Bitcoin Forum

Don't you ever step back and look at the big picture? We are putting our faith into a complex mathematical equation, nothing but encryption to guarantee a transaction among liquid currencies. So far the algorithms within Bitcoin are holding up while guarantees/shares/bitcoins, equal to billions of dollars, are floating around in the ledger. Could you imagine what would happen if someone found a way to crack the encryption and forge bitcoins? It would be catastrophic.

Instead of putting our faith in gold, we are putting our faith in algorithms.

This worries me because remember Internet Protocol version 4? We thought the algorithms within IPV4 would hold up for the future when in fact it did not and we ended up developing a bunch of hacks like NAT so that the internet could handle more than 4 billion hosts.

Could you imagine what would happen if someone buys 3 houses with money that he lent from his bank and then house prices collaps ? It would be catastrophic.  ;)

Could you imagine what would happen if the gov bans gold trading or makes a 80% tax?

nothing is safe. if you have no money, you have less worries ;-)

I never doubted Bitcoin's ability to be traded. Governments who ban gold would be foolish and would miss out on a lot of economic activity.

I question Bitcoin's ability to be reliable down to the machine code, can we trust bitcoin's reliability vs the element Au?

When it comes down to it, will Bitcoin be here in 20-30 years?

You are talking about two different concerns. The first one is the integrity of encryption algorithms and the second refers to scalability. If ecnryption used by bitcoin get proved unsafe bitcoin will not be the only thing that it will face a huge crisis.

IPv4 was invented to represent every University and US military installation in the world.  It was NEVER intended to represent everyone on earth.

Bitcoin was invented to represent everyone on earth if they want.

It is more likely that we will find a way to produce artificial gold cheaper than what gold is worth today, than having the Bitcoin protocol broken.

The question is, when will people realize this, along with the other advantages of crypto-currencies? It could take decades. Fortunately, I'm in my twenties ;)

About IPv4: it's still used today, and replacing it would not break the Internet, just like a hard fork doesn't have to break the blockchain.

What algorithms? IPv4 still does exactly what it was designed to. Comparing IPv4 to encryption potentially being broken makes absolutely no sense. It would've made more sense to mention something like MD5 or DES.

Looks like some weaknesses in Bitcoin were found ;)

and being addressed as we chat