Bitcoin Forum

So I just woke up from a dream about time travel and it had me thinking all sorts of questions...

If you could time travel and leave yourself a note "Mine and buy Bitcoin at cents each, then sell for 1,000 dollars each," and sign it so you know it's you from the future, what would happen?

1) Would you do it?

2) If you did, knowing it could be sold for 1,000 dollars, would you keep buying and buying as the price rose, and how much do you think you could make if it you sold it all or most of it for 1,000 dollars each?

3) What would that kind of heavy demand from the beginning do for Bitcoin, would it have rose much faster, and higher quicker?

4) What would that kind of amount of dumping, at 1,000 dollars each, do to the price?

5) Do you think you could kill Bitcoin, trying to dump that much?

6) If you could kill Bitcoin, would you still do it just to profit?

think logically if time travel can kill the world why couldnt it kill bitcoin

Sure, time travel could kill. Imagine I could go back to the time when your mom was a teenager, and drive over her with a truck. You'd be no more.

I probably would not buy as the price rose up, but CPU mine as many coins as possible and call it a day. Funny thought experiment anyway.

I meant just trying to dump that amount of bitcoin at 1,000 dollars because you were told you could, not in general, like killing Satoshi (if you actually knew who they were) or something.

There are so many possibilities but I imagine if I could leave myself a note, i would write a note on the winning jackpot lottery number. That would say me all the work on mining.

If you could go back in time you would have so many possibilities to make money that Bitcoin would be of absolutely no interest to you.

I guess I was thinking more, accidentally ending up back in time without knowing how long you'll be there and writing a quick note. If it was an accident, you wouldn't know the lottery numbers + day/time they'll be drawn off the top of your head most likely.

I could time travel into the future, get the private key for a 100 BTC wallet in a flash drive, and come back to the current time.
Boom, 21 million and 100 coins now in existence.

Well apparently going back in time is impossible, so no.

if you had a time machine, bitcoin is nothing.  i'd bring some automatic weapons back to genghis khan times and take over the world.

you can only time travel as far back as the time machine gets invented.

so if you invent a time machine, you will have lots of visitors from the future instantly you power it on the first time.

I'd go back in time 5 yrs before Genghis Khan times, since there would be no automatic weapons when I try to conquer the world

I would go black 5 years from now and buy 1 million BTC.

This.

Also, messing with supply/demand on early stage of Bitcoin could mean that it would never reach $1000 or even some better-distributed altcoin could've taken the 1st place.

if you could send a messge to yoursef back in 2009-2010 when bitcoin was pennies, and tell yourself to sell it at $1000 in december 2013.. guess what would happen

it would crash down to $220 by february 2015. (hinting a time travel event may have caused the crash :D (im joking by the way))

but it wont kill bitcoin. it will only crash the fake prices of crappy exchanges for a while, but bitcoin will continue.

after all you can kill the price but the decentralised code will continue.(you cant kill bitcoin, but can kill the fiat value)

then later on the price will return once some demand momentum returns

Time travel would only kill bitcoin, if you go in the past and buy a large amount, and the price doesn't increase

I would have not invested in bitcoin only in the past  :P

If it would make $1000 each, the price at that time would be worth more than now.

I would actually buy all the coins from satoshi, then hold them. Then sell them in 2013, and do a pump for you guys now with all that money ;)

first of all if i could go back in time i had more important stuff to do rather than buying bitcoin :D

but to answer your question
it depends on if timetravel is something accessible to most people or just me! because if it is accessible to everyone then the first one who mines/ buys bitcoin at 0.01$ will get the profit because the price will skyrocket automatically!

if time travel was possible. then id write down the lottery numbers for the last 3 years and make sure i won every single one of them.

the total of 3 years worth of lotteries would far exceed the market cap of bitcoin

Kill bitcoin is impossible if you can't find satoshi nakamoto first!
if i do time travel i will buy half coin ;D

Of course it is. Ever met a time traveller?

OR.... They keep it super-duper secret in the future and only the government or the person who found it first uses it.

Time travel is real.  It is the reason we have Bitcoin.  It is a long story and more complicated than Occam's Razor would suggest but, to summarize, Satoshi (not his real name) is from the past AND the future and it is his sojourn in the future and his return to our epoch bearing Bitcoin (like Prometheus bought fire to mortals) that created the singularity in which we are now participating.  

The ride is not over yet.  Wait and see what the present holds...

Makes sne, thats why he has to be anonymous.

Yes, BTC could be eliminated.
Time travel could even kill all life on Earth and leave only scattered atoms and elements struggling to create primitive life.
ps. My real name is John Connor: "I'll be back"...  :D

if I could travel back in time I would put my money in the bank and cashout the interest

What laws prevent it from being possible?
Obviously it's possible that by going back to the future you do not change the current timeline, but a new parallel one gets created. One that is dependent on the changes that you make to the world.

