vbuterin

17 ms·

91.
by vbuterin 13y ago
The information distribution should not be any more skewed than Bitcoin because every block can be validated by itself assuming only the validity of its parent as prior knowledge. This differs from the Israeli authors' GHOST, which ass
92.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> I'm afraid they are spending a lot of effort cargo-culting on the wrong things, while missing where the real challenge lies: How to deal with the inevitable orders-of-magnitude increase in transaction size/complexity while p
93.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Bitcoin "solves" the problems behind Byzantine fault tolerance, quorum systems, etc by completely ignoring the past 30 years of research on the topic, and introducing a very simple construction that bypasses all of the issues enti
94.
by vbuterin 13y ago
There is some statistical evidence that males have higher variance in general. CEOs are mostly male, people in extremely advanced math classes are mostly male, but at the same time people in prison are mostly male, and people performing dir
95.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Ah okay, interesting, thanks for the link. So it's basically a maximally powerful non-Turing-complete language. I would argue that the section in our v2 whitepaper on non-Turing-complete languages still covers the fallacy behind that:
96.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Pure functional programming? Yeah. But those aren't magic. Whenever you have conditional branching, the halting problem reintroduces itself. (def (collatz-depth x) (if (= x 1) 0 (if (= (mod x
97.
by vbuterin 13y ago
I understand. I was simply clarifying for everyone's benefit.
98.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Actually, we kind of discovered that, unless we radically cripple our model (eg. by removing the first-class-citizen property) Turing-completeness is basically irrelevant either way. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki&#x2
99.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Copying from a post I made on Reddit: Lately I have become much more comfortable with the idea of computer-controlled systems for one simple reason: our world is already computer controlled. The computer in question is the universe with its
100.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Ethereum founder here. The general four categories of options that we had are: (i) a traditional banking/tax haven (Isle of Man, Panama, etc) (ii) Switzerland (iii) Iceland (iv) Singapore / some other "Asian tiger" The r
101.
by vbuterin 13y ago
There are many categories of people behind a "business", but you can generally classify them into three: 1. Employees (incl. management) 2. Shareholders 3. Investors In criminal law, if a group does something illegal outside of a
102.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Given that even libertarians don't agree on what it means I think it's fair to give that one a pass.
103.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> I'd say of course we have to include that as a measure of how much of a role the government plays in the society. This is with no judgment about whether this is a good/bad thing. Government has a $10 trillion+ impact on the e
104.
by vbuterin 13y ago
The issue is that the concept of "size" is very nebulous, and it's very reductionist and misleading to measure that with just money. A good example to make here is that North Korea has no income tax. The undesirable part of t
105.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Species is not a matter of choice. And yet we're quite fine oppressing chickens.
106.
by vbuterin 13y ago
They are nevertheless buying higher than everyone else and selling lower than everyone else. Otherwise their orders would never get filled.
107.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> 2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government.[4] Pretty much every single libertarian I talk to would vehemently disagree here.
108.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Zero-confirmation transactions are fine for everything but rivalrous digital goods; it takes longer than 60m to ship something in any case, so if there's a double spend you just notify the merchant and they can cancel the order.
109.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Eating is trivial; charities can feed people for <$1000 per day. Living space is also cheap; the only reason you need more than a 2m * 1m * 1m horizontal cupboard is a combination of government restrictions and psychological factors whic
110.
by vbuterin 13y ago
This article comes to mind: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Virtue1.html
111.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Bitcoin already has a basic income distributed via one-CPU-one-vote: it's called a mining reward. And if you distribute a basic income via one-coin-one-vote it's called an interest rate. The whole point of BI is to be per-person.
112.
by vbuterin 13y ago
EdDSA uses something very similar to RFV6979, so the author had to have realized that just retroactively adding that small piece to ECDSA was a possibility. So I don't think it's really fair to call determinism an intrinsic proper
113.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> It requires cryptographic randomness for each individual signature This is false. Although the default algorithm does work that way, RFC6979 lets you do ECDSA entirely with pseudorandom numbers seeded by the message and key. http:&#x2
114.
by vbuterin 13y ago
No, because perks aren't just there to make employees more productive. They're also there to make sure they stay at the company in the first place.
115.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Actually, even in coins fast hashes have their place (specifically, in Merkle trees; we're using SHA3 in Ethereum precisely because computers will have hardware modules for it), and for mining you don't want to be using anything t
116.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Personally, I would donate it all to Aubrey de Grey.
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by vbuterin 13y ago
> It's a matter of probability. The more you drive, the more you are likely to have an accident at some point. That was actually part of my point. I am not saying men are inferior, I am saying men are more likely to be in jobs where
118.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Meanwhile: * 93% of prisoners are male: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1... * 92% of all occupational deaths are male: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality
119.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Except that MtGox is known to with very high probability have been acting criminally dishonestly and there is a strong public interest in helping people determine what happened and recover what could potentially be up to 200000 of their own
120.
by vbuterin 13y ago
People have been saying this almost since the day Bitcoin was created. It happened to the open source software movement (see what I did there?), it happened to Linux, and now it's happening to our beloved open source currency. The big

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