AES and similar algorithms are specifically designed to not do that, because otherwise details of the ciphertext leak details about the plaintext. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis is about exploiting any unintentional leak of info like that.
AES in CTR mode does work like that. So do most stream ciphers.
Differential cryptanalysis is not about defending against bit-flips. Instead, it is about comparing two cipher texts to learn something about the relation between corresponding plain-text.
This is only possible on AES-CTR if you have to ciphertexts with the same key and nonce/IV. This is why a nonce is supposed to be used only once. Same goes for other xor based stream ciphers.
There is a genetic component for sure; not everyone can become an elite athlete or lifter. However, with consistent training on a decent program (like you say), I would believe that nearly everyone who does not have a disability could get to a point where they can deadlift 2.5x ideal body weight, squat 2x, and bench 1.5x. And if you get here, you are physically strong.
I don't do specific training on those lifts, but I am approaching those targets. Hard work, eating right, and appropriate training.
To me, eating right means a good balance of carbs, fat, and protein. I target my ideal body weight in lbs x 1.5 as grams (about 260g of protein a day). I don't always get there, but I try to get to over 1/3 of that by early morning with some overnight oats with added protein powder, a protein shake post early morning workout, and something with protein for breakfast right before I start work). If I am building, I eat around 3k calories a day. If I am cutting, I try to stay around 2k.
Hard work means getting my heart going, sweating, and tracking and increasing my percentages. I enjoy crossfit style workouts. I track what my training max is, and lift an appropriate percent of that for given sets. Do varied lifts. Olympic lifts, power lifts, gymnastics, etc.
Appropriate training. Find a program and stick with it a while. A 5/3/1 program can be solid. I got a lot out of a cycle of juggernaut training on my back squat a while back. I went from 240 lbs to 305 lbs in a short window where I thought I had plateaued. I'm currently at 345 lbs. I'm in no rush to add the last 35 lbs to that to hit my 2x target, but I'll get there. If I wanted to get there faster, I'd be back on 5/3/1 or juggernaut again.
> I would believe that nearly everyone who does not have a disability could get to a point where they can deadlift 2.5x ideal body weight
There's no way I can deadlift 500 lbs, not after I injured my back anyway. But my best pull after 3 years of lifting was 335 lbs. My best squat was 285 lbs. Both at 196 lbs body weight.
> bench 1.5x
no way I can ever bench 300 lbs, I'm way too far from that mark. I can't even do 225 yet. If I got 210 after 3 years of lifting, it's safe to say my max is probably 250 or 270 or somewhere there, but not 300
I was on several programs for extended periods of time.
I was on starting strength for 7 months, got pretty fat, but also made most of my gains. I stalled multiple times after 6 months so I deloaded for some time and started lean gains. I only improved my deadlift on leangains after 11 months, and ended up spinning my wheels. I only lost weight at the end when I cut my calories more.
I tried UD 2.0 after this and got tendonitis in one of my calves and elbows.
Since about 6 months and many years later, no matter what program I did I only got marginal gains. Maybe bench would go from 185 max to 210 in 2 years.
I took time off and a year later I haven't gotten back to 210 bench. Part of why is because I've had shoulder impingement. So fixing the issue with posture and doing some myofascial release I've gone back to around the strength I had 6 months after I started working out. Probably in a few months more I can just get back to where I was previously.
At the same time, some people in high school are benching 300+
A properly configured $5 VPS can handle a massive amount of traffic if it's just serving a single static (cached) page.
But to follow up on your point: I hope the EB script that updates the pages automatically while doing maintenance will not wait for a response to its POST requests before actually letting EB perform the maintenance. Otherwise you create a crucial unwanted dependency on your status server.
Indeed a properly configured VPS can - What I mean is make sure it's properly configured before chucking a status page on it. The post didn't really go into the properly configured part.
I cannot attest to the 'properly configured' part. I simply used their Ubuntu Droplet 'out of the box' apart from installing MySQL on it. Would love it if you can point me at a guide or post on how to configure a Digital Ocean droplet for better availability and reliability.
Thanks for the observation, but currently there are no dependencies with those scripts. They are simply 'fire and forget' while EB gets on with the other tasks at hand.
You could make the same claim about bitcoin not being needed, given that we have money and a working banking system. Your POV is just as invested in bitcoin as others are in Ethereum.
Bitcoin is for the underserved. It services the people that can't be served in incumbent institutions, and they use it because it's as close as they can get to the dollar.
The reason that Ethereum is particularly silly, is because there are no underserved code execute'rs. (Go to Alphabay or Bovada if you doubt this)
I assume that is meant as sarcasm, because if I had very little money I would certainly be worried about losing half of it over the weekend because of things like a hack the causes some panic and sends the exchange rate down. And the possibility to double my money due to rising Bitcoin prices would certainly not wipe out my worries.
