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klafbang posted:A crypto-currency like Bitcoin is every bit (ha!) as much a currency as a crypto-zoologist is a zoologist. i'm more of a crypto-poster
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Mar 3, 2016 19:14
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Sometimes there are things that could be done, but aren't, not because they are impossible or unknown, but because they aren't very good ideas. Bitcoin is like money except worse in every way except for committing crime.
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Mar 3, 2016 19:25
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jre posted:What bits of it do you think are novel or groundbreaking ? It combines proof-of-work, cryptography, distributed networks, and a tamper-resistant public ledger in a way that has never been seen before. It's more than just the sum of its parts and while it exists more of a proof-of-concept than a finished product, the concepts and the different ways they can be used are unique and interesting. Look I fully support mocking Bitcoiners, and there are a lot of flaws in Bitcoin itself, but you guys should actually make fun of the stuff that's worth making fun of. Assuming Bitcoin didn't exist, a white paper describing the technology would certainly be at the level of an Ivy League computer science thesis. It just looks stupid to say stuff like "hahaha Bitcoin can't scale." Well no poo poo it can't. It's a proof-of-concept that really has no place in the world outside of a lab. And from an economist point of view, the whole idea is rather poisonous. But to say that the technology isn't novel or groundbreaking or that we can't learn anything from it is simply ignorant. Some of the new stuff that's being explored, like using a blockchain system to store contracts for example, is incredibly compelling from a CS viewpoint.
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Mar 3, 2016 19:33
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Syd Midnight posted:Sometimes there are things that could be done, but aren't, not because they are impossible or unknown, but because they aren't very good ideas. Bitcoin is like money except worse in every way except for committing crime. But wouldn't cash be superior for crime because of its untracability after it's in circulation? Seems like it's only viable for autistic smackheads with social anxiety and libertarians who want to roleplay as captains of industry with monopoly money
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Mar 3, 2016 19:35
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revmoo posted:using a blockchain system to store contracts for example, is incredibly compelling from a There ya go, buddy. Don't mention it. Using a computational arms race to store a contract is some seriously dumb poo poo. I have another way to store a contract. It's called a filing cabinet.
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Mar 3, 2016 19:39
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Bitcoin has neat parts, but its totally hobby grade and kind of the perfect example of the old joke about computer scientists being so antisocial they are looking to shoe horn in an unthinking machine into the most mundane of tasks if it means removing any potential of irrational meat thinking.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:02
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revmoo posted:...using a blockchain system to store contracts for example, is incredibly compelling from a CS viewpoint. No. No it's not. Any ERP system out there uses that technology. SAP, Dynamics, Fusion all store data to append-only storage and has for decades. I can't believe you made me say something nice about SAP! Bitcoin truly brings it the worst in people.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:02
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revmoo posted:It combines proof-of-work, cryptography, distributed networks, and a tamper-resistant public ledger in a way that has never been seen before. Nah it's purely an iterative step from existing work, If you've never done any reading in distributed systems or crypto research it might seem new, but folk have been doing this stuff for 20 years The only unique thing about it is the community of morons pretending its a currency. There is not one original or unique thing in it. quote:more of a proof-of-concept than a finished product, quote:the concepts and the different ways they can be used are unique and interesting. quote:Some of the new stuff that's being explored, like using a blockchain system to store contracts for example, is incredibly compelling from a CS viewpoint. Non smart contracts ( e.g. automated purchasing ) have existed for decades in things like microsoft dynamics and don't require wasting the energy requirements of Ireland doing useless busy work jre fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Mar 3, 2016 |
