Re: Nice... no mention of how the very first Bitcoins were minted though?

Not strictly true either. The difficulty of mining Bitcoin doesn't increase exponentially. The difficulty of mining is automatically adjusted - either up or down.

Essentially, the next hash is computed from, amongst other things, the hash of the previous block's transactions - which can't be predicted ahead of time - so work on mining the hash which comes after the next one can't be done ahead of time.

That 'next' hash which is being mined needs to have a specific number of leading zeros. The number of these leading zeros that is required varies depending on, essentially, how much world-wide computing power is dedicated to the task of mining. If the protocol detects that megatons of computer power is applied, the number of leading zeroes is increased, making the mining operation much more difficult, and keeping the rate at which these hashes are found constant (at about one every ten minutes.

If the amount of computing power which is mining was decreased (meaning that it would take longer to stumble upon a hash that fits the requirements), then, after a while, the protocol will decrease the number of leading zeros required in the 'next' hash - making the mining operation easier.

All that effort/time/money people put into mining simply makes the mining difficult and much more expensive. The rate at which someone can find Bitcoins remains relatively constant. The number of Bitcoins found each time will be reduced as time goes on. After a while, mining operations will produce no more Bitcoins.

At that time, all these mining operations will stop, and the hashing requirements will be relatively easy.

Copy'n'pasting from the Bitcoin FAQ at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

== How does the proof-of-work system help secure Bitcoin?

==

== To give a general idea of the mining process, imagine this setup:

== payload = <some data related to things happening on the Bitcoin network>

== nonce = 1

== hash = SHA2( SHA2( payload + nonce ) )

==

== The work performed by a miner consists of repeatedly increasing "nonce" until the hash

== function yields a value, that has the rare property of being below a certain target threshold.

== (In other words: The hash "starts with a certain number of zeroes", if you display it in the

== fixed-length representation, that is typically used.)

Re: Chip n Pin

Came here to say the same thing. I believe that the near-100% prevalence of chip'n'pin cards in Canada has made skimmers obsolete.

Now, if we can just get rid of white label ABMs...

Re: Imperative

"Submitted..for the same certification"?

Is that like Ken Brockman's 'Emmy-submitted' Six O'Clock News?

Re: Reminds me of...

One of the late-night talk shows on Radio-Canada used to get a classical music reviewer to review the heavy metal rock albums - all in good fun. Generally, the reviewer would draw parallels with opera.

...What's to stop people from using reflective paint?

...note that the delta-shaped plane in the video is painted matte black.

/While we're at it, why not fly smart drones with mirrors?

Y'know, so that the beam can be reflected back to the ship? Heh...

Re: Mostly harmless

From The Register, just a few days ago:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/04/assange_extradition_unlikely/

Justice Stefan Lindskog, a senior judge from Sweden’s supreme court, has told an Australian audience..

...snip, snip, snip,...

[/That] his personal view,..., is that Assange has done good works.

“At the end of the day Assange will be thought of as someone who made public certain pieces of information,” Lindskog says, adding that he feels many of Wikileaks’ leaks “were good for society and should not be punished.”

“The good made by leakage of such information cannot be underestimated,” he says. “It should never be a crime to make known the crime of a state.”

Me, I'm from the "You are what you do, not what you (or others) say you do" school... On the whole, IMHO, Assange's contributions have made the world a little better.

Now, if we can just arrest Bush and Blair and drag them to the ICC...

Re: Yikes!

You have to remember that El Reg's reporters' salaries start at a quarter million plus.

To them, £200 is chump change.

Actually,

In Canada, you get a double credit for every day you spend in jail pre-trial.

If you ask me, they should give him a week's credit for every pre-trial day he spent in solitary confinment.

/not an anonymous coward

Re: 'Deadly Weapons' ; Was: I blame Holly wood

Some friends and I saw that film in the theatre(s) when it came out. We walked out at about the 2/3rd mark, we couldn't take the boredom.

At the time, the local newspaper interviewed her. "They're real," she asserted to the reporter. "Hmm," he thought, "there's not that much silicon in the whole world."

If memory serves, she was married to a referee in the NHL.

Re: Higher temperatures =

Damn you, boltar! I came here to say the exact same thing! It's no surprise.

The Antartic is also known as a desert, at an annual precipitation of about 165mm - the extreme cold makes the air extremely dry. A rainfall of less than 250mm per year qualifies it as a desert. For comparison's sake, London's annual rainfall is 1,480mm.

