Bitcoin Forum

Three years ago or two years ago, if you asked me what Bitcoin is, I’d tell you it is the future of money. It is managed by the network, not by the government. Plus, it is private, anonymous and fast. It’s just perfect!
And Bitcoin is proved very successful. But it has inherent risks like anonymity, hacking，51%attack, double spending. Stop imagining bitcoin is perfect. No coins are perfect. I’d say bitcoin means more about possibilities, possibilities of expression of value. Before, I’ve been taken it for granted that the government should control currencies. But now I’d like to take a moment to think of the question:
“What is the nature and origin of money?”
by hacked, i only mean btc exchanges and by 51% Attack, i mean hash power is seen as by many the king in the btc world; and by security, Large Bitcoin Collider is working to smash open btc wallets. http://news.8btc.com/bitcoin-is-not-ideal-it-is-an-expression-of-value

Bitcoin can't be hacked, it's impossible.  Even 51% attacks wouldn't be hacks, they'd just be attacks on transactions.  Double spending isn't really very much of a threat unless it has no confirmations - a lot of the reason we have mining is to fix the double spend problem.

A lot of the problems you mention don't exist.  Anonymity isn't even a problem, and if people want anonymity they'll gradually move to real anonymous coins like Monero, and illegal activity will just be a side effect so it doesn't really matter that they're used for illegal activity.  Cash is as well.

Bitcoin isn't perfect but you're looking at the wrong things as problems.

You may have many questions on Bitcoin features and drawbacks. Well, everything in this mighty world has drawbacks. This is the basis of evolution. Same applies to Bitcoin and one of the major reason why we see more and more cryptocurrencies everyday is the lacks of Bitcoin. Just take a moment and go through Altcoins ANN section, you will see many coins claiming themselves to be superior than Bitcoin on these basis.

Bitcoin can be hack? Impossible.
I guess your were talking about the bitcoin exchanger sites that got hack? Right.
51 percent attack is just spamming the network with transactions but the solution is miners. Double spending the solution is also miners.
Bitcoin's only major crisis right now is it's stagnant scaling problem.

Where are the real life cases of double spending?

The world is going towards IoTs (internet of things). Everything will be connected in future. The missing part is money. Although online bank transactions and credit card payments contribute to the online concept, but still there is a need of a strong cryptocurrency to become a Pivot point in IoTs. So far, Bitcoin is a strong candidate, but I agree there are a lot of problems regarding the security of something which is online... Special protocols are required to safeguard Bitcoins from adversaries.

I stopped reading after you said bitcoins are anonymous. Obviously if you present false information in your  statement your whole post is going to be stupid bullshit FUD.

TD;DR, OP is going to use shitcoins for his big important purchases now. Thanks for dropping by. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

A bit of rephrasing would make it easily correct - "Bitcoin can be solely pseudonymous, making it anonymous for practical purposes as long as you take various steps involving anonymising your own Internet connection and using mixing services, or at least dramatically closer to anonymous than digital fiat currency as long as you're careful enough". 

But that doesn't sound so nice in a post like this, so why be pedantic?

Yes,the problems you mentioned are not at all an issue.Bitcoin cannot be hacked at any time.I do accept that bitcoin is not perfect.But i could surely say that bitcoin is far better than the existing centralized currencies.

by anonymity, i only mean that's the first impression of bitcoin to many people. of course, the pseudonymous is more accurate.

where bitcoin is anonymous if you don''t reveal your name attached to your address, which is the same as any other coins, otherwise you have a different definition of anonymous here

in fact the possibility to track each address don't make bitcoin not anonymous...


this is one https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152348.0 and i remember at least another but i can't find it at the moment

after 3 or so years I am still saying a similar thing, although I never used the word "anonymous" I prefer calling it "giving you a better privacy if you know how to" and I would never call it perfect but only because NOTHING is perfect. but bitcoin is the best thing that I have seen so far. many others claim to be better, some even come close but nothing could compete with bitcoin so far.

what is "risk like anonymity" how can it be a risk?

bitcoin has never been hacked and for many years to come, it can not be hacked. the cryptography level that it uses is good enough to prevent it and in case some vulnerability was found it will affect a lot of things, not just bitcoin. and it can be patched.
hacks have always happened because of people's mistakes. like having a key logger, having no password on your wallet, not using cold storage,...

I wouldn't call these as "risks". these are small possibilities that also can be prevented.

it is best to have a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages (or if you like calling it risks) of bitcoin or anything for that matter before starting to use it and try to learn then from reliable resources not what you read on the internet from random source or what your personal understanding is. they can be very wrong.

