emin_gun_sirer's comments

Very interesting autopsy. But there are many uses for a virtual notary besides those times when "sh#t hits the fan."

Open source distributions, for instance, are currently distributed along with a hash, supposedly for protection, but we all know that those hashes are essentially worthless. This is a way to get integrity protection for free.

Employment status is another case where an independent certificate that you were employed at that instant would be valuable for the recipient.

Raffles and so forth are entirely untrustworthy at the moment; participants need to trust the reputation of the raffle holder, and while there are some laws, they are just not enforced.

In all these cases, VN can provide a useful service far before anything hits the fan. CertTime looks like it was a great attempt at a very specific instance of the problem. Virtual Notary is attempting to tackle a more general version of the attestation problem, so I'm hoping that there are more savvy users to draw on.

We've been running the service for many months now, and it costs 0.005 BTC per day, which is a small price to pay for a useful service. Just curious about what caused you to shut the service down.

Yes, quite possibly, if there is sufficient interest.

Great idea. We'll add this to the to-do list.

A git factoid plugin is a great idea. What exactly is the attestation that you have in mind? You provide the name of a repo plus a tag, and the VN issues a certificate of the hash?

It's an API-compatible drop in replacement for LevelDB, so anyone else who currently uses LevelDB should be able to switch fairly easily.

This article would have been stronger if it had contained a bit of introspection. Why did it require a UK paper to uncover this operation?

I can answer the opposite question: we intend to keep in sync with upstream. Since HyperLevelDB is a drop-in replacement for LevelDB, it should be fairly easy for LevelDB users to pick it up.

Those of you interested in cache conscious algorithm design should check out Anthony LaMarca's thesis from 1996: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lamarca/pubs/lamarca-thesis....

The article only cites papers from 1961 and 1964, and complains about how CS departments use out-of-date machine models when teaching algorithms. This is just not true at any of the top schools.

Because each coin transaction entails a 40KB zero knowledge proof. So a Satoshi will require 40*10^8 KB transferred for a 1BTC transaction.

Technically, this is very cool work. But one thing the paper overlooks is divisibility. How does one make change with zerocoin? It appears that the trapdoors allow only a whole coin to be spent, with no recourse for spending a partial coin. Needless to say, non-divisibility will make a practical deployment difficult.

Don't forget that the short squeeze also feeds the runaway price of BTC and props it even higher.

>Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party.

This is false. Karma was a p2p currency that did this in 2004, 5 years before Bitcoin: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/papers/karma.pdf

For the record: not Oakleys, not at a beach, but yes, looking to the side.

If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?

It's funny what a few days of teaching Operating Systems will do to a man.

Do you know which president I had in mind? I lived through quite a few 8 year terms, and yes, that includes Reagan.

If your response is "but everyone knows which president you were referring to," then surely it's fair game to refer to whoever that is since the facts are universally accepted? :-)

That kind of language will bring the discussion to an end.

My post ends on this note:

  Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy
  towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a
  few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or
  Clojure or whatever code you like to implement a
  replacement, either from scratch, or by contributing to 
  an existing OSS project. It's a big world out there, we
  have not "entered a darker timeline in the history of 
  the net," and it's always time to make it better, not 
  demand that someone else do that for you.

If that perspective sounds like trolling to anyone, they can just click on any of the other submissions and discuss the relative merits of the Google Reader population over ordinary people.

Here's some straight-up satire:

  Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly
  highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals
  used Reader.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119

It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.

Agreed, contributing to OSS is much better than rolling one's own from scratch. From the vehemence of the "bring-back-Reader" posts, I assumed that there were absolutely no OSS projects that were suitable, and wrote the post for the worst case, building from scratch. But contributing to an existing project would clearly be a better idea. And if all these Reader users could pool their efforts constructively, the sky is the limit.

>Fuck you

Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.