Topic: Visa’s top-secret Operations Center / Bitcoin is so much cooler & cheaper :) (Read 6584 times)

And the satellite view of the building at that location:



Maybe they have a couple backups for redundancies, but they don't have the tens of thousands of backups like Bitcoin does:
 - http://www.weusecoins.com/globe
 - https://blockchain.info/nodes-globe

Incidentally, details on that data breach exposing data fro 1.5 million credit card and debit card accounts:
 - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mastercard-warns-of-massive-accountholder-breach-why-bitcoins-are-better-74744

In case anyone is curious here is where the data center is located:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Ashburn,+VA+visa&hl=en&ll=39.048702,-77.444515&spn=0.012465,0.026436&sll=38.739319,-77.002254&sspn=0.012519,0.026436&t=h&hq=visa&hnear=Ashburn,+Loudoun,+Virginia&fll=39.050269,-77.44488&fspn=0.012465,0.026436&z=16

Enough said, you answered my question.

You are not interested in a substantive, logical discussion, so I am not responding to this.

Sorry, wrong question it's clear you don't understand the duplicity.  I just want to understand your line of thinking, thus may I ask if HYPOTHETICALLY you solution was destructive in the long run would you still support it?

Hmmm... No, I don't understand this at all. My views are pretty damn clear, just check my post history. Perhaps it would be better for you to explain. Please use a logical argument to support your view that proof-of-stake has negative properties which are not also present in proof-of-work.

I could not figure out why Krugmanites like yourself can not see what is obviously destructive ends of you ideas until I saw this video again today and now I SEE!

"To change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions, in the interest of defending themselves their families, their community, and their country."
...
"A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crashes his, then he will understand, but not before that. That's the tragic of the situation of demoralization." - Yuri Bezmenov

The banksters did the same to you so well that you are unable to see the destruction of your ideas even when you write it out yourself.  I have bow down to the banksters greatness and learn what school did you go to?   Now that I know there is no showing you the truth with facts I would like to learn more about how you got your education.

I apologize for my jokes and sarcasm, since there is no point in presenting facts to you I want to learn more about how you come to your conclusions.  Maybe you do understand that proof-of-stake is profitable in the short run but destructive in the long run? Do you agree that in the long run we are all dead so who cares?  Or do you believe its sustainable? Do you not agree that all centralized systems become compromised?  I am now fascinated with your thought process.

Send me your address I will send 2 BTC for answering my questions.


Regards

Davinci

Fat chance for the government to create such a system. The whole point of Bitcoin and friends is to circumvent government restrictions in a distributed fashion; if a friendly government exists, it is overkill to use such complex systems.

While some centralization is needed for ecologic minting, we don't need to go "full retard" and put the system into govt. hands. We simply need a trusted authority that can vouch a certain public key corresponds to a real life charity. The trusted authority will not have money creation privileges or any other control over the system. When the charity list is published and time has come to print some money, the charities receive the cash in a proportion democratically chosen by the holders of the currency; voting is done by proof of stake, a setting in your client that embeds your charity choice for all transactions you create.

The charity validation authority is needed since otherwise people will designate their own wallet as a charity and earn interest simply for holding money.

Oh, okay. I agree with you then. I would prefer distribution by a centralized authority such as a government. The centralized authority would use distribution to provide incentives for merchant and consumer adoption. Essentially, you would try to monitor purchases that use bitcoin and then provide temporary "cash back" rewards to merchants that get consumers to make purchases with bitcoin. Merchants would then have an incentive to offer discounts for bitcoin purchases. Funding for the incentives comes from block reward.

I've given up on evangelizing this type of distribution because community resistance to any kind of pre-mine, centralized authority, or subsidization is even stronger than resistance to proof-of-stake.

5% is implausibly high. Even allowing for competing payment processors attacking the network directly, they will likely won't be willing to spend more than the profit margin enabled by the new customers. How did you produce that number ?

I own a % of the Federal Reserve and the rest of the STAKE holders agree it should continue printing money and giving it to us.
Proof-of-stake works for for me and my crooked friends.
I don't like proof-of-work ether because it means if someone works harder they will beat me because they built a better mouse trap.

"Competition is a sin!" - John D. Rockefeller  <-- visionary!

FYI I am being sarcastic.

Ooooooh, "Somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard"... right this place is so secret nobody knows where it is, right.

USA Today is bunch of asshats and idiots and so is their readership.

The VISA operations center east is located in Richmond, Virginia, at the intersection of Russell Branch Parkway and Loudon County Parkway. The gate can be reached also by taking Richfield Way off of Rt. 7. George Washington University is right on the other side of Route 7 from the VISA campus.

So much for super secrecy.

The incentives of a competitor to sabotage bitcoin are proportional to total market size, not the size of the largest individual txn. With that out of the way, let's return to substantive issues.

1) Proof-of-work distribution can be copied by a proof-of-stake system. Thus any perceived distributional advantages of proof-of-work could also be enjoyed by a proof-of-stake system. This is a non-issue.

2) Proof-of-work is secured through competitive consumption of external resources. External resource consumption requires a net input of resources. This must be supported through fees levied on the user base. The exact level of fees necessary is hard to say. I think a 5% tax on each send is a plausible prediction. This is not compatible with a competitive payment platform. VISA will not need to burn fossil fuels to process each payment, but bitcoin will. This will kill bitcoin.

Proof-of-stake is secured through competitive transfers of internal resources. These transfers are expensive from an individual's perspective and thus effective in securing the system. However, they are just transfers. Transfers do not require external input of resources and thus do not require the imposition of onerous fees. This is compatible with a competitive payment platform.