Looks like you have just woke from a long nap, I really don't know which year you are exactly trying to draw attention to. As far the attacks Bitcoins is unhackackble, if you are trying to say exchanges were attacked then those exchanges of course are not fool proof, it's been said again and again not to trust them. No Bitcoin has ever been hacked. Wake up, read around the forum you may wish to change your words.

bitcoin is the first of its kind (at least the first one that became big and popular on a large scale). and it has also been receiving improvements, bug fixes, etc. so it is understandable that it is not perfect. there are always weaknesses in every system and anything that claims to have none is clearly lying.
however i'd say these weaknesses are not at all serious or a reason to call bitcoin "not perfect".

Anonymity => is actually a feature not a problem, why anybody have to shout out about their financial transaction.

Hacking => Bitcoin is not vulnerable to hacking, if private key is placed in secure place.

51% attack => Bitcoin network is no more vulnerable to 51% attack because it is almost impossible for someone to spend a lot of mining power to attack bitcoin network these days.

Double spending => Double spending is possible, but after getting one confirmation merchants don't have to worry about double spending.

Well, i like your opinion on bitcoin its really good but bitcoin is the one who helped me with my expenses in the house by earning it and also their are alot of hacks and attacks but you got to be careful on it be secure by using a secure wallet i know bitcoins isn't that perfect but almost countries in the world who use bitcoin and bitcoin is money in the internet so its perfect to me.. the nature of bitcoin is to help those people who want's to earn and buy stuff on the internet origin of the money is to make life easier and fair.

Recently, a group called the Large Bitcoin Collider(LBC) claims that it is using its computing power to smash open bitcoin wallets owned by other people and potentially taking the coins inside.http://news.8btc.com/bitcoin-is-not-ideal-it-is-an-expression-of-value
That explains how bitcoin's privacy is widely misunderstood.

you do know that project was a rootkit to abuse the trust of fools who run that so called collider on their computer, right?

also i should add that they never "smash open" anything apart from some private keys that were put there to be found as a puzzle project.

Even in science there is no such thing as ideal, ideal gas, ideal number, ideal transformer, ideal conditions, because these things are supposed to be perfect but there's always have a flaws and I think that's okie.

These ideal things had bring us to this point. It serves as an outstanding peak that need to be reach in order for the system to be perfect. Bitcoin is not ideal of course there's always flaws and errors. But the possibilities it can bring brought us hope to change the monetary system. The possibilities are endless so they say and it will keep improving.😇

Bitcoin is far from ideal, otherwise it would have been adopted at the onset. But in this world, nothing is perfect. Bitcoin is better than fiat (which is also flawed) in some aspects but it has also its own set of deficiencies. We are going to witness continuous changes in our currency system and bitcoin will be one of the players in a world that's heading into a more digital future.

Your first paragraph is really true for Everytime in my life . But as your are asking about the bad future Currently Because of the double spend , hack of network and it is possible also that you can ask about the confirmation for the next post .
Here I would like to tell you that hacking of the bitcoin network is impossible because yet no one hacked this network .
Your second fact that double spend , these have solutions and also I faced the problem of double spend but I get solution simply .
If you will compare bitcoin with the Fiat then you will find that fuat have more bug then what the bitcoin have .
In my life I never faced any big problem in the bitcoin than what I faced in the practical money .

Bitcoin is not hackable nor can anyone bring the network down easily. It is not a total anonymous system thats why we have mixers and blenders using which we can make some transactions anonymous. Otherwise, it is just pseudonymous as exchange sites can give out your details and transaction details.

Bitcoin is more about anonimity and i will stand on that, i have no other argument but only one thing: it's anonymous and if you are going to disagree then you need to unveil who is the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
it's anonymous, even the creator of this coin himself is anonymous.
yes it's not perfect since nothing is perfect in this imperfect world.

Well bitcoin design has its flawed. No doubt about it. The some of your inherent risk is not a risk at all. No one has ever hack bitcoin, they can only slowed it a bit like spamming the network. Double spending, its just a small issue haven't seen anyone complain about it. Bitcoin is not perfect but I have to agree that it represents a lot of possibilities and its a great option for fiat.

Nobody says that bitcoin is perfect.I don`t think that "anonymity" is a risk.It`s an advantage.
Bitcoin has some problems that stop mass adoption,but when they are resolved we can see some major changes in the finance industry.

show me more than a single double spend that actually occurred.

anonymity isn't inherently negative.

the network has never been hacked.

