elux
Joined 16 years ago
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550
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35
Member since
Nov 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph”,
a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".)
Preprint available here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
(The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)
Comment · 13 years ago
>How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine.
The hundreds (thousands now?) of (mostly) small businesses accepting bitcoin for goods and services include gift card vendors. [1]
You can spend your bitcoins on gift cards (a form of virtual currency in itself) which you can use at some of the world's largest retailers, for example Amazon[2] or Walmart [3].
It's a two-step process, but you can use your bitcoins at Amazon or Walmart, today.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Gift.2FDebit_Cards
[2] http://www.gyft.com/shop-for-gift-cards/
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1om2jm/egifter_now_...
Comment · 13 years ago
You may have heard that a proton is made from three quarks. Indeed here are several pages that say so. This is a lie — a white lie, but a big one. In fact there are zillions of gluons, antiquarks, and quarks in a proton. The standard shorthand, “the proton is made from two up quarks and one down quark”, is really a statement that the proton has two more up quarks than up antiquarks, and one more down quark than down antiquarks. To make the glib shorthand correct you need to add the phrase “plus zillions of gluons and zillions of quark-antiquark pairs.” Without this phrase, one’s view of the proton is so simplistic that it is not possible to understand the LHC at all.
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadronc...
Comment · 13 years ago
>If the Americans don't like the situation then they can vote for someone who will enact legislation that reflects that,
Like who? Red? Or Blue?
Comment · 13 years ago
>Bitcoin has a long way to go before it's as easy to use as Paypal.
Coinbase (out of Y combinator) is getting there.
Comment · 13 years ago
Utterly flawed reasoning. See: "Prosecutor's fallacy"
Comment · 13 years ago
From the WMAP edition at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/BBSound_2003.html
>Q: How can you represent it as a sound? Sound is supposed to be a wave that travels through air, and there was no air in the early stages of the Big Bang?
>A: The Big Bang Sound in the simulation is derived from the sound propagating as compression waves through the plasma/hydrogen medium of the early universe some 100 to 700 thousand years after the initial Big Bang. The density of this medium was changing as the universe expanded, but should have been considerably more dense than air on our little planet. One does NOT need air to have sound, only some medium in which compression/rarefaction waves can propagate. The sound waves were very low in frequency and had wavelengths comparable to some fraction of the size of the universe. For the convenience of humans, who could not hear such low frequencies, I have increased them to the audio range of the human ear.
Or... One could simply say it's a rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien's Ainulindalë. ;)
"The Music of The Ainur", strange and beautiful.
Comment · 13 years ago
I believe the EFF donated their coins to the original "Bitcoin Faucet", a service by Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen that would give away fractions of a coin for free, so the newbies would have some to experiment with. (The Bitcoin Faucet happens to be where I got my first 0.05 BTC, a few years ago.)
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20185.0;wap2
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
Now what?