Why bitcoin is doomed and dangerous

As it is now, though beautiful beyond belief, bitcoin is doomed

the reason is nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with human nature

humans, contrary to what some might claim, are basically dishonest

"opportunity makes a thief"

bitcoin is too much like cash to trust to anyone other than maybe your matress

Mark Karpeles stole everybody's bitcoins quite simply because he could, he knew he could, he knew he could and get away with it and he knew he could even start a new MtGox and do it all over again.

bitcoin's flaw is that both price discovery and currency exchange must go through what is essentially a completely unregulated bank - a private bank owned by anyone who can operate that bank until it has so much digital gold that the temptation to steal it and hide the theft behind the mathematical complexity of the currency becomes too much to resist

unless bitcoin price discovery and exchange with other currencies is totally decentralised there is no future for bitcoin other than as a tool for the rich and a means for unscrupulous people to fleece others

the blockchain tracks the movement of bitcoin but it does not incorporate what the bitcoin was consideration for - ie what it was exchanged for - without this price discovery does not exist and the only way to know what bitcoins are worth is by having exchanges and those will always be places that crooks can steal your money from

bitcoin - beautiful but doomed

doomed by the fact that it is far too easy to steal

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Mt Gox withholding transfers to recoup its losses

Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange is withholding bitcoin transfers so that it can force down the bitcoin price on it's own exchange.

It is doing this so that it can buy bitcoin at a below market price and escape the losses it would otherwise incur as a consequence of its shoddy accounting system.

There's no doubt about it - this is a form of theft.

Mt Gox already has solved the "tech" problem it had but because its owners were off driving around in their Maseratis instead of managing their business while they were fleeced of most of their funds they are now trying to save themselves from serious litigation by buying cheap to pay back the BTC they allowed to be stolen.

They say they have their clients BTC in safe wallets but it's a lie.


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Eye-Fi card and wrong geo-tagging

This post is now obsolete because support for these cards has been dropped - but who cares!

See my superior solution for doing the same thing here.

Eye-Fi: a bunch of assholes.

___________________________________________________________________

Just because someone else might suffer a similar problem

So, I discovered the wonders of the Eye-Fi card

My beautiful Pentax K5 DSLR

 suddenly becomes so much more powerful.

With my trusty Galaxy SIII

and a substantial home network of linux and windows boxes all my pictures are automagically stored on my home storage and are uploaded to flickr and then with ifttt copied to tumblr, facebook etc

Fantastic.

I never have to plug in my camera and muck around with files and uploads ever again.

The only problem was geo-tagging.

You see, if I used the camera out and about I'd get perfect geo-tagging (via the S3) but if I used it at home the pictures would all be geo-tagged as being in Sydney near where we used to live there.

I just could not figure it out.

In the end I discovered that it was one of my wireless routers - somehow it had been added to the skyhook network when we used it in Sydney. When the eye-fi card starts to send new photographs it looks for and locates all nearby wireless MAC addresses and bundles that list up with the data it uploads to the eye-fi servers. There the MAC addresses are submitted to the skyhook system and the first successful response triggers eye-fi to geo-tag the photo with that data.

So i've now submitted the mac addresses of all local wireless routers to the skyhook system (here) and all is well again.

have fun

pop

i will never ever want to have a city wife

I've been going through my late mother's documents - organising them, scanning them to make them available for family.

She collected all of my poems - even ones that i had never kept a copy of.

Here's one from August 2002 - i guess i did not like it enough to keep it

the scanning is way too difficult, even for me (ie i have to reread too many lines)

I went to an air show

We live right next door to an army base.

On occasion that means we have to put up with explosions and gunfire and loud aircraft noises.

For a few days we watched as parachutes opened up above us and a Saab Griffin rocketed back and forth.

It was all in account of "army day" which is a Thai event similar to 'children's day" which is like mother's day. Kindof.

So i jumped on my trusty steed:

and sauntered off to the base to see what would happen.

I took my beloved Pentax K5 and a decent set of lenses and snapped a few pics like this one of a kid who caught a lizard:

Eventually i was snapping shots of skydivers:

When this guy (on the left):

called me over and from then on i was immersed in all things Military Thai (God bless them every one):

such a wonderful experience and such lovely people

you can see all of the pics i took (and my friend who took pics for me) here

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The police are your friends? I think not.

Sad story of brutality

My brother suffered schizophrenia. He was terrified of policemen. I get it Allan. So sorry to have doubted you.



story here and here.

pop

ps NSA? fuck you, slimy, dishonest, abusive, lowlife, servants of the American Dream

Singer sewing machine: built for a lifetime

In 1954 my father bought my mother a new Singer sewing machine.

Mum used it to make all our clothes:

Of course that changed once Australian clothes manufacturing got off the ground:

She still used it time to time but it was not used much until I was in my teens and decided making my own clothes was the only way i was going to be able to dress like a real hippie.

That's when mum taught me how to use the Singer though i never thought to ask her how to maintain it properly.

Years later, when i had children of my own, I begged her to let me have it so i could make clothes for them and do repairs and alterations.

