A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@dcoder While the existence of these images is sad, I find it hilarious that one single asshole could make the whole bitcoin blockchain completely illegal forever.
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@topspin There's also the question of who thought it a good idea to allow storing of arbitrary values in the block chain.
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
There's also the question of who thought
Filed under: Time spent thinking is time not spent innovating
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@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Filed under: Time spent thinking is time not spent innovating
Hyperpoop is
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@dcoder That doesn't even slightly make sense to me. How do you store an image in the blockchain? Anything in it that isn't a valid hash is going to be thrown out.
I wonder if they just compared bytes to "known" child abuse images and coincidentally some of the images matched.
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@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
There's also the question of who thought it a good idea to allow storing of arbitrary values in the block chain.
AFAIK the only place they can exist is in unconfirmed transactions, where they'll get thrown out as soon as enough miners look at those transactions and reject them. Although maybe that's where they were found, I dunno.
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@blakeyrat Good question. Here's what I found with a quick search:
Approach 1: Bitcoin addresses are just hex values. You can send bitcoins to any address you like – even if that address doesn't exist. Generate a large number of transactions this way, combine their addresses, voila.
Approach 2: transactions can include scripts to restrict the usage of funds from this transaction, e.g. you can say "anyone can spend these coins", or "coins cannot be spent until July 4 2026". These scripts can do pointless things like
var foo = 0x12345678; return true;
to keep your custom data infoo
.See the below article for examples of things that people had already put into the blockchain by 2014, and the approaches used:
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@dcoder Apparently someone also managed to set off Microsoft Security Essentials by embedding data which duped MSE into detecting it as a decades-old virus:
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Approach 2: transactions can include scripts to restrict the usage of funds from this transaction, e.g. you can say "anyone can spend these coins", or "coins cannot be spent until July 4 2026". These scripts can do pointless things like var foo = 0x12345678; return true; to keep your custom data in foo.
Is that true in Bitcoin? I thought that was Ethereum.
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@blakeyrat Bitcoin scripting is intentionally minimalistic and not Turing-complete. Ethereum has a full-blown Virtual Machine for scripting and uses a Turing-complete language for it.
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@jbert Nice. I was expecting EICAR when I read that.
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@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat Bitcoin scripting is intentionally minimalistic and not Turing-complete. Ethereum has a full-blown Virtual Machine for scripting and uses a Turing-complete language for it.
"Our currency isn't based on arbitrary values, like that nasty FIAT stuff-- but you can run Linux inside of it."
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Hyperpoop
Or how to use the toilet while going fast?
(answer: it's a shitty situation)
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@luhmann said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Hyperpoop
Or how to use the toilet while going fast?
(answer: it's a shitty situation)
I thought it was shitting into a vacuum tube.
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@hungrier
You are confused with the competition's VacuPoop
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And a circlejerk is certainly something we could get together, too.
You're the pivot man.
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My cryptocurrency-loving friend is in full defensive mode over the storing of arbitrary data in the Bitcoin blockchain.
"Fake news!"
"Complete fabrication by the media."
"Not real, it's not real data."
"They would need to ban image files too then because you can add any metadata to those."
"The police in USA closed the investigation, because it's not worth investigating."
"They only found one 6-character address that was pointing towards illegal content."Any problem, warning flag and potentially negative news about cryptocurrencies are met the same way. Full-on defensive mode, I and/or the media have misunderstood the problem, it's blown out of proportion, it's fake, the cryptocurrency news sites are writing nothing about it, therefore it's not real, etc...
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@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
full defensive mode over the storing of arbitrary data in the Bitcoin blockchain.
There are many ways in which Bitcoin is a failure: waste of energy, it does not work as a currency in practice, slow, stupid, causes speculation ...
But being able to store data, on a distributed database designed to store data, is not one of them.
The ability to store arbitrary data is clearly obvious from the start: you can create a series of accounts, then put specific amounts of BTC on them, then announce the numbers/sequence can be interpreted as <something>.
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@adynathos Bring up any of those points with him and he will also dismiss them. The more I have spoken with him the more I understand how much of the kool-aid he's been drinking. At least he's not stupid, so he only keeps on reinvesting his profits from mining (as far as I know), but he gets really defensive if anything negative is brought up.