I agree that bitcoin is not ideal but represents possibilities because when a country accept and open its door to bitcoin then it also accepts possibilities to have a great economy because bitcoin will help a country to have a faster payment system and more profitable because of being volatile of bitcoin to its price.

It is definitely not ideal.

For one, the confirmation times are obviously a lot larger than it was like 3 years ago. There are scalability issues and there is obviously a lot of debate going on currently regarding how that issue should be handled.

However, ideal money is completely imaginary. There will never be a currency that is perfect in every aspect, as some aspects of money are actually contradictory to each other and cannot be achieved at the same time.

Agree, it really represents possibilities...too much possibilities we can imagine. We say that its a game changer in financial industry. Also the blockchain technology is really the new technology with so many application.

Nothing in this world is perfect or ideal, that goes for bitcoin to.
But he is good in many ways, off course they are thing that are not good for it but in time eventually if will be all fixed and maintained to be nearly perfect or ideal.

Perfect things don't exists and Bitcoin probably wasn't meant to be ideal. It has advantages and disadvantages like anything else but still represents big technological progress and new opportunity in the finances.Some things about Bitcoin could be improved and this could make it even better.

Yeah I think bitcoin and altcoins
is the future of money because they
give a lot of advantages to the people.
So because of this many advantages,
a lot of people are now using this.

Dont ignore the facts about world single cryptocurrency.They are money of future. We need them to make world a better place ;D

Bitcoin was never meant to be perfect, it was meant to be good enough that the normal person could use it, contribute to it, and secure some of their wealth outside of their economic system of origin so that they wouldn't be subject to the complete control of banks and at the mercy of governments who wouldn't bail them out.
Money is never perfect, most of the time we just have to do our best and make sure that we don't mess up. We may have a "perfect" system in the future, but that is never for sure. Chances are we won't see any sort of perfect system for a long time.

The biggest problem I see today are the delays in the transactions. It is necessary that the scalability debate is resolved soon to end the great traffic jam in the network. In addition it´s necessary to take into account that the world continues to work with fiat money, therefore the fear of many people is that when buying bitcoin to move it and change it for fiat again, the currency could have lost value, with the delay of transactions the fear may be greater.

Right point.If crowd see the downgrade on btc price they are running to sell coins. But investors see that opportunity and buys that share from sellers. That's how markets work and  long term investors always win at the end.

I never thought of bitcoin as money. I have always considered bitcoin as a means to engage in trade, a decentralized way to exchange goods and services. When you think about it, that's all that matters because our time and labor is the stuff that is ultimately being sought, not ones and zeros, not paper, and not any number of the trinkets which have also been used throughout history. The pyramids were not built with paper; they were built off the backs of the people.

World has got lots and lots of cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin have grabbed the position to be the single currency that has the ability to serve the world countries. This happened because of the technology behind it as well the team that work even when several mastermind tries to take control of it.

No currency is perfect, every single one of them has drawbacks the important thing is if you are willing to accept them and adapt to it, some like gold, but gold can be easily stolen an it is bulky, fiat has the problem of having to trust the government to not print too much and they always betray that trust.

You're right! i embraced bitcoin for the first time in the beginning of 2013 i thought that it was the "future" "private" "simplest" and "faster'' payment method well all three are doing well but the last i mean the "faster"  idk if it's just me or..? that bitcoin transaction is very slow for normal transaction you must wait 10-30 minutes to get confirmed, i know that if you want to decrease the time you must increase the fee but it's not simple anymore if we must check and estimate which fee should we use to get fast transaction. Maybe this is the only reason why i don't like bitcoin, while others I'm very satisfied.

There is still a problem with bitcoin where blocksize can't be upgraded and still using the size of 1 mb for each transaction, this becomes a complicated problem if the transaction ballooned in one time and will result in pending in long term. I am not so sure that people always boast of anonymity because the world government puts more emphasis on financial transparency and self data, this is a reverse current for bitcoin so until now the American government doesn't regard it as legal tender.

Bitcoin could be hack, the bitcoin network is the one that can't be hack. The bitcoin in our online wallets could be hack because it is connected on the internet, I mean it is too vulnerable to the eyes of the hacker, while the bitcoin network has been made to be decentralized that is why it is too complicated to hack by the hackers. Bitcoin network is too secure and safe, because the whole life of bitcoin is depending on it.

Getting it hacked is the worst thing that could happen to us, if the bitcoin network would be screwed by this hackers.

Bitcoin blocksize can be upgraded but developer wants a consensus about the update.  They will not barge in and say to the community "hey we upgraded the blocksize, upgrade of be left behind, we need you to follow and deal with it" instead, they wanted the majority agree with the up coming update so it will be a smooth transition.