Time Travel could potentially kill everything, but not in our timeline.

You have the wrong perspective about this.

The person with the time machine can simulate a 51% attack (or even a 100% attack, in fact).

There's this miner, working hard to find a block. After say, two hours, she finds a block. Then she travels back in time to seconds after the previous block was found, and then she broadcasts her new block. No matter what happens, even if the difficulty is the highest possible, she will be able to wait for the new block and then broadcast it seconds after the previous.

This would also mean, after two weeks, the difficulty would increase unimaginably high, because what's supposed to happen every 10 minutes is happening every 10 seconds.

I went back in time and gave you bitcoin. You don't want to know the alternative.

You're welcome

If we could travel back in time we could fix the issues that Bitcoin was created to solve.

Not in the scenario you describe.

maybe in different scenarios.

If you are from the future and you tell yourself to gain a lot of BitCoin now, and dump when you get to the future, it will kill it, but we hope that in the future that there will be no need to dump because we hope to use BitCoin for day to day things when it becomes less volatile.

jeez guys--- if you had enough money TO AFFORD A TIME MACHINE-- i'm pretty sure you wouldn't have your mind on making a quick buck with bitcoin.

It could be done just for teh lulz.

I had just woken up from a dream, lol. But I was thinking more like the movie Butterfly Effect, where he only gets minutes or seconds before going back to the present, and he can't bring anything with him like money to invest in banks, etc.

But what's your opinion on actually being able to attack Bitcoin using a time machine?

I was thinking, that if someone could go back in time, tell themselves to purchase at pennies (mining too) and sell at 1,000, they'd probably end up being greedy and buy more. If you get into a situation like that, you're buying every Bitcoin that's being sold, the price would go up faster, and probably would go up higher, because more people would be interested in something that someone out there is paying THAT much for.

You'd want to make your payday when it hits 1,000, and dumping that many coins, might make Bitcoin's price fall, fast. HOWEVER, I don't think Bitcoin would die. I think Bitcoin's price would plummet, lower at one time, than we've seen. But, I think enough people would be into Bitcoin, because all the demand would make MORE people notice than they have so far. That somewhere out there someone would be ready to do their own buying frenzy.

So no, I don't think Bitcoin would be killed. But I do think the price would drop with that many being sold at one time.

And to answer my last question, if it would kill Bitcoin, I wouldn't do it.

You're talking about price manipulation, but my hypothetical Bitcoin attack involves actually disrupting the mining process:

Guess that time traveling is impossible so in my opinion answer is no.

Obviously, but this is a “What if” question. It's just for fun.

time travel paradox

solution: multiverse

answer: in a multiverse basically everything would be possible, the different timeline you went back too could/would develop completely differently then your original timeline. so might be possible you went back in time and btc will be worthless after you bought alot  :'(

Ah, yes. Interesting.  But I think if that happened, people would complain that it was too difficult. If it's not worthwhile to mine (as it would be increasingly difficult for other miners to get a block reward) they would stop mining. If she kept it up:

1. Bitcoin would die
2. A New Altcoin might popup, and if she tried it there she'd kill it too.
or
3. She'd stop it because people were complaining that it's dying and she would realize you can't make any money on Bitcoin if the no one wants it. And people won't want it if they feel it's not worth it to put their work into mining it and/or they think it has a problem (it can't account for time travel). ;)

The reality you leave to time travel from would go on as if nothing happened.  The changes you make, would effect one of the parallel universes you enter.  So the answer to your question is both yes and no.  Or to be more precise, it doesn't make any difference for where and when you're from.

The threads in this forum are becoming more retarded every single day.

What if nuking the Eath's core kills Bitcoin?
What if an Asteroid kills Bitcoin?

Relax, it's just for entertainment.

I think a more interesting scenario is , imagine bitcoin was never invented (satoshi never existed) but you have the knowledge you have bout it.   would you try to invent bitcoin?  write a white paper?  would you do it anonymously?  what would you do?

The question was for entertainment, and I hardly expected as many responses. But I did kinda think someone might do the math, and figure out how many Bitcoins someone, in the know, could have hoarded from the beginning and how much that would be worth at the high... but I wasn't around then. I know someone tried to sell 10,000 Bitcoins for 50 dollars, that would have been scooped up. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92.0 But I don't know how many of those deals could have been taken up on.

These kind of responses make me think a few people didn't read beyond the title "Could Time Travel Kill Bitcoin?" to actually read the longer poll question and first post at all before posting here.

