jerrylives

>Bitcoin is widely regarded as the first broadly successful ecash system. An oft-cited concern, though, is that mining Bitcoins wastes computational resources. Indeed, Bitcoin’s underlying mining mechanism, which we call a scratch-off puzzle (SOP), involves continuously attempting to solve computational puzzles that have no intrinsic utility. We propose a modification to Bitcoin that repurposes its mining resources to achieve a more broadly useful goal: distributed storage of archival data. We call our new scheme Permacoin. Unlike Bitcoin and its proposed alternatives, Permacoin requires clients to invest not just computational resources, but also storage. Our scheme involves an alternative scratch-off puzzle for Bitcoin based on Proofs-ofRetrievability (PORs). Successfully minting money with this SOP requires local, random access to a copy of a file. Given the competition among mining clients in Bitcoin, this modi- fied SOP gives rise to highly decentralized file storage, thus reducing the overall waste of Bitcoin. Using a model of rational economic agents we show that our modified SOP preserves the essential properties of the original Bitcoin puzzle. We also provide parameterizations and calculations based on realistic hardware constraints to demonstrate the practicality of Permacoin as a whole.

Comment · 9 years ago

> But the truth is that there are far less women than men who are like that, and that this will never change because of biological factors.

What about all the women through the 40s up until the 80s who worked as computer programmers? For a while it was a seriously female dominated field. A woman wrote the first compiler. A woman wrote the code to help get us to the moon. A woman taught my CS courses in high school and i had two female CS professors in college (and just about half my graduating class in that major was female).

Did biology change? Where's the science that says women as a whole don't enjoy IT as much? You crow on and on about science but provide no citations, no logical coherent argument.

When I see posts like this on HN, it makes me think you haven't worked closely with women. Or even know any lol

Comment · 9 years ago

Well, we had Robert Moses and look how that turned out

Comment · 9 years ago

These two instances are not at all remotely comparable lol

Comment · 9 years ago

Have there been any articles / pieces about it from women working at Google? I'd be interested in hearing that perspective.

Comment · 9 years ago

Uh like none of this happened when the dumpster bombs went off in Chelsea last year. They closed the streets for the investigation and to look for more bombs but it wasn't even close to a "lockdown of all public buildings", I'm pretty sure they just halted traffic. You could even - yes- walk around the area where the bomb went off the next day. It was a block from my office.