tzumby
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4 years ago
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on: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
If you don’t believe that there is value in a distributed self replicating Byzantine tolerant state machine, that’s fair, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
tzumby
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4 years ago
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on: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
this = blockchain + proof of work / proof of stake , in my comment. The crypto currencies are a requirement to fulfill the Byzantine tolerance. They need to have value in order for the incentives to make sense
tzumby
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4 years ago
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on: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
What is surprising is how large the number of techies who don’t get this. It’s not about crypto currencies as much as it is about the game theory that allows it to run a distributed self replicating state machine that is Byzantine tolerant - this is the true innovation
tzumby
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4 years ago
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on: PolarDB, yet another open source database system based on PostgreSQL
“high availability through Paxos based replication”. I thought Paxos is supposed to be a CP system.
tzumby
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4 years ago
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on: Ethereum Fork Fails on OpenEthereum
I think this depends on how good the specs are. I agree that if we look at other examples of separate implementations, this would support this argument (see Browsers for example). But on the flip-side, ETH 2.0 - the proof of stake work, released very good specs and now we have working implementations in Go, Java, Nim, Rust and more. All working right now since the launch that happened in December 2020
tzumby
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5 years ago
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on: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
+1
I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Human reproductive cloning: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
There are, the machinery I mentioned is a lot more complex in humans. The expression of genes is heavily influenced by how the DNA folds (and this is affected by complexes of proteins that Methylate at different locations in the DNA)
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Human reproductive cloning: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
I agree that someone might have tried that, but the real question is, was the clone viable? From what I remember from my human genetics class in uni, cloning is not just about the genes but also about Methylation sites that are carried by complex machinery in the womb (a subject of Epigenetics).
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona
If you're not using proof of work, blockchains start to look more like distributed storage with an audit trail and immutable row level db constraints
- if it's a Proof of Authority is like a way to deal with who has access to write to the db
- the distributed consensus part is well researched (Raft, Paxos etc)
The only advantage that I can think of is interoperability: you will be able to communicate with the public blockchain for point in time "backups". Also, building your internal smart contracts you can use an existing language like Solidity.
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona
For sure, doesn’t seem like there’s a need to solve for adversarial Byzantine style attacks here. Even a permissioned proof of authority blockchain is overkill for this (which is most likely what Accenture is building/configuring for them)
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Bosch Smart glasses: A tiny laser array paints images directly onto your retina
I had the exact same reaction as I read the comment :D
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Critical flaw in Trezor hardware wallets
Thanks for sharing this, I had to google RWC. For others that don’t know the acronym:
https://rwc.iacr.org
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Critical flaw in Trezor hardware wallets
Banks store private keys for their ATMs in hardware security modules (HSM) and there are lots of crypto exchanges that started doing that. One of the features is private keys self destruct when tampering is detected. If you have a backup you’ll be able to recover the private key. While I agree that Trezor wasn’t designed with this in mind, I think it’s a good idea to include this feature. Not sure about the size requirements for that though, it might make the device significantly bigger.
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: A Proof of Useful Work for Artificial Intelligence on the Blockchain
Agreed, the issue is economic. That's one of the things that I find fascinating about Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication. You can view cryptocurrencies as a method of payment for the economic incentive of playing fair. I think the big story here is that we can have a BFT distributed consensus!
Also, I think those large primes do have economic value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Pri...). I'm not sure if that's the purpose of PrimeCoin or who would get the prize, but they nonetheless have some economic value.
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: A Proof of Useful Work for Artificial Intelligence on the Blockchain
I would argue against the PoW having to be wasteful. It has to be difficult (in terms of compute power and time) but not wasteful. I'm not affiliated in any way with this, but there is one project that uses PoW to search for large primes.
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
I haven't used this myself but it looks like it uses nightly encrypted backups using Tarsnap
tzumby
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6 years ago
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on: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
I bet you can train a model to predict your skill based on your google searches related to software development.
tzumby
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7 years ago
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on: Show HN: Privacy-focused iOS hiking app
You should add more details about how you’re protecting the user’s privacy. If you are saving all the geo ip data that is linked to a fb/google account in your database that may be problematic. I suggest you encrypt that with a client side key or just store everything on the client.
tzumby
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7 years ago
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on: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
I read an article a while back about the team behind Bing. I think they had some of the best people working there and they must feel pretty proud. I think after the project picket up and they started managing them from top up most of them left. I tried looking for the article but can’t find it anymore
tzumby
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7 years ago
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on: Alleged Coinomi exploit shows how easy it is to have Bitcoin stolen
In the context of wallet word seeds you are correct. The dictionary is a 2048 word list that is standardized. If you want to spell check that you can roll something offline. Furthermore, the whole phrase has a checksum step so you'll know if you got one of the words wrong after you're done inputting the words.