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Mar 3, 2016 20:16
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revmoo posted:Can we please mock the idiot bitcoiners delusion that BTC is going to take over the world without trying to feel smug about how bad the design is? best answer: It's easier to mine the laughchain if you don't include any new jokes in the block.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:33
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revmoo posted:It combines proof-of-work, cryptography, distributed networks, and a tamper-resistant public ledger in a way that has never been seen before. It's more than just the sum of its parts and while it exists more of a proof-of-concept than a finished product, the concepts and the different ways they can be used are unique and interesting. Databases, P2P, and computer cryptography are all ground breaking technologies. Smashing them together just creates a Frankenstein of shambling poop. Mostly just wanted to have another post to go LOL You Dumb
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Mar 3, 2016 20:34
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LethalGeek posted:Smashing them together just creates a Frankenstein of shambling poop. That's not necessarily right. Butts has all the characteristics of a master's thesis project: smash a bunch of existing poo poo together, cut a heel and clip a toe to finish in time (like using a pseudo-proof of busywork instead of a real proof of work, like assuming a p2p system where everybody knows everything ever, etc). Most master's projects luckily gets forgotten in weeks, allowing the author to hide their shame of their embarrassing work. Bitcoin was not so lucky. But smashing existing poo poo together can genuinely lead to new groundbreaking stuff (see what, e.g., Apple does). Just don't pretend that if you take apart butts you get interesting parts. When you split a butt all you get is poo poo.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:43
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klafbang posted:When you split a butt all you get is poo poo. Sounds like words to live your life by right there.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:47
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LethalGeek posted:No it isn't you loving idiot. It's a database. It's the world's worst most inefficient database with a ton of screwy rear end behavior that wastes a mind boggling amount of electricity to do something any device accessing this forum could do by itself.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:02
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Here, I edited some of the fluff out of your post and rearranged some words to hit the truly salient points. No need to thank me  revmoo posted:you guys should actually make fun of the stuff that's worth making fun of...Bitcoin itself
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Mar 3, 2016 21:04
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If ever there was a visual metaphor for bitcoin it's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q A curiosity that has no real world application
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Mar 3, 2016 21:19
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jre posted:If ever there was a visual metaphor for bitcoin it's this: Not a great metaphor. Art has value.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:21
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^ Replace the audio with three minutes of an Atlas Shrugged audiobook skipping and you've nailed it.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:22
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Here, I edited some of the fluff out of your post and rearranged some words to hit the truly salient points. No need to thank me  quote:LONDON — Forty of the world's biggest banks, including HSBC and Citi, have tested a system for trading fixed income using the technology that underpins bitcoin, fintech company R3 CEV said on Thursday. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/03/02/business/02reuters-banking-blockchain-bonds.html Again, there's plenty of comedy to be had from the intersection of autists and libertarians that is Bitcoin users, but mocking the actual tech is silly. It's at least more compelling than yet another Snapchat clone. But hey I'm just a software engineer so I guess a lot of this stuff just goes right over my head. I definitely enjoyed cashing in on the gold rush while you guys were so busy getting on the hate bandwagon, poo poo's funny. I'm not even pro-Bitcoin, I just think that blanket poo poo-talking the tech is just as bad as the idiot redditors that can't shut the gently caress up about it.
