BitCoins are a secure, decentralized, anonymous, non-inflationary digital currency.

Just like the market for Canadian dollars is built on the group of people who believe that dollars are valid currency, the market for BitCoins is built around a distributed network of computers that “believe” in BitCoins. Each transaction, including minting new coins, requires the network to do heavy algorithmic calculations. The network is immune to attack by any group of malicious processors that is less powerful than the good group. The algorithm stops producing new coins once there are 21 million in circulation, so inflation will stop.

BitCoins themselves have no id, like the serial number on a bill. Instead, the transactions have cryptographic proofs. So you can verify that Alice gave 100 coins to Bob, but then Bob can change his name to Bruce and give 50 coins to Carol. Carol can determine that Bruce has 50 coins but not where they came from. Bruce can’t then give 75 coins to Dave because he can’t prove that he has that many – BitCoins are immune to the double-spending problem.

Like items in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, BitCoins can be converted to and from real world currencies. BitCoins are of interest for tax evasion, including the tax called inflation collected by fractional reserve banking. At the moment their killer app is buying drugs online, but an untaxable currency holds a lot of potential.

Although they are cryptographically secure, the BitCoin market is probably susceptible to a coordinated political attack like the one that crippled WikiLeaks. Because they’re non-inflationary, there is a concern that people may stop spending them once their value is guaranteed to increase relative to inflationary currency. Because the market is small and unregulated, they may also be susceptible to market manipulation.

I just got the iPad 3 — or what Apple now calls “the new iPad” to help curb version inflation — and signed up for Netflix. So far the device is pretty awesome and the service lacks known content. This is a problem I am having with ebooks too — if you try to consume content legitimately it often turns out to be either inconvenient or impossible. Piracy is a far better user experience, even taking into account the viruses and porn.

But I wanted to watch some light horror, and Netflix Canada does have the complete X-Files. The key is to skip all the episodes about the never-ending alien conspiracy and just watch the moster-of-the-week stand-alones. Here’s the list from Wikipedia.

Happy Easter long weekend! Hmmm, I wonder if they have American Horror Story… Nope!

The game I’m on right now was announced at PAX this morning:

“We are extremely excited to work with Twisted Pixel in bringing splosions to mobile devices,” says Iron Galaxy C.E.Bro, Dave Lang. “Ms. Splosion Man has really deep gameplay that is born from deceptively simple controls, so it’s a great game on any platform.”

The Mint supposedly wants devs to help it build a national e-currency. Unfortunately they’re suggesting it be used for oldbad ideas from the 90s, like paying for news stories with microtransactions:

Here’s the challenge. The prize? $50k in gold bullion (y’know — because e-currency can’t be trusted).

Via Julius.

Maybe Citizen’s United was a good thing. This reddit-based PAC, “test PAC” (slogan: “Please ignore.”) is going on the offensive against a politician who supported SOPA (I think this is via Maddow):

Maybe the Libertarians are right. Maybe total deregulation is the answer. In the past people couldn’t organize (inter-)national protests in their spare time, and now the regulatory framework is extremely permissive — streamlined, even: a one-page form and you can accept unlimited anonymous donations and do whatever you want with them (in terms of political media).

And now that the legal system’s been pwnd the raving hordes of grown-up /b/tards have no compunction about raeping the loophole, powertroll-styles.

All media are messageboards, but the spokespeople aren’t used to the public responding, or to having a real conversation. People have been writing on the Toronto subway ads — I assume because there’s no “comment” feature but felt marker. It seems the New Aesthetic is going global, organically — the digital way-of-being intrudes into what was once reality and transforms it.

Placeholder architecture: testPAC. Y’know — for bootstrapping a real online society.

Congrats to my sugar-pie Jill on crushing the ethics exam her pro college requires of all inductees. It’s scored relatively and she got about 2.6 sigmas — or over 98% in normal person talk apparently I don’t speak normal. It was 91st %tile on 1.7 sigmas.

Silly Jilly: I told you so

Here’s a vision of a potential near-ish future:

So yeah, when he’s weaving in traffic and the HUD is going nuts — if he collides with a taxi does he sue Google? It seems like there’s a fundamental safety issue with HUDs…

Via a coworker, check this:

Chinese table of elements, sure, but look at the characters: the radicals of the glyphs indicate properties of the elements. Look, for example, at the Noble Gasses and note the commonalities in their names. The little “arrow” looking things at the top of the character are apparently an “air” radical, and it appears in the name of any element which is gaseous at room temperature.

Embedding information within language: wicked.

Why hire a model, a photographer, and a shooper to get that super-unrealistic fashion look when you can just put famously unreal virtual people who are already digital in your clothes? I guess you’d have to digitize the clothes, but they’re probably designed in software now anyway — custom gown sewers are being replaced by small shell scripts!

Here’s Prada 2012 on a Final Fantasy model (meant in the technical and artistic sense simultaneously). Ladies:

Gentlemen:

“Maybe we could treat wheelchairs as a kind of pants.”