Posts by Rich of Observationz
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It's obviously not in the interests of a landlord to perform a test - I certainly wouldn't. Property owners should always be wary of creating a paper trail that impacts their LIM or creates something you are bound to disclose - for instance, if you have an issue with neighbours, don't put in writing if at all avoidable.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to BenWilson,
Yeah, I think the problem is that the inventors of bitcoin were (I suspect) propertarian wingnuts. As such, they believe in the idea of a currency based on an artificially scarce commodity (cf gold). As expected (and I think I documented this someplace many years ago) this is likely to lead to rampant deflation - which is of course just as much a problem to anyone attempting to use the currency as rampant inflation would be.
If my business took bitcoin, we'd have to adjust our prices in realtime and then have a highly unstable cashflow (in real money we can pay staff, rent, servers and taxes in) to manage.
An alternative that simply pegged the coins to a real-world currency and issued them against a bank account full of money would work better and not waste energy - but it would still suffer from excessive transaction times.
The real problem this is solving isn't technical - having central ledgers operated by trustworthy organisations is a perfectly good solution - but that governments grant an oligopoly to banks which then fail to deliver innovative payment solutions that aren't beset by legacy issues (embossed numbers on credit cards and so on).
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The whole business of being an MP relies on the member being honourable
Absent that, they need to get re-elected every three years. Of course, the electorate may have their reasons to elect a highly dishonourable candidate (wanting to pollute rivers and cover mountainsides with subdivisions, for instance).
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to izogi,
Yep, any kind of non-polling place voting, be it postal ballots or online will suffer from the same problem.
I'd suspect that one reason the trial of online voting at last years council elections didn't happen is this unfulfillable requirement in the spec:
1.24 The online voting system must not enable the voter to be in possession of a proof of the content of the vote cast.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Neil Graham,
I see that.
If we're making a system that lets a voter go along to a polling station, get given a ballot paper, and validates that they're the first to vote, then one could do that with a blockchain. The problem with it (in common with many such solutions) would be the time taken for the change to the blockchain to propagate - you wouldn't know a vote was being duplicated until the voter and the mis-voter had both left the building.
And I can't see great advantages over a conventional centralised database to solve this problem.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Russell Brown,
This article proposes two blockchains, one for voter status (eligible and hasn't voted) another for the actual vote, which is encrypted. (Of course, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that any form of voting away from a polling place is *inherently* non-private).
The trouble with everything article I read about blockchain is that the author is clearly fully aroused by the subject, but doesn't know enough about CS and cryptography to write an article that makes sense at a technical level.
And whenever I have tried to actually use bitcoin over the last few years, my computer has spent many hours grinding away before the funds finally got transferred.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I'm not saying that the police don't improperly inform people of the progress of investigations, but that they often shouldn't.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Katharine Moody,
MPs don't have superiors (in their capacity as MPs). And it's improper for the police to inform people of their interaction with a witness/suspect in order to pressurise that person.
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Yeah, I think the OP could win some kind of award for outstanding un-prescience.
And I'm loving the irony that following one of the charges on Corbyn's indictment being support for a terrorist-linked political party, May now depends for her majority on, guess what, a terrorist-linked political party.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to BenWilson,
GOP?
