zazen

There was a US senate hearing today about virtual currencies, and they generally said positive stuff about it. e.g. see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/u-s-agencies-to-say-bitcoins-offer-legitimate-benefits.html http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304439804579205740125297358 US Govt making positive noises can only fuel the rise. I think it'll break $1000 soon.

$4.6m in todays price

lol

It hit $197 on Mt Gox today. $180 on the more cool-headed bitstamp.net interesting times

That sorta looks cool but I have no idea whats going on once he gets inside the guys mouth. Why does he turn his head? What kills him? How does microscopic ant-man throw the other guy through the window?

wow, yeah. Looks like he's moved to Fargo with his Sister. Thats pretty major http://www.youtube.com/user/ulillillia/videos?view=0

Four posts in a row, I must seem pretty obsessed. Ok to be clear: I think bitcoin is fascinating but it is experimental and potentially unstable. I don't think of it as a scam, but on the other hand I wouldn't advise anyone to put money into it that they can't afford to lose. Its all pretty volatile and the exchanges regularly get DDOSed or go bust.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/12/bitcoin-is-ludicrous-but-it-tells-us-something-important-about-the-nature-of-money/ As to the deflationary thing, thats a bit beyond my grasp of economics. The article claims it caused the great depression, but surely there was more than one cause of that. Ultimately though, Bticoin is open-source so if the community agrees, they could switch to Bitcoin2 or whatever which could be designed to not have a finite limit. I imagine bitcoins original makers built in a limit because they were hedging against Moore's law. As for the faith question: whether to put my faith in a central bank vs a bunch of programmers: I'm a programmer and I've seen the tech/programming community create some literally amazing things over the past decade or so. The fact that Linux exists is incredible. The fact that Wikipedia exists is incredible. Its early days for Bitcoin but I think a currency created with the same open spirit as Linux or Wikipedia is a fascinating idea. I'm not exactly putting much faith in it yet, but compared to the complete bollocks-up of everything that the traditional financial sector has managed over the last few years, I'm interested to see where bitcoin goes.

The energy that goes into mining is problematic, I agree. But a technical detail that people often miss is that the Miners are actually providing the "Transaction Engine" that validates the Bitcoin transactions people are making. That is, the pooled processing power of the miners is also what powers the blockchain and hence the whole peer-to-peer validation system. So the energy the Miners consume should be compared to the the energy that normal banks consume with their own transaction systems (visa, swift, bacs etc).

No-one really knows how its going to turn out yet. Its a new thing. People try to compare it to Gold or Tulips or Ponzi schemes but because of the open-source and because of the internet angle it feels fundamentally different to me. ... e.g. Compare with the Euro: invented by economists, politicians and bankers in the mid-1990s. They just decided how it was going to work. ...Hackernews: I am very intrigued by Bitcoin. It has all the signs. Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it's derided as a toy. Just like microcomputers. I admire your optimism, but I really don't see a paradigm shift here. Imo, it's just another form of currency and simply adds another example to a large amount of other examples. And the comparison to the euro is a bad comparison, imo. The euro was about joining various nations within a new "nation", the eu. The new coin was but an instrument against the context of creating a union. It was not some new invention of how economies should work. It was about taking from how economies tend to work, and using that to help creating an eu. I know the euro is completely different, I was just comparing how politicians and nation states design things to how computer programmers design things. And, fyi, the countries that used the euro remained separate nations. You don't agree that a completely decentralised currency that uses peer-to-peer validation is a paradigm shift? Well, ok then. I'm not that optimistic - Bitcoin is an experiment and it could go wrong. main problem at the moment is that for it to be useful, its value needs to be fairly steady against other currencies. But because of the press and newness, its attracting a lot of speculation. Here's a good blog post about how Bitcoin could be useful in the Developing world. http://blog.nyaruka.com/bitcoins-bottom-billion-why-the-developing-world-may-be-bitcoins-biggest-customers e.g. imagine you're in Rwanda and you run a tech startup (which is that blogger does, incidentally). Trying to get validated with a merchant visa account is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Whereas setting up to receive bitcoin payments requires no rubber stamp from any corporation or government. Similarly, if you're in China, government control of currency exchange is a big problem. http://qz.com/74137/six-reasons-why-chinese-people-will-drive-the-next-bull-market-in-bitcoin/ Disclosure: I have 6.2 bitcoins, just for fun. I'm interested in the tech and economic ideas around it.

