AC is one of my favorite games of all time (neck and neck with Ultima II (I'm old)). I still play on the emulators from time to time - endlessly searching for more Hoary Mattekars.
I played on Thistledown and ran a little portal bot named Stip Dickens an Ayan Baqur that helped ferry people into the Shard of the Herald event. That was a lot of fun.
The loot system was also one-of-a-kind. I don't see that level of randomness in many other games.
The game felt like the writers and staff were highly literate and well read. I now know so many real life herbs and plants due to their use in spellcasting. And AC taught me words like "Mnemosyne".
And each month we would get several pages of amazing lore. (Side note, there's an ongoing web serial called "The Wandering Inn" that reminds me quite a bit of AC. People dropped into a video game like world, insect people, references to a "Zeikhal"(similar to a town name)....
So, I just want to thank you for your work on AC. It's had a profoundly positive impact on my life.
I really appreciate you writing this guide. As a long time Linux user, I've always wanted to learn AWK, but it seemed too daunting. Three minutes into your guide and I immediately saw how I could use it in my day-to-day usage.
It is much safer for me to buy things on the Internet with cryptocurrencies than credit cards. It seems like every few months there's a huge leak of customers and credit card information.
I think Keybase is making a mistake in choosing Zcash over Monero - especially so soon after Zcash's launch. But that's okay - they'll come around soon enough. Zcash has been fantastic advertising for Monero.
If you are interested in anonymous blockchains, I highly encourage you to look into Monero. It meets or exceeds that of ZCash. And Monero's RingCT is currently implemented and in use on TestNet with a target "go-live" this January.
> The cypherpunk, anarchist future wasn’t supposed to be about stronger banking guarantees and wealth redistribution among Reddit users.
I think your interests may fall more closely in line with what the Monero folks are doing. I'm not aware of any other cryptocurrency project with better privacy features. And they're working directly with the I2P developers to get better privacy at the network level(Kovri).
There are plenty of early adopters who purchased Monero for several dollars each. And it languished at 30-50 cents for well over a year. And is now only ~$1.
So there's been plenty of time for anyone to be an early adopter....continuing through today and easily for months to come.
Or skip Monero altogether. Aeon, a related project is available right now for less than 1 penny. And has been for quite some time.
So, as to your question, Done. You can be an "early adopter" right now.
I'm not sure that anyone can speak to what happens to crypto in a post quantum world.
Mixing does not happen on a server - that would be an atrocious violation of privacy. Monero (and other cryptonote coins ) use ring signatures - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf
This technology already exists today in the form of the Cryptonote based coins - of which Monero is the leading example.
Cryptonote, by default, is an opaque blockchain - your transactions are not visible to the world. But, let's say you're a non-profit organization and you do wish for your donations to be public. Cryptonote allows for that using a "view key".
In this way, you get the best of both worlds - privacy by default, and openness when you need it.
The cryptonote wallets are still in their early stages, but the various coins are available and trading on exchanges today. And you can even use them to pay bitcoin based merchants using a service like ShapeShift or xmr.to .
Again, existing technologies already provide this. And they further empower the user to expressly define how much anonymity they want...down to the transactional level.
Empowering governments with additional taxation tools is about the only thing this brings to the table over existing technologies.