The point I was trying to make was the fact that people are abusing the ability to store arbitrary data. But he's fully dismissing that and denying that it is happening, and questioning the existence of such data. Maybe. He both denied that there was any illegal data and said they had only found one occurrence a couple sentences later, while reiterating his point that image files can also store such data in them. His arguing is however reminiscent of someone who wants to be 100% secure, but is filled with plenty doubts that he wants to pretend is not there.
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That's some goooooooooooooood shit, bro!
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@lolwhat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That's some goooooooooooooood shit, bro!
Another CEO is an idiot. Nothing to see here, move along.
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@lolwhat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That's some goooooooooooooood shit, bro!
Whatever it is he's taking, he either needs more or less of it.
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@atazhaia
Trump Derangement Syndrome by any other name...
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@atazhaia Weird; from my experience even people who are way into cryptocurrencies will regard Bitcoin as important, but a highly flawed first attempt with a ton of practical problems.
Or maybe he's totally forgotten at this point that the original point of Bitcoin was that it could be used to send payments to people. At the thing it was designed to do, it's an utter failure.
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@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The point I was trying to make was the fact that people are abusing the ability to store arbitrary data. But he's fully dismissing that and denying that it is happening, and questioning the existence of such data. Maybe. He both denied that there was any illegal data and said they had only found one occurrence a couple sentences later, while reiterating his point that image files can also store such data in them. His arguing is however reminiscent of someone who wants to be 100% secure, but is filled with plenty doubts that he wants to pretend is not there.
The real problem isn't that there's data in the blockchain, but that there's data in the blockchain that makes it literally illegal for any US citizen to possess the blockchain.
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@mrl said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Another CEO is an idiot. Nothing to see here, move along.
Was this followed by another speech where Elon Musk thinks AI robots are going to kill us all, Terminator 2-style?
Being rich doesn't make you immune from thinking really stupid things. In fact it enforces it, because you get surrounded by yes-men.
Neither does being smart in one area, FYI. That's why Ben Carson who's literally a brain surgeon thinks Egyptian pyramids were built as granaries.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That's why Ben Carson who's literally a brain surgeon thinks Egyptian pyramids were built as granaries.
How exactly do you think they've dealt with 7 years of famine?!
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The real problem isn't that there's data in the blockchain, but that there's data in the blockchain that makes it literally illegal for any US citizen to possess the blockchain.
And he was strongly refuting that claim today, being all "Fake news!" about the whole deal. Even when I sent him the article explaining how it's possible, he called the whole thing bullshit and "not possible" and "it's not real data" and other such stuff, trying to deny the whole thing. He doesn't even have any Bitcoin anymore iirc, so I dunno why he spends so much effort defending that one currency either.
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@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The real problem isn't that there's data in the blockchain, but that there's data in the blockchain that makes it literally illegal for any US citizen to possess the blockchain.
And he was strongly refuting that claim today, being all "Fake news!" about the whole deal. Even when I sent him the article explaining how it's possible, he called the whole thing bullshit and "not possible" and "it's not real data" and other such stuff, trying to deny the whole thing. He doesn't even have any Bitcoin anymore iirc, so I dunno why he spends so much effort defending that one currency either.
Hysterical self delusion, fuelled by fear of admitting being wrong.
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@lorne-kates said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat Bitcoin scripting is intentionally minimalistic and not Turing-complete. Ethereum has a full-blown Virtual Machine for scripting and uses a Turing-complete language for it.
"Our currency isn't based on arbitrary values, like that nasty FIAT stuff-- but you can run Linux inside of it."
Can someone explain me why somebody think that Ethereum is a good idea, or useful?
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@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Can someone explain me why somebody think that Ethereum is a good idea, or useful?
Since that would imply that cryptocurrencies are a good idea: no, that's not possible.
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@jbert said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder Apparently someone also managed to set off Microsoft Security Essentials by embedding data which duped MSE into detecting it as a decades-old virus:
I wonder what would happen if you put a computer virus signature in the description field of a traditional bank transfer.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Was this followed by another speech where Elon Musk thinks AI robots are going to kill us all, Terminator 2-style?
Let's just be realistic, that is one of the more sane of Elon's batshit crazy statements.
