vbuterin

12 ms·

61.
by vbuterin 12y ago
There is absolutely nothing wrong with premining, if it is done honestly and transparently and especially if your coin is using a consensus algorithm that has no need for regular mining in the first place. Let's evaluate the fairness o
62.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Ripple consensus.
63.
by vbuterin 12y ago
There should be a name for deliberately making a big fuss of following every regulation as expansively as possible to prove a point; inverse civil disobedience, civil obedience maybe?
64.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> An upward price trend (existing for whatever reason) encourages hoarding, which reduces liquidity. This creates a feedback loop, resulting in bubbles and crashes. A downward price trend encourages splurging, which provides excessive li
65.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Sounds like "go ahead, but if you start trying to sue us then we'll sue you"
66.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Right, they also have: 十 = 10 白 = 10^2 千 = 10^3 万 = 10^4 亿 = 10^8 This leads to the non-Western-like feature that the word for a million is 一白万 (1 10^2 10^4) whereas ten million is 一千万 (1 10^3 10^4) instead of 十白万 (10 10^2 10^4) which you m
67.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I'm not a steak-and-fries person at all (or even a sandwich-and-salad or rice-and-veggie person, which I've internalized as my own safe defaults); I go out and have unfamiliar dishes quite often. If I want to do something amazing
68.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Chinese: 零一二三四五六七八九 Africans are a diverse group so I expect that they have many different systems.
69.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Works fine for me right now. When someone creates a competitor to BCI that provides SPV proofs in an API, I'll be the first to include fully validating support into pybitcointools. Until then, sorry, convenience and zero loading time (
70.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Because nobody wants to store and maintain a local copy of the blockchain. Simple as that. That's why I use blockchain.info for everything and not bitcoind.
71.
by vbuterin 12y ago
What these guys just did here is actually a very clever idea in another way. Suppose that there exists a weakness in 1 in 2^30 curves, and each curve takes 2^10 steps to generate. If they picked seeds NIST style (or even using cos(1), exp(c
72.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I think you just agreed with the comment you said "that's not true" to.
73.
by vbuterin 12y ago
It's useful in "shoot a ball out of a cannon at 50 m/s at a 27' angle, how far does it go?" problems.
74.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> Everything we do, will ultimately be undone, if you extend the time horizon long enough. Well, not necessarily. Economics quite clearly says that the total future benefit of any amount of nonzero-benefit present activity, at least if m
75.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Actually, you can even argue that the blockchain itself is a similar concept. It's a Schelling-point-based system for determining consensus, except its scope is limited to the simple question of which transactions came first.
76.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Bitcoin does rely on an identity system; it's called proof-of-work. It counts hashing cycles rather than humans, but it's close enough since the final goal is decentralization and not perfect equality. Here proof-of-work or proof-
77.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> What counts as a node? Can I spin up a million or a billion nodes on AWS and influence the vote that way? Proof of work? Proof of stake? It's not exactly an unsolved problem.
78.
by vbuterin 12y ago
The Bitcoin price is falling because the Google Trends search volume is going down. That's it. All of the technical analysis and China news is just a mirage that makes a few jolts in the short term. http://www.google.com&#x2
79.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Bitcoin users. Which is a larger population than that of many countries that have national currencies.
80.
by vbuterin 12y ago
http://www.quora.com/Has-the-worldwide-GINI-coefficient-incr... You're completely correct.
81.
by vbuterin 13y ago
As an (armchair) economist, when looking at these cases of Veblen good consumption one of the things that always interests me is: is there some clever way to nudge our culture in such a way that the product of such consumption becomes socia
82.
by vbuterin 13y ago
I would say rename the whole thing to something like "intellectual use tax".
83.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> SHA256 is an instance of SHA2. Presumably you didn't mean that SHA512 was bad, or, better, SHA512/256. Right. But I don't see a reason why you would ever want either of those when SHA256 works just fine. Maybe because it
84.
by vbuterin 13y ago
The first step is to stop using the word "compulsory licensing". Compulsory licensing sounds like some kind of crazily authoritarian evil government regulation; if I didn't know what it actually is, and there were no triggers
85.
by vbuterin 13y ago
SHA256, SHA3, AES, ECDSA and ECDH/ECIES are all good, plus one-time pads and Shamir's secret sharing. There's no real need to use anything else.
86.
by vbuterin 13y ago
And out broken political process remains because of everyone in the government doing everything they can to sustain their own livelihood. Reality is a result of human action; to change reality you pretty much have to convince people to act
87.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Intuit's argument generally is that if the government was allowed to create their own online filing system then that would create an imbalance of incentives, since the incentive of the people setting up the tax form would be to try to
88.
by vbuterin 13y ago
They are useful in customer-merchant contexts because the merchant can cancel the order after anyway in case of a double spend, and in in-person contexts because you're in person so the risk of trying to cheat is too high. That's
89.
by vbuterin 13y ago
So the actual protocol change that needs to be made in order to make challenge-response protocols fully effective is basically the inclusion of merkle-sum-trees - make each node N = [ H, F ] where H = sha256(N.child0, N.child1) and F = N.ch
90.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> It's equally applicable to Bitcoin (though not implemented anywhere for any system yet). I don't recall you describing it to me, but it's likely you did and I didn't realize it was important at the time. Also, I nev

More ›