No-one really knows how its going to turn out yet. Its a new thing. People try to compare it to Gold or Tulips or Ponzi schemes but because of the open-source and because of the internet angle it feels fundamentally different to me. Its being built with an open-source hacker/engineer mentality. e.g. Compare with the Euro: invented by economists, politicians and bankers in the mid-1990s. They just decided how it was going to work. Not many people ever understood the finer details of how it was supposed to work once you had countries sharing a currency but not a central bank. The economists and politicians assured everyone it was fine. Confidence held for a bit (see my previous post about confidence). Now its all falling to pieces. Now look at Bitcoin: Created on the basis of a published paper, code written open-source, collaboration by different people. Decentralised, see what works mentality. Different clients and exchanges all plugged into the same system. Public debates about features and future directions. When there's a crisis (a hack, or 0.7/0.8 blockchain split) some people panic, some people get together and work out a fix. A good example: MtGox site has been unresponsive/up/down for maintenance for the last few days. Everyones angry. Do they put out a press release? No, they do an AMA on Reddit. This is completely unlike anything we've seen before - a currency backed by hobbyists and hackers rather than a Government. That means its shaky - confidence wanes, exchange rates yoyo, exchanges come and go bust again, web sites buckle under the pressure. But thats an engineering approach - try different things, see what works. Main problem at the moment is that for Bitcoin to be useful the exchange value needs to be less volatile. But because its new and interesting and has been getting a lot of press, we're getting spikes and bubbles. But perhaps the community will figure out a fix. A word of warning though: Along with the DIY hacker mentality, is the opportunity for scammers and thieves, so be careful. In summary: This is a new thing, it looks somewhat like old things that didn't work. But really, no-one knows. its all about confidence in the end. Here's a good quote from Paul Graham, veteran technologist at head honcho at Hackernews: I am very intrigued by Bitcoin. It has all the signs. Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it's derided as a toy. Just like microcomputers.

OK, let me explain it: Money is just confidence in a collaborative illusion. USDs are backed by the government etc and so on, but in the end, the value of a USD is just based on the idea that people are confident in it. Granted, the US Government is a pretty powerful entity. On the other hand they're in a lot of debt and so on. Its confidence judegments about that based on other countries that makes the USD go up and down against other currencies. And those other currencies are also based on confidence about their respective countries/governments. And thats it. The USD represents nothing else than that. Its not backed by gold stacked away somewhere. Its just based on confidence that the USD will continue to be the USD. Currencies need a community. For the USD that community is obviously people of the USA and also most of the rest of the world who are happy to deal with USD. If you're talking Uruguayan Peso then thats a smaller community, but still, lots of people all over the world are willing to exchange your Uruguayan Pesos for things. Zimbabwean Dollars - not so good. In theory the people of Zimbabwe form the community for that currency, but in practice they barely believe in it. Not a very big community for Zimbabwean Dollars. Gold - has some intrinsic value due to its use in jewelry (its a nice bendy pretty metal) and also electronics. But its trading value as a commodity is based on confidence - confidence that people will continue to use it as an exchangable thing and will continue to view it as valuable. Bitcoin, then, is designed to be distributed. The problem of keeping track of who has which bitcoins in their wallet is solved by a distributed system. The blockchain. I won't go into detail, but its designed so that as long as the Bitcoin community have more processing power combined than the 'bad guys' combined (whoever they may be) then the system will continue to work. Note that this has never been done before on this scale. Every other currency must be tracked by centralised regulated entities like banks. Bitcoins are tracked by the 'cloud' as it were. Bitcoin has also been designed so that people can generate new bitcoins by mining. Its designed to get harder over time and then stop completely by the year 2140. This serves to entice people into the bitcoin community and also helps make sure the bitcoin community has more combined processing power than the 'bad guys'. Bitcoin is new and very innovative, so although it has a community and that community has confidence in it, that confidence wavers a lot and so the price of bitcoins will remain volatile for many years to come. But i think it has a future. Bitcoins don't exist, but then neither do USDs in any strict sense. Whats important is that there is a system to track who has what and that there is a community and that they have confidence in the illusion.

