asciilifeform: probabilistic algo. also quite possible that it will never converge (i.e. nothing useful hashes to fooXXXX... where foo is the vanity string)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: that'd hardly win you the slimmest turd contest.
asciilifeform: birthing a parsimonious implementation of something (i.e. one that can actually be understood) is not necessarily the same as the student pissing contest of 'write the shortest hello world for ms-dos in asm'
asciilifeform: mike_c: you could certainly phrase it that way.
asciilifeform: mike_c: i'd love to read 'Bitcoin, the book.' with rationales. but it would be of little worth without a strictly-minimal, brain-loadable reference implementation.
asciilifeform: ok what's this talk of state machines ?
asciilifeform: ;;later tell mircea_popescu nope. me, i use lex and yacc, and even those only when it cannot be helped.
asciilifeform: i still predict that gox et al will eventually 'repay' the chumps in a scamcoin minted for the purpose.
asciilifeform: "To this day pots of late-Roman gold are periodically dug up in England during excavations of Roman villas; the residents of these villas were unable to derive any benefit from their hoards as their empire collapsed and the Dark Age closed in around them." (further from herr Orlov)
asciilifeform: for the $1, bought a keychain in a 'dollar store' when we landed. still got it.
asciilifeform: i (and countless other people) got a boyhood education in fiat. when my folks were packing for the u.s., i traded in a shoebox full of rubles for $1.
asciilifeform: ifetimes some tin-pot pseudo-nationalist leader will print up ugly slips of paper with pictures of dead people, Masonic symbols and big numbers, and attempt to charge people for using them as a medium of exchange in all transactions, and your great-grandchildren need to know, from an early age, that it is a scam. It is an official scvam, backed up by the threat of violence, but it is still a scam."☟︎
asciilifeform: en they will probably think that anyway, because by then you probably will be. But it certainly won't be helpful to hold on to multiple shoeboxes full of old currency, because then your great-grandchildren will think that you are in fact insane, because no sane person would be hoarding such trash. It is important that they don't think that, because the lesson is an important one: chances are that during their l
asciilifeform: "... And so, you too should hold on to a few dollar, or euro, or ruble or yuan notes, in the highest denominations available at the time they all become worthless, as a keepsake. Then you will be able to show them to your great-grandchildren and say, 'Can you imagine, this ugly piece of paper was once a prized possession!' And your great-grandchildren will no doubt think that you are a little bit senile, but th
asciilifeform: -ruble note, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, and was very surprised to hear that it was completely worthless and that I could take one and use it as a bookmark (which I did). It was not until the 1990s that Russia again issued a note in that denomination, which likewise became worthless soon after it was printed."
asciilifeform: "You should hold on to some cash, for purely didactic purposes. I remember my great-grandmother, who passed away when I was seven, and I remember playing with her little hoard of kerenki - ruble notes in ridiculously high yet worthless denominations that had been issued by the Russian Provisional Government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky... ... I was quite taken with the ten-thousand☟︎
asciilifeform: 'suspicious,' naturally, will mean that the heuristic suspects the luser of operating a (btc market, etc) card spoofer.
asciilifeform: prediction: at some point ATMs will require the user to stuff his hand in a 'monkey trap.' if the transaction is deemed 'suspicious', the clamps close.
asciilifeform: btc <-> the code. code -> rfid emitter.
asciilifeform: pankkake: take-home lesson - found a hole? sell it to spammers and stfu. play your part in the food chain.
asciilifeform: (at one time, and perhaps still, the courts there presumed guilt on the part of the complaining card holder)
asciilifeform: like the british folks who were jailed for refusing to pay fraudulent charges on their accounts.
asciilifeform: i (and millions of others) get spam cards in the mail. anyone who can discover some very accessible biographical data can activate said card, should he break the mailbox, and borrow $.
asciilifeform: these folks are not interested in securing anything aside from themselves.
asciilifeform: one important fact is that u.s. card issuers love sending 'spam cards' via mail
asciilifeform: decimation: probably. but not economically.
asciilifeform: (i could draw a picture of why, but i'll leave it as an exercise for the alert reader.)
asciilifeform: incidentally, if the avaricious idiots move everybody to RFID cards sans crypto challenge/response (as appears to be the plan) - every ATM becomes a btc-ATM.☟︎
asciilifeform: instead, we see expensive (active silicon) but deliberately-porous crap, e.g. british 'chip&pin.'
asciilifeform: fact is, 'carding' could disappear overnight if the card issuers wished it. (even in countries with ubiquitous old-style magnetic readers. devices which present the correct magnetism, using one-time account #s, are trivial.)☟︎☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: yeah, it would be quite surprising if 'amazon' were reamed to the same depth as a corner shop.
asciilifeform: the merchant loses whatever $ was stolen, plus some.
asciilifeform: they're 'banks' in the medieval sense, one could say. but, sure.
asciilifeform: electric theft involves considerably less physical labour.
asciilifeform: punkman: national mints are doomed to reinvent the blockchain. that is, if anti-counterfeiting were an actual thing, instead of a psychological 'security theatre.'
asciilifeform: the solution to the 'idiot X pays Q btc for fistfight' is: pay idiot Y, R btc, to present himself for fistfight to idiot X, where R < Q.
asciilifeform: they have 'payday loans' built in, too.
