This thread is awesome. Goxed is now my new favorite word (sorry for the more initiated if I'm already late to the party). It's just like being doxed - you exposed yourself in some way, and some clever bastard got the better of you for it.
This seems like the best way to go about it. Use statistical analysis to find similarities between wallets involved in transactions stemming from the root. When you can give a qualitative "Here's where these coins are going", you can start to identify the culprit. Since there doesn't seem to be a legal framework to prosecute such theft anyway, I'd really just want to find them to congratulate them. Sorry to anybody who lost their coins :(
And those of you that think this believe Fox News has your interests in mind? Where does them making money off of selling subscriptions and political campaign ads at ridiculous markup come into this? What a coincidence. They're not only one of the most expensive channels a cable company has to pay for, but they're also heroes.
Addiction really is the operating word here. It's what keeps you in front of the TV in the same way it keeps people in front of slot machines. The worst part is the thesis of conservative media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous liberal agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person (ignoring all information regarding demographics and welfare recipients). Fox News makes good money off of convincing people who feel they are victims of the world at large that they are in fact autonomous conservatives/libertarians.
"The worst part is the thesis of [...] media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous [...] agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person"
That's not particular to conservative media; it's the same tactic used to convince whole swaths of the population that the rich, the white, sexists, racists, jingoists, big corporations, government, etc. are keeping you down.
Leveling it at only one side of a debate is falling into the trap polemicists set up. They all do this, from every angle and via all means possible. It's just propaganda, and one insidious aspect of it is that they convince people only the other side engages in it.
True, but Fox News is the best at it, so they get the flak. I'll give the other channels for convincing people Obama was going to change things, but those people already mostly wanted change (especially after the financial crisis). Fox News did more than that. They convinced people who had been Republicans for 30 years that they have been libertarians fo 30 years. That's just really scary.
Meanwhile, people who have been actually libertarian for 30 years have to find another word to use for themselves. Again.
If you want to be truly libertarian, guys, you also have to embrace open borders, support non-interventionist foreign policy, and desire that drug prohibitions cease. Defending gun rights and complaining about taxes and welfare is just a tiny part of the package. You can still oppose state-sanctioned gay marriage if you want, but only to the extent that you oppose government involvement in any kind of marriage.
As I am a long-time libertard, the people who talk about freedom after watching Fox News make me laugh. They fill their heads with mass-media talking points all day, meet with like-minded people to create an echo chamber for the ideas they were force-fed, then worry about having adequate self-determination.
Yeah, but people are stupid and especially so when greed kicks in! I always explore Internet phenomenons and try to put myself in the shoes of the affected. I've spent days playing Mafia Wars to see what the hell makes people waste so much time with that crap and I think got it. I did everything a Bitcoiner does for a few months, BitcoinWisdom.com charts are now burnt into my retina, I had nightmares about crashes (some were real when I woke up), and I know first-hand how your mindset changes. Anyway, everybody's in for a quick lazy profit! I got totally disgusted by Bitcoin thanks to people like Barry Silbert (this guys is like an open book), the Winklevii, potheads like Chalie Shrem (http://www.vocativ.com/12-2013/night-bitcoin-millionaire-pro...) who some are now trying to turn into a hero, and even Fred Wilson who was totally arrogant and deceitful during the NYDFS hearing.
We, the startupers, of course, like to make money, too, but we know it is not easy, it's actually a lot of work, skills, and luck, and money is almost never top priority - it's just a nice added bonus, a reward if we do good! We want to change the world, but not to change the world so that we get rich from the hoarded coins!
I do like the innovation that Bitcoin brought, I like that it brought the attention to some of the problems it's claiming to solve (almost many are false promises - like micropayments), but I don't think it can be sustained for much longer!
I agree. It wasn't so much a pro Bitcoin statement as it was angst with the world economy at large. People just want to make money, and I know people have to make money, but people don't have to just want to make money. Startupers want to make money, but it's like you say, they want to do so in being innovative, productive, creating valuable things (not to generalize - I'm sure there are some people here just for the money). There are people like this in the cryptocurrency community too, but the accessibility of Bitcoin attracted plenty of asshats as well. It will prove to be a game changing experiment somehow, but if it doesn't become a world-saving currency or whatever, I won't care or be surprised.
It's not compromise. Compromise implies you give a fuck about the wills and whims of the other party or parties out of concern or compassion or belief in some objective fairness. That's not how shit works. You aim to get what you can anyway you can or you lose to someone else who does. That's politics.
What usually happens is that a policy will have some ridiculously extreme measures added to it, which no sane person would ever agree to. Then, in the name of "compromise", those extreme measures will be taken out and the policy ends up passing in its original form. As an added bonus, those who oppose the policy's original measures are "paranoid" and "unwilling to compromise".
Some examples which spring to mind are the Snoopers' Charter and Digital Economy Act.
I'd think content providers in general would be willing to provide bandwidth under a mesh network. They'd also be the ones most likely to pipe the mesh into the existing infrastructure. Who else besides the likes of Google / Netflix / Facebook would front heavier duty APs city-wide. Every ounce of traffic would have to be encrypted though. The main barriers for mesh networking when I look at it are:
First and foremost: Antennas and hardware in general. It's one thing to maintain a multi-channel 500mbps connection within 10-20 feet, let alone doing it with multiple devices simultaneously connected to other multiple devices. Even if you scale the speed down, the consumer grade hardware out there isn't targeting this use case.
Second: Protocols. If we had the hardware, the whole mesh has to be trustless while being affected as little as possible by connectivity and pathing overhead. Plus backwards compatible with existing infrastructure (which is less hard I guess).
Third: Gatekeepers. If you get them on board, creating the mesh as a natural extension of the internet becomes easy. Since they invariably won't be on board, it'll be that much harder.
Naturally the internet is not a mesh network because nobody will take this role of gatekeeper without benefit. If somebody does, it becomes ISP again.
However, although the current web is messy, we should be able to organize it using distributed network solutions in a peer-to-peer manner, as proposed in the blog here: http://bit.ly/1e8vrLL. It serves an additional layer on top of the nature internet. It has the protocols built-in and the "Gatekeepers" sitting in between the distributed nodes and a feasible business model to support its execution, rather than the ideal Semantic Web solution requiring DRM.
Once the taboo of "I saw this person's update on Facebook, but I can't just jump into a conversation with them referencing that update without qualifying it with a: 'I saw your update on Facebook'" then Facebook will begin to advertise itself as timeshifting social interaction. You can "catch up" with your friends without having to actually talk to them. Here's one use case (sorry for anybody seeing me reference this car crash multiple times):
I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like, all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).
