Today Mircea Popescu offers a proposal which he is mulling as a necessary condition for any fundamental change to the Bitcoin protocol to receive his approval. The proposal would strengthen the bond between Bitcoin miners and nodes. Popescu is pledging to sink any hard fork proposal that does not include these changes, but if these changes are to be adopted he is willing to negotiate changes to the Bitcoin protocol including a maximum blocksize increase.
Category Archives: News
Ether Huffing Reddit Spam Persists
Private message spam on the social engineering platform Reddit supporting the dreams and aspersations of Ether huffers continues without any sign of abatement. The continued spam promoting Buterin's waterfall suggests that either Reddit is incapable of controlling spam, or that they actually support this spam at a high level. The lack of more traditional spam promoting online pharmacies, LVMH merchandise, and other marginal commercial ventures seems to demonstrate that Reddit actually has the technical ability to prevent spam. This leaves the very real possibility that Reddit management materially supports this spam campaign as the increasingly probable explanation for the spam campaign's persistence.
Bitcoin Foundation Address Recap: Next Release Imminent, Shiva Introduced
A flurry of activity at the Bitcoin Foundation in January, much of which has already been covered on Qntra, has lead up to a code freeze for the next release of the reference Bitcoin daemon. The address covers a number of developments relevant to the upcoming release including makefile contributions, Malleus Mikehearnificarum, a switch for toggling between enforcement of low-s or high-s signature creation, refinement of the programmable version strings mechanism, and further iteration of the V provenance management system.
One particularly interesting development which will miss this release, but likely play a key part in the future of the reference client was given a brief mention. In late January asciilifeform of No Such lAbs introduced Shiva, an experimental Lisp shell for interacting with bitcoind. Shiva's introduction introduces a number of possible development directions, all of which are far more interesting than various coups intending to impose governance upon Bitcoin through sloppy hard fork plans.
Chiraqi Police Sabotaging Surveillance Equipment
Have you ever wondered why those squad car dashcam videos you see on the nightly news are so often silent? Continue reading
Networking Equipment Designated Weapon System
Reports are emerging that the United States Air Force has designated the computer networking equipment that separates its internal network from the rest of the internet a weapons system (archived). While various propaganda outlets parrot the Air Force's public relations friendly justification of the move as a merely a means to extract greater funding from legislators, this move to begin openly classifying mundane networking equipment as a form of weapons system is in concordance with United States President Hussein Bahamas' intensification of the war on computing.
California Environmentalists Fight To Save Endangered Nuclear Plant
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an emergent environmental advocacy group has coalesced to advocate for saving the regulatorily imperilled Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (archived). The approximately 2.2 gigawatt plant currently provides 7 to 8 percent of California's electricity. Any non-nuclear replacement for the plant would require an energy expenditure relative to output 4 to 5 times greater than replacing Diablo Canyon with another nuclear plant, and a new nuclear plant would still require a greater capital outlay than continuing to operate Diablo Canyon. With energy prices in the United States falling to a point that prohibits new capital investment, these actual environmentalists are advocating for the outcome which minimizes the price in energy to keep the lights on in California.
Article On Swedish Murder Censored In Sweden
An article in the Daily Mail on the stabbing death of student social worker Alexandra Mezher (archived) has reportedly been censored in Sweden. Users in Sweden are being redirected to a url on the Daily Mail website named /unavailable/index.html which apologizes for being "unable to find" the article. Beyond the circumstances of the murder, the Daily Mail article describes an increase in violence affecting many Swedish population centers which makes Gothenburg increasingly resemble the United States hell hole known as James Lafond Presents Baltimore.
Bank Of Japan Takes Interest Rates Negative
The Bank of Japan has introduced a negative interest rate policy a mere week after Bank Governor Haruhiko Kuroda assured the world his bank would not taking such a course of action anytime "soon" (archived). The move helped to take Bitcoin and the United States dollar higher against the yen. The euro spiked higher against the yen and then regressed.
Russian Communists Seek To Emulate United States Socialists With Asset Forfeiture
Russia Today reports that two communist legislators are trying to bring United States style asset forfeiture back into the Russian legal system as a penalty for extralegal pharmaceutical entrepreneurs (archived). Asset forfeiture which came into popularity with United States "law enforcement" with the "War on Drugs" has of course expanded to become a default punishment for all kinds of behavior the United States Government has decided is undesirable. Assumptions about asset forfeiture have become so engrained into the United States legal system that surprise was in no short supply when New Zealand rejected assertions by United States Department of "Justice" that there is nothing wrong with using asset forfeiture to deny defendants access to resources necessary to their legal defense.
Gavin Andresen Proposes Same Hard Fork Again
United States Government saboteur and hard fork advocate Gavin Andresen has proposed the same hard fork yet another time. His latest proposal is exactly the same as the increase in "Bitcoin Classic" advocated by himself, Toomim, and serial scammer and morally bankrupt hamplanet Marshmallow Long1. As the exact same proposal has been roundly dismissed in the form of Bitcoin Classic, the chances of this gaining actual as opposed to astroturfed traction are likely the same.