Bitcoin Forum

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4164634/total-bitcoin-value-passes-1-billion (http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4164634/total-bitcoin-value-passes-1-billion)

I'm dying to make it first to these articles just to make the first comment something like,
"New rule: if you didn't read the white paper, understand the basic concepts including but not limited to the POW system, the blockchain, p2p technology, open source communication protocols, hashing algorithms, public key private key cryptography, etc., you are NOT allowed to comment. Thank you!"

What can you expect...

The drop in the reward subsidy haven't affect the price of bitcoin even one lick.

Probably more than one lick but certainly less than two. It has a small affect on the supply for sale, but not a lot.

The article is wrong.
There's no damn encryption used in Bitcoin. My opinion is similar to WiW's, but not the same.

That for journalists to get the honest opinion of doing "good journalism" they must do an effort to understand what they are talking about.

This is bad journalism! We use cryptography, but that is NOT the same as encryption. Theverge probably have always dealt on the topic of cryptography with ignorance, they are not a tech magazine, are they?

You are correct when referring to the Bitcoin protocol (which was the context of that excerpt).

But just to clarify your statement, in the Biticoin-Qt/blitcoind client (and most others) there is encryption.  For example:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_encryption

Signing is a subset of encryption, so it's not correct to say that no encryption is used in the protocol.

Is it not fair to say that signing is a subset of cryptography, just like encryption is a subset of cryptography? Wikipedia says (to me) that signing is not encryption: "In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding messages (or information) in such a way that eavesdroppers or hackers cannot read it, but that authorized parties can." Encryption, per se, seems to be the opposite of how the blockchain works (everybody sees every transaction).

Last time I checked. It is pretty hard to verify a message without the public key. Sounds like an authorized party to me. IMO

That is not a good definition, encryption is basically just a mathematical function that takes plaintext and a key as inputs. With public key cryptography you have two keys and what one key encrypts the other key decrypts.

What we call encryption means using a public key to convert a message to cyphertext. Signing is the exact same mathematical function, except the private key is used and the data which is encrypted is the hash of a message instead of the message itself.