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Mar 3, 2016 22:45
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revmoo posted:The actual concept behind Bitcoin is incredibly novel and groundbreaking so is a new tropical flesh eating disease that no one's ever caught before, but that won't unrot your dick off
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Mar 3, 2016 22:51
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"hey guys I managed to get lucky and not lose my money like a huge % of people did in butts"  Edit: It's amazing how many people think they're smart because they managed to cash out while there are as many stories of people getting their life savings wiped out in the 100% bitcoin exchange failure rate to date. That sure sounds like a great system I want to be involved in! Oh look another venture that mentions butts and then never will go anywhere like all the rest of them. LethalGeek fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 3, 2016 |
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Mar 3, 2016 22:53
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revmoo posted:It just looks stupid to say stuff like "hahaha Bitcoin can't scale." Well no poo poo it can't. You're not paying attention, because what we say is "hahaha bitcoiners think that bitcoin will replace all other currencies, but it obviously can't scale". We don't really laugh at bitcoin, we laugh at bitcoiners Were you around for the early bitcoin threads back in 2009-2010? Goons weren't laughing about it back then because no one was making pie-in-the-sky promises like they have been since 2012ish. The flaws were known but no one gave a poo poo because bitcoins were worth like a nickel and you could reliably mine them with just a CPU, so it really was just a neat geeky thing. There weren't really any laughs to be had until libertarians pinned all of their hopes and dreams on bitcoin, and then began scamming each other over and over, and then somehow convinced a bunch of idiot VCs to turn BLOCKCHAIN into a buzzword
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Mar 3, 2016 22:56
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revmoo posted:
No one is mocking distributed write-only databases, cryptography, or proof of work. That's the actual tech. We're more mocking the idiots who think that Satoshi invented these things. That article talks about "big banks" looking at blockchain technology, but the key thing that they're leaving out is that many of these "blockchains" (such as IBM's) are simply distributed ledgers verified cryptographically, a technology that had existed for many years before bitcoin. The only innovation here is that "blockchain" is a better-sounding term than "cryptographically-verified distributed ledger". These "blockchains" don't have a currency component to them, which is the only unique thing that bitcoin has that prior cryptographic distributed ledgers did not.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:11
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revmoo posted:
so you didn't pick up that that "article" is a warmed over press release for r53 and doesn't contain a single quote from any of the 42 banks?
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Mar 3, 2016 23:23
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jre posted:If ever there was a visual metaphor for bitcoin it's this: I was expecting something like  but instead you're just an rear end in a top hat who hates awesome things
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Mar 3, 2016 23:33
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revmoo posted:
looks like you really are a cryptobitcoiner. my condolences.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:00
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revmoo posted:mocking the actual tech is silly Boy, our faces sure are red quote:I'm not even pro-Bitcoin The buttcoin equivalent of "I'm not racist, but"
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Mar 4, 2016 01:05
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Adix posted:I was expecting something like Hilariously enough, the hardcore Bitcoin coworker I have, has one of these on his desk.
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Mar 4, 2016 01:08
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https://www.twitch.tv/bitcoinplays/
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Mar 4, 2016 01:09
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revmoo posted:It combines proof-of-work, cryptography, distributed networks, and a tamper-resistant public ledger in a way that has never been seen before. It's more than just the sum of its parts and while it exists more of a proof-of-concept than a finished product, the concepts and the different ways they can be used are unique and interesting. The issue for me is it is this ridiculously complicated way of doing something that existed 3,000 years ago (deregulated currency), but addresses barely any of the issues that have always existed with such a system. It's greater than the sum of its parts in the same way a Rube Goldberg machine that makes breakfast is greater than the sum of its parts. But the technology of a rube goldberg machine isn't useful for doing anything in any kind of "better" way Edit: Speaking of adding nothing, I see now that several other posters on this page have made this same argument, only better. Carry on. Drunk Nerds fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 01:46
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revmoo posted:Assuming Bitcoin didn't exist, a white paper describing the technology would certainly be at the level of an Ivy League computer science thesis. Not really.
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Mar 4, 2016 02:05
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klafbang posted:That's not necessarily right. Pretty much this. It was essentially someone's master thesis project that, surprise, doesn't work in practice. And this isn't even the first try at a decentralized economy, is it? I seem to remember that other governments in the past have tried and failed at a decentralized economy and they've all failed for similar reasons. I'm not sure how adding computers to mix would suddenly make it work. Speaking of bitcoins terrible technical design: I'm still a bit surprised that processing Bitcoin transactions and mining are two separate processes. I always assumed mining actually did work on the network, but apparently it's just some useless lottery system. You'd think it would have been better to make sure that the mining process actually did something useful.