With regards to transfer, it is still fast in global transfers, 10 to 30 min. transfer from southern part of the globe to northern part without the third party involvement.

Bitcoin is impossible to hack but we cant say so maybe in the future they can hack it but this time we have almost 10billion i guess on who ever can hack the bitcoin but no one can hack it no one knows but still not sure that it is safe or whatever there's always a possibility that it will be hack in the coming years.

Whether bitcoin can be hacked?

I think it's a conversation about a successful bitcoin changer.

In order to break BTC, they'd need to break SHA256. This might eventually happen, but hopefully we'll make advancements to prevent digital currency from falling apart by then with better algos.

Bitcoin is unstoppable and the bitcoin core team will not allow other bad people to break that because they will do their best to maintain bitcoin at a good health and bitcoin will become more popular and be more expensive so and bitcoin also getting more and more investor and supporters so i don't think it will be easy for other people to break bitcoin.

One of the selling points of Bitcoin is that the governments are not the ones to decide, changes are to be backed by consensus of users and we can all appreciate the fact that reaching a consensus in anything is never an easy task. The blocksize issue is actually going through its normal course of getting a consensus decision and it is sure to be long coming.

Bitcoin network can not be hacked because it is decentralized, it will be difficult for hack it
 but bitcoin will be dangerous if there are many super computers,
be used on every where or all of people use super computers on every activity related with internet
and we can be lost amount bitcoin if the other people know our private key.

What you have quoted doesn't look clear. Bitcoin hacking is quite hard but cannot deny that bitcoin is completely not hackable as well in reality there are users who have lost their bitcoins through hacks. Recently even one among the biggest trading service lender got hacked leaving its users suffer.

There are measurements already taken to protect the security of our private Keys. I remember Theymos wrote on reddit like switching over to new algorithm based encryption in next 5 to 6 years. Actually Theymos made  this statement for the concern of Satohi's hoarding (believed Satohis had mined 1+ million coins).

So, super computer or quantum computation will not be threat as bitcoin will be switching over to new encryption well in advance itself.

Unless, you share the private key of the wallet or wallet.dat file no one cannot able to hack your wallet easily. Ofcourse, it hack by super computer but the energy multiple super computers only able to do that. It costs more than bitcoins you have in the wallet. That's why no is ready to hack the richest bitcoin address wallets.
Decentralization is a form of bitcoin once its been legal, then bitcoin will be centralized money.

Double spending is not only a disadvantage but as an advantage as well because of so many transactions being unconfirmed. Why is it considered bad? It can be misused by scammers but the transaction can be identified as a double spend which is easy to track. It's not mainly anonymous as it's possible to track down the IP of the node which makes transactions open to all. Bitcoin cannot be hacked ever as it is decentralized and if you're talking about exchanges, they are like normal banking websites that can easily be hacked. That's not an issue with bitcoins as almost all sites have vulnerabilities.

Quantum computers are not going to appear overnight it is going to be a slow development and when they appear not only bitcoin but the whole financial system will be vulnerable but that will give us time to implement solution for that since there are already some algorithms that cannot be broken by those computers.

this depend, because switching to anythign require an hard fork, and since the bitcoin communit is resiliant to hard fork and can't come up with simply thing that require consensus, i dobut there will ever be an hardfork

and no you can't switching to another algo without miners consensus, which will never be approved, unless you want to kill bitcoin and losing all the confidence from many people in the world

another bad thing about chaning algo, is that yuo need to build another kind of asic for it(which can't be done overnight), and with the diff retarget of bitcoin,

no gpu can be pointed at it because the diff would still be crazy high, while you wait for the new asic, this make the network 100% unsecure...

The fear posed by super computers is unfounded as rising sea is sure to raise all boats, so encryption is sure not going to stay same, but will also advance inline with quantum computation.
 
One thing that needs to be cleared is that it is not Bitcoin per se that have been hacked so far in the exchanges, rather it was a break into their data base and it has been most in-house, just like anyone gaining access to your email address password can read and manipulate all your mails.

Most money is already digital so I don’t think bitcoin is that necessary at least from that point of view, bitcoin is a must because it gives back to people the right to print their own currency.

Quantum computing will be making lot changes in the future. A start to it have been found in grown Countries under the research. Well hacking and gaining access to one's personal account has difference. Gaining access to personal account takes place due to the mistakes done by the user whereas hacking is entirely based on computation and programming.

