A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
-
Today my crypto friend gave me a major as a followup to yesterdays conversation, as he came into the room and said this:
Today I read on the crypto forums that they had found weapon blueprints from ISIS in [the blockchain(?)] as well as scripts that were executed while mining to also improve on weapons for ISIS at the same time. I don't know where they come up with this bullshit because that's not possible at all, but I expect media to have more misinformed articles up soon.
While I also think that story is complete bullshit I do wonder where he even got it from, as he didn't give me any source for it, and asking him for sources tend to be pointless as "I can't find them again" or "I forgot where I read it". He also didn't say how and where the blueprints and scripts were supposedly hidden, or which currencies were affected.
He again also shot down that there was (a problem with) irrelevant metadata hidden in the Bitcoin blockchain with "Well, you could find that kind of stuff much easier by just going to Google.com." to which I thought "That's not the fucking problem here!". deep sigh
-
@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
He again also shot down that there was (a problem with) irrelevant metadata hidden in the Bitcoin blockchain with "Well, you could find that kind of stuff much easier by just going to Google.com." to which I thought "That's not the fucking problem here!". deep sigh
Indeed. If there's content that violates the law, Google can remove (its link to) it. BTC is built such that it never, ever can.
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
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.
And why somebody would put real money on a currency that can be "forked" like this? Rethorical question. That's stupid.
It's like reverting everybody bank accounts after the financial system being stolen.
-
@heterodox It's like Schrödinger's metadata when I've spoken to him about it, where it both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. So I got "It's not possible to do that.", "They may as well ban image files too because you can store any data in them too." and "They only found one link to illegal content.". from him within the same minute, talking about Bitcoin specifically. So it doesn't work, image files should be banned because you can store arbitrary data in them too, and they only found one link to illegal content in the Bitcoin ledger anyway, so it's not a big problem. And he kept jumping back and forth about how it was afterwards too. So I don't even know what point he's trying to argue anymore.
-
@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So I don't even know what point he's trying to argue anymore.
"This thing I believe in is great. I'm not an idiot. I'm not wrong."
-
@sockpuppet7 said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And why somebody would put real money on a currency that can be "forked" like this? Rethorical question. That's stupid.
Any cryptocurrency can be forked this way, not just Ethereum. It's inherent in the concept of a blockchain. All it takes is 51% miners agreeing to use the rolled-back chain.
For Ethereum, forking was not the main selling point, "code as law" was. The "fuck the big banks, fuck the law" crowd loved that idea. Shysters and scam artists saw an opportunity to spout buzzwords and get rich. The hype train sucked in a lot of gullible people. Until that fork actually happened, everyone assumed forking was just a theoretical apocalypse scenario, not an annual proctology exam.
-
@mrl said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
"This thing I believe in is great. I'm not an idiot. I'm not wrong."
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest
Filed under: Smart Contract
-
@lorne-kates Now all we need is an equivalent contest for the gifted language that you have to use for these contracts, Solidity. With prizes being "whatever your contract can snatch from the judges' accounts before they find all the traps".
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@mrl said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
"This thing I believe in is great. I'm not an idiot. I'm not wrong."
The weird thing is that he shouldn't need to defend it so vigorously for his own personal sake. If he's telling me the truth, he's recouped his investments already and is right now paying for his mining/investments with cryptocurrencies only. Although he also has some... weird... ideas.
I know that they are used on the black market, but any coin I own cannot be used for anything illegal, therefore I am doing a good deed by owning many coins.
I heard ISIS is going to make their own cryptocurrency. I should buy into it just to lock down coins so they can't be used for anything bad.
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@lorne-kates Now all we need is an equivalent contest for the gifted language that you have to use for these contracts, Solidity. With prizes being "whatever your contract can snatch from the judges' accounts before they find all the traps".
You you = new You(); fuck(you); you.give(new Me(), you.getMoney());
-
@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I heard ISIS is going to make their own cryptocurrency. I should buy into it just to lock down coins so they can't be used for anything bad.
So his plan is to give the terrorists real money in exchange for Terrorist FunBux, to prevent the funding of terrorism?
-
@hungrier 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:
@lorne-kates Now all we need is an equivalent contest for the gifted language that you have to use for these contracts, Solidity. With prizes being "whatever your contract can snatch from the judges' accounts before they find all the traps".
function void NotATrap() { You you = new You(); fuck(you); you.give(new Me(), you.getMoney()); }
"Smart'd" that for you.
-
-
@atazhaia said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I heard ISIS is going to make their own cryptocurrency. I should buy into it just to lock down coins so they can't be used for anything bad.
WTF?!?!?!
-
This is a curated list of known vulnerabilities in smart contracts sorted by date.
That's roughly $700M worth of magic digital mcguffins gone so far.