3) There is never any point at which a proof-of-work currency could be more secure than an otherwise identical proof-of-stake currency. If you assume rational behavior, as soon as the first block is mined proof-of-work currency will necessarily provide inferior security. If you like, I will post a mathematical argument supporting this.

Your argument that proof-of-work enables a jump to a high level of initial security is completely wrong. It is the block reward which does this. Proof-of-work has nothing to do with it. Proof-of-stake can also have block reward.
 

Some of my favorite Krugman-isms are...

Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion Would End Economic Slump

Yeah Paul good idea but a better one would be if we just selectively evacuated and blew up cities, this way we can rebuild them without all the casualties.  Think about all the economic activity, people working to blow up the cities, TV shows, clean up crews and much more.  Talk about economic BOOM, no pun intended.

The baby-sitting co-op that went bust teaches us something that could save the world.

The title shows us why your plan will not work yet you still persist Paul, I'm impressed.  Why?  I don't know anyone who can write down a solution that ends in disaster and call a plan to save the world.  You are one of a kind Paul Krugman you deserve that fake Nobel prize.


I wonder if people would be dumb enough to believe in a Nobel prize in pooping if a banker created it, called it Nobel then paid the official committee to give it out along side of rest of the Nobel prizes.  I mean it worked for economics so why not Nobel poop?  The winner would the guy who is full of shit, just like the economic prize winner.  

Yes however full nodes would require some significant hashing power.  Likely transaction processing (not just block hash generation) would need to be GPU (or FGPA) accelerated.  Full nodes would require significant memory to keep transaction pool fast and large arrays of fast disks.  If Bitcoin ever got that large most users wouldn't run full nodes and instead connected to the network via light clients.

Quite the contrary, distribution is key. Ignoring distribution, the proof-of-work chains are an elegant solution to a hard CompSci problem, and relatively efficient when funded be fees only. The required security of the network is proportional to the largest payment it can process, not total volume. The Bitcoin mining hardware existing as of today is sufficient to guard against multi-million dollar fraud. Thus a Visa sized Bitcoin network can protect multi-million dollar transactions with abysmal fees.

On the other hand, if you go for a POW distribution, you can either:
- create a limited initial monetary base like in Bitcoin and expect massive deflation, perverse incentives for the early adopters, and periodic bubbles; as a person of "Keynesian spirit" which has a Krugman avatar, you should probably see the problem here
- create a macroeconomically sound monetary expansion for the lifetime of the system, case in which the resources wasted for POW become a significant size of the economy, i.e a "vast resource consuming monster"

The distribution problem here is extremely trivial. A currency could begin as pure proof-of-work and then progress to proof-of-stake over time.

Nevertheless, these are worthwhile points. Devising an optimal distribution process is quite complex. It requires a lot of data and modeling. Proof-of-work is almost certianly suboptimal, but it is widely accepted. It is probably more practical to just copy proof-of-work and give up on improvements in this area.

Well, 210 people meeting and declaring themselves the stakeholders of the new currency is exactly what centralization means, except maybe if those 210 people will be the only users of the currency for it's entire lifetime.

The problem is this: how to create a distributed and eco-friendly currency, usable by anybody, without creating a perverse incentive for the early adopters? The system should succeed on it's technical merits alone, not by fanatical backing from a vested minority.

Actually, proof of stake can solve the initial distribution problem in a way, simply by initially issuing coins to the stakeholders.

Have proponents of proof of stake put up wealth, in return for which they are provided with, between them, the sum total number of coins ever to be minted. Like, say, have 210 stakeholders and issue to each of them at the start 10,000 coins.

Actually I guess they maybe don't even have to put up any wealth to get those initial coins unless there is enough competition to become an initial stakeholder that making them sacrifice some wealth to get to be one is necessary to avoid six billion people all wanting to be initial stakeholders.

-MarkM-

Proof of stake is a solution for a different problem: byzantine fault tolerance of the coin database, a.k.a double spend protection and global consistency. For this task Bitcoin uses a uniquely creative solution, called by some "Nakamoto proof of work chains"; the necessary work is funded at equilibrium (block reward=0) by the transaction fees.

What we are talking about here is initial coin disbursement, coin minting. The issue is confusing because Bitcoin cleverly employs the same proof of work for both minting and byzantine fault tolerance, thus jump starting a secure network before the transaction fee volume would otherwise enable it. While you could certainly create an e-currency based on proof of stake, the issue of initial coin distribution remains open. Without initial distribution there is no stake, thus no proof of stake.

So a resource-friendly currency would have to imagine a different way for coin distribution. Incidentally, a theoretical result know as the Sybil attack proves there is no possible method by which you could do a "fair" distribution of coins over an anonymous medium such as the internet. You must either allow some degree of centralization, or fallback to proof of work. Anything else will be subverted by automated programs and allow their authors to earn most of the minted money.

Here's how a non-POW, centralized-but-fair distribution method could go: a central authority mints all possible coins allowed by the protocol, prints them onto little pieces of paper, then pulls a "Helicopter Ben". Alternatively, a central authority has no minting powers, but can approve (or veto) a list of charitable organizations that would receive the proceeds of seigniorage; when the monetary mass is scheduled to increase, the charities get the money, in a proportion democratically chosen by the holders of currency (similar to proof of stake).


I have more faith in democracy. I'm sure if the general public understood the problems, there would be instant political will for change. As always, the problem lays with the public, not the politicians:
http://www.maniacworld.com/the-public-sucks.html