Bitcoin Forum

I ran into some article about the loom currency. But I do not seem to get what it really is. Can anyone please explain to me, in short, what loom really is and how it compares to bitcoin or other electronic currencies?
Thanks very much.

Here is the article:
http://www.dgcmagazine.com/blog/index.php/2010/12/16/the-new-global-banking-account/

It's not a currency.  It's an anonymous banking system, or more precisely an asset exchange service.

It's very interesting, though.  I could use that for my brokerage project.

PS.  I've ust read the FAQ.  It's pretty cool.  I don't like the centralized aspect, though.

I think it would be a good candidate for an other implementation of bitcoin concepts.  Basically it would be the same service as Loom, but it would work in a decentralised manner, using bitcoin's time server.

This could be neat, but it has to be more thought through.

PS#2.  Hum, it's open source !  This is good, for it means anyone can run his own loom server.  This makes decentralisation not necessary.

This concept of "federation" has always intrigued me. You have have a "centralized" service, but still be able to connect those services together without every member of the network having to act as a server.

You can run your own loom server. But the assets you store on one server are still subject to a single point of failure.
So decentralisation is stilll 'neccesary' if you want to be protected against simply disappearing, cheating or defection of that node.

I have just read the FAQ ( https://loom.cc/faq ), and there is one thing i don't understand...

Assets are a random hashes, just like bitcoin addresses are. How does loom protect people from guessing assets at random, if somebody for example trues to guess one trillion assets per second ?
There will be a small possibility of guessing correct. Is there a limitation of how many assets can an entity request per unit of time ?

Can't people do the same with bitcoin addresses?

I think they can, but knowing a Bitcoin address won't give you the money it posesses.
Knowing the asset's address in Loom will.

Erm, guess private key to bitcoin address?

Will the private key be enough to steal somebody's wallet ?

It's enough to be able to spend the coins associated to one address.

Then again, both loom hashes and bitcoin private keys are huge. Simply guessing is not a vulnerability you should be worried about in either case. Do the math.

I just want to tell you that I am currently building something similar and it's gonna kick ass !

It will be a bash CGI script and it will just use RSA keys to identify owners of shares.  I'll use the excellent "openssl" command that I've recently learned.

Still, you have to know how many coins he has, otherwise the transaction will be invalid. Am i rigth ?
So this makes things insanely difficult.

Either you try to brute force private keys with simultaneous sending small amounts, which won't be very profittable, or you can try big amounts and risk producing invalid transactions.

But with bitcoin, everyone can see how much coins are 'owned' by an address, and as the address is the public key, I guess it's simple to generate from the private key that you guessed.

I might be wrong though.

Well, you can have multiple addresses and receive money to the other one, so probably no.
And the address is not exactly the same as public key, is it ?