flashdance

That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end?

Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field?

Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job.

I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.

That's exactly what it is. If you recall, these image based captchas were originally in 2007 for digitizing books. [1]

In 2012, Google started using captchas to identify house numbers from google street view. [2]

Now, users are identifying cars, bikes, traffic lights, and crosswalks most of the time. While Google/Alphabet has been mum on what specifically they're using the data for, it is speculated by engineers at competing firms that they are using this data to help Alphabet's subsidiary, Waymo, with its self-driving car program. [3] This data is either used as training data or to validate outputs that were already classified by their system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha...

[3] https://www.ceros.com/originals/recaptcha-waymo-future-of-se...

Well, I'll be damned. It looks like there's going to be a general strike primarily organized by the US Government. I guess horseshoe theory is real after all.

Seriously though, it'll be interesting to see how much disruption is necessary to force the hand of the legislative and executive branch to finally fund the government.

I think that's because nothing on wikipedia links to that page.

I managed to go from spud gun -> great depression -> dissolution of the soviet union -> soviet union -> sputnik, but I couldn't get the last step!

Oh, I see what you mean.

You can premine chain splits. See bitcoin gold, which had a premine of 100k coins, or the very coin this thread is about, with a premine of millions.

One public key contains 1.8B USD, but take a look at the address again:

3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r

See how it starts with a 3? Most normal bitcoin addresses start with a 1. The 3 means that it's a pay to script hash address, which means that its likely a multisignature address.

Multisig addresses require multiple signatures to send funds. This could be two out of three possible signatures, seven out of seven possible signatures, fifty out of one hundred possible signatures, it all depends how it is configured.

In short though it kind of works like nuclear weapons where you need multiple keys help by different people to authenticate a transaction.

Yes, maybe, kind of?

With quantum computing it's expected that the ECDSA public-key cryptography used in bitcoin addresses will be broken. However, the ECDSA public key is only exposed when your first transaction out of the address is signed. If you only use addresses once (recommended practice), an attacker would have to break your private key faster than it takes for your transaction to propagate to the entire network in order to steal your coins. It would take a long time between the first cracking of ECDSA to nearly instantly being able to crack it. For example, the first publicly-disclosed attack on SHA1 took 110 GPU-years.

If the accounts listed by the OP have sent transactions in the past and reused addresses (which was common back in 2010/11), it's possible the private keys can be bruteforced in the future.

If not, we don't know the ECDSA public key for the address. Bruteforcing it gets a LOT harder--but never say never.

Your source uses poor methodology to calculate inequality, and is really outdated.

The 2014 article you're citing uses this 2013 article [1] as a source. This uses data from bitcoinrichlist.com, which contains balances for all active bitcoin addresses at the time.

This sort of blockchain analysis isn't super useful, especially in 2017, because some extremely-rich people have funds in multiple addresses and some extremely-rich addresses contain funds for multiple people.

The richest bitcoin address in 2017 has 1.8B worth of bitcoin, but it's the cold storage address for hundreds of thousands of bitfinex users [2]. It's possible that many of the other addresses on the richlist are coinbase vault addresses or cold storage addresses for other custodial wallets. The important part is that, with some publicly disclosed exceptions, we don't know if a rich address belongs to a single person or an organization.

Meanwhile, the poorest addresses contain UTXOs worth pennies that cost more in fees to send than they're worth. These addresses have been completely abandoned by their users and have no practical owner.

Even addresses with a spendable balance don't correspond to one user ever since Hierarchical Deterministic address generation has become the standard. HD wallets generate a new address for every incoming transaction for greater privacy [3]. A typical user may have their funds spread over dozens of addresses.

That being said, I'm sure wealth is highly concentrated in the bitcoin ecosystem: it's just very hard to quantify to what degree it is.

Disclaimer: I hold bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bi...

[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmc...

[3] https://support.mycelium.com/hc/en-us/articles/207045475-Wha...

It pays dividends

It doesn't pay dividends in ETH, it pays dividends in more kitties. Is that really a dividend?

If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares instead of USD would they have any value?

This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.

Ethereum at least has a purpose, cryptokitties do not seem to have one. Besides, you can't just say that the price of one crypto asset will go up because a different one has gone up in the past!