I don't think that most of the money is already digital because if so, then we don't need to use fiat anymore and we will just need an internet connection and smartphone but that's not what's happening right now because we still use physical money. Bitcoin is a must to use bitcoin of its security and possibilities to own a currency and have an investment at the same time.

Bitcoin as a whole cannot be hacked but as a n amount it can be hacked. Did you hear about North Korea they are hacking a large amount of bitcoins monthly and they are transferring it to their account. Have you heard of bitfinex they have been hacked and a large amount of bitcoins were stolen. Thus bitcoin is prone to hacking but there are ways to combat it or to lessen the risk.

There arent perfect things in this world but i wouldn't agree that bitcoin can be hacked because it really cant be.
Whats important right now is that it has value

I understand most countries are trying hard to turn their societies into cashless ones because of the many advantages inherent with digital money especially the reduction in the cost of printing, shipping and securing bank notes. Everything is certainly not going to be tied around the internet - your debit and credit cards for instance are digital form of money not restricted for use only on the internet.

I think the goal with a cashless society is not the saving in the issue of money but the control. Each transaction with physical money from hand to hand is a transaction that governments don´t control and therefore can not tax. What they want is that there is no such physical money and that all money transfers are registered and controlled, that's why they are so interested in the blockchain (their blockchain). Governments see this as a tool to fight against tax evasion or black money.

Actually, nothing and no one is ideal.
You cannot really expect that the first cryptocurrency that was ever created may be ideal, in my opinion everybody should expect that bitcoin is going to encounter some problems, because it is the first time that something like that was created.
Without a decent test environment you are not really able yo check if something works well, and I think that bitcoin being used worldwide can give us the best opportunity to look for some issues with the mechanics, or technical solutions.

And, as we see there are issues with fees and confirmation time.

It is not possible to hack bitcoin with the current technology we have and is it possible to do so in the future only time can verify these things,the value of bitcoin is rising and it will moving forward until there is a bad news ,the reason you can call bitcoin is not ideal is when we show case the scaling issues as it cannot be mass adopted ,which means that if a couple of hundred million people turns to bitcoin and starts transaction the network will crash. :D

I completely agree with the opinion of the author of the topic. I want to say that due to the fact that bitcoin is only gaining popularity among the average population of the planet, not all its possibilities are still fully appreciable. In most middle-income countries, the opportunities for this currency remain unclear for the time being.

As we can see Bitcoin is a threat to central banks and countries are backed up by banks. So unless that country is not dependent on the world's current system then it will make the economy grow, but when the country still denies cryptocurrencies mixing the two (fiat and cryptocurrencies) will be difficult.


True. The addresses can be stolen, with a screeshot or a spy eye on you or using a sniffer or a screen recorder the address can be stolen, like fiat wallet it is on us on how we will keep it safe. The system is the one that is hard to break, but we still don't know. Even the people in the past said that the enigma machine is impossible to crack and now it is a piece of cake. But I think before that happens cryptocurrencies will improve too.

Every opinion should be appreciated. See its development at the beginning bitcoin does not have many users. But nowadays wherever we are bitcoin has become known. Although in a small and poor country, now they have begun to understand and use bitcoin. The most important is the infrastructure because with adequate infrastructure bitcoin can grow better.

I have read this somewhere that Bitcoin can e impossible to get hacked. Yes, those exchanges can be hacked by a good hacker or group of hackers and they had done that thing in the past but never the Bitcoin itself. The infrastructure for Bitcoin is not perfect but it is so strong to withstand intrusions. Right now, the Bitcoin stakeholders need to solve the scaling challenge to make Bitcoin get into into its full potential.

Which is why XtraBytes a brand new coin which is impossible to hack and has solved the 51% attack that POW and POS piece of shit coins could only dream about WILL be the future.

Is XtraBytes like the moondollar I've been hearing about?

Most of the challenges being faced by bitcoin are created by the actual players themselves. It is a very good currency and store of value, but bitter disagreements, different factions taking sides, opposing opinions and differing principles have lead to slower development. The good thing is we are seeing some progress even if it is being derailed by these disagreements, but I hope all these things get solved one at a time to push bitcoin towards higher price and more stability.

I agree Double spending does have its advantages when used correctly but because some users use this feature to scam others or service providers this gets a bad name but otherwise this is still a powerful tool which could be used to accelerate transactions with low fees ! And besides,a certain number of confirmations are needed to avoid being a victim of such.

Many people might not want to believe your assertion but is the truth. Crypto currency as much risk as all the other transaction media. But it can be the future for an individual if you can manage and deal with this risks very well. The future is unknown and all we ve got.is the.present. For now, BTC is good to invest in and I gladly do.