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Every time you hear about cryptocurrencies that allow fee-less, immediate, eco-friendly transactions, it's worth to wonder why dominant cryptocurrencies still suffer from those issues.

For example, one reason for the existence of transaction fees is to prevent network from being DoSed (overwhelmed in terms of processing and storage) by flood of "free" transactions. How can e.g. Nano handle this problem with no fees? This and other problems are discussed in section "V. ATTACKVECTORS" of their whitepaper [1].

Unfortunately, rather than provide concrete, mathematical solutions, the white-paper provides mostly "discussions" of why those issues are not really a problem or that some feature will prevent them (e.g. PoW attached to each transaction - which in itself is form of a fee, non eco-friendly and might be prohibitivly slow at scale). Those discussions are not researched enough to give assurance that Nano would function efficiently and securely if it were ever to get popular.

Blockchains are very inefficient and a we're still figuring out how to make them faster and cheaper without sacrificing too much security and decentralization. But as is often the case - there's no free lunch. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.

[1]. https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf

You're referring to the Terms of the website, not "Ethereum 2.0". It's like agreeing to the Terms of Use of a Bitcoin wallet. It doesn't mean that Bitcoin is a "centralized joke".

It's not my field, but I remember reading that your example doesn't represent entanglement because when put into envelopes, one marble is already red and another blue.

In quantum entanglement they are both truly and really random until you measure one. And it's not random in a sense that you closed your eyes when putting them into envelope. They actually both don't have a "selected" color. They "snap into one of two colors" when you measure (look at) one. And the "unbelievable" thing is that when you measure one, the other one immediately snaps into opposite color, no matter how far it is.

This reminds me the bet in the bitcoin community [1]. If on average bitcoin blocks are produced every 10 minutes, and you learn that 5 minutes ago someone found a block, what is the average time you will wait for the next block? It turns out it's 10 minutes, not 5 minutes as you would intuitively think. (it's a memoryless process, so average expected time till block is always the same - 10 minutes - no matter how many blocks were recently found).

In other words, when you're waiting for bitcoin transaction to be confirmed and go to check how long ago the most recent block was produced, in order to estimate how soon the next one will come - you're doing it wrong. Even if previous block was found 9 minutes ago, you're average waiting time for the next block is still 10 minutes.

[1]. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7rs8ko/dr_craig_s_wrig...

This is because running code on Ethereum VM and storing data is hugely expensive (rightly so, as it's being done on all nodes in the world). Therefore Solidity will try to compile into a VM code that uses the least numbers of cheapest instructions and pack data into as small memory package as possible.

I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it can.

I have no confidence that Bitcoin or any other currency doesn't fork in the future, because it is possible at any moment. The fact that the fork has happened or not changes nothing - it always stays as a possibility.

In other words the chance of Ethereum or Bitcoin hard-forking in the future wouldn't change if the hard-fork didn't happen right now.

This is a very one-sided discussion which makes it seem like it was written by a person who wants Monero's value to rise. It doesn't mention any drawbacks of Monero - like poor scalability - that blocks it's wide adoption. There's also a good deal of FUD around Dash and Zcash, which has been quickly refuted on reddit [1].

Apart from that I liked this post and it shone some light on issues I wasn't aware of.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4nai1r/on_fungibility_...

Please check aiopg [1]. There's also an interesting list of packages for asyncio [2].

[1] https://aiopg.readthedocs.org/en/stable/

[2] http://asyncio.org/

Yes, it is a single process application. But to utilize all cores I use Gunicorn to spawn multiple processes.

http://aiohttp.readthedocs.org/en/stable/gunicorn.html

Unfortunately the code is not open source - I'll try to open parts of it in the future.

But please do check this simple gist I found some time ago that helped me understand how powerful asyncio is:

https://gist.github.com/gdamjan/d7333a4d9069af96fa4d

We see people hyping all the time for NodeJS mainly because it can handle millions of concurrently open connections. Now we get a much cleaner (IMHO) way to achieve the same thing in python (of course python is slower) - i.e. see aiohttp as websockets server. I would not call it a disaster.

I've been using the new async/await syntax to write beautiful asynchronous websockets server and I fell in love with it. It handles hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections (on top of aiohttp) and the code is so much cleaner than it would be with i.e. NodeJS and Express and Promises. It reads like a serial code.

I think benchmarking asyncio with any type of CPU bound tasks misses the point. Previously we were relying on hacks like monkeypatching with gevent, but now we've been presented with clean, explicit and beautiful way to write massivly parralel servers in Python.

It's not only a distraction but outright dangerous. People got used to accept every banner with word "cookie" in it. There were cases in Poland where scammers would add "and I subscribe to X and will pay Y monthly" onto the cookie banners and then send invoices to customers (as long as they could get their address, e.g. when they came via email link).