That's an MMORPG for kids. You can go on quests, enter contests, chat with friends, post on their forums, make guilds, do battle against other pets, solve puzzles, trade on the NEODAQ, and make a little home. Pets cost a few bucks. Honestly from googling neopets it sounds an awful lot like a better version of club penguin.

With cryptokitties we're talking about 100K for a picture of cat. From what I've read the platform is dedicated only to buying and selling these cats.

The game's top cat brought in $117,712.12 (£87,686.11) when it sold on Saturday, 2 December.

Is it weird that I think that the cat that was sold for 100K was a wash trade (someone trading with themself)? Who would honestly pay 100K for a 'rare' digital cat? Just because something's rare doesn't mean it's valuable.

I think it's interesting foreshadowing that the developers are calling these "breedable Beanie Babies".

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

Fair enough, I just figured others may find the exceptions interesting.

And to be fair, both of those cryptocurrencies have been around for ~3 years now, which is practically ancient history in this field.

Monero and dash both have fairly good privacy built into the protocol [1] [2], although monero suffers from large transaction sizes and dash suffers from centralization as a result of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)#Privac...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_(cryptocurrency)#PrivateS...

Disclaimer: I have no monero or dash, but I do have various other cryptocurrencies.

Many are located in Georgia and WA (honourable mention goes out to Labrador), which have cheap hydroelectricity.

Your blog is excellent, but your BM1387 numbers are a hair off.

BM1387 has worse performance than 0.10J/GH @ the wall in practice. Bitmain has released 3 BM1387 based miners (S9, T9, R4). Only two are intended for industrial use and should seriously be considered (home mining is dead):

* The S9 is advertised as pulling 0.098 J/GH +10% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [1]

* The T9 is advertised as pulling 0.126 J/GH + 7% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [2]

However, measured performance in the field tends to be a better indicator. BlockOperations tested the T-9 and S-9 with wattmeters and discovered that the Batch 16 12TH S-9 burns 1329W at the wall and the 11.5TH T-9 burns 1352W, for an efficiency of 0.111 J/GH and 0.117 J/GH respectively at a fairly cool (60F) room temperature [3]. If the room is hotter (most mines are) the fans spin harder and the efficiency gets a tiny bit worse.

Only the earliest batches of S9s that had fixed frequencies achieved 0.10 J/GH, but they had serious issues with reliability and stability so bitmain switched to variable frequency, which helped the reliability and stability but hurt the efficiency.

Another thing you might want to factor in is that the actual hashrate of the bitcoin network is higher than the network difficulty indicates. Remember, roughly 2% of generated blocks are orphaned and never counted, so you should adjust your estimate upwards somewhat to account for that missing hashrate.

[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/specifications.htm?name=antminer_s9...

[2] https://shop.bitmain.com/antminer_t9_asic_bitcoin_miner.htm?...

[3] https://blockoperations.com/power-comparison-antminer-t9-ant...

Poe's law is working against me here, what gives away that this person isn't serious?

I think it's cool, by the way.

That's correct, but this isn't the same!

I've seen some folks on reddit mention you can get 7% of someone's deposited money as a bonus if you refer them. Only a ponzi scheme can sustain that sort of aggressive networking. This sort of referral system has been done before, for GAWminers, Pbmining, and Hashie--all ponzi schemes which later collapsed, of course!

That said, I'm not sure it's a ponzi scheme exactly.

Red flags:

* Incredible, almost unbelievable returns

* A referral program to draw in new people

* Open-ended IPO, the platform has no limit on investment

* Incentives for individuals to invest more (seriously, you get higher returns for investing $10k versus $100, it makes no fucking sense)

* People are prevented from withdrawing their funds until they wait several months.

* Operators are anonymous

* No proof has been released that they're not a ponzi scheme. Why don't they have audited reserves? We're talking billions here.

Every single red flag shows that this platform is designed from the ground up to pay old investors with money from new investors. 1% a day is a completely ludicrous amount of money to make from day trading. It's such a shaky premise.

I'm sick and tired of people deflecting for these scumbags. And yes, it's happened before--it was a scam then, and it's a scam now. Here's a very much abridged list of other things that had those red flags:

GAWMiners, PBmining, Hashie, Paycoin, Lunaminer, Eobot, Scrypt.cc

Feel free to google them and tell me if they're still in business.

