Because they're designed for demand side load shedding.
Also to enable "surge pricing" such that folks ration of disconnect themselves, rather than pay the surge price.
Other than that, they don't really have a benefit for the user, the details one variable use could simply be monitored by manual reading on a weekly basis.
The security is broken and it broadcasts your information in the clear. I set up a RTLSDR plugged into my laptop in my kitchen and was able to read the energy utilization of my entire neighborhood after about 10min of work.
> The security is broken and it broadcasts your information in the clear. I set up a RTLSDR plugged into my laptop in my kitchen and was able to read the energy utilization of my entire neighborhood after about 10min of work.
In America, yes. Here the meter->gateway is encrypted zigbee, the gateway is over 3/4g.
However the remote contactor is more of an issue. You can be turned off remotely without much ceremony.
In the UK only "central" England and south transmits data over the mobile network. In northern England and Scotland, the data is transmitted over UHF radio.
Sorry yes, I should have been more specific. The important thing is that it is reasonably well encrypted. Its not like the USA where they just yeet it in the clear for all to see.
The downside is that the non cellular backhaul is provided by arquiva, who are shits.
If someone wanted, they could drive up to my house and see the colour of my door. The fact that someone has always been able to create a database of front door colours isn't inherently a data leak.
A UUID and electricity usage for the past half hour for a house in the general vicinity isn't useful. Even if you could put a name to that UUID, I struggle to think of how that would be a major issue. Especially considering with a thermal camera, and assuming construction details from the age and type of the house, you could already estimate your neighbours energy usage anyway.
The decision is often inspired by two things
A) how near impossible it is to migrate the sheer amount of services and code without breaking something.
B) that often the needed performance is not needed is not having big jumps. So small but constant improvements are the way to go.
I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.
As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.
Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?
Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.
Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.
I disagree with your statement that bcash is manipulative language.
I now understand where you are coming from after reading your posts but there is a community out there referring to bitcoin cash as bcash since its short and succinct and easy to speak.
Also might I suggest to reflect on your posts? The tone sounds quite angry and seems to stem from frustration which can lead to reading bad intent where is none.
Open source projects often fork. To take one such example, years ago X.org forked from XFree86. Both projects considered themselves implementations of the X Window System. Can you imagine if XFree86 supporters insisted that X.org not be allowed to use "X" in their name? If these supporters invented their own name for X.org, say "Zorg", made outlandish claims that "X.org" sounded offensive to them, and that they earnestly believed that "Zorg" was a better name for the project, even though no one in the project itself referred to it by that name. Would you not agree that those using the term "Zorg" in this example are using manipulative language?
Another way to look at this: the difference between small-blockers and big-blockers is a deep philosophical divide, much like what often occurs in politics. Imagine trying to have a civil political discussion with someone that has different political beliefs than you, and that person keeps using loaded terminology, rather than neutral terminology. You can imagine that under these circumstances, it would be increasingly difficult to keep the conversation civil, and you'd be well within your rights to ask your interlocutor to use neutral terminology. If they refused, it would be a reflection on their lack of civility, not yours.
How is it even possibly pejorative? BCH has the problem that it's read by many people as "bitch", and is even used that way by by developers (the nodes software gets called BCHN 'bitching'), and more than a few people find that offensive.
> market has spoken on this issue
I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces, BCH yes. Calling it "Bitcoin Cash" has a well understood problem of tricking people so serious businesses avoid it.
The argument as far as I'm aware is that it's like Bitcoin, except with transaction fees low enough to make it actually usable as a currency as opposed to being a pure store of value.
It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values. This was hinted by Satoshi as well, but was made impossible by the current BTC.
The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a version made later than a final version). Replacement was intended for use with payment channels, like incrementally updating an open account paying someone.
Unfortunately, the functionality had a flaw: It enabled a DOS attack. You could make a transaction then replace it 2^32 times and only pay one fee. So we disabled it. Without the explicit functionality you could still replace transactions by spamming nodes (and esp miners) with the new transaction and hoping they accepted it, but it wasn't very reliable but also no longer DOS-attackable.
Later, people pointed out that the DOS attack could be avoided if it was also required that each replacement increase the tx fee by at least the minimum transaction fee that would have been accepted. And the functionality was re-enabled: you could again mark transactions as non-final.
When BCH was created they ripped out the functionality and falsely claimed that this made 'instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values' possible. This makes literally zero sense: First, in BCH you can still replace unconfirmed transactions, it's just less reliable. Secondly, replacement is functionality intended to enable faster transactions! Thirdly, you can disable it in Bitcoin (or replace a non-final one with a final version) and get the same behaviour as BCH if that's what your use case requires.
Finally, its alleged that this was some dastardly move by Bitcoin devs to "break" "0-conf" transactions, fuled by people who can't understand that Bitcoin devs saying 0-conf transactions are not very secure doesn't mean that they don't like your ability to make them if you want to, and it ignores the fact that the basic replacement functionality was there in the very first version ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... ) and had been disabled by the self-same people being attacked for adding it.
