vbuterin

18 ms·

121.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Why is it a currency's job to provide consumer protection? That's like saying that it's a kitchen stove's job to tell you what things you can cook with it, or that it's TCP's job to provide built-in encryption
122.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> Even East Asia textile sweatshops offer work from home. I'd like to learn more about this. Intuitively, it makes sense for something like this to be true; the "workers slaving away at assembly lines in factories 12 hours a da
123.
by vbuterin 13y ago
For those interested, I (Ethereum founder) will be writing a "DAOs/self-enforcing-whatevers are not scary" series on Bitcoin Magazine and the Ethereum blog over the next little while talking about these kinds of issues in det
124.
by vbuterin 13y ago
That sounds like one of those "serious in theory, trivial in practice" problems. Like it or not, there ARE only 3 types of standard transactions, and even the network-level protocol recognizes this. Each of them has a specific add
125.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Ah okay, that makes sense. You're completely right that that's not really solvable in general. Unless, of course, we finally switch over to a public/private key based login system and each user's balance sheet is compose
126.
by vbuterin 13y ago
One way to defeat the "hide the negative balances inside a subtree of technologically clueless grandmas" attack might be to generate the tree using some easily verifiable deterministic algorithm (ie. alphabetic order of hashes of
127.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Because then any guy with a laptop and coding skills could use the API to set up almost any kind of fiat currency-based money services or currency exchange business, and we can't have people doing that without million-dollar MSB/M
128.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Suppose the balance sheet is: [ -1000, 1000, 2000, 2000 ] The Merkle tree is: [ -1000, 1000, 2000, 2000 ] [ 0, 4000 ] [ 4000 ] You actually owe 5000 BTC, but it seems like you owe 4000 BTC. Seems so far so good. Th
129.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Easier said than done. I had dismissed cshrem as a playboy half a year ago when he completely failed at getting Bitcoin Wireless off the ground and let BitInstant just die, but I had absolutely no idea he was doing anything illegal.
130.
by vbuterin 13y ago
IMO, bitcoind is a terrible idea. The huge deal-breaking problem with bitcoind is that it provides no way to query for transactions associated with a specific address unless you import that address into the client and give it the private ke
131.
by vbuterin 13y ago
There is a huge moral difference between the sort of victimless-crime-contraband that is on SR (especially since SR1 at least, not sure about SR2, actively filtered out child porn, weapons, assassinations and all of the other truly scary th
132.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Shrem is out the door. But if you're saying the foundation should have fired him the moment he got arrested, absolutely no. He's still innocent before proven guilty, and knee jerk reactions like that are counterproductive more oft
133.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Gavin doesn't operate bitcoin.org; that's another developer. You are right that the foundation does pay his salary, but the fact is that compared to its endowment and its legal expenses the portion of its money that goes out to de
134.
by vbuterin 13y ago
They're _a lobbying group_. They don't release educational materials, they don't write code, the main thing that they do is lobby. I too agree that Charlie Shrem is 100% morally innocent (with the exception of other alleged s
135.
by vbuterin 13y ago
I don't think it's subverting the intent to move the BTC out. The point of subpoenas is to get information, not resources; if you want resources the correct mechanism is a seizure. The court is probably just asking for everything
136.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Not by itself it doesn't. Google does mass surveillance on us all the time, and most people barely register that. What creates the chilling effect is mass surveillance _combined with power_. That's what people are scared of - not
137.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> But sadism is very rare, in reality. But the power of the internet can magnify the effect of a single sadist to the point that it affects a million people (up to the limited extent that such opportunities exist).
138.
by vbuterin 13y ago
I haven't, for one.
139.
by vbuterin 13y ago
You can push directly to Eligius if you want anything up to k-of-20; http://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools lets you do that with the eligius_pushtx command.
140.
by vbuterin 13y ago
If you are under 25 and so easily have enough time to start from scratch if you lost all your money, Bitcoin is perfectly fine for the majority of your assets. If you're 50, then you should think of Bitcoin as a startup investment, as
141.
by vbuterin 13y ago
All you really need is to always prepend your username to your password. If people all did that, then 99.9%+ of these brainwallet thefts would already not have happened. Slow KDFs are just icing on the cake.
142.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> This is impossible with sums of continuous periodic functions, such as Fourier series, because continuous periodic functions are bounded, while x^2 is unbounded. But infinite sums of continuous periodic functions are not necessarily bo
143.
by vbuterin 13y ago
> I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, yo
144.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Actually, it's "no, unless" and "yes, if" that are synonyms. "No, because" carries the implication that the listed justifications are irresolvable.
145.
by vbuterin 13y ago
There are several cryptoanarchist responses to that: 1. Some government-like mechanisms should definitely exist on the level of the physical world (this could be anywhere from Rothbardian private law to a concept of private cities to a more
146.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Cryptoanarchy is a means of organizing society under conditions of a very high defense/offense asymmetry (ie. if it costs Y resources to cause X harm to someone, the ratio Y/X is high). The greater that this asymmetry is, the more
147.
by vbuterin 13y ago
It depends on who you talk to; I feel like there's a sort of winding spectrum. It's something like: F A | | | | | | E B \ /
148.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Thanks for the well-reasoned response; always happy to talk about this stuff. My main concern with that style of thinking in general is that, while it is good at finding principles, it is less good at finding cases where those principles do
149.
by vbuterin 13y ago
Good point about needing to meet people outside your echo chamber. Although I suppose that for me I get that sort of interaction from Reddit; I don't really see myself actually interacting with people in any of these spaces that are su
150.
by vbuterin 13y ago
I don't see the problem here. Atlas Shrugged is a very complex book and has many parts that I find profound (eg. her thoughts on romance, the concept of sanction of the victim and her surprisingly sane views on the relationship between

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