If you guys want to check out the most ludicrous scam I've seen, take a look at Bitconnect. It's a 2 billion dollar literal (and I mean literal) ponzi scheme.

They promise 1%/day returns but only if you deposit your money on their platform for several months, they have a referral program with ridiculously high bonuses, and they have no real justification for the returns other than a bunch of technobabble about their "amazing" proprietary trading software. Of course, this doesn't explain why they don't just use it themselves without needing other people's money.

Also, the owners are anonymous.

I swear, there's so many red flags it feels like I'm playing minesweeper.

The most damning things about this scheme is their own marketing. Take a look at this video from their "conference": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXI5eGJK-CY&feature=youtu.be...

For the sake of full disclosure and identifying my bias I do hold some cryptocurrency.

Yeah the volatility is a huge problem right now, agreed! There's a lot of greed, too. It reminds me of 2013, but worse.

You wouldn't have a self contained lightning channel with every single merchant that has to be settled individually. I'm not sure what makes you think that, as my last post describes why the lightning network has "network" in the name.

I recommend you read the summary on lightning.network.

With lightning it's still ultimately settled on the bitcoin network.

Here's a lazy copy/paste from the site:

The Lightning Network is dependent upon the underlying technology of the blockchain. By using real Bitcoin/blockchain transactions and using its native smart-contract scripting language, it is possible to create a secure network of participants which are able to transact at high volume and high speed.

Bidirectional Payment Channels. Two participants create a ledger entry on the blockchain which requires both participants to sign off on any spending of funds. Both parties create transactions which refund the ledger entry to their individual allocation, but do not broadcast them to the blockchain. They can update their individual allocations for the ledger entry by creating many transactions spending from the current ledger entry output. Only the most recent version is valid, which is enforced by blockchain-parsable smart-contract scripting. This entry can be closed out at any time by either party without any trust or custodianship by broadcasting the most recent version to the blockchain.

Lightning Network. By creating a network of these two-party ledger entries, it is possible to find a path across the network similar to routing packets on the internet. The nodes along the path are not trusted, as the payment is enforced using a script which enforces the atomicity (either the entire payment succeeds or fails) via decrementing time-locks.

Blockchain as Arbiter. As a result, it is possible to conduct transactions off-blockchain without limitations. Transactions can be made off-chain with confidence of on-blockchain enforceability. This is similar to how one makes many legal contracts with others, but one does not go to court every time a contract is made. By making the transactions and scripts parsable, the smart-contract can be enforced on-blockchain. Only in the event of non-cooperation is the court involved – but with the blockchain, the result is deterministic.

I haven't explored sidechains enough to give you a competent tl;dr but the security model is discussed in the whitepaper I linked.

Bitcoin's block size should begin to approach 1.8MB (with a super theoretical maximum of 4MB IIRC) now that the segregated witness upgrade has been activated. In the long term, additional scalability can be done using the lightning network and/or sidechains.

In dirt-simple terms, the lightning network allows you to squash several transactions taking place over a long period of time into one of a much smaller size. It also allows instant payments. [1]

Another way to scale is using sidechains, which shift the transaction burden onto a complementing chain that has a two-way peg to bitcoin. [2]

Neither of these are production-ready yet, but should help improve scalability by a couple of orders of magnitude in the long run.

That being said the current price bubble is out of control and I would strongly warn you away from buying any--and for the sake of full disclosure and identifying my bias I do hold some cryptocurrency.

[1] https://lightning.network/

[2] https://blockstream.com/technology/sidechains.pdf

It's probably because you're calling him snow dog.

There is no evidence that PGP is compromised. In fact, the snowden leaks revealed that the NSA has "serious problems" following people through TOR, and is unable to decrypt some OTR and PGP encrypted messages.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...

You're an all-star. Thanks for this, the GIFS took up half my screen.

Just noticed I said Purism 5. It's called the Librem 5--and of course I see this after it's too late to edit! :'(

The Purism 5 is going to be using a baseband processor that's similar to ones used in car infotainment systems. It won't share RAM with the CPU and will be isolated from the rest of the phone. It'll even have a hardware kill switch, where you can physically sever the circuit, if you're that paranoid!

The CEO of purism did an interview where he went to a moderate degree of depth on the technical side, you can watch it here if you're curious. He mentions all of the above features in it, and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SwE9W8JasA

Fair point.