It is NOT in the spam filters.

Also: I am a member for 4 years, and I got several mails from bitcointalk in the past.

Thanks for the info. I confirmed at least two people who did not receive any such e-mail. One is a Google Mail address (@gmail.com), the other one has a big German university's e-mail address. The mails are not in the spam folders either.

Just saying. Get a decent way to send them, theymos, and send all of them again. You cannot just set up a random server with a random IP address and send mails. It's not the 80's any more. Due to spam epidemic, major mail providers will reject those mails.

I certainly did not get it, and I asked a few people from whom nobody got it either.

Why did you not even send a warning mail to all addresses? Thousands of casual forum users don't even know about this incident and their password hashes stolen.

You are implying that OpenSSL is not a complete pile of shit. But it is. The new libsecp256k1 can't be worse than OpenSSL.

It can't possibly be
- documented worse
- less readable by humans
- harder to comprehend by humans
than OpenSSL.

Heartbleed was no surprise to anybody who ever worked with OpenSSL. Nobody can understand OpenSSL. It is bloated with features that have no use, which make it hard to even track the code path of a single thing that you want to analyze. And you cannot even use debugging tools on OpenSSL (because they implement their own memory management instead of malloc() etc. etc.).

The past can be considered more secure, but the attacker could fork at the current block, spend coins on the public block and save them in his own.

128 bits should be enough, you can put them into an PRNG then. You will not get more “security” with a secp256k1 ECDSA key anyway.

The strengths of SHA256 will not be eternal.

You argue as if this was some sort of an isolated question. It is not. And I am not talking about opinion polls or anything like this. You just have to imagine what it means if Bitcoin is becoming unattractive for small payments. It means that some users will stop using Bitcoin and look for something else, which will relatively* hurt the value. The “majority”, whoever that is, will have an interest to maximize the value of their assets.




*) Even if the value is still rising and not dropping, it may rise less in case of fewer users than it would rise in case of more users.

@Danny: Of course nobody knows what the future will bring. But the whole issue of size only makes sense under the assumption that it will.



If block size is limited, small transactions will be pretty much impossible. A miner will always pick a larger transaction over a smaller, because for him it does not matter whether the user is giving a 1% fee or a 10% fee. Only the absolute amount matters. Of course most people don't want this to happen.

This is not a valid argument. When Bitcoin's popularity will grow, there will be more transactions and that limit will have to be raised anyway, if you want to keep Bitcoin working.

I agree with everything else you said.

You don't really cut size just by putting all the transactions into a single block.

It is true that you can remove some transactions, but even the number of transactions that CANNOT be removed is growing exponentially.



PS: Of course there is a limit, since there is a finite number of Satoshis. But that limit does not help us much now, and will not help has when Satoshis will be subdivided in the far future.

And I strongly disagree with that point. The inflation control is not the interesting part at all. Without decentralization, inflation control is not a problem at all. It is the decentralization that makes the big difference from previous digital monies.


What does time even mean if you don't have the block chain or a central authority?

I looked it up, they both don't:

• The Bit Gold p2p transaction log is based on network addresses.
• B-money design A is assuming that you have perfect communication which distributes the same transaction to everybody synchronously and doesn't need it.
• B-money design B is uses “servers” to keep track of transactions. Setup of new servers is limited by requiring money to create one.

The real interesting new thing about Bitcoin is not the scarcity of the coins, but the decentralized ledger. The coin scarcity is a side effect.

I don't get why anybody would want that. Why should Bitcoin be more like gold in the first place? It is fine how it is.

I also doubt that you could convince the Bitcoin community to adopt such a fundamental change.

Note that the 51 % attack only allows you to double spend or to invalidate other people's transactions. It does not enable you to steal any coins from other people's addresses.


So the real risk for 800 BTC (now around $300k) here is not people using this to steal money, but big players (governments) trying to DoS the network.

But it isn't. Bitcoin doesn't use hash cash only to limit the amount of Bitcoins. It uses it to build a block chain of transactions. Does B-money or bitgold have that?

BTW., I don't want to say that Bitcoin isn't well designed. I like how it is designed. All I am saying is that you should be more careful with real-world comparisons.

It is totally fine to say: “Bitcoin is scarce just like gold, that makes it a secure asset.” But that is basically all you can say, you can not go any further. The way and reasons how and why Bitcoin is scarce is totally different from the way and reasons how and why gold is scarce.

I still like the term “mining” for block generation though.

Of course that would be possible. You could just say that one Bitcoin to mine costs a difficulty of x, and the difficulty rises (doubles) in a certain (block) time interval. But Bitcoin does not do it. (Maybe some Altcoin does.)

The hard limit of 21 million BTC does not really resemble the gold scarcity. Gold is not scarce because people have mined all the gold on earth. There is still a huge amount of gold, and mining levels are increasing, not decreasing. And people who believe that mineral prices can only go up should look what happened to the oil price recently. They are deluded by the peak oil myth. As prices go higher, miners will invest more money in innovation and capacity to increase mining rate.

For gold for example, most gold is in the inner core of the earth. Of course it is unrealistic for us to think about how to mine that, but it is not a hard limit like the 21M limit.

Gold production according to Wikipedia:

The gold mining analogy sucks because of the following dynamic:

When the market price for gold is going up, extraction of gold is more attractive and more tons gold will get extracted per day by miners. When market price for gold is going down, mining activity is going down as well, some hard-to-mine source will even be totally unprofitable to mine.

With Bitcoin, it is different. With market price, hashing power is going up and down. But it is always a fixed independent number of BTC that are being mined (right now 150 BTC per hour). The number of Bitcoins is limited, but it is independent from the market price.



The gold value analogy make more sense though, because both are valued by people because they are limited. But that has nothing to do with mining or hashing. (Let alone that the oil price is just telling us a lesson that limited resources are not as limited as we often think. When price rises and technology advances, there may always be new ways to mine more of the stuff.)