It's basically 5G CAUSES COVID level of inanity, and it breaks my heart to see people duped by telephone-game polished versions of it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. According to it, 0-conf transactions are possible in BTC as well. Why isn't more people using this? It seems safe enough, since attacking such a transaction is probably more expensive than the gains from the scam.
It's only safe in the sense that most people aren't trying to rip you off.
A moderately technically sophisticated attacker will concurrently broadcast one txn version near miners, and another to as many other nodes as they can reach. Their success rate on double spends can easily be >90% and the marginal cost of the attack is approximately zero.
Other than the technical know-how to setup the transaction broadcasting and the risk that you might just pay for what you were buying, there is no cost to the scam.
The situation is somewhat worse on BCH in the sense that they only have ~1.2% of Bitcoin's hashrate, so there are many single Bitcoin miners that can reorg bch, so even single confirmations aren't particularly safe.
There are, of course, plenty of cases where 0-conf could be accepted-- e.g. you could credit someone assets but not allow withdraw until they clear, or if goods will ship the next day you need only check that they've confirmed before shipment. Some places do this now.
Can't this attack be made impractical with some heuristic? For example, only accept 0-conf transactions if a given number of nodes have this transaction in their mempool. (I'm thinking of both BTC and BCH)
No, because only a single node really matters: the next node to mine a block-- which may not even be reachable to you. Even if the attack worked just 10% of the time, that's like a free 10% rebate credit card for the attacker.
(and more generally, only a couple nodes matter at all for this purpose-- the set of nodes that could mine the next block)
Plus bch hashrate is so low the attacker can mine the next block themselves with rented hashrate, because the mining pays next to break even, renting the hashrate isn't a significant loss in the expectation.
>It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values.
Can you elaborate on this? I did a quick search and the gist of it seems to be that BCH doesn't support replace by fee and bitcoin does, so therefore it's possible to "safely" accept 0 confirmation transactions on BCH because you can reasonably believe that it won't be double-spent before it gets its first confirmation. The only problem I can think of is that there's nothing preventing the attacker (the person making the purchase) from bribing a miner to mine his double spend transaction. Indeed, even without RPF there are "transaction accelerators"[1] that allow you make out of band payments to miners to increase your transaction's priority. It's not too hard to imagine a service where you can pay $$$ for a miner to mine your double-spend transaction.
Bitcoin cash is the only cryptocurrency I have regularly used in the past 3-4 years. Almost all the crypto payment options support bch seamlessly (because they aim to integrate bitcoin which results in no-effort integration of bitcoin cash).
I just can never get myself to pay the tx fees of bitcoin or ether. I recently discover that USDT exists on bch (but BitPay doesn't accept bch usdt) so I keep USDT on BCH and do JIT swaps to BCH and make almost zero fee payments.
Just to be clear, BCH will never dethrone BTC, but BCH is becoming a defacto layer 2 solution for Bitcoin. Now there are tokens and NFT tokens on BCH too.
The math doesn't work out: https://flurly.com/pricing. The real cost is 3.9% + $0.30 (which takes into account Stripe's fees). If you are a seller and price your item at $100, the platform charges $103.20 to the customer, gives $99 to you, takes $1.00, and gives $3.20 to Stripe.
The additional cost is covered by the customer, so they're not lying about only taking 1% from the seller... still a bit misleading, though.
OP, please fix this! It looks like you've made a cool product; there's no need to be misleading about how much it costs. Just give the real "after-fees" percentage straight out.
Wait a second -- that means your claim that 99% goes to the seller is false, which is even worse in my opinion because you explicitly state that they get 99%. You can't have it both ways -- someone is paying for the Stripe fees, dude. You should change your wording immediately to make it clear that the seller does NOT get 99%, they get 99% LESS Stripe fees, which is a huge difference, since your entire marketing strategy seems to rely on them getting 99% (which is not the case).
The fine print contains a larger fee (2.9% + 30) than the large print (1%), so it's still definitely misleading. It's like selling someone a $5 item with fine print that shipping will be $10. Shouldn't you be up front about the larger term? Anyway, good luck. Also, you forgot to update the gif.
agreed. I was visiting Bucharest last November and was surprised that there were multiple tech meetups on meetup.com. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but ... I was just... pleasantly surprised. I wasn't there for work, but found a couple evenings where I ended up having the night to myself and stumbled on the idea of checking my meetup app and... bam - multiple places to go meet up with tech folks. More than I had time for actually...
Bucharest is capital, not 'just' an EU city, but it's by no means the largest nor would I think it has the most tech folks compared to other areas. (maybe that's wrong assumption though?)
Healthy ecosystem exists even in rather small cities. Up here in Vilnius, Lithuania, small-sized backwater EU city, we've quite a few meetups with a decent amount of networking opportunities. Sure it's not as SV scale. But even < 1million metro area can sustain that.
Yeah, you're totally right and I actually will now! Infra wasn't ready at all for the HN hug. I think I'd had at most 20 simultaneous connections prior to this!
