Taek

51 ms·

691.
by Taek 6y ago
I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the same wallet/address until more features are rolled out
692.
by Taek 6y ago
You're telling me the fine is something like 5% of the profit collected from making the 737MAX?
693.
Deeper Implications of the Recent WhatsApp Policy Changes(blog.sia.tech)
1 points by Taek 6y ago|0 comments
694.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin has the most infrastructure surrounding it. And Bitcoin is the most careful to make life easy for infrastructure providers. Eth is very challenging to operate securely. Breaking updates are frequent, often with little warning. Bitco
695.
by Taek 6y ago
Makes you wonder if this sort of strategy should be legal. Uber wants you to make decisions like choosing to live in a home away from public transportation because you know you can use Uber instead of the train. Once you've made that d
696.
Verifiable Computation on Skynet Using a Merklized Virtual Machine(blog.sia.tech)
2 points by Taek 6y ago|0 comments
697.
by Taek 6y ago
The title says "puzzle solved" which I think is clear enough that the article is not claiming to have found the actual Satoshi Nakamoto. Admittedly, I did think initially it was a Bitcoin puzzle that got solved, but I am not disap
698.
by Taek 6y ago
If your coins are 99.9% biased it means you are going to need more than 5 coins. Bias approaches zero exponentially fast as you add more coins, and in this case it means you'd need 1151 coins at 99.9% bias per coin to have a simulated
699.
by Taek 6y ago
A run like 0000000 is only compressible if it appears more often than it would in a fully random output. And in a fully random output, we would expect the run '0000000' to appear about once every 16 bytes. When you compress 000000
700.
by Taek 6y ago
This is the exact type of bad intuition that the article is trying to warn against. A purely random number - including the output of SHA2 - is going to have long consecutive strings of 1's or 0's. Here's a simulation: https:
701.
by Taek 6y ago
I think you've misunderstood my method. We aren't using the Von Neumann extractor here, we're counting the total number of heads and saying "heads" for the result if the count is even, and "tails" of the r
702.
by Taek 6y ago
I'm guessing you didn't read the post? It covers the Von Neumann trick, why that doesn't work in practice, and then it also explains why using biased coins to generate random numbers results in real security when done correct
703.
by Taek 6y ago
If you know a coin is biased towards heads, the most likely outcome is all heads. So you'd start by guessing all heads, then guess all combinations with one head, all combinations with 2 heads, etc If you don't know the bias you c
704.
by Taek 6y ago
Ah whoops you have to multiply the whole product by 1/2. (0.5 + 1/2 * (coin product)) not (0.5 + (coin product)) Thanks for pointing out the mistake. I've edited the blog post accordingly.
705.
by Taek 6y ago
edit: Math mistake in the blog post, now fixed and updated. I was missing a '1/2' that you have to multiply the entire product of the coins by. -------- old comment enumerating all possibilities: You can see the example is co
706.
Generating Cryptographically Secure Random Numbers with Coins and a Cup(blog.sia.tech)
72 points by Taek 6y ago|49 comments
707.
by Taek 6y ago
I would argue that being a public company has the same pressure as being VC funded only much stronger. Cloudflare is increasingly pushing their position as the world's biggest man-in-the-middle, and things like their new secure DNS are
708.
by Taek 6y ago
Profitability isn't necessarily important to the strategy of a VC company. Everything is about the exit, and most exits are either acquisitions or IPOs. Neither type of exit mandates profitability, and both care capable of offloading t
709.
by Taek 6y ago
There's a dashboard for it somewhere and iirc something like 50-80% of bitcoins haven't moved in over a year.
710.
by Taek 6y ago
It's not semantics, it's an incorrect worldview. Miners follow revenue. If miners had chosen to mine Bitcoin Cash, all that would have happened is they would have lost a ton of money competing with eachother while the miners who s
711.
by Taek 6y ago
I like https://foundationdevices.com/ Foundation devices is committed to using fully open source designs, all the way from the software down to the firmware, the hardware designs, and eventually I believe they hope to open
712.
by Taek 6y ago
Ledger is closed source, which is not great. Also, we've submitted bug reports to them before explaining how malware on a laptop could extract coins from users, and the response we got was 'won't fix'... Which is not gre
713.
by Taek 6y ago
The main purpose of Bitcoin is not to buy a pack of gum, it's to provide a sovereign store of value with a stable monetary policy. Bitcoin's energy bills are paid for by its users via transaction fees and inflation. It's a we
714.
by Taek 6y ago
"By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork." This is incorrect and a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Hard forks require
715.
by Taek 6y ago
There is no question though that a lot of people have put their faith in Bitcoin. Misplaced or not, that original comment is wrong :)
716.
by Taek 6y ago
Twitter is an odd suggestion. I think the highest signal-to-noise ratio is probably podcasts. I'd start with 'On the Brink' and 'Uncommon Core'.
717.
by Taek 6y ago
We're using blockchain technology to build a decentralized cloud where users can store data on remote hosts without having to trust them, and without giving up ownership of the data. The blockchain is a critical part of the infrastruct
718.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin's value is fundamentally monetary in nature. Bitcoin itself (less so the cryptocurrency space as a whole) is about financial sovereignty, stable monetary policy, robust uptime guarantees, and resistance to manipulation in the g
719.
by Taek 6y ago
A blockchain is a lot more than just a data structure, it's an entire governance system that needs a community around it and active maintenance, continually running nodes, etc. It is more like a discord server than it is like a data st
720.
by Taek 6y ago
Deaths per million in Korea is a factor of 80 lower than in the US. Even if they return to previous highs they are way outperforming the US.

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