flashmob

Would you say that this has limitations and it's not a silver bullet? Eg. What if your software added numbers, formal verification proved that your program was indeed correct because it added the numbers. However, it missed the requirement that you also had to do subtraction, which for some reason was omitted in the specification.

True, no statistic tells to whole story and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I think this metric has a lot of psychological value as it's easy to grasp and has been generally accepted by the bitcoiners when it was 80%.

Do you think there could be any other metrics that can tell a better story? (serious question, just wondering what your thoughts are)

Interesting to note that at the same time bitcoin's dominance in the cryptocurrency market is down to 55.5%, hugging historic lows. http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

I'm failing to see your point. I do not know why, nether don't care, why Alice wants to buy currency B. Maybe she just wanted to buy some coffee from Charlie, and she was comfortable that her transaction didn't burn thousands of dollars of electricity to verify it? Maybe it was early in the morning? Faster block times means she'll get her coffee sooner. If that was the reason, let's hope she was satisfied with her coffee. I also do not care why currency B got so popular, but I suspect it may have been because of the coffee ICO ;-)

Oh, and then there were cryptocurrencies C, D and F too, but that's a different thought experiment.

> useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources

Thought experiment:

Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B.

Alice mines A.

Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware.

So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would Alice see that she "destroyed physical resources" for currency B? (Yes, to Alice she had to destroy physical resources)

Later, Alice wants to transact with Charlie, who also holds currency B. She transfers her B to Charlie, that was bought using A. Would Charlie care that Alice had to "destroy physical resources" to get B? (No, that information is useless in a PoS system)

Some time in the future, currency B becomes very popular (as it's just as secure and not wasting resources like currency A). Alice wants more B too, so she exchanges her B with the masses. Eventually, currency B takes over A in popularity, and by that time, Alice has exchanged all her A for B. The question is, would Alice now view that to get B, she had to "destroy physical resources"? Would that fact matter if she continues to transact with Charlie?

Thanks for clarifying.

Sorry, didn't mean to bring out the ASIC debate so strongly - my point was mainly that the research is not exclusive, and can be shared between projects, as in the litecoin using Segwit example.

> Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it

It's not like the research is exclusive. Note that any research done on bitcoin can also be shared and used on other projects. Litecoin for example, which is a fork of bitcoin, is now benefiting from bitcoin's R&D by using Segwit first.

Likewise, other blockchains can teach a lesson for bitcoin. For example sha256 proved not to be a good hashing algo because the reliance on ASICs, which centralizes mining. Another important area in research is the development of other greener forms of blockchain security such as Proof of Stake, which will most likely replace Proof Of Work once perfected.

In a way, when I think of bitcoin, I think of it as this whole massive umbrella project that includes all the alternative blockchain projects too, that can all share their research / experiences / ideas with each-other. This is the beauty of open source software.

It's not censorship - it's called consensus.

Look back to the screenshot in my post. Censorship is when you conceal information. The screenshot clearly specifies a yes/no choice without leaning to any choice. (it specifies you can use any chains you want, both buttons are blue).

If only the bitcoin core developers were as brave as that to put something like this in their client and let the community reach consensus! "Hi, we are over capacity. Do you want bigger blocks? Yes / No". Instead, we see any post that doesn't fit their narrative deleted. Now that's censorship.

Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules 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.

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...

Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to Proof of Stake (PoS) mining in the future.

You're right. Household CO2 emissions are nothing compared to commercial / transport.

Just look at airlines. As a random example, Qantas Airlines, in the 2015 financial year, burned $3.9 billion AUD worth fuel! (About $3 billion in USD).

Source: page 15 of their annual report: http://www.qantas.com.au/infodetail/about/corporateGovernanc...

For a minute I though I was looking at the real github and they finally got rid of that black bar. Well done! ;-)

It's happening already, although very subtle. For example some see Facebook as a digital nation. This is an interesting article from 2011 making this observation http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/the_rise_of_facebook_nation/

Perhaps 20th century western nation-states won't get totally abolished soon, but they'll see a lot more competition from virtual states in the near future!

Sounds drastic, but once there is runaway greenhouse effect, something drastic would need to be done to cool the Earth.

Your idea of carpet bombing might just work, provided that the result would produce aerosols that have the similar effect of those produced by volcanoes (volcanic winter)

Building railways is kind of like visual programming.

