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Topic: Kim Dotcom Mansion: Press conference 2013-01-19 GMT - page 3. (Read 20489 times)

legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
Interesting that already we are at a phase where it is occasionally the case that a forum member 'knows people' who undertakes such a novel and unusual thing as to run a client just to 'support the idea.'  Time is definitely on high speed in Bitcoin-land.
Are you being sarcastic? Have you heard of a little project called 'Tor'? Or 'SETI'? Or 'Folding@home?'
If you think it's so incredible that a forum member here knows other people who participate in novel and unusual computing projects even without the promise of huge returns, you should get out of the house more.

I was being sarcastic, but in a way which seemed to have escaped you completely.

legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
One way or another, that's exactly the opposite of what attracted me to Bitcoin in the first place.
I don't understand why you post here at all.

I guess it is largely because so far Theymos has not seen fit to restrict the forum to unquestioning fan-boys.

hero member
Activity: 868
Merit: 1002
Interesting that already we are at a phase where it is occasionally the case that a forum member 'knows people' who undertakes such a novel and unusual thing as to run a client just to 'support the idea.'  Time is definitely on high speed in Bitcoin-land.
Are you being sarcastic? Have you heard of a little project called 'Tor'? Or 'SETI'? Or 'Folding@home?'
If you think it's so incredible that a forum member here knows other people who participate in novel and unusual computing projects even without the promise of huge returns, you should get out of the house more.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
Do you know that they are working on a new database system wich make the blockchain download much much much faster? I'm trying it since some days and it is really much faster. In like 6 hours or so a decent computer get the whole chain.
Yes, it is still a lot and that's why unless you want to run a full node, you should use a lightweight client (especially since lightweight clients have a much better interface!)

I wish Satoshi would have entertained the (not completely unheard-of) concept of sharding as a possible way to address the inevitable scaling issues back when his brain was churning things.  I'm not impressed with how his theoretical work on Merkle pruning is coming along.  Even if someone adapts the most astonishing database technology imaginable to the problem, it's only going to go so far.  If Bitcoin takes off, that is.

Electrum and Multibit are like the normal client but without the blockchain. They aren't online wallet lol

Do the clients take part in strengthening the network...aside from (or as opposed to) paying up whatever is requested to the infrastructure operators?  (That is actually a fair question since I do not know the answer to it at this point, BTW.)

legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1013
One way or another, that's exactly the opposite of what attracted me to Bitcoin in the first place.
I don't understand why you post here at all.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
I anticipated the scenerio, but I imagine that some of those who bought the P2P hype a year ago might be down-faced about things.
Not at all. The P2P network exists and will continue to exist without every new user running a full node.

Of course.  Indeed, the modern banking system is also 'peer to peer'.  To become a 'peer', you just need to plunk down some capital on account at the central bank and get a license.  Easy as pie.

The "high-performance servers that handle the most complicated parts of the Bitcoin system" that Electrum brags about fail to impress me a lot.  Wells Fargo undoubtedly has gear which would put to shame whatever the Electrum branch of philosophical thought has cobbled together.  One way or another, that's exactly the opposite of what attracted me to Bitcoin in the first place.

I know people who downloaded the default client and run it without ever investing or mining. They just wanted to support the idea.

Interesting that already we are at a phase where it is occasionally the case that a forum member 'knows people' who undertakes such a novel and unusual thing as to run a client just to 'support the idea.'  Time is definitely on high speed in Bitcoin-land.

legendary
Activity: 1148
Merit: 1008
If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat
Do you know that they are working on a new database system wich make the blockchain download much much much faster? I'm trying it since some days and it is really much faster. In like 6 hours or so a decent computer get the whole chain.
Yes, it is still a lot and that's why unless you want to run a full node, you should use a lightweight client (especially since lightweight clients have a much better interface!)

Electrum and Multibit are like the normal client but without the blockchain. They aren't online wallet lol
hero member
Activity: 868
Merit: 1002
I anticipated the scenerio, but I imagine that some of those who bought the P2P hype a year ago might be down-faced about things.

Not at all. The P2P network exists and will continue to exist without every new user running a full node.

I know people who downloaded the default client and run it without ever investing or mining. They just wanted to support the idea.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
Quote
I would not argue against that.  I finally got a friend of mine to mess around with it.  Even at this early stage, one needs a pretty decent computer...at least for the initial block download which he gave up on after a few days.  How it would be in steady-state, I don't know.
Never heard about lightweight client? Seriously why the hell did you tell to your friend to use the qt client? Tell him to use Multibit or Electrum, you start it and it's ready to use!

