Lao Tse
Verified User
and the step after that is to simply just stop trying to cost cut fellow human beings out of existence due to our own criminal indoctrination into nihilistic naziism.
Blockchain is bullshit.
- Thread starter Lao Tse
- Start date
and the step after that is to simply just stop trying to cost cut fellow human beings out of existence due to our own criminal indoctrination into nihilistic naziism.
Banks count on being the one keepers of the true ledger for everyone else. Seriously, distributed ledgers challenge their power. You are the defender of the bankers. Fascists are even more centralized with their ledger.
You would need to falsify every last copy, so good luck with that. If you can do it, you can make billions. Odd how no one has done it.
People have made fake paper money. People have made fake gold. People have made fake silver. People have made fake diamonds. All that is doable.
The Bitcoin protocol is completely open source. It has to be to work. Most of the programs that use it are open source too. While not all people are technically savvy enough to check that the software is working, large numbers of them are.
If he had his money in Bitcoins, they would not be able to take his money. trump has his money in real estate, which is easily seized.
Americans are less than 5% of the population, that have almost 25% of the consumption of humanity... Maybe the reason you are missing out on the nice things the rest of us get is you are failing?
I have nice things. Why would I want to change to be more like you, when you admit you do not have nice things?
Lao Tse
Verified User
people can't work with open source.
you're still asking for blind trust.
you're the banker fascist defender.
even if theoretically blockchain would work for "full trust" or whatever the fuck dumb thing you say, that doesn't mean implementations wouldn't have backdoors to exploit the unfounded trust.
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Italy did not even have "regular corporations" until after WWII. LLC are a recent invention. For half of America's existence, they did not exist in America.
Corporatism, which included fascism, did not believe everything should be LLC. In fact, a pre-WWII Italian or Spaniard would not be thinking of a LLC. The corporations in corporatism is the cartels made up of whole segments of the economy.
Republicans are the supply siders in America. Republicans worship the supposed "job creators."
Democrats believe consumers are the real job creators. They are more demand siders.
Fascists claim to be opposed to a group they call the globalists. The NeoCons are Republicans.
Lao Tse
Verified User
many globalists are fascists. they're just NOT nationalist.
globalism can also be called internationalist fascism. it believe in the supremacy of the multinational bank and and the multinational corporation.
I know in the newspeak your try to tie fascism to nationalism, but it need not be.
it's simply the union of state and corporate power.
that;s why i call globalism "internationalist fascism".
in fact, the FASCISM NOW IS PREDOMINANTLY ANTI-NATIONALIST or globalist.
The demand siders are trying to figure out how to keep human beings as consumers.
I work with open source all the time.
Again, all the implementations would have to have the same backdoor.... WHICH DID HAPPEN!!! It is worth looking at what happened when it did happen.
Numbers on computers can rollover like an odometer in a car. If the computer adds two big enough numbers together, it will rollover to a small number. Lets pretend the rollover point is 1,000,000. Someone realized that if he takes 1 Bitcoin and says take that 1 Bitcoin and transfer 500,000 Bitcoins to one account, and 500,001 Bitcoins to another, the all the software would make the same mistake and approve it. It added 500,000 to 500,001, and got 1 which is the same amount as it started with, so that is a fine transaction.
This was immediately noticed around the world. It turns out that there are people all over the place checking the Bitcoin Blockchain for errors. They immediately fixed the software, but the next step was how to convince miners to use the corrected software. After all, if you throw away that branch, then all the miners after the wrong block lose their reward, even though they spent good money to get those blocks.
When they convinced 50+% of the miners to use the corrected software, the corrected branch grew longer than the incorrect branch, and then even the miners who had not corrected the software began using the corrected branch. Almost all miners just add onto the longest branch, if the longest branch makes sense to them.
It turns out that transactions are reversible, you just need to convince 50+% of the miners.
The incorrect branch was forked by miners who refused to give up their prize, and became Bitcoin Classic, or some such name.
Lao Tse
Verified User
but to seek mass adoption of a system you can't expect people to go look at the code, and even if they could do that, you can't guarantee no backdoors or bad code in an implemented system.
and mining is stupid anyway. mining means there will be new bitcoins created.
and what's the limit on how far a bitcoin can be subdivided? effectively none.
inflation can still happen with effectively fiat infinitely divided bitcoins.
and it's digital nature guarantees enmeshment with the technocratic fascist state forever.
it's bad and stupid in all regards.
Lao Tse
Verified User
no. different implementations could have different backdoors.
why are you saying dumb shit?
I already explained what happens when an accidental backdoor happens. There are enough people looking at the details of the code, that they catch and correct the problem.
About every four years, the number of Bitcoins create per block halves. We are about to have another halving. The diminishing number of Bitcoins created each time means there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins.
I consider that to be a design mistake, because it means there will probably be Bitcoin deflation. Deflation is the empire killer.
