srehn's blog

I still read slashdot because every once in a while one of the stories really catches my interest.  The latest such story is about Bitcoin, an attempt to create a decentralized currency system.  If it, or a similar system, works it could create a whole new, and perhaps even more structurally sound, monetary system for the world.  More likely it will die with a wimper, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It works a little like freenet, in that it is based on a lot of clients sending packets to one another to achieve some emergent objective.  Instead of transmitting data, the objective here is to keep track of the transactions going on.  There's also a distributed computing aspect in that the transactions in each "block" (roughly 10 minutes) are all combined together into a hash which is very difficult to compute.  Any client set to do so will spend its spare compute cycles to try to compute the hash for the current block.  It's pretty random which key works, so the more compute cycles you have the more likely you are to get the correct key first..  The client taht gets that key also gets a certain number of Bitcoins as a kind of prize or incentive.

When you make a transaction it goes out to all of the other clients yours is connected to, and spreads out within the network.  When a block is computed, it combines all of the known transactions into it to prevent "double-spending", the idea of the owner of a Bitcoin spending it with two (or more) recipients.  In a sense, the main objective of all of that computing above is to keep track of the owners of bitcoins and prevent double-spending.

The original concept of the system should deal with the problem of an attacker trying to gain control of the network.  The one who computes the next block has a certain degree of control, and that's distributed pretty much randomly according to computing power.  That means that an attacker would have to have as much power than the entire network to have an even chance of taking over, and more power to be guaranteed of doing so.  If they have that much power they'd be better off just generating keys and keeping the Bitcoins than just destroying the whole system to steal the current value fo the bitcoins.

There are likely some less obvious flaws with the current concept or implementation.  It's important that these get dealt with before the network gets too big, or when someone finds a major vulnerability in the (future) big network the whole thing could collapse due to shattered confidence.  Since it's an open-source project, many of them will be worked out over time.  Another key way to find flaws is for there to be a financial incentive to do so (which is starting to be true, since you can trade Bitcoins for real money already).  Of course, since this is based on public key cryptography, if a quantum computer with enough entangled qbits to tackle keys of this size are ever created, the whole thing will fall apart.  Of course if that happens, much of the rest of the financial system will die too, so it will be the least of our worries.

The current implementation is essentially designed to be deflationary in the long run.  New coins are being created, sure, but that's intended to be phased out over time.  Coins will certainly be lost as hard drives crash and files get lost.  If the system is successful, the current limit of BTC0.01 per transaction closer to the coded limit of BTC0.00000001 as the finite number of coins get spread out over a larger number of owners.

One potential attach system I haven't seen addressed yet (and I've done quite a bit of reading) is exactly _who_ decides how hard it should be to calculate the next block's hash?  I know it's automatically adjusted to take 10 minutes on average, but who does so?  If it's a single decision-maker, then that's an attack point.  If it's a collective decision of all of the clients, then maybe that could be manipulated by a sizable, but not overwhelming, population of dishonest clients.

For now, however, I've got a client running and I'm playing with it.  If you're bored, send me a bitcoin at 1DUXcZoYtKwbETc8GMDnhvWSqmNVW5pfE5 !  They're only worth about a penny.  So far...

As those who follow science news should know, it turns out that the climategate scandal was utter bunk.  The whole thing started when a group of climate deniers managed to steal the email logs from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  The emails appear to have shown that the researchers had (Gasp!) an opinion about whether their research was correct or not!  They did not, however, show that they'd faked any research or lied about anything.  Anyway, the folks who stole the emails sent them around to various news organizations, who obligingly blew them out of proportion and manufactured a scandal.

Currently everybody who had been accused of wrongdoing has been cleared, and a couple of newspapers have even admitted that they did wrong!  Unfortunately these admissions will never receive the same level of press coverage that the original "scandal" did, so many of those who aren't as well educated about climate change science will think that the previous nonsense proves that it's fake or something.

Hat tip: Pharyngula

Oh, and would you like the recipe for a happy sex life?  Wait to even kiss until your wedding day, of course!

Since religions can't actually deliver on the promises of unreasonable bribes, they have to get around that part somehow.  A very effective way to do that is to claim to make good on the promise only when or where nobody can verify it.