-
Rule 34₡: no matter how stupid or impossible an idea is, there's a shitcoin for it.
Source: @davidgerard
-
@dcoder They can transmute lead (or something) into platinum, but they can't grammar-check their webpage.
I got this email today:
Where I guess the premise is that there's so many ICOs now that they're impossible to keep track of, so you should buy THIS ICO which provides the ability to automatically convert it into other ICOs? Or something. I only skimmed it.
BTW "airdrop" means you get a certain amount of tokens for free without trading anything for them or having to pay cash-money.
-
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
They can transmute lead (or something) into platinum
No they mean they coded their website with ColdFusion
-
BTW why do all these crypto ICOs and such use Telegram? I'd never even heard of Telegram before I started following this shit. Both the SEED tokens I linked and the matter re-arranger DCoder linked require membership in Telegram.
...
Also, what the fuck is Telegram? Like yet another Slack knockoff?
-
@blakeyrat Messenger with end-to-end encryption. Said encryption is developed by Telegram's devs themselves.
Which, of course, has been widely criticised as sporting insecure elements, surprising exactly no one.
Which in turn is about par for the course for Crypto Currencies I guess.
Bonus: Telegram has been founded by the Russian equivalent of Facebook (VKontakte). Sounds like a really secure solution to me!
-
So what's the hivemind's consensus on currencies that require actual processing work on actual projects, not just blockchain stuff?
I.E. folding@home, SETI@home,
-
@thebread What "currency" do you get from SETI@home? Are you talking about the bragging rights for having a lot of hours?
-
@blakeyrat you can run BOINC and get gridcoin for doing it, which is worth $0.05 right now.
-
@thebread I had no idea. Good on them.
-
@thebread said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
gridcoin
power to attempt to cure cancer/AIDS/Ebola/malaria,
Good!
map the Milky Way galaxy,
Sure, I like space!
crack Enigma machine codes,
Whaaa... why?
"Man if we had cracked this in June of 1943, we sure would have saved that ship from being torpedoed!"
-
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Whaaa... why?
"Man if we had cracked this in June of 1943, we sure would have saved that ship from being torpedoed!"History nerds, I presume
Also, while I'd much prefer Folding, literally anything has more utility than mining bitcoin.Filed under: nazi@home
-
AMD stock price went down today because ETH ASIC miners are now efficient.
So GPU prices might go down for us now. Nvidia GPUs mine worse.
BTW one of these miners are $3000. I was thinking of buying one or two but the price before returns doesn't seem economical for me.
-
I thought the deal was most miners that are doing GPU mining are just mining alt coins in order to trade into ETH or BTC. As long as those are still compatible, then GPUs may stay up there.
-
@thebread Yeah but generally once a coin gets an ASIC miner available, the GPU mining becomes unprofitable.
So far this hasn't been a disaster because:
- There are a LOT of coins, even actively-traded coins
- Some of them actively defeat companies trying to develop ASIC miners by frequently changing their algorithms
-
@blakeyrat Aren't some supposedly 'ASIC-proof'?
-
@thebread No. ASICS are more efficient per watt from what I understand.
I only trade crypto, not mine.
-
@thebread said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat Aren't some supposedly 'ASIC-proof'?
Yeah. ASICs only work when the algorithm never changes; ASICs can't be "reprogrammed" after they've shipped.
So if a coin changes their algorithm every 6 months or so, PC users can easily update their mining software, but all ASICs for that coin become utterly useless. I know a couple coins are doing that.
-
@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Telegram has been founded by the Russian equivalent of Facebook (VKontakte)
well shit, I had no idea it was tied to VK. well, that fuckin blows
-
@bb36e said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Telegram has been founded by the Russian equivalent of Facebook (VKontakte)
well shit, I had no idea it was tied to VK. well, that fuckin blows
That's not the only part about Telegram that blows:
-
Well if you're going to make up fake money, might as well do something good with it until the gravy train runs out.
-
@bb36e said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
VK
Oh, I saw this a few days ago but forgot to tell anyone.
Here are the top referrers for my 9 hour Dwarf Fortress video:
Yes, the top video suggesting this video is this video. Two thirds of the video's watch time is from Russians, and 3% is from trolls. Surprisingly, no Reddit or bay12forums this time around.
-
@ben_lubar said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Two thirds of the video's watch time is from Russians, and 3% is from trolls. Surprisingly, no Reddit or bay12forums this time around.
Maybe they liked the music.
-
@blakeyrat said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@thebread said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@blakeyrat Aren't some supposedly 'ASIC-proof'?
Yeah. ASICs only work when the algorithm never changes; ASICs can't be "reprogrammed" after they've shipped.
So if a coin changes their algorithm every 6 months or so, PC users can easily update their mining software, but all ASICs for that coin become utterly useless. I know a couple coins are doing that.