The Railway orientated programming comes to mind http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/

Technically, no history was re-written! No transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules. 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.

Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to POS mining in the future.

Programmer's laptop: A good quality, high performing, non-widescreen laptop with a 4:3 aspect rato.

Why? With a taller screen, there's less scrolling and your eyes don't have to jump as much when reading from line to line.

I would like to know if there would be a market for this and why manufacturers phased out 4:3 displays?

underground

How about miner's fee, is that added to the transaction?

In the About, they say that they make 2 undependable dust transactions.

Would there be any incentive for miners to confirm these transactions and store them in the blockchain? If there's no incentive to confirm the transactions, then the miners might find a way to filter these out of the blockchain.

See also dust transactions:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10986/what-is-mea...

http://bitcoinfees.com/

Interestingly, some of bitcoin's roots originate from spam fighting. The idea of the 'proof of work' function that is used by bitcoin came out of the idea of Hashcash http://www.hashcash.org/ (as referenced in Satoshi's white-paper).

The hashcash idea wasn't so successful, although it's still around and somewhat useful. One problem of hashcash was that the difficulty didn't adjust, making it somewhat unfair, not taking in account GPUs, etc.

On the other hand, bitcoin solves the difficulty problem that was with hashcash. Perhaps in the future, bitcoin could be used for ensuring the smooth delivery of priority emails.

I'm a huge fan of PhpStorm. However, I'm wondering what's the purpose of having vagrant in an IDE?

Vagrant is easy to work already, just 'vagrant up' and you're away. What problem does the IDE solve? And looking at the interface, the 'halt' button is too close to the 'destroy' button. Might have an accidental click there...

It would be cool if they had an interface such as WAMP Server, where you can select the php versions, php extensions, start / stop services, log files, v-host configs, etc, all from one menu. Now that would be very useful.

GOTO 10

The commodore 64 rocks as an educational tool about computers! Here are some interesting things that we did besides games:

- Sprites. You had to use pencil and paper to calculate the bit values on a bit map and convert these in to DATA statement in BASIC

- Modifying bytes directly on the disk to change some ASCII text to whatever you like.

- Going to K-Mart and program the demo machine with some prank program and let it run.

- SAM Text-to-speech. We hooked it up to the phone mic and used it to do prank call our friends.

- Peek and Poke any part of memory, sometimes get funny results

- Typing out programs from magazines and watch them do funny things, flip text or other effects

- Connecting to a BBS

Fun times!

With advanced tech, there is no need for them to build probes. Eg. use wormholes to peek in to any location in the universe, or some other teleportation system. Probably that's why you can't see them. Source: Sci-fi films.

One should not get too dependent on just one tool as Grep, sacrificing some useful features of dynamic languages... In the Javascript example, (and possibly others), it is still possible to easily find where the method was defined - open a debugger, add a break point on console.log(ray.getPosition()); and step in to it. there are many other tools to help you, for example, many modern IDEs have powerful inspection features these days.

Another great thing:

gofmt - Go has no style guide, just this tool!

Committed code ends up looking cleaner and you don't have to adapt to other's wacky standards. No more tabs vs spaces arguments or where to place that brace... brilliant.

http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#formatting

DEA users are most likely long time internet users who care about their privacy and have learned to protect their email. At the same time, they have enough interest to register and try your stuff - so let them be... If the site requires users to enter an email address for freebies, savvy users will eventually find a way around it, as you suggested. You might also be blocking the early adopters. Eg. bloggers who want to review your stuff, etc!

Ultimate hackers laptop would be one without a wide-screen! Bring back the 4:3 displays that we had in the old day please. These were good for reading and editing text/code. You can't buy any decent laptop without a wide-screen, so you will have no competition in this area.

Does persona reveal your email address to the website that you login to?

OpenID usually doesn't reveal your email address.

For example, when logging in to Google via OpenID, google will only send back a unique identifier that means 'yes, the user has a google account' but no other personal information. Yahoo does the same.

(of course, it's possible to use OpenID extensions to get a user's email at their discretion)

Does persona work in the same way?

Without a doubt, a talented developer. He made some very useful libraries. Sad to learn of his passing...

Actually, the earliest mention is here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch

Other famous usenet posts: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html