You publish the white paper and the source code, becoming Satoshi and fulfilling the bootstrap paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_paradox).

f time travel can happen then killing of Bitcoin ain't a big deal  :-\

but I don't think I have the skills to write the code from scratch...despite my knowledge of programming, I don't know many of the things required such as networking, cryptography, etc...  and probably I don't know enough of the details of Bitcoin implementation to get it right.  I know most of the basic concepts and could certainly rewrite a white paper of sorts...I wonder how it would it turn out? I'm guessing only publishing a paper would require waiting a year or two until some does code it.

If you add parallel universes into the equation, there is no reason for time travel to be impossible. Since space can be bent, time could possibly too (maybe only going forward i.e. the future).

Who's to say that Satoshi did not go through time to make Bitcoin?  :) :D

uhmm no.. your key would have no coin in it until the future when someone deposits to that address so still only 21m coin

time travel is possible.  only at relative to current time and speed so basically forward only.

higher rate of speed will speed up your time passage, slower rate will make your time pass slower.  an example is someone who spends a year in orbit ages slower than someone currently on earth.

But this thread is about traveling backwards in time, which is impossible.

The word "travelling" implies increasing t parameter. 

That being said, it is possible for a block to have a timestamp before the previous block's timestamp.  If you can keep this up for a few hundred blocks get back to me. 

This

If you travel back in time, you will change the randomness of the network and cause the blockchain to be totally different than the blockchain that we know today

The world will just fork into another reality that is unrelated to the reality you know today

Actually I don't believe the multiverse theory since it creates energy out of nothing when the world splits into two reality, and we all know that energy will just go down and entropy is getting higher and higher over time. So time travel is impossible at least in our universe

But Time machine is fueled with Bitcoins. So ofcourse Bitcoin is something.

If you could time travel, wouldn't it just be easier to buy a winning lotto ticket instead?

If time travel would kill Bitcoin, then Bitcoin would be already dead. Meaning that somebody would already have come from the future with the better alternative to bitcoin.

My conclusion is that either time travel is not possible (neither now, neither in the future), either it will/didn't kill bitcoin.

That would be so cool first of all!
Time travel, i always think of it sometimes!
Only if i could , i would just leave a message to myself , yes you must buy it , don't think
And there it is , am done 8)

I would love to go to the future and see if we forked or not for once.

You should never travel back to a time where you existed.


That's my theory.

I'll have to check back with this thread when we all start time traveling.

Why not? It would be interesting to meet myself.

If time travel were possible, I wouldn't waste it on bitcoin.  There are so many things I would change or do differently. Wrongs I would try to make right. There is more to life than bitcoin.

Are you sure?

If I can unmix a liquid then why not time?

https://i.imgur.com/twhOw95.png (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V6kc0PQa14)

Time is not a liquid, to begin with.

Though, true, and I have things I wish I had done differently, same as most.... big picture, I believe everything happens for a reason, even the crappy, and horrible stuff; it makes us who we are... and we were meant to be the people reading this forum this morning. Yes, I believe in the butterfly effect, and changing one thing, no matter how small and we wouldn't be who we are today exactly...

It's just fun to think about what ifs, sometimes... and it would have been nice to have a windfall of money, but then I wouldn't have done the work I did these last few years, and wouldn't know what I know now, and I wouldn't be working on what I'm working on today. Actually I can think of lots of things I wouldn't have done, and I'm really glad I didn't know about it back then because I really wouldn't have wanted that stuff to not happen.

Are you sure?

"In this theoretical framework, it has been suggested that spacetime should be treated as a fluid." -- http://phys.org/news/2014-04-liquid-spacetime-slippery-superfluid.html

"Superfluid vacuum theory (SVT), sometimes known as the BEC vacuum theory, is an approach in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics where the fundamental physical vacuum (non-removable background) is viewed as superfluid or as a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_vacuum_theory

I said “liquid”, but your examples talk about “superfluid”. They certainly work differently.

Also, time being a superfluid still doesn't prove we can travel back in time.

Perhaps the issue here is that the concept of "time" is an artificial one making both travel forwards and/or backwards impossible.

Yes, that's why all this conversation about Bitcoin and time travel is hypothetical.

Interesting analogy.  Perhaps the fulcrum rests on the pointy part of delta S.  Figure out how to break or circumvent the law of entropy and perhaps you found the wormhole to time travel.  I have some wood putty, some dryer lint, and some liquid nitrogen.  When I succeed I will get back to you -- no pun intended. 

See you sooner!

Imagine if someone got back from the future and mined most of bitcoins, he could get some equipment with him and for next to nothing mine BTC and increase it with time, so difficulty doesn't just all at once.

Satoshi is from the future.

