asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: the common pattern here is that "money makes money" doesn't apply here; having more BTC (or USD) does not give you an advantage in purely intellectual battles
asciilifeform: Insaneatyou: work on evil things. Trojans that steal BTC/LTC or mine; more efficient ways to brute-force SHA256; attacks on the network; and the like.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: he's more (vaguely) Slavophilic than pro-Soviet.
asciilifeform: gwillen: the marketdroids can call a turd a sausage and eat with relish. but we don't have to
asciilifeform: gwillen: it is an ASIC only in the sense that it isn't field-programmable. But most of the actual circuitry is identical to that of an FPGA
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I tend to think in the currency I buy food with. Is this really so odd?
asciilifeform: but the fact is, a real asic has a 7 figure (USD) tooling cost and hardcopy FPGAs have 4 figure tooling cost.
asciilifeform: well yes, and I can wire a resistor from my garbage can across the power terminals and use 500W
asciilifeform: but the watt/hash/hr figure is a smoking gun by itself
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mail me one and I'll happily vivisect it and post the result
asciilifeform: deadweasely: it explains the power consumption
asciilifeform: why is nobody talking about how Avalon shipped HardCopy FPGAs instead of real ASICs?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: considering what I concluded in that piece, this is hilariously funny
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I'm more of an amateur mathematics crackpot than a serious BTC enthusiast. I have ~3 BTC...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you can repackage and post this if you like, the readers of my little computer architecture blog are probably tired of the BTC ramblings...
asciilifeform: and virtually nobody appears to be the least bit interested in my (or anyone else's) ideas for cutting the fiat world out of the loop (I suggested product delivery via dead drops, flying machines, other crackpot nuttery)☟︎
asciilifeform: my impression is that the idiot noobs are playing the role of the "stupid money" at online poker tables - keeping the system adequately "pressurized" for real commerce
asciilifeform: correct me if I'm wrong, but most people who pump fiat into BTC are hoping to use gox in particular at some point to pump it back out
asciilifeform: forget about reddit coffee, what about mtgox? what would a sudden desaparecido of gox be like?
asciilifeform: right now, if the legit commerce in BTC gets decreed out of existence, the currency will be on very shaky legs indeed
asciilifeform: I know this is a hard sell, but it seems to me that things like Silk Road are steps in the right direction. Right now, most BTC users are law-abiding wimps who will give up if their gov. so much as sneezes at them. But if you can get organized crime to actually rely on BTC in a serious way, it will be invincible.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I was arguing from the "may as well hang for a sheep as a lamb" angle.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fair enough. If you screw with the "cattle infrastructure" you will Have Problems, whether it breaks any formal law or not.
asciilifeform: although the U.S. authorities are in the process of decreeing that cash card balances must be declared at customs checkpoints.
asciilifeform: IANAL, but I'm not even sure this would be illegal under (current) American law.
asciilifeform: the BTC prosecutions (and firing squads, eventually) will come whether we like it or not.
asciilifeform: another variation on the CC idea: use #s lifted from perfectly genuine "cash cards," of the kind sold in virtually every country.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what made you remember it now?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: thank Alex Tolstoy, not me.
asciilifeform: but I agree, anyone who tries will "have problems" rather quickly.
asciilifeform: what does it take to get valid single-use CC #s, though? Can you do it from the Seychelles or the like?
asciilifeform: not in the USSA certainly. but maybe in France...
asciilifeform: let some other loser handle the ATMs, drive the armored trucks, etc.
asciilifeform: then you can withdraw cash from normal ATMs.
asciilifeform: consider a hardware widget that receives a single-use CC number (for $X) from a hypothetical BTC-enabled bank and writes it to a blank physical ATM card, when you send the bank $X equiv. of BTC.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: question: wtf do gypsies have to do with all of this?
asciilifeform: if every time you carry out a transaction God transmitted it to every BTC user simultaneously, this scenario would not apply. But this isn't how the network works.
asciilifeform: jurov: the whales move unmolested now, because nobody (AFAIK) is operating a massive "BTC telescope" for the purpose of front-running.
asciilifeform: (replace "exchange" with the ultimate destination of MP's 1 MegaBTC.)
asciilifeform: a clever fellow could observe the parcel changing hands before the price on the exchange moves
asciilifeform: ok strike that. but imagine you were to actually spend a large parcel of your coin on something - anything.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: when you push "return", 1 BTC is worth 1 Marscoin. But before the transaction goes through, 1 Marscoin will be worth 1000 BTC. Because front-runners...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one day you'll cash out your 1 MegaBTC to buy Marscoins, to fly your harem to Mars and retire there...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: BTC is your playground, too. presumably you like to win rather than lose.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is far more interesting when a clever fellow thinks he is all that, and you show him better.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: right now, nobody. after the fact, everybody.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: esp. fun when you phuck the people who think they're unphuckable
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: blackhatness is fun, because you can not just make money, but phuck people
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ASICs are boring because they're a straight competition of fiat bank accounts (with the possible exception of the sneak-an-SHA256-engine-on-a-commercial-die idea)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you carry on with the assumption that you are the only thinking man in BTC, you will come to no good.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: most Americans can't tie their shoes. Doesn't stop the remaining ones from, well, buggering the planet raw.
asciilifeform: bigger and better evil theory: a network of colluding BTC nodes is front-running trades.
asciilifeform: They do What They Must, Because They Can (tm)
asciilifeform: easy & fun explanation: mtgox is front-running trades.
asciilifeform: who wants to be the first to set up a trading bot that counts irc/www BTC chumps and adjusts trading strategy accordingly?
asciilifeform: Lyspooner: "first ecstasy, then laundry."
asciilifeform: Lyspooner: are you also jealous of the people who happily send their life savings to Nigerian spammers? ignorance is bliss, and all that?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ask mtgox nicely to give the secret price adjustment knob a quarter-turn up, and the idiots will go away again.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you demonstrate how to steal a vault full of diamonds in Belgium, I'll give you a U.S. dollar in bounty.
asciilifeform: pick up a spectrum analyzer on ebay and see how far your laptop radiates.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: is your cold machine kept in a Faraday cage room, with optically isolated power?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you hand-type the public keys and signed transactions?
asciilifeform: also, in practice, most air gaps aren't. see Stuxnet & friends.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, ok, MPEx might be using cold wallets, kept on Mars. But most BTC users don't. and if you want to spend any, you have to defrost.
asciilifeform: a cold wallet is only cold until you want to spend some?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hope you'll enjoy having him as the sole client, then
asciilifeform: mpex hums along because a bureaucrat hasn't hit the "dump all win32/osx machine's BTC wallets to one address" key yet.
asciilifeform: this includes Cisco/Juniper backbones.
asciilifeform: if you run a popular commercial OS, you're uncle sam's bitch, whether you know it or not.
asciilifeform: what fraction of BTC users use MSwin/macos?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: a slice of stake from the grocery also doesn't have a fixed purpose. you can cook and eat it, or put it out in the sun and wait for it to grow with thousands of flies.
