Agreed. Anyone who still maintains a 'side' seems myopic to me, as the mud seems evenly distributed from my vantage point. I am just hoping to continue the trend of transparancy and manage the growing technocratic forces with perverse incentives to manipulate the pubic. Regretably, no party seems to have this primary aim, but many individuals within them do.
"When beggars and shoeshine boys, barbers and beauticians can tell you how to get rich it is time to remind yourself that there is no more dangerous illusion than the belief that one can get something for nothing."
Yeah, the telemarketing people who clog up the phone lines and interrupt dinner times all over the planet won't see the benefit of this at all </sarcasm>
Welcome to the 90's Microsoft. Glad you could make it.
No one has used telnet for over 20 years. The fact that it took Redmond over 20 years to incorporte an SSH client proves to me that they really aren't as security conscious as they claim to be.
What are the current crop of cryptocurrencies that are truly anonymous? The list I have so far is: Aeon, DASH, Komodo, Monero , NAV Coin, PIVX, Verge, Zcash, Zcoin, and ZenCash.
This article feels like a puff piece for Monero, as opposed to a true discussion on the merits of anonymous cryptocurrency, which would minimally mention a subset of what you have listed above.
These coin all employ some anonymity features. Some real shallow (such a Verge only routing traffic over TOR) and some more elaborate (such as ZCash with zero knowledge proofs).
If you define truly anonymous as having no way to see transaction addresses and amounts, no way to check balances and history and these features all active by default... it would leave you with Monero and Aeon.
Of course other differences exist, such as vulnerable crytography (Zcoin), a potentially flawed "trusted setup" (ZCash, ZenCash), etc
Truly anonymous would mean if you bought $100 worth of anoncoin under your own name from an exchange and then played two hands of poker at an online casino, there would be no way for the casino and the exchange to collude and identifier you. Is that the case for any of the systems you listed?
Exchange gives you coin, and then have no way of telling what you did with it. Exchange just knows you are given 300 coins at the time of transaction, nothing more.
SafeCoin would be if it were actually implemented. As it currently stands, there is just a MaidSafeCoin token with a promise of a 1:1 exchange when SafeCoin gets implemented. Still, the concept is interesting. It's not blockchain-based, and a coin's data structure only contains the current and previous owner signatures.
I remember RISC's back in the late 80's/early 90's. CISC's bullied them away and we've been stuck in Intel's quagmire every since. Anytime there's an attack on the status quo, the established players feign concern and beat back the attack then return to the way things were (remember Negroponte's $100 laptop and the netbook response?)
It wasn't that CISC won or that RISC lost, it was that the architectures got so blurry you couldn't tell one from the other. There's so much microcode in a CPU now that the instruction set is just the icing layer on the cake. Internally there's surprising amounts of commonality between PowerPC, ARM and x86 type chips.
Plus PowerPC started to adopt CISC-like instructions, x86-64 started to adopt RISC-like features such as having a multitude of generic registers, and here we are where nobody cares about the distinction.
Don't forget that while Intel won in certain markets, like notebooks, desktops and servers, it's absolutely, utterly irrelevant in other places that ship far, far more CPUs. A typical car may have as many as one hundred CPUs of various types, typically at least fifty, many of them PowerPC for power and legacy reasons. Your phone is probably ARM. Remote controls. Routers. Switches. Refrigerators. Thermostats. Televisions and displays. Hard drives. Keyboards and mice. Basically anything that needs some kind of compute capability probably has a non-Intel processor.
If there's a quagmire we're stuck in it's that we're surrounded by thousands of devices that are likely full of vulnerabilities that can never, will ever be fixed.
Actually most real RISC CPUs have no microcode, and if they do it's really just the same instruction set running out of an exception handler, not hardwired stuff on some other lower level private ISA
After microcoding, this is all silly. What matters is how efficiently you can encode and communicate the μ-ops to the ROB. RISC-V, with the C extension (and using only today's nascent compiler backends!), has more-or-less the same μ-op density as x86-64 (with a good order of magnitude or two less complexity in the decoder), and considerably better density than AArch64, which completely lacks reduced width instructions.
It's not that CISC won, it's that CISC (eventually) didn't lose to any great degree.
x86s were about the most riscy of the cisc processors - 99.9% of instructions that access memory perform an access to a single address, no double indirect accesses no move memory to memory accesses, not 21 TLB misses on a single instruction (meaning a program might have to have enough memory to get all 21 page table pages and the underlying data pages (42 pages) to make progress) - that sort of thing.
The CISC->RISC thing largely happened because the ratio of cpu speeds and memory speeds changed, low end CPUs got caches, they moved on chip, instruction decoding started to be an issue, the x86s were riscy enough that they survived that change
RISCV is pretty far from attacking Intel anywhere. ARM is the one that should be both worried about RISCV and simultaneously be a cause of worry for Intel.
I don't think this matters, as long as the internals are completely inaccessible to a programmer. In other words, what happens inside is not what is usually called "architecture" (which is part of the definition of what RISC is).
What scares me is not the success or failure of BitCoin. What I find troubling is the spirit of BitCoin is paving the way for the exact opposite result.
The idealism is to produce a system for faster, cheaper, and censorship-resistant way to transact. BitCoin is actually becoming unusable for that. It's slower than Etherium, the fees continue to climb when measured against the US Dollar, and the privacy issues are not being addressed.
Sadly, no one will pay any attention to this while the price continues to climb. Only when the price crashes will folks come to their senses, just like when MintPal was hacked which destroyed VeriCoin and when The DAO collapsed with people voting to roll back and fork.
Does anyone remember him? He had a huge impact on my life back in 2006 when I was trying to learn Ruby to use Ruby on Rails.
The
Thanks Jonathan for all the foxes, and thanks to whoever is maintaining his legacy: https://whytheluckystiff.net/