I used it for years though i often cursed that it did not have a "free arm" so i could take up jeans and such.

The Singer was lugged from house to house as over the years we moved to where the work was. That meant that it moved from Melbourne to Sydney and then to New Zealand where it moved from town to town until returning to Sydney, back to NZ, back to Sydney and eventually to Thailand where it's been sitting at the farm of my wife's family for a while.

My mum died in November 2013.

The day she died my mother in law reported that the Singer had stopped working.

I've spent hours trying to fix it but it just refuses to operate properly:

It's survived the lifetime of my mother but seems as though it misses her as much as i do.

Update! October 2015.

Now we have a "new" one - a Singer special zig-zag 498:

what's really nice is that we have the User Manual.

Welcome to Civilization

"Knockout" game is coming to teenagers near you




and if you think the law will help you



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Weird

yeh well

Thai Drivers - worst in the world

Let me start by making something very clear from the start. I love Thai people. I frequently find myself saying to myself “I love this place”. Whether I am riding my motorcycle through throngs of market goers or walking through a market or visiting a famous temple or even driving on major highways through Bangkok, i find myself spontaneously saying under my breath “I love this place”.

That being said let me now deliver the point of this post. Thai drivers are not very good.

Ran into a big truck full of earth and rock? Going to fast?
Neither: LPG system blew up.

Of course that does not mean all Thai drivers. Not infrequently I recognise in a Thai driver all those things that I count highly as attributes of a good driver.

And I'm not asserting that “farangs” are better drivers. No. In Thailand the farangs are frequently as bad or worse than Thai drivers. I recall just recently in Chiang Mai sitting in a big 4WD driven by a farang who did not even see the two girls caught on the center line between fast moving cars begging to be freed from their trap. He simply did not register that they were there. He exhibited the very essence of what I now assert is at the heart of the atrocious driving in Thailand – lack of empathy. Or tunnel vision. Or lack of training. Unaware.

sometimes it's just inexperience and an old car

I read once that the Buddha defined compassion as the act of “seeing” others. Not "looking at them" but not being blind to them. Being blind to others is what all those neuroscience and psychology studies tell us that the rich do. They quite simply do not “see” those who are “lower”. You walk along a street and there is a man with twisted legs and disfigured arms holding a tin while he sings badly. The few cents that you might give him make the all the difference in his day. But many people walk by with hearts so hardened by their frequent acts of “not today” that they no longer even see the beggar. He is just an object on the street like a trash can or lump of concrete to be walked around, to be avoided. We do not see him.

Too fast past a construction site

It came to me just recently that, here in the heart of one of the most Buddhist countries on earth, the majority of people, once behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, had no theory of mind whatsoever.

Black pick-up overtook blind to hit U-turning car.

I've tried to figure out what is behind this apparent truth. For example it crossed my mind that it might be to do with the fact that almost every car in Thailand has reflective tinting which makes it impossible to see anyone in the vehicle. This is mostly to do with keeping out the heat (or so I have been told though I've seen no research to back it up). I've also theorised that because most Thais had mobile phones with games on them before they had cars, maybe they drive like they play phone games. Who knows? The bottom line is that Thais quite simply don't seem to realise that all the other cars on the road have living breathing THINKING humans in them.

My sister in law is a fitness freak so recently we went to watch and photograph her at an aerobics competition. When I was parking the car there were cars forced to wait for another car to exit a parking spot. A Thai woman simply saw those cars as obstacles and tried to drive around them. Just like people avoiding the beggar on the street she simply saw the waiting cars as obstacles. That there might have been a reason for them waiting did not cross her mind. She exhibited no theory of mind.She behaved exactly as if she saw the other cars as not human objects.

On the highways oh my God. They are simply insane. They overtake at the most dangerous places and they seem to lack any understanding of driving physics.

at Ta Sala police station - just the ones out front

We recently drove almost 5,000 kilometers around Thailand – from the Malaysian border to the Golden Triangle and back. We lost track of the accidents we witnessed and of the insane behaviour of drivers. It's bad enough that many of the roads are like the surface of the moon but with the Thai drivers it's like threading your way through a mine field of death traps. They are often the silliest drivers I have ever seen anywhere on planet earth. I have driven all over the world including places that left me gob-smacked as to how insane the drivers were (Italy, Mexico) but Thai drivers are so bad it takes your breath away.

So how to resolve the problem?

I've thought of a nutty campaign of my own where I mass produce a poster that I then plaster on the wall above the men's urinals at the PTT service stations (the most popular places for drivers to fill-up) – something along the lines of “hey man, drive careful dude!”

It's a truly bizarre place – it's the “wild wild west” in ever way except of course that it's the “east”.

A rescue vehicle that careered off the road
lucky occupants could have drowned

I really hope that as they all become more middle class they will develop some road sense.

pop

update

since writing this piece they do as a whole seem to be improving

the pics above are recent though and all were close to where we live

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Four dead, 47 injured in Ayutthaya crash; Four dead as train hits car in South

Boy dies, skull fractured in crash, Woman killed at railway crossing train crash,

Indian tourists killed in van crash on elevated road to airport