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@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Can someone explain me why somebody think that Ethereum is a good idea, or useful?
I think we've had a post about this before, but the basic idea of Ethereum is that you can create a "virtual business" that runs IN the blockchain. You write your business plan in the form of computer code, store that in the blockchain and people can invest in your business by just sending your bot Ethereum currency.
It's a stupid idea that doesn't work for a million different reasons, but. That's the idea.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The point I was trying to make was the fact that people are abusing the ability to store arbitrary data. But he's fully dismissing that and denying that it is happening, and questioning the existence of such data. Maybe. He both denied that there was any illegal data and said they had only found one occurrence a couple sentences later, while reiterating his point that image files can also store such data in them. His arguing is however reminiscent of someone who wants to be 100% secure, but is filled with plenty doubts that he wants to pretend is not there.
The real problem isn't that there's data in the blockchain, but that there's data in the blockchain that makes it literally illegal for any US citizen to possess the blockchain.
No... the real problem is that, supposing for the sake of argument that the blockchain does contain data that makes it literally illegal for any US citizen to possess it, there is no way to remove that data from it without compromising the whole entire blockchain.
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@anotherusername Yes that is just restating the same problem, but congratulations.
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@blakeyrat Overall I was agreeing with you, but I was adding an important nuance that you hadn't mentioned.
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@hungrier said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I thought it was shitting into a vacuum tube.
A hyperpoo hyperloop is when you shit into a vacuum tube that's connected back to your mouth.
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@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Bring up any of those points with him and he will also dismiss them.
Then just start making up things about BitCoin's failures and watch him try to argue them.
As a bonus: no matter how stupid you make up something, there's a non-zero chance you'll be right.
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@lorne-kates I'd rather just use the hyperloo.
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@blakeyrat I don't get when or what machine executes this code, and it scream stupid so loudly that I don't get me doing the effort to learn. Maybe the miner will run the code when registering the transaction? What could possibly go wrong. I can't think a single use case that would be useful.
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@sockpuppet7 The script has to provide some amount of currency as "gas" which pays miners to run its script commands. If it runs out of "gas" it halts until someone adds more.
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@lorne-kates said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@hungrier said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I thought it was shitting into a vacuum tube.
A hyperpoo hyperloop is when you shit into a vacuum tube that's connected back to your mouth.
Sounds like Jackass.
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@pleegwat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@jbert said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcoder Apparently someone also managed to set off Microsoft Security Essentials by embedding data which duped MSE into detecting it as a decades-old virus:
I wonder what would happen if you put a computer virus signature in the description field of a traditional bank transfer.
I wonder if you could do that with EICAR.
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@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If it runs out of "gas" it halts until someone adds more.
Does it catch fire?
(at least if it does, it won't explode the gas tank)
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@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Can someone explain me why somebody think that Ethereum is a good idea, or useful?
Adding to what @blakeyrat said, one of Ethereum's main advertising points is "code is law" – you write a Smart Contract in their (rather atrocious) scripting language, the contract gets executed by the miners, and whatever that contract's code does is final. You don't have the human element in the process – there's no way for your business partner to create "alternative facts" and scam you by doing something different than what the contract says, no way for a bank to refuse service to either party, no way for a court of law to force you to void a contract, etc.
When, inevitably, a bug was exploited in the biggest smart contract logic and the attackers swiped $50M (edit: other sources say $40M or $60M, presumably due to different exchange rates at the time) worth of Ether, the community hemmed and hawed about respecting or reverting those transactions. Ultimately they forked Ethereum into two blockchains: "Ethereum Classic" which treated the hacks as legit transactions and just continued unchanged, and "Ethereum" which rolled the entire blockchain back to the point just before the hacks.
This is their story:
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(This is not related to the hack mentioned in the above post.)
The jarring vulnerability was discovered by Dutch fintech firm VI Company, which reported the issue to Coinbase back in late December last year. The exchange desk fixed the issue a month later in January and has since rewarded the Dutch company with a $10,000 bounty.
“If [one] wallets transaction in the smart contract fails all transactions before that will be reversed,” VI Company explained. “But on Coinbase these transactions will not be reversed, meaning a person could add as much Ethereum to their balance as they want.”
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@lorne-kates
sounds more like a vacuum centepede