T then is not just the life experience of one human - to learn from observation by example, to reconstruct a human, you'd need to observe the life experiences of trillions and trillions of humans to gain sufficient information about humans to narrow down the possible implementations that match human behavior not just mechanically given the same input, but also given new previously untested input.
at 3gb encoded as dna the search space already is huge, but that ignores that the genome alone doesn't contain the information needed to read it. (e.g. you need a living thing to use the DNA, for it to make sense)
Well I guess I have some citations to read later, but intuitively I just have a hard time believing that lack of training data is the problem. There's so incredibly much data available on the internet. If that was the limiting factor, it would just be a matter of throwing more data at T to increase the amount of information in M, but that doesn't help if we haven't found the right machine learning algorithm L. And searching that space is the real challenge of AI. To search that space we either need human experts, huge amounts of computational power to brute force, or some combination thereof. We've tried human experts alone for decades, without much success, so I think it's likely that we will need some computational assistance to find the right algorithms. That's why AI people love throwing around graphs of Moore's law.
not if the amount of training data required to learn by example is exponential or even combinatorial. we might not even be in the same ballpark. all data ever recorded on digital media might not be enough to learn even a simple intelligence without assumptions about structure.
a kind of analogous problem is: can you learn how to build a living thing purely from digitally recorded DNA samples, if you don't have access to the internal structure of any living thing? How many dna samples would you need?
author: there's no fundamental objection. i'm only pointing out that throwing faster computation at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. right now all the work essentially needs to be done by humans.
If you follow the link to the lower bound to learning by example, you'll see that it's really hard to learn by example if you haven't pre-encoded ideas about the interpretation into the reading program. Without prior knowledge, you need lots and lots and lots of examples.
All the information that humanity has ever stored on digital media is likely not remotely enough to reconstruct a human mind from.
I'm far less optimistic. I was one of the most vocal and active pro-european-startup activists before I left for San Francisco in 2009. With no capital, I started multiple companies. Some failed, some are still active and now do combined multiple millions of annual revenue (e.g. mjam.net). I started Europe's first YC-inspired accelerator (YEurope) in 2006 and helped put the current global hackerspaces movement into motion so we'd have support infrastructure. Back then I regularly talked to european politicians up to the president level.
The point where I left for San Francisco was when I realized that no one there realizes that there is a causal link between wealth creation and having wealth. They don't know they have a problem, or even should they suspect it, they don't know what causes it.
On a recent trip back I haven't noticed any change in that - so even if they wanted to improve something, they wouldn't know what or how. The economic crisis provides a convenient excuse for all problems, not an incentive to explore what's wrong.
The easiest argument against Europe for startups is sadly on an individual level: Statistics. If you're one of the best - but not the best - entrepreneur in Europe (500 Million People), you know that almost no one more talented than you ever succeeded. And almost no one less talented either. In San Francisco, both people more and less talented succeed all the time.
So statistics. It's far more pretentious to think you're so much better than the best among 500 million, than to think you'll do well among the 8 million in the Bay Area.
That help won't be coming from politicians, because they don't even remotely get that wealth and wealth creation are linked. And despite what OP wrote, the fundamentals haven't changed in any other way that was perceptible to me.
I can't tell you exactly what's wrong with startups in Europe. It's no one thing. It's thousands of things.
Unless you've experienced the Bay Area, it's probably impossible to anticipate what you're missing. I didn't. The stuff you get in the Bay Area is stuff that doesn't transfer over the internet - so just by reading hackernews and techcrunch you have no means to figure out what is or could be different.
I think Paul Graham's argument (paraphrased) that all startups die by default, but in some environments they sometimes get saved, might come closest in describing what's happening.