I thought so too, but saying "two most popular" actually makes it perfectly clear which one he refers to later.

"available for the two most popular operating systems and some lame one nobody outside of it’s devoted cult following actually likes."

Really? Lame one? Devoted cult?

What you are writing is exactly why I threw game theory into the mix. Game theory show strategies that given a certain set of rules are beneficial for the player or all players (for interesting example see Nash equilibrium). The example you have given in first paragraph, that forbidding slavery creates a better environment for the whole of it's people is exactly just that - showing one strategy to be more beneficial than the other. It's not showing that slavery is "objectively" wrong. I remember seeing a nature documentary where two species were explained to live in something that could be seen a master/slave symbiosis which benefited them both. (As a sidenote, I'm all against slavery and I do not accept causing harm to others no matter how beneficial it would be to myself).

You say that "people tend to live better lives" and "I would like to live in" etc. This is very subjective. As for quantifying wellbeing of members, we may ask if it's better for 100% of society to feel well, or is it better for 80% of society to feel fantastic and 20% miserable and in fear. It's again a matter of opinion and we can use mathematical concepts like game theory to better explain using formal methods why some moral values would be beneficial for us and other's not. That's why I threw it into the mix.

You also say that some opinions are better than others. This general statement is very dangerous and was used throughout the ages by proponents of slavery, racism etc. They definitely claim that their opinions are better than yours while you do otherwise. The thing is, some opinions are better to achieve certain goal given some set of circumstances, rules and participants. Acknowledging that opinions and moral values are not objectively right or wrong doesn't make us crazy to pursue those that we see as moving the society we live in in the direction we want.

The article doesn't provide anything to back the claim that moral opinions may be universally, non-subjectively true. The cartoonist example is deeply flawed. We're outraged because this event violated our deepest beliefs and values we hold dear, not because it violated some universal eternal moral law. We also know that there were people that weren't saddened by this event too.

This is the problem I have with many philosophers. In the whole text you cannot find a single strong logical evidence. Everything is just an opinion.

It is impossible to prove that e.g. "stealing from others" is universally "bad". It may not be a beneficial strategy in a game theory, or maybe some statistical analysis can show societies are better off with this rule, or just that people sleep better knowing that others can't steal. But neither of this is universally true for humanity in general, and there are examples in game theory were cheating actually is a winning strategy.

I still struggle to understand why we need to have a real address of domain's owner publicly assigned to WHOIS data. The registrar knows the owner so it is available to law enforcement if lawfully necessary. Owners can also use SSL certificate to show their address if they need to. But why force them to make it always public?

Using VPN will not change Russian laws, but GitHub not complying with the request might help Russian tech sector realize how dangerous and ridiculous the law is and trigger more pressure on government to change it.

Since they're not sure if they found a security related error or not, I would rather make a disclosure to Bitcoin dev team fist before going public with it.

Please see my comment above. For all practical purposes, GHash pool owner controls the whole hashing power - he becomes the owner of each mined block and can do whatever he want's with it without users' consent.

I don't think you're right. The mining machines are pointed towards Ghash pool owner and he becomes the owner of the mined block - that's how he can distribute the BTC to everyone who contributed. So in practice, he controls the whole hashing power and can perform the attack without users' consent.

I think this may be the way for attackers to force price of BTC to fall down, then buy tons of them to sell when the price goes up again.

.. and if it was not some kind of brain-wallet (supported by Electrum, etc.). If it was, then the wallet can be regenerated from memorized hash.

That's the reason I really hope most of the software will be webbrowser-based in the future. I know that right now native apps give you a better overall experience but too often they pull you into the walled garden of hardware vendor.

There are solutions like phonegap etc. that let you write semi-native apps that use embedded browser inside it, but with HTML5 and successors I believe it will be possible to just have everything run in a browser, setting everyone free from any vendor specific solutions.

Don't give your data to this site until they fix this:

http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...

One problem I see with self-affirmations is that they only change your perception of what you can achieve, not what you actually can achieve. No amount of self-affirmation will help you become a painter unless you take the pain of learning how to paint. And failed expectations after some time build frustration. So you must be cautious of what you make yourself believe. There is a joke about a guy that was praying his whole life asking god to let him win a lottery. He never did, and after his death he asked god why. The god answered "What could I do? You never bought a lottery ticket".

Come on guys, claims with no backing data?

The author writes "user testing is probably your best bet. But if you’re a knowledgeable and experienced designer who can think about problems from the user’s perspective, then you can solve this problem through design analysis."

This is so wrong. Actually design analysis can turn out to be completely wrong. You need to test it, get some numbers, and then you can claim that conclusions of your analysis are correct. Right now it's just a claim that may or may not hold.

It's worth noting that there's a pwdhash Android app, though not authored by the pwdhash.com creators.