Meat-za

Have you seen Emin Gun Sirer on campus and though he's not a professor there anymore, is he still influencing the CS program?

I saw the title and thought it was about the bits BIP I authored years back: BIP-0176

The answer to almost all of these if we're answering honestly is that we don't know. We have no idea because Bitcoin is not a centralized system and that's a good thing. We want people to make decisions based on their own values and profit calculations, and not on centralized dictates.

We have incentive guidelines based on economics. We know lowering the price means more people buy. We know that friction and bad user experience prevent people from adoption. But ultimately, playing with incentives to try to get a particular result is technocratic hubris. Particularly for the reason you point out. We really don't know what the second and third order effects will be. This is the main failure of central planning.

That said, I think the way to solve this is more decentralization. We should be encouraging nodes to be more self-sovereign and decide for themselves what they relay and encourage hashers to decide for themselves what they mine. Power to the people, I say.

I'm not sure it can be measured at all and at the very least, there are lots of of outputs that are functionally the same in the form of lost private keys. And if they can't be measured, it's futile to make concessions to them, no? Imagine if a mafia don came to your place of business and started extorting you. You have to pay some amount that he says each month. If he suddenly says, if you do X for me, I'll knock of $50 from what you owe next month, you have no idea if he'll actually knock off $50 because he determines the amount each month anyway. That's what this seems like to me.

As far as I can tell, this is the argument that if you give them OP_RETURN, perhaps the bad guys will put stuff there instead of where it hurts. I don't trust the bad guys and have no interest in conceding anything to them, especially when there's nothing stopping them from doing what you're trying to prevent them from doing anyway.

What we know from the data is that non-standard OP_RETURN is cumbersome and costly compared to normal transactions. You have to wait longer and pay more. If you make the wait shorter and the cost less, it'll naturally mean more people will use it, not just the bad guys, but lots of people that weren't even thinking about using it.

There was a show called Extracted, which was a lot like what you described, but people were pissed off at the ending.

Being famous, writing a book, being really good at an instrument, getting fit and healthy, being in charge of a large organization

BBQ: La BBQ, Interstellar, Leroy and Lewis (beef cheek on Fridays) Other Meat Restaurants: Garrison for steak, Lonesome Dove for prime rib (Friday lunch), Perry's for porkchop (Friday lunch again) Bars: 6th, Rainey, The Domain Coffee: Mozart's, a bunch of places on the East side and South Congress Entertainment: Alamo Draft House, Top Golf, Austin Bouldering Project, Crux Climbing

You should also join the Austin Bitcoin telegram group and ask there.

There's also a lot of cool stuff that opens up all the time, so check TripAdvisor/Yelp/Google Maps.

I'm a big fan of Girard, so I'll take a stab at the question at the end.

I think Girard would say that US and China are in mimetic warfare and that they're both imitating each other. And in many ways this is true. The Belt and Road initiative is really China's version of the IMF and World Bank, for example. Girard would probably say that Trump's attempting to bring manufacturing to the US is imitating China's manufacturing. Even immigration policy can be seen as going from imitating Europe to imitating China. So at least from an economic perspective, there's a lot of power and status games being played where they're mimetic rivals for supremacy.

In that context, the scapegoat here may very well be Russia, whose conflict with Ukraine really has very little to do with either country, but becomes the source of blame for the malignant economy we've seen the last few years. There's definitely some of that.

Prediction-wise, Girard would say that the mimetic rivalry will result in real violence, so that would mean a conflict with China is way more likely than Russia. But if they do broker peace, it'll be essentially scapegoating Russia and ganging up on it.

I'm going to disagree with this. We're in a consensus system. I don't think it's going to get any easier to get two opposing groups to agree. If anything, the split seems more permanent to me and possibly each camp having their own software. I think that's a good thing, but one of the necessary consequences is that consensus decisions will be that much harder to push through.

Use a normal keypad safe whose code you can change.

Every day, post a puzzle whose solution is the code to the safe. It's a lot more flexible than a safe that he hacks once and is done with.

You can also vary the puzzle's difficulty by his level. So start off easy (57 x 23) and get harder (what's the last olympics whose year was also a square number?)

Or if that's too math-y, you can do something like "A hacker left a note in ASCII: 50 48 48 48. Decode the values to find the 4-digit number"