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Mar 4, 2016 02:05
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Drunk Nerds posted:The issue for me is it is this ridiculously complicated way of doing something that existed 3,000 years ago (deregulated currency), but addresses barely any of the issues that have always existed with such a system. It's greater than the sum of its parts in the same way a Rube Goldberg machine that makes breakfast is greater than the sum of its parts. But the technology of a rube goldberg machine isn't useful for doing anything in any kind of "better" way It solves one problem with traditional loosely regulated currency, it's difficult/impossible to debase or counterfeit. That admittedly means nothing in an era where online banking and credit cards exist, but 1600s Britain would be super stoked about some of the features of bitcoin, so it isn't quite 3000 years behind the times. My Linux Rig posted:Pretty much this. It was essentially someone's master thesis project that, surprise, doesn't work in practice. And this isn't even the first try at a decentralized economy, is it? I seem to remember that other governments in the past have tried and failed at a decentralized economy and they've all failed for similar reasons. I'm not sure how adding computers to mix would suddenly make it work. I'm pretty sure that mining is transaction processing, but the outputs of the processing have to look a certain way which means that while you are chiseling Alice paid Bob  into the ledger you have to add a bunch of garbage to it so that the ledger will be satisfied with your submission. Because the ledger has declared that today all submissions must be in purple plaid, tomorrow you will need to gild them as well. For this analogy assume that you have no idea what the product of your work will look like when you start it, idk you're blind or something.
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Mar 4, 2016 02:17
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akulanization posted:It solves one problem with traditional loosely regulated currency, it's difficult/impossible to debase or counterfeit. Except when, say, there's a stupid bug in the software and someone enters a negative transaction amount and is spontaneously awarded 9 billion butts or whatever. Or when a person temporarily counterfeits by double-spending butts or by retracting them through subsequent higher-fee transactions. But I guess the first one happened more than a month ago so butters can't remember it, and the other isn't a problem because, well, it just isn't! In fact, it's actually good for bitcoin!
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Mar 4, 2016 02:20
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akulanization posted:It solves one problem with traditional loosely regulated currency, it's difficult/impossible to debase or counterfeit. That admittedly means nothing in an era where online banking and credit cards exist, but 1600s Britain would be super stoked about some of the features of bitcoin, so it isn't quite 3000 years behind the times. But the network has warehouses full of ASICs doing trillions of hashes a second for a network that only accepts 3 to 7 new ones per second by design. Does that mean that old transactions have trillions of confirmations attached to them, and if not, then what's happening to the rest of the hashes? Are they just being thrown away? That's the confusing part when you assume both of the processes are the same. If they are, then what's happening to 99.999% of the work being done?
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Mar 4, 2016 02:28
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The fundamental problem with Bitcoins - more fundamental than the flaws in its technology or implementation - is that it presumes that anonymity in a financial transaction is desirable.
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Mar 4, 2016 02:28
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Bad Munki posted:Except when, say, there's a stupid bug in the software and someone enters a negative transaction amount and is spontaneously awarded 9 billion butts or whatever. aren't bitcoins individually numbered or some poo poo? I would have thought that that kind of underflow wouldn't work because the actual butts don't exist to be credited to your account. but still lol bitcoin, comin' up with novel and impossible ways to gently caress up in TYOOL 2016. for the second, I don't think that fraud is the same problem as counterfeiting/debasement. while obviously if you pass on debased coinage knowingly you commit fraud, that fraud is worse because it undermines faith in the currency. the chargeback is poisonous for the exact same reason, but that's because the currency and the currency exchange mechanism are intractably linked. you know what, never mind it's the exact same thing on a meta level, you are right it is now hilariously easy to "debase" bitcoins (or at least cause effects indistinguishable from passing on debased currency). Leperflesh posted:The fundamental problem with Bitcoins - more fundamental than the flaws in its technology or implementation - is that it presumes that anonymity in a financial transaction is desirable. Oh man, a million times this, I read "trustless system" and I was all like, "why do you think it's a good thing to do away with the fundamental underpinning of every exchange of currency for goods and services?" akulanization fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 02:33
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Herman Merman posted:Not really. hes right though ivy league undergrad theses tend to be just as short-sighted and missing-the-point as they are at any other university
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Mar 4, 2016 02:41
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akulanization posted:aren't bitcoins individually numbered or some poo poo? I would have thought that that kind of underflow wouldn't work because the actual butts don't exist to be credited to your account. but still lol bitcoin, comin' up with novel and impossible ways to gently caress up in TYOOL 2016. quote:for the second, I don't think that fraud is the same problem as counterfeiting/debasement. while obviously if you pass on debased coinage knowingly you commit fraud, that fraud is worse because it undermines faith in the currency. the chargeback is poisonous for the exact same reason, but that's because the currency and the currency exchange mechanism are intractably linked. you know what, never mind it's the exact same thing on a meta level, you are right it is now hilariously easy to "debase" bitcoins (or at least cause effects indistinguishable from passing on debased currency).