I would also not be a huge fan of spending tens of millions of Dollars every year on electricity and hardware to heat the planet and process an amount of transactions that could easily be processed by a single centralized server for a fraction of the costs.
No. Bitcoin IS different. Its network is vastly larger. Newspapers became obsolete when the internet came to fruition. Bitcoin is doing the same to fiat currency. There are many intranets but we all know which one we are talking about when someone says "the internet".
It's one thing to have a tiny transaction-volume virtual currency like bitcoin circulating without any explicit government laws allowing it or not allowing it.
It's quite another thing for paavokoya to make the bold claim that bitcoin will replace government fiat currencies. That won't happen. Government currencies like USA dollars and Euros are backed by courts and police. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin usage beyond the trivial can always be suppressed by the government. All it takes is for the government to pass a law that says, "property purchased with bitcoin is null and void".
Any non-government crypto-currency exists at the pleasure and amusement of the government.
Government has the ultimate power and infuses that power into the fiat currency. That power is spread across tax collectors, courts, and law enforcement. On the other hand, bitcoin can't create its own "Bitcoin Sovereign Island" with its own sympathetic government. Alt-coin enthusiasts overestimate the ability of bitcoin to overthrow government sponsored money.
If bitcoin becomes large enough, governments will simply say "Anything you buy with bitcoin will be taxed the same way you did with dollars. Oh by the way, you also have to show us how you earned that bitcoin, in the same way with dollars."
Eventually, I believe one of the two things would happen:
(1) Bitcoin becomes part of the "system", like Paypal, Amazon, and Visa. It remains one of the handful of convenient methods of transaction for some situations. Some of its early adopters publicly denounce it as corrupted by the government and mega-corporations, and move on to greener pasture.
>USA dollars are not "backed by courts and police" (what does that even mean?).
>Property cannot be null or void, so a government decree as such would be meaningless.
Sorry for writing in shorthand and not making the meaning clearer. It's not the property that's nullified but the transaction of that property.
Ok, you agree to buy a car or domain name from a seller for 100 bitcoins. After you pay the 100, the seller keeps the keys/title/domain. You go to court to help recover your "money" -- aka bitcoins, because it was a fraudulent transaction. The court doesn't recognize the transaction because it doesn't recognize bitcoin as legal consideration. Case closed. You then try to go to the police/sheriff to seize "your" property. The police ask for the court order. You don't have one.
If the government wants to pass a law stating that bitcoin transactions are not recognized, it can do so. It doesn't have to pass such a law at the moment, because bitcoin transaction volume is trivial.
>In the US, government power is derived exclusively from the people, by the people.
Did the "power of the people" stop FDR from confiscating gold?[1] Gold was even more entrenched than bitcoin is today. Did the "power of the people" direct the government to take their 1980 dollars and reduce its purchasing power to 1/3rd in 2016?[2]
There's a difference between repeating the ideals of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the reality of how government actually exercises its power _against_ the people.
If Bitcoin activity got so large that it threatened the USA government's power to manipulate its Federal Reserve Notes to pay debt obligations (at least in nominal terms) or inflate the money supply to pay for Social Security & Medicare, it will make all bitcoin transactions null and void by decree.
Therefore, I disagree with paavokoya that Bitcoin will make fiat currencies like US Dollars and Euros "obsolete". Bitcoin doesn't have that power because Bitcoin doesn't come with its own courts, police, aircraft carriers, etc -- a.k.a. all the apparatus of government. It's the backing of government that enabled the US Dollar to become a global reserve currency.
> You go to court to help recover your "money" -- aka bitcoins, because it was a fraudulent transaction.
I don't understand what this means. Courts don't only consider cases where you pay ordinary money for an exhcange of goods. Contracts exist for purely material exchanges, so I don't see "give me bitcoin for X" wouldn't count.
In the late 80s, the regional director of the Chelybainsk Oblast was executed by firing squad for economic sabotage - possession of US dollars. (Mind you, two years later, nobody cared one whit about his crime, given that everyone came into the possession of US dollars.)
I think it's safe to say that governments will not allow things that will seriously threaten their fiscal policy. For all the wonders of cryptocurrencies, they have to intersect with the real world in order to be useful.
I suspect they're referring to https://www.bitt.com/ lobbying the government there, which their CEO was talking about at an event I attended a few months ago.
Bitt is providing a credit card style phone app there that uses blockchain technology. That's a very very different thing from a government considering using bitcoin instead of their own currency.
Did you just compare consumer preference in media consumption with a government failing as if the connection is self evident? You're fucking with me right?
