LOL. Would you like to apply this generally, e.g. as in "The principle of Rule of Law is a bad idea because it's an invitation to gaming the laws. Much better to have a tyrant...err... benevolent philosopher-king decide matters because it's harder to game him".
I favor more of a polycentric legal system. Call on someone agreeable to all parties to solve disputes when they happen on a mostly case-by-case basis with some generally agreed guidelines.
Downvotes on posts/comments older than X time affect the downvoters karma the same way as they do the downvoted.
Downvotes made after X time from the original posting affect karma at a rate of y%
Downvotes from users with karma below X don't affect the downvoted's karma score
All of these are made on the assumption that malicious downvoters are engaged in a E-Peen measuring contest using Karma as the measuring tool.
Only if the miners are all behaving rationally. Sunk Cost fallacy is a thing in far more people that it is not.
Plus the investment in the mining equipment market will make for more efficient mining equipment, which would be needed for the new difficulty. We'd have a second mining equipment bubble.
State actors would need to aquire mining hardware in order to make a 51% attack. Several million dollars worth of it. Trying to do so would have obvious effects on the small bitcoin mining equipment market, and unless the government turned all their machines on at once, they would spend the time they ramp up to a 51% attack actually strengthening the network, and causing other miners to also buy more equipment to keep up with the new difficulty.
This is certainly a possibility, if someone in the government recognizes the potential threat bitcoin offers to the government money monopoly. However, anyone smart enough to recognize the threat is also incentiveized to... (read more)
Bitcoiner here, so bear that in mind
A 51% attack is hard. It's come close to happening once with a mining pool called GHash.io. The community quickly responded, and as of right now, the largest pool has about 17% of the network hashing power, and GHash.io has about 4%. The current state of network power distribution can be viewed at https://blockchain.info/pools , as well as other blockchain watching services. It is in any particular miners interest to be in the largest pool possible, but counter to any miners purpose to be in any pool with the possibility of making a 51% attack, since a successful 51% attack would be the end of bitcoin's... (read more)
This is, IIRC the long aftermath of the 3rd major bubble. One in June 2011 (to ~$30), one in April 2013 (To ~$220) and one in November 2013 (To ~$1100).
Personally, I'm not expecting a major recovery until the protocol hits the next halving of the mining rate, which is July of 2016 on the current mining timetable. In the mean time, I'm dollar cost averaging my investment in Bitcoin, and stacking up whatever I can get.
No, I am not.
I personally rate the probability of catastrophic negative effects of this action as significantly lower than the probability of any negative effects, and the probability of no negative effects.
I am also speaking from a position of ignorance, and I don't like making decisions from ignorance.
I don't know what the ill effects would be, but the benefit is clear. If more cheap information is readily available, I want it (and some has been provided). If some amount of expensive evidence would increase my estimate of catastrophic effects, and that evidence can be clearly defined and gathered, I want it. If only vague, hard to measure risks remain, I say do it.
I'm a little cautious about deliberately eliminating a species, even a harmful to humans one. The environment is a complex system, and sticking our monkey hands in and pulling leavers can backfire in unpredicted ways.
What other environmental effects do the mosquitoes have? Do they control some other pest species? Are they food for something larger? Does the additional infection vector of mosquito bites significantly improve the general immune system functions of humans or other species bitten by these mosquitoes?
Hal Finney has not died, he has entered long term cryopreservation . Death is permanent, Hal still could get better.
A new study indicates that people become more utilitarian (save more lives) when viewing a moral dilemma in a virtual reality situation, as compared to reading the same situation in text.
... (read more)Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally-separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in
Let the record also show that 2 years later, bitcoin is up 243%
https://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD