HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. “Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests, ” says Popper. “But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass
An anonymous reader writes “A former MIT instructor and students have come up with software that can write an entire essay in less than one second; just feed it up to three keywords.The essays, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning and have proved to be graded highly by automated essay-grading software. From The Chronicle of Higher Education article: ‘Critics of automated essay scoring are a small but lively band, and Mr. Perelman is perhaps the most theatrical. He has claimed to be able to guess, from across a room, the scores awarded to SAT essays, judging solely on the basis of length. (It’s a skill he happily demonstrated to a New York Times reporter in 2005.) In presentations, he likes to show how the Gettysburg Address would have scored poorly on the SAT writing test. (That test is graded by human readers, but Mr. Perelman says the rubric is so rigid, and time so short, that they may as well be robots.).'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.