My Blog

Capitalism finished a long time ago; if it ever existed. The use of capitalism as a synonym for greedy business is a sad commentary on the lack of language of our day. Capitalism is about capital formation and nothing to do with the ripping off of the masses. That's the role of religions and politicians who encourage everyone to work harder and accept their lot.

If your transaction is not being confirmed, and you did not use replace-by-fee (you almost certainly did not, very few bitcoin wallets support this) then you will have to wait for the network nodes to drop your transaction from their mempool before you can attempt to resend your transaction. After 72 hours of being unconfirmed, most mempools will drop it (nodes with default settings). If volume is particularly high and mempools are completely filled up (beyond 300MB for default settings) then it will be dropped sooner. However there is no way to know if your transaction is being dropped or not, beyond just going to common blockchain explorers and seeing if they have it. Blockchain.info has very liberal node configurations, they keep almost every transaction. Chain.so is an example of one with conservative settings, they are likely to drop your transaction before other explorers and nodes.

Big money moves ahead of news. Small money moves after news.

I think the media and press coverage Bitcoin is getting as being a safe-haven asset will increase investor awareness and eventually make it a recognized safe-haven asset as investors reevaluate options. But I expect that to occur over a more gradual timespan of months to years as investors encounter long-term global financial instability. Very few people had their finger on a trigger to buy BTC the way traders were ready to shift GDP to USD or gold. Until Bitcoin has an ETF or Forex presence (on major Forex brokers) I don't expect markets to react on a similar timescale.

I teach at a university and since Facebook I see a drastic shortening of attention spans allowed for reading and listening. If I cannot say it in less than 3-5 minutes, then I've lost them. Before Facebook and smart phones, I had 20-30 minutes. Attention span planning is forcing major changes in education. It's our world... journalists have to adjust too. SusieMach Source .

When printing your keys make sure you use a proper font (that don't have similar characters - like "I" and "l", zero and big O). Also don't trust your printer - some printers have hard drives. And copy of all printed documents is saved on your hard drive (and then "erased" but it still revocable using "undelete" programs) - even in Linux. You can use this trick to prevent copies of printed pages to be written on the computer's hard drive (this is NOT applicable for printer's hard drive): mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /var/spool/cups chmod 0710 /var/spool/cups chown root:lp /var/spool/cups mkdir /var/spool/cups/tmp chmod 1770 /var/spool/cups/tmp chown root:lp /var/spool/cups/tmp Also you need encrypted home folder (/home/yourusername) to be safe and use tmpfs for writing the secrets before encryption. The default installation of Linux distros like Ubuntu is not very secure if you don't know what you are doing. For exa...

Used to work in compliance, specifically AML/BSA. Sorry, ton of words coming... There's a pretty blurry line between informing the client of a delay regarding a compliance investigation and what's known as "tipping off". If a financial institution is found to have tipped off, the penalties are stiff. Jail time and big fines to the person who did it, and potential loss of MSB licensure for the business. Again, that line boils down to interpretation. Most FIs won't say anything other than, "sorry for the delay," and nothing about compliance. This is especially true if the investigator has found something they find to be suspicious. What's suspicious is also muddy. Could be that the amount is the "magic number" of 10,000. Despite the rule that all cash deposits "larger than $10,000" must be reported, most suspicious activities like fraud, account takeover, etc are exactly $10,000, even if they aren'...