Proof of work tends to be inherently slow, has inherently high transaction costs, and the miner’s interests are not identical with those holding currency as a store of value and those using currency as a medium of exchange. Proof of stake is nontrival to get right. It is a form of the infamously difficult to understand (and infamously difficult to program correctly) Paxos protocol. The Paxos protocol has the great …
Category: crypto
A bad time to invest in Bitcoin
Back in 2013 I urged people to invest in Bitcoin. Yesterday someone asked my cleaning lady to invest in Bitcoin. Now if someone had asked her to accept payment in Bitcoin, or send payment in Bitcoin, then this would be compelling evidence that one should invest in Bitcoin. But when cleaning ladies are asked to invest in Bitcoin, not a good investment. When Bitcoin began, everyone was a miner, and …
Cryptocurrency
Our financial system is corrupt and oppressive. Cryptocurrencies represent an opportunity to route around that system, and make lots of money doing so. Cryptocurrency is real, and presents the opportunity to make enormous amounts of money. Also, cryptocurrency scams are real, and present the opportunity to lose enormous amounts of money. Like the dot-com bubble in the 90s, you can add the concept of blockchain to just about anything and …
Censoring the internet
Racist sites are being taken off the internet. Expect “racist” sites to follow. The internet is built to resist censorship, and it is time for alt tech that takes advantage of this. patronize Gab.ai, duckduckgo, hatreon, and infogalactic.com, assuming that they are still up by the time you read this. If they are not, namecoin and tor.
The bitcoin crisis
There can only be one. There can only be one money, at the root of all others. Money is a measure of value, a store of value, and a medium of exchange, and you want to uses the same medium of exchange and measure of value as everyone else. At the very beginning, I said the trouble with bitcoin, as originally designed, is that it does not scale. Everyone, to …
Tor compromised
It has long been known that much of the resources for Tor are provided by US spy agencies. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since they might want a means for communicating that no one can spy on. However, Lucky Green, a key figure in the privacy community, has issued a warrant canary – what you issue when you are forbidden to tell people you have had a warrant …
Against urbit
The world is moving to cloud computing – which means that the world is moving to giant megacorps that are excessively cozy with the government owning all your data. Which, as general David Petraeus discovered, can be really bad for you. Google tipped off his enemies, not by reading his email, though they did read his email, but by tracking where he was when he logged in to gmail. Which …
Bitcoin crisis
Back in the beginning, I argued bitcoin would not scale. The counter argument was that we could muddle our way through somehow with ad hoc solutions, which could be sort of true, in principle. The scaling problems started to bite in 2013. They are now biting really hard. The scaling problems are now well and truly here. Downloading the blockchain is slow and expensive. Doing transactions is slow, unpredictable, expensive, …
Tim Cook “I am proud to be gay” spys on Mac users
In the recent release of the Mac operating system: If you set up an email that does not belong to Apple, the OS phones your email domain home to Apple to help them dox you. No matter who you use a search provider, the browser reports your search strings to Apple
Silk Road 2.0 goes down
“This hidden site has been seized” We are going to need a heavily decentralized solution, so that if a relatively small number of nodes get shut down or taken over by law enforcement, the network continues to function correctly, and, because no single node is central, no single node has traffic patterns that make it stand out. The Tor hidden site system will always fail if a hidden site generates …