"Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounces+1604765-1070-timeofmind=gmail.com@em.coinbase.com designates 50.31.37.137 as permitted sender)"

Either coinbase mail server was used, or the their DNS server was accessed and SPF record altered.

Coils on the inside of the wall where the main connects to your meter?

Whether cancer is predominantly a lifestyle disease, or a disease of old age, it is definitely a failure of your own body. Consider the fact that every living person has cancerous cells in their body that are kept in check by your immune system. How do you think cancer suddenly gets out of check? Magic?

"You probably should read about Steve Jobbs death, he declined all medical treatment in order to use a wide range of alternate medice and it failed."

You could make the same argument about numerous people who declined a wide range of alternate medicine in order to use "conventional" medical treatment and failed. You can't possibly know which treatments are most effective until you put particular proven treatments head to head in a study, ensuring that all treatments follow proper proven protocols.

Most people would be completely unwilling to make the changes in their life that would be required to cure them of cancer. The treatment, and preventative measures could be 100% verified and well known, and it would still not make any difference, because a lifestyle is a deeply engrained addiction. Few people can even change their lifestyle to loose a few pounds...

Consider, for instance, Dr. Terry Wahls who cured herself of MS. Most people would not be willing to give up all conventional food and go an a diet of 3 heaping plates full of raw vegetables daily, in addition to animal organ meats, and other nutrient dense foods. It doesn't matter how well proven it is, people will not do it. People will cling to their lifestyle to their last dying breath; which is well illustrated by those people still smoking with emphysema or lung cancer.... or those people with eating addictions.

You should probably read this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2227.0

This is an old topic that appears to have been extensively covered.

"some of the current core nodes". OK. So I put 30% "current core nodes" and 70% nodes that have forked ledgers. How would that work out? Could there end up a proliferation of forked ledgers across the internet? I doubt it. What incentive is there to running a forked ledger, when there is no core of services supporting that fork?

It seems to me that there is little incentive for any individual to run servers in Ripple. Whether you run a server or not, you are dependent on "core nodes"; so you might as well just use a client. I predict that Ripple will simply amount to a core set of services that people connect to through clients; whether you are a selling or buying. In order to knock out the entire Ripple network, it would just take the shutting down of a handful of core services.

In bitcoin, I'm forced to trust the chain with the most combined proof of work. In Ripple I'm forced to trust the ledger built by some particular core providers. I would say Bitcoin is a little more flexible. Right now the majority of the proof of work comes from a few pools, but the network could quickly adapt if those pools proved to be unreliable, and then the source of this proof of work could rapidly change. With Ripple, it would take the network much longer to adjust if the core providers were knocked out ie. due to legal or financial reasons. There would be far more users in the Ripple network who rely on using it via clients that connect to a particular server.

Maybe all house holds can be heated with solo mining ASICs and we can have our decentralized network again. :-) But I doubt it since heat pumps are more efficient.

By now, I think it is pretty clear that Ripple - with its UNLs - will ultimately become a core of Ripple service providers, while everyone else will use ripple clients that depend on one of these providers. You can go ahead and run your own Ripple server, but your server will be useless unless you put those core service providers into your UNL list, so basically, the network will be completely dependent on a core set of providers. Those providers will have to be trusted not to collude, and basically trusted with the entire operations of the Ripple network.

I've brought this up a number of times in a number of ways, and Ripple supporters all agree, but they say "Bitcoin (or any mined coin) is no better because everyone relies on pools. The pools have all the power, so you have to trust them just the same."

So basically, Ripple consensus is just as good as Bitcoin mining, because the decentralized ideal of Bitcoin is gone.

Every fabric of the universe is energy. Usable energy is just establishing the ability to route the fabric of the universe into patterns of motion that suite our will. As humanity grows in sophistication, our ability to control the patterns of energy around us will be completely established and quantity of energy, in the form of electricity and heat, will be just a matter of infrastructure. Eventually the economic cost of energy will be near zero. When ASICs reach their peak mining efficiency and manufacturing of ASICs also reaches peak efficiency, one's mining power equates to available energy one has access to + cost in energy to produce the required ASICs to mine that energy. At this point, costs of bitcoin mining will be so incredibly low, that transactions fees will be reduced to negligible amounts, but the mining will continue, in absence of reward, because there will be literally no cost to it. Bitcoin mining will become simply a way to use up the free excess usable energy left over from all other energy requirements of humanity. Maybe eventually, when usable energy storage technologies are perfected, we will simply scrap crypto coins and just use pure energy as a form of currency. That seems like the next step in the sequence: barter => physical coins => digital coins => pure energy? Nothing is simpler to exchange and more universal than usable energy, so why not? And nothing has more reassurance against counterfitting than energy, due to our confidence in the law of conservation of energy. Infrastructure to transmit large amounts of energy over long distances I'm sure would be trivial by this time; so currency could disappear and the world economy could operate on the basis of exchanging energy alone.

