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Comment: Re:What we've learned from Bitcoin (Score 1) 187

by IamTheRealMike (#46471507) Attached to: The Future of Cryptocurrencies

For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.

As pointed out by another poster, 2.6 TB of transfer quota per month is trivial even by today's standards: anyone can afford that. And should Bitcoin ever scale to those levels it won't be relying on today's resources, it'll be relying on tomorrow's. So your own example falls apart almost immediately.

Also, rather than just guessing what the US population "needs" why not take a look at existing networks? 2000tps is about a fifth of VISA traffic for the whole world. Of course not every transaction goes via VISA, but it should indicate to you that maybe your numbers are once again a bit sketchy.

You can read an article I wrote a long time ago here: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. It goes over the various ways the system scales up. Performance is unintuitive, there's no substitute for just working it out on the back of an envelope. Bear in mind we live in a world where single websites can generate a large fraction of total internet traffic and not go bankrupt.

Comment: Re:Makers and takers (Score 1) 646

What you call "out of circulation" could also just as well be called "savings". By forcing savings to be spent via taxes on them, all you actually do is artificially move spending that would have happened in future into the present day.

This is terrible outcome for two reasons. One is that it results in huge liabilities for future spending - we can see this in the various insolvent pension schemes that are looming on the horizon (e.g. CALPERS which will never catch up to where it needs to be by now).

The second is that the so-called "growth" in the economy that results is in reality merely some arbitrary economic activity: the fact that it took place can be measured, hence growth, but whether it was actually useful or increased societies wealth is harder to measure and often explicitly ignored. If by taxing savings you force people to instead put their money into a housing bubble, that then triggers a construction boom, this appears to central bankers/planners to be successful economic growth whereas in reality it's merely a gross misallocation of resources towards investments that wouldn't normally make any kind of economic sense.

Comment: Re:Makers and takers (Score 0) 646

You can't have a printing press controlled by humans and not have it be ultimately end up abused for political purposes. Central bankers are not somehow magically immune from bad decision making just because they're unelected and unaccountable: they are explicitly given their mission by politicians and their mission is economic growth at any cost, even if it means sacrificing long term stability for short term gain: exactly the same thing as the politicians mission.

We can easily see this in recent times, with central banks desperately trying to jack their economies via free money in order to try and solve political problems, like recessions or possible Eurozone breakups. Does this really make long term sense? No - running the printing presses at full speed in order to make something, anything, happen is not a sensible economic policy. Nor is doing so to bail out profligate and badly managed countries to achieve the entirely emotional and political goal of keeping them inside the Eurozone. And indeed Draghi resisted the latter for a long time, but eventually the public pressure being heaped on him daily ("Draghi will destroy the euro" etc) got too much and he caved.

This is why Bitcoin has the most sensible economic policy of all. Long term, it's meant to have no inflation and no deflation. It's meant to provide a stable monetary base. And critically, it's independent of any individuals who will inevitably give into temptation to try and shape things through money creation.

Comment: Re:...and this wont change because (Score 1) 160

by swv3752 (#46457871) Attached to: Top E-commerce Sites Fail To Protect Users From Stupid Passwords

I had this with my Gas Utility company. I can only see the last couple of digits of credit card. The worst someone could is pay my bill before I am ready, or see how much gas i am using. Why do I need to use a 16 character alphanumeric case sensitive password that requires multiple special characters. I work in IT and have to maintain strong passwords, even on government HIPAA systems, and the gas company is more stringent.

I have ended up setting up an auto-pay and have not touched the account in two years.

Comment: Is there a way to make it explode? (Score 1) 371

by gelfling (#46453475) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Can I Prepare For the Theft of My Android Phone?

In South Africa the way we typically defeat car thefts is to leave a bottle of liquor in the glovebox and it's laced with cyanide. Usually they get about a half mile, die and crash. But it's just a fender. Drag out the dead guy, get the dings knocked out, you're good to go. I wonder if there's a way to kill the thief by making the phone explode though. Or at the least electrocute his face when he holds it up.

Comment: Re:Snowden's an expert? (Score 1) 115

by IamTheRealMike (#46449003) Attached to: SXSW: Edward Snowden Swipes At NSA

Haha, yeah, anyone who can take on the US Government and win is by definition an expert in national security. By now he probably also read more documents on national security than even the most highly cleared guys. He had everything from the minutiae of NSA tech to reports written for the inspector general. Given the rampant lying that occurs inside the security state he's probably the only guy with any clarity on how things really work at all, especially because judging from previous behaviour around the Wikileaks incidents, a lot of the NSA/DoD guys will have refused to read any of the public reports in case they get "contaminated" by classified materials!

Comment: Re:What exact laws were broken? (Score 4, Informative) 115

by IamTheRealMike (#46448285) Attached to: SXSW: Edward Snowden Swipes At NSA

Lots already. Even if you ignore the Constitution, people running the NSA and general security state have been caught lying to Congress (a crime), lying to the kangeroo FISA court meant to be overseeing them (contempt of court), lying to regular courts about whether defendents were being informed about the origin of evidence against them (more contempt of court), violating FISA court orders (more contempt), and re-interpreting the PATRIOT Act in such a way that even the guy who wrote the damn thing was shocked - that's just normal law breaking: you aren't supposed to be able to "reinterpret" laws however you see fit.

But when you ask "is there a way to charge anyone with a crime", I think you already know that the answer is yes just because there are so many vaguely worded laws in the USA that basically anyone can be charged with some kind of crime. What matters is whether you actually ARE charged, and that's an entirely politically driven decision.

That's the situation in the USA. In the UK the laws are much worse and much vaguer, believe it or not, to the extent that there's basically no functioning oversight at all - the UK equivalent of FISA is not only not a court, it's actually staffed by anonymous people! There's no way to find out who even sits on it. And they have never ruled against the intelligence services even once: FISA Court has at least made a token effort to appear useful. RIPA, the law that is claimed to authorise such collection, is so vaguely worded as to be basically useless as a law - it would appear to authorise practically anything. And the Prime Minister, unlike Obama, has rejected the very notion that there might be a debate at all - simply asserting that if GCHQ does it, it must be by definition be OK.

So even though the situation in the USA is dire, it's actually not as bad as it could be.

Comment: Liberals will call this another Obama victory (Score -1, Troll) 494

by gelfling (#46447371) Attached to: Ukraine May Have To Rearm With Nuclear Weapons Says Ukrainian MP

Keeping in mind of course that Obama gets most of his foreign policy advice from Walt and Mearshiemer, both of who are staunch advocates of 'neo realism' and who both lobby for the ideas of neo realism developed by their mentor the father of neo realism Dr Ken Waltz. And what is one of the foundational beliefs of neo realism you ask? It's that nuclear proliferation is a GOOD and stabilizing force in the world. The more countries have atomic weapons the better. Waltz had a 4 part debate series with Dr Scott Sagan on this very topic where over and over he comes out in favor of nuclear arms for all nations no matter how unstable they appear to be.

Loose bits sink chips.