Topic: 10 under merited posts (Read 508 times)

It's a good list, but not really what I was looking for. I updated my post:

If you want to be a merit source:

 1. Be a somewhat established member.
 2. Collect TEN posts written in the last couple of months that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread.
 3. We will take a look at your history and maybe make you a source.

I am especially eager to have merit sources in sub-communities such as the local sections.

I dont think you understood what theymos meant.

You are supposed to collect ten high quality posts from a single user. Not from 10 different ones.
Then they can be considered to become a merit source (assuming they are still active and theymos agrees/sees them fit to be one).

I'd guess he will wait a while to let the system settle in before selecting anyone. Your interpretation may well be right, that's just what I thought he meant when I first read it. I think theymos needs to clarify it.

right now, almost all high quality posts are "undermerited".

I read this the same way as the OP.
I thought theymos was looking for people with good judgement as to what deserves merit and also shown that they'll put the effort in to find and reward it.

If you want to be a merit source:

Collect TEN posts that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread.

Ahh I thought the idea was that people spreading merit should be able to find the right deserving posts to spread to.

I dont think you understood what theymos meant.

You are supposed to collect ten high quality posts from a single user. Not from 10 different ones.
Then they can be considered to become a merit source (assuming they are still active and theymos agrees/sees them fit to be one).

I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time.  Still wrong.  w/e.  GF's out at a lesbian bar, BTC crashing WHY AM I HOLDING? I'LL TELL YOU WHY.  It's because I'm a bad trader and I KNOW I'M A BAD TRADER.  Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro.  Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT'S GOING DOWN I'M GONNA SELL he he he and then they're like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART traders who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING buy back in but you know what?  I'm not part of that group.  When the traders buy back in I'm already part of the market capital so GUESS WHO YOU'RE CHEATING day traders NOT ME~!  Those taunt threads saying "OHH YOU SHOULD HAVE SOLD" YEAH NO SHIT.  NO SHIT I SHOULD HAVE SOLD.  I SHOULD HAVE SOLD MOMENTS BEFORE EVERY SELL AND BOUGHT MOMENTS BEFORE EVERY BUY BUT YOU KNOW WHAT NOT EVERYBODY IS AS COOL AS YOU.  You only sell in a bear market if you are a good day trader or an illusioned noob.  The people inbetween hold.  In a zero-sum game such as this, traders can only take your money if you sell.

so i've had some whiskey
actually on the bottle it's spelled whisky
w/e
sue me
(but only if it's payable in BTC)

HODL!

Right.  Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating.  In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.  I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Computers have to get about 2^200 times faster before that starts to be a problem.  Someone with lots of compute power could make more money by generating than by trying to steal.

Welcome to the New Beginning

When the grand experiment that is bitcoin began, the anonymous wizard desired to test two parameters- a trustless, decentralized database enjoying security enforced by the austere relentlessness of cryptography and a robust transaction system capable of sending value across the world without intermediaries. Yet the past five years years have painfully demonstrated a third missing feature: a sufficiently powerful Turing-complete scripting language. Up until this point, most innovation in advanced applications such as domain and identity registration, user-issued currencies, smart property, smart contracts, and decentralized exchange has been highly fragmented, and implementing any of these technologies has required creating an entire meta-protocol layer or even a specialized blockchain. Theoretically, however, each and every one of these innovations and more can potentially be made hundreds of times easier to implement, and easier to scale, if only there was a stronger foundational layer with a powerful scripting language for all of these protocols to build upon. And this need is what we seek to satisfy.

Ethereum is a modular, stateful, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain and developed with a philosophy of simplicity, universal accessibility and generalization. Our goal is to provide a platform for decentralized applications - an android of the cryptocurrency world, where all efforts can share a common set of APIs, trustless interactions and no compromises. We ask for the community to join us as volunteers, developers, investors and evangelists seeking to enable a fundamentally different paradigm for the internet and the relationships it provides.

Who is Behind Ethereum?

Our primary core devs are:

• Vitalik Buterin → Inventor of Ethereum, protocol developer and researcher
• Gavin Wood →Lead C++ developer
• Jeffrey Wilcke → Lead Go developer

Primary non-development members include:

• Anthony Di Iorio → Founder and Executive Director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, Bitcoin Decentral, KryptoKit
• Mihai Alisie → Founder of Bitcoin Magazine and Egora
• Joseph Lubin → Software engineer, Quantitative Analyst
• Stephan Tual → Founder of Ursium, Communications

A more extensive but non-exhaustive list of team members can be found here.

Our ether sale is available at http://ethereum.org ; the site contains all needed instructions.

The Next Step: Some Links

Welcome to the Ethereum Ecosystem:

• http://ethereum.org/
• http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
• Enjoy the Code: https://github.com/ethereum
• Whitepaper: https://ethereum.org/pdfs/EthereumWhitePaper.pdf
• Yellowpaper: https://ethereum.org/pdfs/EthereumYellowPaper.pdf
• Blog: http://blog.ethereum.org
• Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/ethereum

Contact Us:

General Queries
[email protected]

We know that Bitcoin's resistance to attack is based on the cost for the attacker to overwhelm the network, or at least to control a large fraction of its computing power. We assume this cost will continue to rise in the future so attacks will be infeasible even for well-funded attackers.

But the computational power of the network is proportional to difficulty; and it appears that difficulty is proportional to bitcoin price. It follows that unless bitcoins become substantially more valuable than they are today, the Bitcoin network will never be substantially more resistant to attack than it is today.

For Bitcoin to succeed and become secure, bitcoins must become vastly more expensive.

An idea that's too big to fail.

I thought I'd write about the last four years, an eventful time for Bitcoin and me.

For those who don't know me, I'm Hal Finney. I got my start in crypto working on an early version of PGP, working closely with Phil Zimmermann. When Phil decided to start PGP Corporation, I was one of the first hires. I would work on PGP until my retirement. At the same time, I got involved with the Cypherpunks. I ran the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer, among other activities.

Fast forward to late 2008 and the announcement of Bitcoin. I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It's one of those glass half full half empty things.

The next I heard of Bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they'll be worth something to my heirs.

Speaking of heirs, I got a surprise in 2009, when I was suddenly diagnosed with a fatal disease. I was in the best shape of my life at the start of that year, I'd lost a lot of weight and taken up distance running. I'd run several half marathons, and I was starting to train for a full marathon. I worked my way up to 20+ mile runs, and I thought I was all set. That's when everything went wrong.

My body began to fail. I slurred my speech, lost strength in my hands, and my legs were slow to recover. In August, 2009, I was given the diagnosis of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous baseball player who got it.

ALS is a disease that kills moter neurons, which carry signals from the brain to the muscles. It causes first weakness, then gradually increasing paralysis. It is usually fatal in 2 to 5 years. My symptoms were mild at first and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.

Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair's position using my eyes.

It has been an adjustment, but my life is not too bad. I can still read, listen to music, and watch TV and movies. I recently discovered that I can even write code. It's very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals. Currently I'm working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets. It's almost ready to release. I just have to do the documentation.

And of course the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me. I have skin in the game. But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me. I lived through the crash of 2011. So I've seen it before. Easy come, easy go.

That's my story. I'm pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy.
[edited slightly]

I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza.

Pictures: http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/

Thanks jercos!

I spent it all on pizza long ago:  https://blockchain.info/address/1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4

3-4 years ago there were less than 100 people frequenting this forum, and I was pretty happy to trade 10,000 coins for pizza.  I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time.  I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.

Laszlo