I think the statistics argument really is the most solid one (though admittedly self-fulfilling, because it means the most driven entrepreneurs leave). Unless something fundamentally changes, any improvements to the ecosystem will have to be gradual over a long time.
using up resources is not valuable by itself. forcing someone to spend on anything, anything at all, does not lead to a good allocation of resources. it might increase GDP, but it does not create value.
under inflationary interpretations of value creation, building a road circling back onto itself - not connected to anything - in the middle of a desert that no one ever visits - increases GDP and thus helps the economy. the better if you afterwards tear it up and rebuild it a second time.
on the other hand, in a stable currency system, if someone holds on to their capital, they actually free up resources for those who do spend. this means the purchasing power of those who do spend goes up.
in such a system money flows away from those who spend on things that have no return (consumption), and towards those who create (value creation by seizing and creating opportunities).
How is bitcoin a non-commodity currency? If bitcoins have value because they allow you to do things you couldn't otherwise do (my point), it's a commodity.
why is it desirable for a currency to be a non-commodity currency?
Bitcoins do not have value anymore then a paper dollar has value. People are willing to accept it as payment knowing that others will also accept it as payment. You can (and I have) set up your own bitcoin system and get as many as you want. The only difference with that one and the main network is that the main network is bigger, and has a genesis block that people recognize as identifying it as the main bitcoin network.
If everyone changed their programs to recognize my genesis block as the correct one, then all of the main bitcoins will be worthless.
Well, if you don't make the bill unfit to be reissued (or don't intend to), you're in the clear in the US. The law with coins is more lenient; as long as you aren't defacing them fraudulently, it's not illegal.
I was trying to avoid the term "fiat money" to describe bitcoin, because the term has several meanings, and some argue that bitcoin is not a fiat currency because it is decentralized.
What I mean by "commodity currency" is a currency that is (or is backed by) a currency. Gold would be the obvious example.
>why is it desirable for a currency to be a non-commodity currency?
One of the most important tasks of a monetary system is to regulate the money supply. This can be done via various methods. This can be done with monetary policy as in the case of the US dollar. Or it can be done by leveraging a commodity with a (hopefully) predictable market, as with gold. Or it can be done, as with bitcoin, by creating an artificial process which is provably predictable.
Now, when you use a commodity, you have a problem which is that you are hoping that no new developments will come about that completely throw off your assumptions about the market. If you were using precious aluminum as a currency in 1850, your economy would have collapsed in 1886 when the Hall–Héroult process was invented, causing rapid inflation. That's a supply side problem.
But a demand side problem is also possible. Imagine if indium had been our currency, for example. Indium is a rare element and was rather useless until the latter half of the 20th century. The rapidly increasing demand for indium as a useful commodity would have caused severe deflation.
A fiat currency system works on the assumption that there is no market effect of demand for the money outside of its function as money. In the case of American currency, this assumption is mostly true, but there are small exceptions such as coin collection which have a negligible impact on the money supply (a collected quarter is effectively 25 cents taken out of circulation). If the assumption were rendered totally invalid, the Fed could completely lose control of the money supply.
the dollar and euro are also assets in that way. you're usually just not aware of its fluctuations (against each other, against other currencies, and against commodities)
Not quite. My point is Bitcoin is more like gold rather than any fiat currency. Gold can still be inflationary by finding new mining rigs and asteroid mining in the future but Bitcoin has a upper limit. So it will always be an asset against all fiat currencies. Which will hinder trade as the way I have listed above.
yes, bitcoins in theory can be infinitely divided. classical observations about hoarding and "bad currency driving out the good" likely don't apply. if you want to spend, you just spend however little you want to spend.
author here: there's a cost with storing gold in the ground and securing it, and there's a cost with printing counterfeit-resistant paper and finding and jailing counterfeiters (and a cost with not doing so - unbounded inflation)
an interesting question then is: are the above costs greater than the cost of operating bitcoin? it might seem so at first, but don't be so sure and run the numbers on the back of an envelope.
also walk around downtown in SF and NYC and look at the amount of skyscrapers that are nothing but banks, scratch your head, and ask yourself what value they're actually adding.
>also walk around downtown in SF and NYC and look at the amount of skyscrapers that are nothing but banks, scratch your head, and ask yourself what value they're actually adding.
