It was a parody of Wolff’s book written by Twitter user “Pixelated Boat”, but Wolff’s whole approach to the book is in question. It turns out a hell of a lot of the book is essentially made up by him. His excuse during his MSNBC interview yesterday was “if it rings true, it is true”, which should go down in the…

Well, Wolff said “If it rings true, it is true”, and apparently a whole lot of people are happy to go with that as a journalistic standard.

I don’t think you understand. If you challenge the importance of any government program, You Want People To Die (TM).

Yes to both. A block is mined approximately every ten minutes, give or take, and difficulty is adjusted as necessary to keep it that way [I should clarify here that the miners mine blocks, essentially pages for the ledger, and Bitcoins are the reward that comes with the block. They do not mine Bitcoins per se, which…

Why do you want rural people to die?

It wouldn’t be “magically”, it would be “mathematically”, but you’re right that it won’t happen again. I was using that to illustrate how the system works, but I don’t think anyone who knows what they are talking about envisions a scenario where so many professional miners drop out that home desktop mining becomes…

Right. Speed and power consumption are closely related issues. Think fuel mileage in sports car vs economy car. They can both get you there, but one can go much faster. However, it will use more fuel to go the same distance.

Iceland benefits from both cold climate and cheap electricity. They are uniquely suited for cheap geothermal energy.

Veggieburger is correct about transaction times at the moment. Transactions have gotten too long and expensive for everyday currency use, but there are solutions to this problem waiting in the wings. They will be implemented soon enough, and this will be only a temporary issue.

I don’t know the identity of the guy who invented paper dollars either, but I’m not sure I need to care about that.

You’re trusting the software protocols, not the users.

When you’re shouting “See, it crashed!” at at a number you said was impossibly high and unreachable...maybe time to re-evaluate.

In all honesty, I wasn’t trying to “own” anyone here (although I’m far from above trying to do so on occasion). I simply saw a poor presentation of the situation stemming from what seems to be a very superficial understanding of the topic. It does seem kind of strange that a tech blog doesn’t have anyone on staff who…

I think people who are spooked by this will mainly be those who fall prey to the fact that “mining” is an imperfect analogy for BTC.

If the miners become too centralized and too greedy, they always face the risk of a fork with less advantageous protocols. So it’s back to something which can cause issues in the short term, but should be self-correcting as long as people stick with it. By now, people sticking with it seems a safe bet.

I’d say there’s plenty of incentive if you are a Kim Jong Un type or some black-skimask group who wants to watch the world burn. But you’d still need enormous resources to do it.

“lol no, just go jack off to hyper dimension or whatever dude, no one cares about your attempt to sound esoteric and informed”

One legitimate issue with having only a small pool of miners would be that the network is more responsible to a 51% attack. If someone can control 51% of the power of a blockchain network, they can cheat the system, and that would essentially destroy Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin network is the biggest computer network in…

You should silence me with your righteous bicycle lock of Justice

No. YOU fuck off.