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Mar 4, 2016 02:41
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akulanization posted:aren't bitcoins individually numbered or some poo poo? I would have thought that that kind of underflow wouldn't work because the actual butts don't exist to be credited to your account. but still lol bitcoin, comin' up with novel and impossible ways to gently caress up in TYOOL 2016. Bitcoins don't actually exist. Instead, the transaction ledger says " X address contains exactly 4.38743 bitcoins." Every time a transaction is made, 100% of those bitcoins must be transferred: but, you can split them, so you can send a portion to one address and the rest (your "change") to another. If you give the address containing your "payment" to the person you're paying, they now control that address, and thus, the value the ledger says it contains, in Bitcoins. This means that, for example, if you lose the keys to a given address, the bitcoins it held are lost forever. It also means that if someone else gets the keys to an address, they can transfer the contents to a new address they control, and there's no way to reverse that transaction. It also means that there's no way to know exactly how many bitcoins are still "in circulation," because an address that has been static for years might be someone's stash they can access at any time... or it might be data on a hard drive in a landfill. akulanization posted:for the second, I don't think that fraud is the same problem as counterfeiting/debasement. while obviously if you pass on debased coinage knowingly you commit fraud, that fraud is worse because it undermines faith in the currency. the chargeback is poisonous for the exact same reason, but that's because the currency and the currency exchange mechanism are intractably linked. you know what, never mind it's the exact same thing on a meta level, you are right it is now hilariously easy to "debase" bitcoins (or at least cause effects indistinguishable from passing on debased currency). Nah, fraud and debasement are two different problems. The problem of debasement is twofold: on an individual transaction level, the money you're being paid has been backed with a commodity, but the amount of commodity in the coin itself is indeterminate. A country with rampant coinage debasement will experience severe inflation as confidence in the value of each unit of currency falls. (But it also implies that you have a commodity-backed currency, which is worse for important economic reasons than a fiat currency.) Fraud, on the other hand, is simply theft. If someone defrauds me out of some dollars, I don't (necessarily) lose confidence in the value of the dollars themselves. (Specifically, I think it's useful to think of fraud as "theft by failure to perform to a contractual agreement that you entered into with intent not to perform"... but in this conception, "I will pay you X for Y" is a type of contract. If your failure to perform wasn't premeditated, that's not necessarily fraud... and if you simply terminated a contract in accordance with its termination clauses, that's not illegal at all.)
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Mar 4, 2016 02:48
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My Linux Rig posted:But the network has warehouses full of ASICs doing trillions of hashes a second for a network that only accepts 3 to 7 new ones per second by design. Does that mean that old transactions have trillions of confirmations attached to them, and if not, then what's happening to the rest of the hashes? Are they just being thrown away? If your hash doesn't look the right way, you haven't done anything network affecting. You're spinning your wheels until you win the lottery in finding that random fudge factor. The computational electricity is accepted as a sacrifice necessary to secure the network on the back of a P2P system. Mining is the term given to what's in place to sweeten the pot before transaction fees can pay for the computation power to be competitive in the arms race. Basically, the most important transaction to put in the ledger on any go around you can get your hands on is the one saying "create all these bitcoins in my account." You also get to make the ledger entry that says "also I get all the transaction fees from the transactions I am posting."
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Mar 4, 2016 03:03
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