highly successful, will be integrated into the upcoming 'mist browser' release, plus a few other places (wallets & exchanges) support it already. Over 133k names registered.

Probably more I've missed.

Let's have a look...

> and a private key akin to the signature

Nope, a private key is not akin to a signature. It's akin to a... key? Or perhaps a special pen / wax-seal that you use for signing? I don't think there is an exact analogy?

> To carry out transactions, those codes are passed between bitcoin wallets

Lol, nope. Private keys are not passed around. Neither the public keys (assuming they mean 'addresses' here), which are actually hashes of the public key.

I too bought, about $800, at the bottom right, to place the words "Million Dollar Script". The script cost $50 a pop, and allowed you to make a self-hosted copycat site.

I was quite busy for the next few months as orders kept rushing in!

I've also had a few competitors pop up & the script was pirated, including some selling it on ebay, they even forgot to remove my contact email, so their customers were coming to me for support.

Eventually, the fad died down, but it got a lot of business out of those 800 pixels.

Thanks Alex, if you're reading this, for the original idea & letting my ad on your site.

Again, I think this is where we differ - you're thinking in terms of stocks and shareholders, but there are no shareholders here. There are no shares that represent ownership of anything, and the most important distinction here is that when the fork was created, there was no transfer of ownership, which is the key concept in your argument.

Also, if I change my level of abstraction to think about the problem as you say, it would appear that the attacker was trying to injure the project, opposite to your Casey example, where she was the victim. Those that had 'skin in the game' did what they had to do, to protect themselves from the attacker. I don't think the attacker was naive, they would have known that such a move would inflict a loss of value for the project.

I also think that the hardfork was the best outcome for both parties: Classic represents the value of Ethereum should it have chosen to keep on going with the attacker, and Ethereum Fork is the value representing the attacker absent. Everybody wins, the thief would be pretty happy with their loot regardless (if it's legally theirs, maybe it's not). In your Casey example, she was left with nothing, so it's another important distinction to make.

Btw, thanks for replying and for the debate. It's been a pleasure.

tbf, the bug was triggered not only because of theDao's code, but because of a combination of other conditions, including the way the virtual machine executed the code. The meat of the exploit was executed in the attacker's contract, as explained here https://medium.com/@MyPaoG/explaining-the-dao-exploit-for-be...

The token holders of theDao did not approve running of the attacker's contract, since they did not agree to the attacker's contract. At least that's how I interpret it.

Also, the word "contract" is not the same as a contract in law, it's more of a buzzword. They are just programs. So I don't think a program can have legal meaning by itself because it also depends of the semantics of the machine & how it interprets the programs. What happens if the code is correct, but something in the machine is broken?

The rules of the Ethereum virtual machine were altered later. I think the 'fallback function' now has a limit of 23k gas, correct me if I'm wrong, so attacks like these are more difficult, if even possible.

So you are saying that people who run a piece of software with a certain configuration option set to "yes", are breaking the US law?

> agree to sell the assets of FooCo to BarCo for $1

This is where your analogy breaks. The classic chain was not sold to the forked chain.

It would be more comparable to Alex & Beth getting together and creating new company, copying all the books & records from the old company (that were public domain), minus Casey's balance. Without buying the old company. Customers of the two companies could go to any company at any time they wish, except for Casey, who is not a customer of the new company. That would be legal in US?

There are a few other issues with your interpretation:

- Coins do not represent shares of a company. There's no stock.

- There's no voting: At most, the miners probably have voting power with their hashrate, however as the linked article stated, a soft-fork was impossible to do, so even the miners could not vote.

- Hardfork was not a vote. Even if you said "Yes" to the hardfork config option, you could still go back and say "No" to play with the classic chain at any point in time. (Refer to the screenshot in my OP)

The classic chain is still there, anyone can use it if they like. That's probably the best thing that happened, both groups had their own way and went their own way. You can't satisfy everyone and keep them on the same chain.

Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to a new state set in the future. The users of the new version also had a choice if they wanted to support the fork or not, the majority went with the fork. It's not like anyone was forced to fork. Actually, you could even run both, and I did for a time until it was clear who was the winner.