 :o

I still think that time travel and space travel are significantly independent of one another, meaning that traveling in time would NOT also automatically cause space travel. I believe that if one time-traveled, he would also have to space-travel to get to the location in space where the time-events that he was looking for existed.

In other words, if you went back into the past 5 years from right now, there probably was nothing at all in this area of space yet. If there was, it certainly wouldn't be the solar system. An astronomer might be able to determine from star charts if there was something in this neighborhood of space back then.

The reality here is, we don't have the ability to do much of any space travel. So, how could we do the space travel to where the solar system was 5 years ago, on top of tunneling back into time?

Science fiction can be fun. But this isn't really fun science fiction. Why not? Because we all know that there is absolutely no way to do it. If there were some little scientific method available, the thought of doing this might be interesting. But since this kind of space travel is so extremely impossible for us, and since we don't have nearly the handle on time travel as we do on space travel, the known impossibilities make this whole idea depressing rather than interesting or exciting.

:)

According to what frame of reference? There's not absolute position in space.

Galactic mass along with inter-galactic mass (to a lesser extent) provide the frame of reference. Five years difference is not long enough to move outside the scope of these reference frames.

:)

Why this one? Why not the solar system frame of reference? What makes one more preferable than the other?

Thank you for helping to explain why such time travel would be entirely impossible, even if it were practical.

:)

What other opportunities have yielded as much profit as Bitcoin did between 2009 and 2013? Apple stock? Uranium futures? I don't think any of them come even remotely close to Bitcoin.

I guess Litecoin and the NXT IPO have yielded greater profits percentage-wise but they're pretty much in the same boat as Bitcoin.

Depends if its the future or the past.

Its physically impossible to go to the past. If it was possible we would have been visited already by future civilization that could go back.

Something being physically possible doesn't imply that it has already happened.

If time travel was possible in the future, we'd know it by now.

What about non-physical time travel? I've heard stories about "remote viewing" through time with the mind and imaging of the past/future with technology.

We could have an organized group of Illuminati satanists using computer enhanced remote viewing to observe Bitcoins various future successes and take action to ensure the success of bankster scam fiat currency. Maybe even sending in especially designed anti-crypto drones to deal with the Bitcoiners.

Something like Minority Report?

Another missed opportunity if I could travel back to time would be domain business. I would grab all the important keyword rich names and hold it.

heee heee another funny question
....well if I can go back in time then I will mine bitcoin with a 3 th/s dragon miner ;p

If I could go back in time I would go some time after the 2008 elections and write up the code for a cryptographic currency, being from the future I would not want my identity figured out and mess with the space time continuum so I would make up a name...something Japanese maybe to throw everyone off. Maybe use British words to make it even more difficult to figure out my identity.

I honestly doubt time travel exists.

If there was time travel there would be infinite loops in time and it would screw up time/life as we know it as everyone would want to be rich, redo history etc...

i would introduce to the market the highly - developed cryptographic technology that is famous today and tried to compete BTC. Who knows maybe I would change the span of the cryptocurrency history :o

Time travel is possible, they have noted it inside nuclear reactors where they get more energy then they should... energy traveled back in time. It's not to much of a leap to think that with quantum entanglement and superposition you could get an item to start transmitting info... Get a really old computer you know was connected to the internet since the beginning of the web, entangle it and there is the probability that some of those computations will go back to the position of that computer 20 years ago. 

knowing everything yet to happen on the blockchain could be useful, you'd know the exploits before they happen, use them or patch them ahead of time, but you still couldn't do much without building your own exchange, or finding more people willing to exchange their Bitcoins, you'd still have to build the entire network to gain anything. Though the idea of bringing back the future blockchain to the now, sounds pretty cool... would it confirm transactions from the future? I think it would, that limitation is not present in Bitcoin.

For a time traveller the random would stop being random, everything would have very well defined vectors, but you would still be limited by the laws of physics... there is only so much you can do to change the flow of a system before it reverts back to it's intended course. Even if Bitcoin had never of existed it would have emerged in a different way eventually, only a matter of time.

LOL, What?  :D

Wait just there. If you think quantum entanglement enables faster-than-light communication (and therefore, time travel), then you don't understand how quantum entanglement actually works.

Yes, quantum particles are entangled in such a way that if we measure the spin on one particle, the spin on the other will automatically be its reverse, and this happens no matter how apart they are. However, we have no way to control which spin the particles will have. They are chosen at random the moment they are measured. So, no, there's no way to send information using quantum entanglement, at least with the current knowledge we have.

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-od647c) explains it very well.

Random? what is random? does pure random exists or we just not having enough power to compute whatever is needed to be computed to find the real seed of that perceived randomness, or is it totally random? aaa my mind fuck it.