Sounds like a classic application for FPGAs, as reprogrammable hardware is much easier to adapt to such things. It's nothing like as cheap per unit though, nor as power efficient as an ASIC.
Also, I've seen presentations from people working on being able to turn around an ASIC far faster; it was academic stuff but it could go to prod fast if the financial incentive is there. The 6 month period might need to be reduced.
-
@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The 6 month period might need to be reduced.
6 months is enough time for 4 other useless crypto currency to come out
-
@timebandit said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The 6 month period might need to be reduced.
6 months is enough time for 4 other useless crypto currency to come out
Yeah; I was just wondering what the lead time on making up a wafer at a fab is. For most hardware, there's so much time spent agonising over it it doesn't really matter, but I don't know how much the actual turnaround time is. The academic presentation on ASIC design speedup was IIRC talking about methods of reducing design time from months to days — i.e., about the realistic speed of producing software — which makes a huge difference for most application areas, but without knowing the actual fab turnaround time it's still hard to know what the effect in this area would be…
My team is more in the custom CPU area, and they're still out of what an ASIC can do (and our boards use FPGAs precisely so that they can be field-reconfigured depending on what hardware you want to connect).
-
@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I was just wondering what the lead time on making up a wafer at a fab is.
It depends on how much you're willing to pay. If you're willing to pay for it, you can get "hot lot" processing, which basically means your lot is at the front of the queue for each processing step. I don't really know just how long any of the processing steps take, but with expedited processing it's possible to get packaged, untested parts within about a week of starting the wafers. It ain't cheap, though. A more typical turnaround is probably more like 3 – 4 weeks, maybe.
Of course, the vast majority of the time is getting a design ready to make chips. Designing the chip (I used to do this), making sure the design does what it's supposed to do (I do this now), turning the logic into gates, arranging the gates on the chip and connecting them together, making sure the gates do the same thing as the higher-level model of the logic, making sure the gates will operate as fast as you want them to, making the masks (manufacturing tooling) to make the chips, and creating tests to detect manufacturing defects (yield is something semiconductor companies do not talk about publically, and the only numbers I could find appear to be really old and not representative of the state of the art — state of the art is likely even worse, because the smaller the device size, the more vulnerable it is to defects — but perhaps somewhere between 5% and 50% of chips have manufacturing defects) all take time. Some of it goes on in parallel, even stuff you might think would be sequential (e.g., the layout team is placing and routing (connecting) gates will before the design team has finished fixing minor bugs in the design), but it still takes time. The vast bulk of the time is actually designing the logic and proving it is correct. This typically takes months (when I was at Intel, years ago, a project was typically scheduled to last about 18 months, with multiple projects in the pipeline at ~6-month intervals; the last company for which I was a regular employee was trying hard to cut their cycle time down to 3 months with less-than-great success), and is the obvious place to try to improve. But it's not simple.
-
@hardwaregeek You know while you guys are having this long-ass conversation about chip fabs, you should know I totally pulled that "6 months" figure completely out of my ass. I don't know how often they change the algorithm.
-
2 Founders of $32 Million Centra Virtual Currency Project Are Arrested
SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities have arrested two founders of a virtual currency that raised $32 million from investors last year and won an endorsement from the boxer Floyd Mayweather.
-
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
2 Founders of $32 Million Centra Virtual Currency Project Are Arrested
SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities have arrested two founders of a virtual currency that raised $32 million from investors last year and won an endorsement from the boxer Floyd Mayweather.
This is the tasty part:
Centra raised $32 million last summer and fall in a so-called initial coin offering, a method of fund-raising in which companies sell custom virtual currencies. The Centra team said at the time that the Centra token would give investors access to a new virtual currency exchange and a virtual currency debit card that would operate on the Visa and Mastercard networks.
The S.E.C. said in its complaint that the Centra team had never received approval from Visa and Mastercard and had misled investors on several other counts. The S.E.C. said that several of the executives listed on the Centra website were fictitious.
-
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
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.
That's like Schrodinger's Cryptocurrency.
-
@polygeekery 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:
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.
That's like Schrodinger's Cryptocurrency.
More like real_escape_crypto.
-
@mrl I thought DogeCoin was the ironic answer to "BitCoin is inherently deflationary and completely safe from people just printing more money", i.e. yes, but everybody can fork their own ShitCoin.
Instead of lauging about it, people took it serious.
-
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@mrl I thought DogeCoin was the ironic answer to "BitCoin is inherently deflationary and completely safe from people just printing more money", i.e. yes, but everybody can fork their own ShitCoin.
Instead of lauging about it, people took it serious.I'm sure some snake oil sellers that already made money sometimes make ridiculous claims just to see how many gullible idiots will bite and have a laugh *caugh**caugh*Musk*caugh**caugh*