You can divide a Bitcoin into 100,000,000th of a Bitcoin. That allows smaller and smaller pieces of a Bitcoin to be transferred to adjust for inflation. If a candy bar costs 1 Bitcoin one year, and one millionth the next year, both transactions can still be made.
A dollar can be divided into pennies, which does not cause inflation.
How so?
Lao Tse
Verified User
Lao Tse
Verified User
the blockchain is effectively a lie accumulator.
For it to make the longest branch, 50+% of the implementations would have to have the same backdoor. And remember, all the implementations will go with the longest branch as long as it makes sense. That means that if only a minority of the implementations have a backdoor that minority will self correct to not have the backdoor.
Now if the majority, but not all have the backdoor, then the longest branch will not make sense to the minority. So even though the backdoor branch is the longest, the non-backdoor implementations will not add to it. That means there will be a very noticeable fork in the blockchain.
A very noticeable backdoor is easily fixed.
If there is a backdoor that the majority wants to keep, then the minority can simply fork the blockchain and continue on without the backdoor.
Blockchains are a way of establishing consensus without any form of centralized control.
It really does not matter if the backdoor is intentional or not, the same facts apply.
Lao Tse
Verified User
no they don't.
Lao Tse
Verified User
nobody cares about your short branch.
the fact remains.... different implementations can have different backdoors.
you're still saying dumb shit.
so... the everyday non programmer joe user must decide which blockchain gang they're in?
ridiculous bullshit.
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Then why aren't you able to make it lie to give you more money? There are billions to be grabbed, and yet no one is doing it?
Lao Tse
Verified User
no argument presented fallacy.
Lao Tse
Verified User
How secure is blockchain really?
It turns out “secure” is a funny word to pin down.
By Mike Orcuttarchive page
April 25, 2018
.....
Creative ways to cheat
So much for the theory. Implementing it in practice is harder. The mere fact that a system works like Bitcoin—as many cryptocurrencies do—doesn’t mean it’s just as secure. Even when developers use tried-and-true cryptographic tools, it is easy to accidentally put them together in ways that are not secure, says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Bitcoin has been around the longest, so it’s the most thoroughly battle-tested.
People have also found creative ways to cheat. Emin Gün Sirer and his colleagues at Cornell University have shown that there is a way to subvert a blockchain even if you have less than half the mining power of the other miners. The details are somewhat technical, but essentially a “selfish miner” can gain an unfair advantage by fooling other nodes into wasting time on already-solved crypto-puzzles.
Another possibility is an “eclipse attack.” Nodes on the blockchain must remain in constant communication in order to compare data. An attacker who manages to take control of one node’s communications and fool it into accepting false data that appears to come from the rest of the network can trick it into wasting resources or confirming fake transactions.
Finally, no matter how tamperproof a blockchain protocol is, it “does not exist in a vacuum,” says Sirer. The cryptocurrency hacks driving recent headlines are usually failures at places where blockchain systems connect with the real world—for example, in software clients and third-party applications.
Hackers can, for instance, break into “hot wallets,” internet-connected applications for storing the private cryptographic keys that anyone who owns cryptocurrency requires in order to spend it. Wallets owned by online cryptocurrency exchanges have become prime targets. Many exchanges claim they keep most of their users’ money in “cold” hardware wallets—storage devices disconnected from the internet. But as the January heist of more than $500 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Japan-based exchange Coincheck showed, that’s not always the case.
Perhaps the most complicated touchpoints between blockchains and the real world are “smart contracts,” which are computer programs stored in certain kinds of blockchain that can automate transactions. In 2016, hackers exploited an unforeseen quirk in a smart contract written on Ethereum’s blockchain to steal 3.6 million ether, worth around $80 million at the time, from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a new kind of blockchain-based investment fund.
Since the DAO code lived on the blockchain, the Ethereum community had to push a controversial software upgrade called a “hard fork” to get the money back—essentially creating a new version of history in which the money was never stolen. Researchers are still developing methods for ensuring that smart contracts won’t malfunction.
The centralization question
One supposed security guarantee of a blockchain system is “decentralization.” If copies of the blockchain are kept on a large and widely distributed network of nodes, there’s no one weak point to attack, and it’s hard for anyone to build up enough computing power to subvert the network. But recent work by Sirer and colleagues shows that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum is as decentralized as you might think. They found that the top four bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity per week. By the same measure, three Ethereum miners accounted for 61 percent.
Some say alternative consensus protocols, perhaps ones that don’t rely on mining, could be more secure. But this hypothesis hasn’t been tested at a large scale, and new protocols would likely have their own security problems.
Others see potential in blockchains that require permission to join, unlike in Bitcoin’s case, where anyone who downloads the software can join the network. Such systems are anathema to the anti-hierarchical ethos of cryptocurrencies, but the approach appeals to financial and other institutions looking to exploit the advantages of a shared cryptographic database.