The poor sods in Crib Goch, have to suffer through 4,473 mm. Maybe Rob McKenna lives there...

Most people who live in snowy climates know that when it's really cold, it tends to not snow much.

Re: Burn the heretics!!

Maple Syrup is also good on 'Oreilles de Crisse', baked beans, ham, sausages, and eggs. Y'know, all the 'lite' fare usually served at sugar shacks in March or April, when the maple sap is running.

Good times...

Can here to say "THIS!"

From the Groklaw article - you'all really should read it:

The foreman[Patent Holder Velvin Hogan - http://patents.justia.com/2008/07352953.html ] told a court representative that the jurors had reached a decision without needing the instructions.

I wonder if Mr. Hogan's patented method was ever used to D/L video without permission...

Re: And if the password is hashed

To all: I think my math is OK here, but pls forgive me. I didn't use billion, as the meaning changes depending what side of the Atlantic you're on.

AC: I don't think you understand just how large a 128-bit number is, let alone a 256-bit number. 128 bits works out to around 3.40 × 10^38 different numbers.

Humor me here: Fit 3 x 10^11 (three hundred thousand million) hashes in a cubic millimetre...

A desktop HDD has an outside volume of 386,022 mm^3. At the same storage density as above, the HDD would have to be able to store 115,806,600,000,000,000 128-bit hashes or 1,852,905,600,000,000,000 bytes (1.9 million petabytes - 1.9 zettabytes) of data to match the storage density of that cubic mm above.

To visualize just how much data that is, think how big a pile nearly two million million 1TB drives would be. The annual HDD production of any sized-storage by the three largest manufacturers is 200M - so that'd be 10,000 years' production.

Last year, IBM announced that it is building a 120 PB HDD data repository - an array of 200,000 HDDs. That 1.8ZB HDD would represent 15,834 of IBM's arrays.

The volume of the Earth is roughly 1.097 x 10^27 mm^3. That's a thousand million million million million.

A planet-Earth-sized pile of 1.8ZB HDDs would be needed just to store all possible 128-bit hashes. (Seagate expects to use HAMR to produce 60 TB+ 3.5" hard drives within the next ten years - you'd still need 31,666 of 'em for ONE 1.9 ZB HDD.)

At current rates of manufacturing, you would need every HDD produced for 2.6 x 10^21 years just to store all possible 128-bit hashes. That's 1.8 x 10^11 times the age of the universe...

Oh, it gets worse, AC.

To store all possible 256-bit hashes, you would need 3.40 × 10^38 Earth-size piles of 1.9 ZB HDDs.

THAT, my friend, is sufficiently large haystack to hide a needle in.

Password hashing IS good practice. Best practice is salted hashing, with individual, random salts (assuming the salts aren't stored with the hashes) and a slow, or a memory-intensive hashing algorithm.

Re: Really?

Actually, Netflix took the 20 year old (Actually, 40 year old) BBC series off of the Canadian pipeline a few months ago. I called to ask them to put them back, please! I was halfway through a few of them, and I'm jonesing...

Re: Heck, I don't know most/nearly-all of my passwords.

I wasn't concerned when the 'breach' happened. (At the time, Lastpass wasn't sure that whether some/all of the database had been stolen - but reported suspicious activity.)

No big deal: Within a day or so of the announcement, I changed my master password and in the next few days, I changed (and muchly strengthened) all of the critical passwords, and some of the less-than-critical ones. This was relatively painless - as it was handled by the Lastpass software.

And, no I don't know what most of my passwords are. Heck, I've even displayed some of the 100plus-character passwords to friends - warning them beforehand that this was their ten-second chance to steal a password of mine. (It always elicited a laugh, once they saw the completely-impossible-to-memorize passphrase...)

Re: imagine the rebuilding time

Don't use RAID 5!

Use RAID 10. You don't even notice it when it's rebuilding.

Re: Not a happy (Canadian) camper...

Thanks!

I asked three fanbois, none of 'em knew how!

Have you ever read Kafka's In the Penal Colony?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony

Cue Maxwell Smart.

"Hang on, Chief, I think he's trying to say something."

Max, kneeling, leans in close and places his ear next to the dying man's mouth and listens, then he stands.

"So, Max, what did he say?

-Get you knee off my chest."