The most common way to "deliver" on a bribe is after death.  Heaven, reincarnation, nirvana, seeing dead family members and some more exotic stuff all "happen" after the recipient is dead and can't tell anybody alive about it.  The human mind, if it has faith, will often convert these failures of religon into successes; e.g. "Grandma's in heaven now," so heaven exists.

One rather exotic case of this meme is the super powers promised by Scientology.  They say that the classes that give you super powers will be available when the building is finished, which will happen when they get enough money.  That has been expected "pretty soon now" for a couple of decades.

A similar category is things are predicted to happen in the future.  Among many Christians, the rapture is an event which will happen in the future and will change the world enough to remove all doubt of their religion's truth.  If you do the reasonable thing and wait until this has happened to believe, they say, you will be too late and won't get the easy access to heaven.  You'll have to suffer through the end times.  And since everybody who's ever predicted the exact date of the rapture so far has been wrong, you should just believe now.  There are similar, though generally less manipulative, issues with other religious timelines.

If nobody you can communicate with has any evidence for or against a proposition, the only reasonable assumption is the null hypothesis; in this case that nothing much happens.  The trouble is that with enough indoctrination and reinforcement, people with faith tend to assume that the less probable option is actually the most reasonable (for reasons I'll post on soon).

This is the first in a hopefully rather long series of posts on memes that some religions have in common.

One of the most common memes among religions is the unreasonable bribe.  By this I mean that if you do everything right, something good and otherwise impossible will happen.  It's the "million dollars" part of kissing Hank's ass.

Here are some examples:

Heaven:  In mainstream Christianity and Islam, going to heaven after you die for the rest of eternity is the classic bribe.  (Whether any place could feel like paradise for eternity is usually not addressed.)  Buddhism and Hinduism add the twist that while various heavens exists, you still live and die there and will eventually use up your good karma, so it's not eternal.  This brings up...

Reincarnation: The belief that after you die, you'll live again in another body seems pretty unlikely to most of the uninitiated on the face of it.  While being reincarnated isn't always a bribe (you could end up in a worse body or on a lower plane than you started if your karma sucks), living your life in the "correct" way is the way to get the good karma which will result in a better life next reincarnation.

Super Powers: Always less coy than other religions, Scientology literally offers super powers if only they can get enough money...  Mormon temple garments are supposed (by some) to offer unusual protections.

Nirvana: While ceasing to exist might seem like the most reasonable thing to expect after one dies to a secularist or most Westerners, it's viewed as an incredibly difficult accomplishment requiring a lifetime (or more than one) by most Buddhists.

Family: While many versions of heaven allow the deceased to be reunited with dead family members, the Mormons get more mileage out of this bribe than most religious groups thanks to their focus on family ties.

Your own planet: It's been reported (though the LDS church officially denies it) that an inner Mormon teaching is that after you die, if you've been one of the very best people, you could become a god or goddess of your own planet.  Seriously.

It should be noted that, regardless of what level of importance a particular religion places on belief, an essential requirement for any of these bribes is that you believe the bribe is possible.  After all, if you don't believe it could possibly happen, why would you bother kissing Hank's ass (or whatever)?

Here's a neat little game that's been around for a long time, but it's fun to play from time to time.  You run a few planets and try to conquer the galaxy.  You do this by clicking on the pictures when you want your planets/ships/etc. to do things.  It's really just a prettied-up forms-based interface.  The trailer on the front page is neat but it has nothing to do with the actual game.  I recommend signing up for one of the "named" universes (Andromeda, Barym, Capella, etc.) rather than the "numbered" ones.  This corresponds to using a server running newer or older software, respectively.

One nice aspect of this game is that rather than the standard mmorpg model which rewards playing more and more hours no matter what, Ogame tends to be most fun if you play a 10-20 minute session many times per day and then go about your business.  That means it's a game you can actually combine with living your life!

Anybody who's followed this site knows that, well... there's been very little to follow for the last few years.  I've decided to change this.  The first step I'm taking is installing this whole new blog software, b2evolution, which should make it a lot more convenient for me to post stuff.  We'll see how that goes.