Anonymity significantly hinders tax assessment and collection. Removing anonymity to increase taxable base is part of reason for the rapid push towards electronic transactions away from cash even in developing markets (the other parts are cost of securing cash & to reduce middlemen corruption).
So governments & financial institutions will certainly embrace blockchain tech as a potential way to possibly reduce transaction paperwork (read eliminate backoffice jobs) but anonymity which underlies bitcoin is unlikely to be supported by governments.
Bitcoin is different, but by no means is it or will it in any way obsolete government issued currency (it's wrong to call it fiat as if bitcoin isn't also fiat, which it is). It is however the only crypto currency that matters and will remain so.
This. Bitcoin is currently paying transaction fees through inflation, but as the halving process continues, those fees will shift back into the marketplace in a less implicit way, as miners need to continue being paid.
Tech like this will never die, it will just become less used if that problem isn't solved, but there will always be some group of people willing to use it despite those charges due to the nature of decentralized cash transfers without a trusted party.
True, "fiat money" would technically be "inconvertible paper money made legal tender by a government decree."
Bitcoin by contrast is "inconvertible digital money made legal tender by no-one because it's not legal tender".
So.. it's fiat in the sense that "by fiat" sense - which is where fiat money as a term comes from, but not in the strict "fiat money" sense of the phrase.
Fiat also means money that isn't a commodity or backed by a commodity. Bitcoin is fiat in this sense the same as USD. Additionally, the blockchain and it's rules are a form of government that is issuing bitcoin and thus it qualifies as government issued as well. You don't have to be a state to be a government.
Not true. Bitcoin is highly centralized, there are less than 10 mints that matter. Bitcoin is thus more centralized than many government operated currencies.
The 'decentralized' attribute is a big lie, and it's good illustration how big lies successfully operate today as they did in the past centuries. They just need repetition.
The DAO was officially introduced by slock.it with "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, but now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore, it seems.
The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and for stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").
Whenever they're about to lose, those with the power to do so usually change the rules to ensure they win. Cryptocurrency developers are rarely an exception to that.
Actually, the Bitcoin devs deserve a huge amount of credit for not attempting to "improve" the block reward or total supply during their multi-year bleed down from $1200->$200.
What? It was clear from the very beginning to anyone who actually looked into what the DAO was and how it worked, except those wanting to strike it rich believing the crypto hype.
You're saying you trusted it, got burned, and are already looking forward to the next one?
The DAO was described as "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, and now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore?
The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").
By that reasoning, I should be allowed to legally contact Amazon customer service and socially engineer access to others' accounts, then place orders to be shipped to myself. If the customers call and cancel the orders as fraudulent, I should be awarded damages in a lawsuit against them.
It's also worth noting that, if you're a person that doesn't have any monetary interest in The DAO, you don't have any right to vote for anything, meaning you're no different than somebody standing near a poker table spouting out your philosophies about where others should put their money (aka in the industry as a railbird).
That's called a loophole in a contract, and folks exploit those all the time.
You're on the receiving end, which sucks, but based on the rules of the DAO, you have no recourse.
The entire presupposition, when putting money into this thing, was that the code was the contract. Period.
If you failed to audit the code to find the loophole, you signed on to a financial arrangement without fully understanding the nature of the contract.
If you don't feel you're qualified to evaluate the terms of the contract, maybe we've just discovered a reason why "smart contracts" aren't such a great idea after all...
No, the DAO believers explicitly decided "f* the government, in code we trust" and wrote in their contract that whatever the DAO did, according to its code, was right.
You don't have such an agreement with Amazon.
Regarding your edit: I don't want to vote for anything. I'm simply pointing out that there is a (real-life!) agreement, and a party (slock.it et al.) not holding themselves to that agreement, and that I'd enjoy seeing that played out in court, where it belongs.
The idea of distributed investments and unstoppable tools that are distributed isn't about "f* the government" or anarchism; it's about not letting anyone other than a consensus of ourselves manipulate us.
> I'm simply pointing out that there is a contract, and a party not holding themselves to that contract, and that I'd enjoy seeing that played out in court, where it belongs.
The point is, if we disagree, what can you do, if you don't have any interest or control over this (hint: nothing)?
You didn't invest in a "distributed investment and unstoppable tool that is distributed", you invested in a partnership with the DAO code explicitly stated as the (potentially legally binding) operating document. If you didn't share the values and conditions in that contract, you probably shouldn't have joined the DAO/partnership.
Regarding your last paragraph: I'm not sure why you're attacking me personally here.
I do share the values of The DAO, which is why I'm happy that things are being handled exactly how I would have wanted them to. I'm not sure where the confusion is arising from. I'm talking about next steps.
> I'm not sure why you're attacking me personally here.
