As Mike Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate — one of roles that is a direct beneficiary of the Assistance and Access bill — points out “there has been considerable inaccurate commentary on the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018″. His attempt to calm the waters down follows the standard […]
I have a few things I need to write, but am still a bit too sick with the flu to put together something novel, so instead I’m going to counter-blog Rob Collins recent claim that Money doesn’t matter. Rob’s thoughts are similar to ones I’ve had before, but I think they’re ultimately badly mistaken. There’s […]
I figured “Someday we’ll find it: the Bitcoin connection; the coders, exchanges, and me” was too long for a title. Anyhoo, since very late February I’ve been gainfully employed in the cryptocurrency space, as a developer on Bitcoin Core at Xapo (it always sounds pretentious to shorten that to “bitcoin core developer” to me). I […]
So the first question: is ASICBoost use plausible in the real world? There are plenty of claims that it’s not: “Much conspiracy around #asicboost today. I don’t believe SegWit non-activation has anything to do with AsicBoost!” – Timo Hanke, one of the patent applicants, on twitter “Sam Cole, Guy Corem and Timo Hanke, ASIC developers […]
I’ve been trying to make heads or tails of what the heck is going on in Bitcoin for a while now. I’m not sure I’ve actually made that much progress, but I’ve at least got some thoughts that seem coherent now. First, this post is background for people playing along at home who aren’t familiar […]
Continuing from my previous post on historical Bitcoin fees… Obviously history is fun and all, but it’s safe to say that working out what’s going on now is usually far more interesting and useful. But what’s going on now is… complicated. First, as was established in the previous post, most transactions are still paying 0.1 […]
Prior to Christmas, Rusty did an interesting post on bitcoin fees which I thought warranted more investigation. My first go involved some python parsing of bitcoin-cli results; which was slow, and as it turned out inaccurate — bitcoin-cli returns figures denominated in bitcoin with 8 digits after the decimal point, and python happily rounds that […]
I’ve been intrigued by micropayments for, like, ever, so I’ve been following Rusty’s experiments with bitcoin with interest. Bitcoin itself, of course, has a roughly 10 minute delay, and a fee of effectively about 3c per transaction (or $3.50 if you count inflation/mining rewards) so isn’t really suitable for true microtransactions; but pettycoin was going […]
At Bradley Kuhn’s talk at linux.conf.au this year, I was surprised and disappointed to see a slide quoting some FUD (in the traditional Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt model, a la the Microsoft Halloween documents from back in the day) about the GPL and the SFLC’s enforcement thereof. Here’s the quote: This is not just a theoretical concern. As […]
Bitcoincerns — as in Bitcoin concerns! Get it? Hahaha. Despite having an interest in ecash, I haven’t invested in any bitcoins. I haven’t thought about it any depth, but my intuition says I don’t really trust it. I’m not really sure why, so I thought I’d write about it to see if I could come […]
I’ve been doing a bit of playing around with REST APIs lately, both at work and for my own amusement. One of the things that was frustrating me a bit was that actually accessing the APIs was pretty baroque — you’d have to construct urls manually with string operations, manually encode any URL parameters or […]
Two posts in one month! Woah! A couple of weeks ago there was a flurry of stuff about the Liberal party’s Parental Leave policy (viz: 26 weeks at 100% of your wage, paid out of the general tax pool rather than by your employer, up to $150k), mostly due to a coalition backbencher coming out […]
It’s been too long since I did an economics blog post… Way back when, I wrote fairly approvingly of the recommendations to simplify the income tax system. The idea being to more or less keep charging everyone the same tax rate, but to simplify the formulae from five different tax rates, a medicare levy, and […]
Okay, so it turns out an interesting, demanding, and rewarding job isn’t as compatible as I’d naively hoped with all the cool things I’d like to be doing as hobbies (like, you know, blogging more than once a year, or anything substantial at all…) Thinking it’s time to see if there’s any truth in the […]
Yikes. Been a while. I can’t think of anything intelligent to blog, so some linky tidbits instead: rpm 4.10 includes “~” as a special versioning character, just like dpkg has for ages. Holds a special place in my heart since I did the original patch for dpkg a bit over 11 years ago now. (And […]