Of course, there is also the issue of whether bitcoiners should simply trust the entire security of Bitcoin to just a few operators.

Lets say BTCGuild knocks out 2 of its biggest competitors, then 51% attacks the network... all in collusion with or under pressure from the government. Sure maybe we could recover from this, but it would be a major hit to public confidence in bitcoin.

Of course, DOS attacks on these pools have already been a problem.

What if NSA (or another government agency in a country where BTCGuild resides) forces BTCGuild to comply with authority orders, which they are legally forced to keep undisclosed and lie to their users about, just as in Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. ? Does this pose a risk?

If the pools are in fact not a risk, then was the initial Bitcoin pitch about decentralization an exaggeration? We don't really care if Bitcoin is mostly centralized now?

Lets say the biggest pools are knocked out completely. Would users still want to run their miners solo, or in smaller pools?

Debate away!

I haven't witnessed many criticisms of Ripple's reliance on trust, yet to me this is one of its major weaknesses. It is meant as a way to fend of Sybil attacks; but bitcoin achieves this through proof-of-work; which requires absolutely no knowledge of the nodes, so how is not the bitcoin way an advantage over Ripple's solution?

If you believe in the IOU system... then you could potentially fork Ripple to remove their weak system of consensus and replace it with a mining-based system of transactions, while keeping the IOU aspect. If the IOU system is a problem, then I don't see anything good in Ripple.

One major drawback of Ripple is that it relies on clients to maintain lists of nodes that are trusted not to collude. Bitcoin is not reliant on this assumption that nodes are not colluding. I could see a scenario where the NSA forces some of the most commonly used nodes to collude in order to comply with the law; even if users would suspect such nodes to have nothing to do with one another. In bitcoin, the NSA would have to take over the mining power. In Ripple, the NSA would just have to force a limited number of nodes to comply, since in order to ensure non-collusion between nodes, the client must choose from well-known nodes. If a client was to simply choose from a random set of nodes, there is no assurance of non-collusion. Ripple claims that this does not require trust, because we only need to be sure that nodes are not colluding, but it basically amounts to a dependence on a set of trusted nodes, because untrusted nodes cannot possibly be trusted to not collude. ie. Where are you getting your list of trusted nodes from?.... it has to be a trusted source. If you take your list of nodes from a public pool of nodes, then there is the potential for someone to contaminate this pool with a large number of colluding nodes.

How much bandwidth does the client eat up?

Shouldn't that also apply to your PC at home? ie. data file encrypted and unencrypted by password, just like the bitcoin client

Nice idea for the rare case where you want to be extra covert. I don't think it will catch on though as a method of payment in a public setting. Loading the private key adds extra time to the transaction and one can't be sure he received payment until the private key is loaded and the bitcoins are sent away from that address.

I sent 0.5 bitcoin with a 0.0005 fee, it has been over 12 hrs without a confirmation.

Correct.


Incorrect. OpenCoin has complete control over the price by having complete control over the supply.

I don't think you were following the conversation... We were not talking about the IOU system or XRP. We were talking about the need for UNLs and consensus, which make Ripple servers totally dependent on a configured list of trusted nodes to fend off sybil attacks. Since XRP is just a unit of quantity that is being tracked on this weakened transactional system, how could you possibly call it an improvement? In addition, they decided to use a centralized model for distribution of XRP. How is that a step forward? Ripple transactions are dependent on the very weaknesses that Bitcoin was designed to overcome and ripple distribution is completely contrary to the goals of Bitcoin.

I'm basing this on the above. If clients have a configuration for "trust level", then hatchers with higher trust are going to be favored by clients over hatchers with lower trust, and hatchers with no trust at all will probably have to wait until there are no other hatchers available to service transactions.