Permissioned systems, however, raise their own questions. Who has the authority to grant permission? How will the system ensure that the validators are who they say they are? A permissioned system may make its owners feel more secure, but it really just gives them more control, which means they can make changes whether or not other network participants agree—something true believers would see as violating the very idea of blockchain.
So in the end, “secure” ends up being very hard to define in the context of blockchains. Secure from whom? Secure for what? “It depends on your perspective,” says Narula.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/25/143246/how-secure-is-blockchain-really/
It turns out “secure” is a funny word to pin down.
By Mike Orcuttarchive page
April 25, 2018
.....
Creative ways to cheat
So much for the theory. Implementing it in practice is harder. The mere fact that a system works like Bitcoin—as many cryptocurrencies do—doesn’t mean it’s just as secure. Even when developers use tried-and-true cryptographic tools, it is easy to accidentally put them together in ways that are not secure, says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Bitcoin has been around the longest, so it’s the most thoroughly battle-tested.
People have also found creative ways to cheat. Emin Gün Sirer and his colleagues at Cornell University have shown that there is a way to subvert a blockchain even if you have less than half the mining power of the other miners. The details are somewhat technical, but essentially a “selfish miner” can gain an unfair advantage by fooling other nodes into wasting time on already-solved crypto-puzzles.
Another possibility is an “eclipse attack.” Nodes on the blockchain must remain in constant communication in order to compare data. An attacker who manages to take control of one node’s communications and fool it into accepting false data that appears to come from the rest of the network can trick it into wasting resources or confirming fake transactions.
Finally, no matter how tamperproof a blockchain protocol is, it “does not exist in a vacuum,” says Sirer. The cryptocurrency hacks driving recent headlines are usually failures at places where blockchain systems connect with the real world—for example, in software clients and third-party applications.
Hackers can, for instance, break into “hot wallets,” internet-connected applications for storing the private cryptographic keys that anyone who owns cryptocurrency requires in order to spend it. Wallets owned by online cryptocurrency exchanges have become prime targets. Many exchanges claim they keep most of their users’ money in “cold” hardware wallets—storage devices disconnected from the internet. But as the January heist of more than $500 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Japan-based exchange Coincheck showed, that’s not always the case.
Perhaps the most complicated touchpoints between blockchains and the real world are “smart contracts,” which are computer programs stored in certain kinds of blockchain that can automate transactions. In 2016, hackers exploited an unforeseen quirk in a smart contract written on Ethereum’s blockchain to steal 3.6 million ether, worth around $80 million at the time, from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a new kind of blockchain-based investment fund.
Since the DAO code lived on the blockchain, the Ethereum community had to push a controversial software upgrade called a “hard fork” to get the money back—essentially creating a new version of history in which the money was never stolen. Researchers are still developing methods for ensuring that smart contracts won’t malfunction.
The centralization question
One supposed security guarantee of a blockchain system is “decentralization.” If copies of the blockchain are kept on a large and widely distributed network of nodes, there’s no one weak point to attack, and it’s hard for anyone to build up enough computing power to subvert the network. But recent work by Sirer and colleagues shows that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum is as decentralized as you might think. They found that the top four bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity per week. By the same measure, three Ethereum miners accounted for 61 percent.
Some say alternative consensus protocols, perhaps ones that don’t rely on mining, could be more secure. But this hypothesis hasn’t been tested at a large scale, and new protocols would likely have their own security problems.
Others see potential in blockchains that require permission to join, unlike in Bitcoin’s case, where anyone who downloads the software can join the network. Such systems are anathema to the anti-hierarchical ethos of cryptocurrencies, but the approach appeals to financial and other institutions looking to exploit the advantages of a shared cryptographic database.
Permissioned systems, however, raise their own questions. Who has the authority to grant permission? How will the system ensure that the validators are who they say they are? A permissioned system may make its owners feel more secure, but it really just gives them more control, which means they can make changes whether or not other network participants agree—something true believers would see as violating the very idea of blockchain.
So in the end, “secure” ends up being very hard to define in the context of blockchains. Secure from whom? Secure for what? “It depends on your perspective,” says Narula.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/25/143246/how-secure-is-blockchain-really/
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Conspiracy theorist fantasy.
Look, the Military Industrial Complex - which I worked in for 35 years - is problematic. The L1's bribe elected officials and procurement personnel in the military as a matter of standard procedure.
Oh, it's not usually cash or anything so blatant - but notice how those who purchase systems within the military "retire" after 20 years into cushy jobs at the primes.
I'm fully aware of the graft and sleaziness. But set policy? You're nuts. The L1's are all about getting funding for programs. It's business - often shady - but Raytheon doesn't set agendas, they sell weapon systems. They might do favors for Senators to ensure PAC-3 is chosen over what Lockheed is offering, offering cushy jobs to relatives and associates.