It hit $250 per bc today The whole thing is very interesting, especially because there's no consensus on whether its the future of money or a huge folly. I'm betting on the software engineers over the economists. Compare y2K to 2008.

Fantastic. Uli's getting older too.

This has got me nostalgic. Here's a video of some of the stuff that was on the Welcome Tape: [youtubehd]WFLiOSIHDfY[/youtubehd] Here's some of the BBC tie-in show from 1983: [youtubehd]UM3tM4RIxFo[/youtubehd]

http://retro-computi...software&id=258 Holy shit, that picture is the BBC Micro Welcome Tape from about 1983. (not a cassette release of this album as some people assumed - look at the owl logo in the top-right corner) So, if you grew up in the UK in the 80s, the 8-bit Acorn BBC Model B was one of the computers that was around. Was pretty good for its time and was used a lot in schools because it was linked to the BBC and there was a tie-in tv series and so on. In those days floppy disk drives were really expensive (and hard disks were way out) so home computers loaded software from cassette tape. I had one of these when I was 8 and you had to hook up an audio connection to a tape recorder and then set the volume level just right so that the computer could parse the sound. It was the same sort of screetchy binary sound later associated with modems. That tape came with the computer and had some (really) simple demos and games. A geeky aside: Years later the BBC Model B was eventually succeeded by the 32-bit Acorn Archimedes which didn't do too well, but for that computer Acorn developed a whole new RISC chip design called the ARM. Its energy use was so efficient that its design-descendants are now used in pretty much all phones/smartphones. So Dave Monoliths cover is based on this (he uses a very recognisable Acorn font for the top bit, and the Rephlex logo is placed exactly where the owl logo was). Which means he probably grew up with one of these back in the 80s.

Ah, I see where you got the photos from. I won't post it here but it turns out Uli's older sister is fairly active on the internet as well. She's a sci-fi/fantasy author, and like Uli, also uses a psudeonym. Looks like the film crew were with Uli's family for the month of July. I hope the documentary gets finished, it could do a lot to help Uli and his family out.

woah, where did you get that photo? I've been trying to find out if the documentary got filmed or not, cos it co-incided with the floods. Looks like they managed to film it. Its weird cos I was thinking that Ulillillia would be a brilliant documentary, with the whole internet angle and everything, and then someone approaches him to film one. re: Ulillillia's family - although he doesn't mention it on his blog, I think his family have done things about his mental health. I emailed him a few years ago and he mentioned that he had seen lots of doctors. He mentions doctors on his blog too, now and then. But mostly he doesn't. Thats not to say his family are coping well or anything, but I think they are basically aware that he's very different and needs help, and within their means they are trying to get him that help.

http://www.metafilte...r-magic#3877622 lol, I was going to post that here too

yeah, that was it

I saw him play at the Essential Weekender in Finsbury Park in 1997. He was wheeled onto stage in a wendy house and he did the whole gig from a laptop (couldn't tell you whether it was a mac or a pc though) While his mates danced around on stage in those giant teddy bear costumes. 808 State, Squarepusher and Massive Attack were all at the same festy. Good times. Anyway, I guess he was just using the laptop for playback so it didn't necessarily reflect what he was using to make music at the time But ... the impression I get with Richard D James album and the Come to Daddy stuff that came after it was that it was mostly done on computers using software. I think he was into laptops and computers and software at that stage didn't get back into analogue gear until a bit later.

haha! I emailed him for advice on colours used in a flyer I designed after reading this but I'm still waiting for a reply :( Did you send an attachment? He wont read anything with attachments. You also need to avoid the words 'Person' and 'People'.

dude, I've been thinking along the same lines:

nothing is boring in ulillillia's world, i'm happy to have found out that he isn't obese see also

nice find.