It was a good opportunity to find out whether or not Bitcoin was still workable as P2P.  As I expected: Nope.  Armory seemed to have a decent feature set if it had turned out to be practical to be a peer, and he would have liked to help support the network if possible.  Electrum looks like SWIFT without legal protection (and possibly the opposite at some point) to me.

We just used instawallet to get him a few coins to play around with.  This isn't your granddad's Bitcoin.  I anticipated the scenerio, but I imagine that some of those who bought the P2P hype a year ago might be down-faced about things.

legendary
Activity: 1148
Merit: 1008
If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat
Quote
I would not argue against that.  I finally got a friend of mine to mess around with it.  Even at this early stage, one needs a pretty decent computer...at least for the initial block download which he gave up on after a few days.  How it would be in steady-state, I don't know.
Never heard about lightweight client? Seriously why the hell did you tell to your friend to use the qt client? Tell him to use Multibit or Electrum, you start it and it's ready to use!
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276

Quote
Like hell. BTC is not only not normal currency, but it is also extremaly hard to use. I've tried to use that piece of $#17 so I know.

I would not argue against that.  I finally got a friend of mine to mess around with it.  Even at this early stage, one needs a pretty decent computer...at least for the initial block download which he gave up on after a few days.  How it would be in steady-state, I don't know.

There was really not much choice but to either forget about Bitcoin or just go ahead and have someone else hold his wallet which is, I feel, a much less reliable way of holding value than just using a mainstream bank and USD (currently.)  On top of that, getting BTC in the first place is kind of an expensive hassle which opens one up to massive surveillance unless one is very careful and knowledgeable.

To me Bitcoin is a hugely interesting and important experiment, but it's not real applicable as an every day currency.  The only practical way to obtain them is in bulk due to overhead, but then one must trust other parties with significant value and/or deal with huge volatility.

I feel as strongly as ever that Bitcoin's main hope in terms gaining traction for general use is for it's competition to fail which would make it more compelling in a relative sense.

legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1001

Quote
Like hell. BTC is not only not normal currency, but it is also extremaly hard to use. I've tried to use that piece of $#17 so I know.
staff
Activity: 4256
Merit: 1208
I support freedom of choice
legendary
Activity: 1148
Merit: 1008
If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat
Lololol
legendary
Activity: 1974
Merit: 1029
Managed to get a 'somewhat' large file uploaded at about 319KB/s into a hack about account.  If anyone wants to have a go at downloading it here is the link;-

Downloaded at 4.6 Mb/s steady.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
I've got a boatload of old Soekris 4801's

Send me one and I will make a build target for you :p .

If you have the bandwidth to do x86 stuff and think you can make something worthwhile of it, I'd be happy to send you one (other than the fact that I hate screwing with mail.)  It would be just the board.  No case.  I missed a shot at getting a lot of cases for the boards unfortunately since they came up before I got the boards.  Anyway, if pentium-class and 128MB is sufficient, they are nice because they use about as much energy as a night-light and have 3 NICs.  PM me.

legendary
Activity: 896
Merit: 1000
I've got a boatload of old Soekris 4801's

Send me one and I will make a build target for you :p .
legendary
Activity: 1890
Merit: 1086
Ian Knowles - CIYAM Lead Developer
This is a "peek" at the "sign up" page I will be adding to CIYAM Open very soon (perhaps just a few hours away after I've finished testing).

http://ciyam.org/sign_up_example.png
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276

I might mention to anyone thinking about creating a Mega account to put more thought than normal into the password.  It is not just a typical web-site access thing (like bitcointalk.org, for instance.)

The password one chooses becomes an integral part of how access to all files that one stores.  I read somewhere that there is some protection against guessing attacks, but I don't know how it works and I am pretty sure that if one choose 'test123' that would render one's files readable by many many parties.

Currently the ability to change passwords is not implemented.  What one chooses one is stuck with.  I usually default to a non-trivial and unique password for anything I sign up for and did in this case, but had I realized how critical it was I would have been much more careful in choosing the Mega one.

That said, until the service becomes vaguely usable it's a bit of a moot point (unless one is silly enough to upload critical or important data in this early period where there are so many questions swirling around.)

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/cracking-tool-milks-weakness-to-reveal-some-mega-passwords/

Wow!  Trivial passwords are easy to crack.  Who'd ah thunk it???

The author of this Ars (who I generally respect) article didn't really delve into why the hashed password might or might not need to be in the initial e-mail, but did seem to blithely compare Mega to other services where the vendor has all of the user's data in clear text without analyzing whether that might be a factor.  Kinda questionable.

To paraphrase the old guy in the first star wars movie, 'The FUD is strong with this one.'  That observation itself lends strength to my gut feeling that Mega may have started work on a trail to something pretty big.  We can hope.

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