Seems coincidental that someone went on the mtgox exchange today and bought 45k driving the price up 25% Your statements make me think you should try to learn more about it, as you want to have an information advantage before trying to exploit a market.

The currency is super volatile because there are not that many merchants accepting bitcoins yet, so the value is mostly derived from speculation. I would expect them to gain value for quite a while until enough money is involved in laundering and illegal activity that a government takes notice. Then the value will drop until it is proven to be resistant to hostile action.

last night at el bulli (closing soon) anthony bourdain filmed a 'last supper' episode. fifty two motherlovin courses.
epic





bourdain:

"History tonight."

"Half the dining room were in tears..."

"Greatest meal of my life. "http://yfrog.com/hsxtqkkj

"Lotta weeping by grown men tonight in Roses." (el bulli is in Roses, Spain)

"People's heads will explode when they see this show."

1. It wasn't me I swear!
2. The government could only shut down merchants that accept bitcoins not bitcoins itself.

A government could just make virtual currency contraband like kiddie porn (digital example).

Can shutdown porn websites
can't shutdown open source networks like bitcoin

In theory you couldn't shut down porn web sites for the same reason, fwiw.

Although keep in mind that all of this stuff rests on cryptography, which rests entirely on a mathematical conjecture that P != NP. Everyone just sorta assumes this is the case, but it might be true that there are really fast algorithms to crack cryptographic things that nobody's thought of yet.

what are P and NP for those of us who didn't get that far in Math?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

this is going to take some time

Figure out what P means

great, don't know, let's just move onto NP

"the class NP consists of all those decision problems whose positive solutions can be verified in polynomial time given the right information"

great, wtf is polynomial time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynom...olynomial_time

..****;dr even if I tried to

so I tried:

"Complexity classes
The concept of polynomial time leads to several complexity classes in computational complexity theory. Some important classes defined using polynomial time are the following.
P: The complexity class of decision problems that can be solved on a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time.
NP: The complexity class of decision problems that can be solved on a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time."

I found P and NP. Great, what is a deterministic Turing machine?

what kind of education do u have to go through to really understand all this?

i have a bachelors in computer science and i'm lost

lol. Here's a description that's pretty close to accurate without using any goofy defintiions like turing machines:

Computer scientists are naturally obsessed with finding the fastest way to solve a problemm, i.e. the method with the fewest "steps". A standard problem is trying to find the most efficient route that visits a bunch of different cities different cities. (FOr example, if I want to visit NYC, chicago, LA, and houston, what order to I visit the cities in.) Obviously, the number of steps depends on the size of the input (e.g. if I ask the computer what's the fastest way to visit two cities, the problem is trivial and it will figure it out immediately, but if I give it every city in the US, it won't ever find the answer). So, you can categorize problems based on the function of steps needed relative to the size of the input.

For example, if n is the number of cities in the input, then the number of steps it will take to find the fastest route will be (very very roughly) 2^n. That's terrible. If you add one more city, it will take twice as long to compute. If you add 10 more cities, it will take over one thousand times as long to compute. So, this problem is believed to be basically intractible for large n (and a program like google maps gets around this by giving you an estimated best route, and not necessarily the best route).

A pretty natural category for this is called P, the class of problems for which this function is a polynomial. For example, if you're given a list of n numbers and want to sort them, a very simple algorithm for sorting them will sort them in about n^2 steps, which is polynomial time. That's not great; if we double the size of the input, we quadruple the number of steps. But, it's no where near as bad as doubling the number of steps each time you increase the size of the input by one.

Another important class of problems is called NP. There are lots of complicated ways to define them, but a nice way is to say that they're problems that are CHECKABLE in polynomial time. The traveling salesman problem that I mentioned above is not in NP because if you give me a route, it will still take me an extremely long time to figure out if it's the best route. I can't think of a great example right now.. maybe I'll think of one later.

The reason that NP is so important is because if we can find problems that are CHECKABLE in polynomial time but NOT SOLVABLE in polynomial time, then that allows for cryptography. For example, when you send an encrypted method (e.g. your password to a poker site or these bitcoin transactions), you're counting on the fact that it takes someone with the encryption key polynomial time to decrypt the method, but that nobody without the encryption key can figure out what it is and decrypt it in any reasonable amount of time.

So, the question of whether P = NP is the question of whether everything that is CHECKABLE in polynomial time is also SOLVABLE in polynomial time. Computer scientists typically assume the that P does not equal NP, so they assume that it would be essentially impossible to break good encryption. (Basically, the best they think you can do isn't much better than checking all possible keys, which for many fairly simple encryption methods would take any computer we currently have much longer than humans will be around.) If that turns out to not be the case, then our current method of doing cryptography would completely fail, and there might be no method to encode a method that can't be easily cracked.

lets get this thread back on track:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGrN3uWO_Rs

oh hey no problem, vanessa takes down mohegan napt b2b years...

so f'ing sick. congrats duck.

congrats vanessa, too sick

Damn. Congrats Vanessa. Once again, you are soooo ridiculous!

thank you for helping me understand the problem NoahSD

Congrats duck thats amazing.

Cute vid RBK!

I'd think Vanessa was awesome if I weren't so busy being ridiculously jealous of her.

NoahSD: There seems to be a ton of hope in regards to sending secure information using quantum cryptology no matter how capable the snooper.

Maybe. I know nothing about quantum cryptography. Quickly reading up on wikipedia suggests that it's actually implemented by some people already, so that's pretty sick.

while i agree with most of your posts, P!=(=?) NP is not something on which practical cryptography algorithms are based on, its more of a pure math kind of thing .

(those with too much free time might look up the Cohen-Lenstra algorithm to get a glimpse of practical cryptography)

the travelling salesman problem though has been proven to be deterministic and solvable in polynomial time under certain constraints ..