True. But I suppose one would need to define "what is a bank". From a pure "money warehouse" definition they don't deserve to be that big, however from a lending / investment perspective there is more value there.
I think in the end, a decentralized lending scheme (Mike Hearn has spoken and written on this subject) integrated to bitcoin as the possibility to radically change the social order.
It will very hard to fund wars without a printing press.
bitcoin's problem is that the financial sector is massively regulated - you're going to jail if you attempt to compete.
creating a website where you can store $10, send it to me, and then let me withdraw it, is a 5 year felony in california. that's even when the site is complying with all anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulation that could be argued for because of terrorism. it's purely a licensing issue.
bitcoin's influence probably won't significantly grow until people find legal workarounds/ways to comply (of which there are plenty, but likely implementing them takes someone committed at least a year), or something happens that makes enforcement of the law unlikely.
i personally know of a sizable number of bitcoin startups with working/finished software and a great marketing strategy, that gave up in the face of financial regulation and threatened jail time.
A legitimate question: is it possible for Bitcoin to still gain traction even if no one profits? I mean, is there a scenario, sort of like social media and the Arab Spring, where people will run the risk and break the law to gain access? Perhaps in a hyperinflation environment like Zimbabwe a few years back? Or for that matter like Iran right now?
could they not just run their services off Tor and thumb their nose at the financial authorities like certain other sites and services do, seemingly with impunity?
only if you're ok with never buying any physical goods with bitcoin. the weak point is the exchange between bitcoins and classical currencies or physical goods.
Running through TOR doesn't actually affect this. After the first node, the only data on who is giving money to who is the bitcoin public keys. The only way to attach those keys to a person is to have access to a node that is 1 degree removed, in which case you have the IP adress from TCP, or look through the. block chain to see who else the bitcoin ID you are looking into traded with. The first aproach is not common, and TOR will not help on the second.
When you are a business fearing regulation, this is all irrelevent, because you need to make public what customers get in return for sending you bitcoins, as well as your public key, so customers know who to pay.
It would be interesting to see a truly anonamaus bitcoin system. You would need invalidate a coin for which you do know a secret, and create a new coin for which someone else knows a secret, in such a way that when the other person proves they know the secret no one can figure out that the coin they know about is the one you gave them. Giving all of the things already possible, this seems like it is easy in theory. Doing it in a computationally efficient way is a different story.
What financial regulations don't apply to Bitcoin?
Just because you're using Dunning-Krugerrands instead of US Dollars doesn't mean what you're doing with them isn't transacting, banking, investing and so on.
It's the act that's regulated, not the currency used for it. (Though that could be regulated too.)
author here: i've written 12x10 minutes, and the original description writes 12x10 minutes. is there something i've missed?
it takes 10 minutes to find a solution, but only after 12 solutions have been found (the chain has been extended 12 times total), can the authenticity of the first of those 12 be guaranteed.
The original description uses the value 12 because of the prior value of 2 hours, whereas you seem to just have N generals and no such hourly time from which to derive 12, plus this:
The existence of the 12-block chain is proof that a majority of them has participated in its creation.
Why is the existence of 12 verifications proof that a majority of N have participated?
because an attacker controlling less than 50% of the computational resources can be lucky and find the first solution before anyone else.
he can even be lucky twice or thrice. but to be lucky 12 times against everyone else with less than 50% of the resources, is statistically improbable.
2 hours is the result of those two values (12 being statistically relevant, and 10 minutes a chosen parameter of problem difficulty), not an input variable.
T then is not just the life experience of one human - to learn from observation by example, to reconstruct a human, you'd need to observe the life experiences of trillions and trillions of humans to gain sufficient information about humans to narrow down the possible implementations that match human behavior not just mechanically given the same input, but also given new previously untested input.
at 3gb encoded as dna the search space already is huge, but that ignores that the genome alone doesn't contain the information needed to read it. (e.g. you need a living thing to use the DNA, for it to make sense)