Neat. Would be interesting to see a more detailed syllabus of what is covered when. Also is the 25% rake net or gross? It is two years full time (well 1.5 if you consider internship) so I don't think it is really fair to compare it to a 3 month program.
At my local university doing 3x semesters of just CS classes leaves you 1 course short of the required CS courses for a degree. Mind you I'm not including the math requirements. But on the other hand this is probably more intensive and with a better student/teacher ratio arguably you will be learning stuff quicker. Not to say they are equivalent... but I'm not sure its fair to write it off as being "code monkey" school.
Not a fan of the location choice though. I get that SF has a lot of really good networking opportunities but for a two year program it is crazy expensive. The difference in rent compared to where I live makes this more expensive than attending university. If I was to get an apartment with equivalent square footage to what I have now the cost of this would actually be pretty close to doing a 4 year degree. That's before factoring in the 25% rake. Mind you I'm in a relatively inexpensive Canadian city.
It's a good question. We want Bitcoin acceptance to be straightforward for our users, so we deal with a failed confirmation on our side. We do not debit the user.
I suspect this is the reason Bitpay is able to waive fees completely: they do not take responsibility for unconfirmed transactions.
> Note: Regardless of the transaction speed settings, a fully paid invoice is credited to your merchant account after the transaction has accrued six confirmations. [1]
The problem isn't detecting whether 99% of transactions will confirm.
The problem is preventing someone from ordering $10,000 worth of gold from a site that uses Stripe with Bitcoin payments enabled. Sending a paying transaction to Stripe, who confirms it within a minute, and simultaneously mining a block with contains a transaction that double spends the bitcoins sent to Stripe.
Stripe is now out $10,000. You receive your gold, sell it to your local bullion dealer for $9,500.
Of course, for Stripe, there are various hackish ways around this problem, like defining a maximum amount of, say, $1000, so that the above attack requires the attacker to mine 10 blocks instead of 1 (ie. repeat the procedure 10 times), in order to earn $10,000.
But they don't really solve the fundamental problem of accepting unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions.
It costs 80 million dollars to buy all the hardware to mine a single block. It will probably costs 800 million dollars to amass enough computing power to mine 10 blocks. It only makes sense to double spend a transaction with a VERY large amount. No transaction going through stripe will qualify.
If you are in Canada that isn't really true. It is extremely easy to open a USD denominated bank account and credit card. Couple banks have Euro accounts as well.
Yeah, but if you get paid in CAD, it's still a question of when you want to deal with the volatility—point of sale, or point of forex-exchange-during-account-transfer. You still have to deal with timing it right (possibly waiting months) if you want to avoid losing tens of cents on the dollar.
And if you're already thinking like that, Bitcoin isn't nearly as scary.
Bullshit. And this is not a matter of opinion or speculation. There is data and history. Take a look: http://imgur.com/FmpI0HY
That's the past year. The flat blue line around 0% is CAD vs USD. The crazy red line that's all over the place, swinging by as much as 100% in a matter of weeks, is CAD/BTC.
Unless you're planning on holding the currency, those graphs are irrelevant - what would matter would be short term changes (1-2 days, perhaps). And while USD might still come out better, your graph grossly distorts how this would affect someone wanting to use USD or BTC primarily purchases while holding their assets in CAD.
Its worth noting that with lead acid most people target a ~50% depth of discharge as batteries start getting damaged when they are cycled deep. (Yes even deep cycle batteries.)
Now that also provides some additional redundancy so it's not like the other 50% is entirely useless.
~30kwh is the national average for daily use. 120 is crazy high unless your blasting an AC or heat all day. At 12 cents a kilowatt hour that's a $438 monthly bill.
Even 30 is pretty damn high. For someone living off grid with a purpose built/renovated structure ~5kwh a day gives you quite a lot to work with.
True, but you want to be able to handle peak usage too. When 2 kW well pump kicks in, I don't want the lights to dim. AC is 3-5 kW and more to start, and so on.
Yeah, if your goal is to live off the grid to save the planet, that's a different story. Then the only question is how much will your Lithium based battery (mining, manufacturing, transport, recycling) affect the planet vs buying wind power from your local utility. If you want to do a little good and save a little money, putting batteries in your house is not the right thing to do. If you want to be independent of the grid in case of emergencies get a wood stove and a gas (or better diesel) generator. All around, I don't see where whole house battery backup fits into any scenario. I see data centers using these batteries, not residences.
I did the shorting current calculation on that battery in the pic elsewhere in this thread. The fuse was there for decorative purposes only, at those currents everything is a fuse, the one Ththing you really have to hope for is that it will douse fast enough and that there will be no air/fuel or H2/O2 mixture nearby. That's the main reason I built this pack into a little building (underground bunker really) of its own near the house but not so near that it would be a problem if it would break down.
The inverters were housed in the second half of that bunker so as far as the house was concerned nothing changed.
The whole system was capable of producing 11KW, two tandem 5.5KW inverters ganged to produce 240 V for well pumps and other large consumers (welder, plasmacutter).
It worked super good but you really had to keep an eye on the charge level when running big tools, the plasmacutter would drain the battery in about an hour.
But running the plasmacutter was the exception, not the rule so most of the time it was just powering a very low level of loads compared to most houses.
Have ear buds from Xiaomi and been very impressed with quality for price. I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to put a $400 dollar cpu and 16gb of ram into a laptop that costs under $500 dollars though. Maybe they are getting a good price on the haswells now that broadwell production is ramping up.
At my local university doing 3x semesters of just CS classes leaves you 1 course short of the required CS courses for a degree. Mind you I'm not including the math requirements. But on the other hand this is probably more intensive and with a better student/teacher ratio arguably you will be learning stuff quicker. Not to say they are equivalent... but I'm not sure its fair to write it off as being "code monkey" school.
Not a fan of the location choice though. I get that SF has a lot of really good networking opportunities but for a two year program it is crazy expensive. The difference in rent compared to where I live makes this more expensive than attending university. If I was to get an apartment with equivalent square footage to what I have now the cost of this would actually be pretty close to doing a 4 year degree. That's before factoring in the 25% rake. Mind you I'm in a relatively inexpensive Canadian city.