This is a screenshot of the choice everyone was asked when starting up their wallet: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et...

Thanks. Glad I checked the profile.

You've wet my appetite. Got a link to your book?

Unlike bitcoin which was originally intended to be used by the consumer for paying for real-world things, ETH is mostly intended to be used for paying for 'gas' in order to execute code in the virtual machine. The good thing is that gas and ETH have been decoupled, which means that the gas prices are always constant, and what you pay per transaction tends to get automatically adjusted based on the price of Ether, so transaction costs don't fluctuate as much.

What you're probably interested in are "Stable Coins", crypto that is pegged to a fiat currency such as the USD or EUR. It may be possible that stable coins may be developed to run on top of Ethereum as smart contracts. One interesting project under development is Maker Dao, see https://makerdao.com/

Exchanges don't care about any particular coin. They only care about their users. If their customers demand trading of segwit2x then that's what what will happen. There could be a lot of opportunity for trading segwit2x because the volatility which is what traders like. Same goes for all other bitcoin forks, it's going to be a trading bonanza for the exchanges!

Other metrics indicate could be just that it's holiday season. In the northern hemispheres, people are outdoors & enjoying the summer.

This coincides with the sudden drop in Google searches for bitcoin and others, also I've noticed the number of users online on poloniex has dropped significantly. This seasonal pattern was first observed with bitcoin, check this out: https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-...

Also, other negative news: 1. Alphabay, the largest darknet market went offline, not sure if that is significant. 2. Bitnumb, largest(?) crypto exchange in South Korea got hacked, also not sure how much impact this had, but usually an exchange hack has a short term effect on prices and there has been a lot of recent activity in SK.

Other reason may be that boom and bust cycles are a natural occurrence of crypto markets. They were getting white-hot for the last few months and finally need some time to cool. So move along, nothing to see.. The cycle continues. The next boom might be bigger than anything we've seen before :-)

Type system is pretty cool in go. Particularly how the interfaces work, you don't have to explicitly declare that your object /type implements an interface, it automatically figures it out.

Lack of genetics makes the code easier to read. Much better with interfaces. Check this out http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/

Hmm, not sure about cycles too. It sounds more like CPU clock cycles, may be confusing to those who see it that way?

Note that there is also one more limit, the max gas per block limit..

Personally, I quite like gas, not too hard for a casual dev like me to understand. However, perhaps in the future it could be something that is totally abstracted, since asking everyone to understand how gas works is too much.

No, gas is a synonym for fee. However, gas is its own unit, separate from ETH.

Each op code in the EVM has a gas price, depending on the complexity of the instruction. Eg. A store op costs more gas than a comparison op.

When you do a transaction, you specify how much ETH you will pay for one unit of gas. Typical transactions use 21k gas, but contracts need much more.

More info about why it's like that:https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-the-gas-i...

I often see 'gas required' 'gas limit' and 'gas price' terms confused, so careful what you read in the comments on the internet ;-)

> best practices there dictate copy-pasting approved code

Not entirely true. In Solidity, you don't need the whole code to call other contracts, you just need their interface (function signature) and you can call any contract.

You'll see all the best practices use interfaces these days.

Agree with all other points, especially about the math safety - there needs to be more support for financial math too.

.XYZ is used by Google's parent company Alphabet inc. I thought that gave .XYZ a bit more street cred, I guess not.

https://abc.xyz

> Who exactly is pro-North Korea that the US is trying to sway?

Perhaps China.

However, propaganda doesn't have to be false. It just has to fit the narrative.

Hmm. This could even be an attack on bitcoin itself? We already know North Korea is bad, then North Korea uses bitcoin, therefore bitcoin = bad?

In this case, there would be a motive to plant a false attribution to North Korea.

Or, how about a QR code?

There needs to be a fairer distribution of the tokens if they want this to succeed. This is because token holders become the ambassadors / evangelists for the project.

There's probably a lot of disappointed people who missed the crowdsale - this means the project would have a lot of salty opponents now.