Yes and no.  This is more like the Walmart versus target contract mining issue.  Use the search function against "walmart" and my screenname, and you will find that I have commented along these lines extensively in the past.

If anything, he under estimates it.  For the most part, his opposition isn't interested in convincing him of anythin, most who post here are just trolling him.  In the long run, not only are we all dead, our grandchildren will receive the benefits of our foresights.  If Sweft is correct, and he actually does something about it beyond arguing about it with people on the Internet, then his grandchildren will benefit and they will be thankful for it.  If we are correct, our grandchildren will be thankful.  In the near term; however, there is no point in us arguing about it, since Bitcoin is presently, and will continue to be for long after my natural life span, a rather inflationary currency. 

A 51% attacker can do almost anything, except steal bitcoins that he has never legitimately possessed.  It is impossible for any attacker to steal my coins in cold storage, even if he sold them to me a couple of months ago, due to checkpointing. 

No meatspace POS system shoudl ever accept any transaction that is not immediately lockable.  This should be obvious enough.  Snack machines shouldn't take IOU's.


Maybe, but as far as I am aware, both the race attack and finney attack are theoretical.  Are there any examples of either being employing in the wild, that does not involve a contrived lab-like setup?  Has anyone, ever, posted on the forums with a "I've been double spended against!" with a credible story?  Online websites should only accept 6 confirms for instantly deliverable goods such as online data streaming, etc; (maybe not a movie, since a double spend simply cuts off the feed halfway through the movie) but meatspace transactions below a certain value are pretty safe.  It's technically simplier to fake a coin operated snack machine using slugs than to double-spend attack it for a bag of chips.

A double spending attack is much harder, even while duping snack machines, than your scenario implies.  There are techniques for detecting a double spend attack while in progress that can be employed, none of which are necessary yet, and thus have not been implimented.  Several of which don't require any outside support for the snack machine, and provide no warning for anyone that does not have a sniffer on the machine's network connection.

A double spend attack is very timing dependent, and for practical reasons requires that all spend attemps hit the bitcoin network within 10 seconds of each other.  Good luck coordinating that in meatspace.

I don't, personally.  Yet, for this exact reasoning, I have long ago predicted that Reykjavík, Iceland will likely become a mining hub due to the confluence of factors including a relatively low electric rate (due to geothermal resources), a high demand for space heating and a high degree of international Internet connectivity, along with other more minor factors.  I also predict that asic mining chips will eventually be included into electric "heat trace" cabling intended to produce spot heating to protect public and private infrastructure from extreme cold.  I've personally been involved in many such projects, and the cable currently in use, although really just a continuous resistor, is already very expensive.  A co-mining method would simply represent an alternative income source to counterbalance the capital costs of such infrastructure.  Oil and gas pipelines in the arctic require quite powerful heat cabling across their entire length.  Imagne the hashrate of a strip of asic chips along a linier network and power line, with each chip placed one per foot along it's length AND circumference, in order to achieve a targeted watts per foot.  In my own mild climate, the watts per foot range is 3-7 watts per liner foot for insullated pipes of less than 3" in diameter and 7 watts per square foot of insulated surface.  I have not even seen a project that was les than 3 watts per square foot.  Every public parking garage in the US built since 1985 (in regions that freeze in winter) has pressurized sprinkler systems required by code & insurance, and every linier foot of insulated pipe you might see when you look up has at least 3 watts per foot of heating cable that must energize whenever the local temp drops below 33 degrees (and usually much warmer due to insurance worries).  What do you suspect woudl happen once Bitcoin is as big an economy as many of us believe it will be?  Do you honestly think that Bitcoin wise engineers will not incorporate spot heat co-mining in such infrastructure?

You just described green addresses.

This is a nonsense statement.  It's impossible for any entity to bankrupt all other miners, no matter his transaction fees.  Not only would any such miner have to aquire the capital investment in order to build his network to beyond 51%, an uphill battle considering the vast majority of the current running network (now or at any other time) is a sunk cost already paid for; he would also have to compete with the hobbyist miners who benefit from co-generation of waste heat.

I have a GPU based mining rig that I choose not to use, that I can use for space heating in my garage at will.  No miner can bankrupt me.

Therefore your "law" is invalid.

I do know what a 51% attack is.  Even then, it would be limited to whomever had recently sold the attackers something of value.  A 51% attacker cannot steal coins that he has never legitimately possessed.

http://www.poeleaboisonline.com/en/poele-godin/644-wood-stove-quotle-petit-godin-3720quot-finishing--enameled-cast-iron-enameled-steel-or-painted-anthra.html

Like this one, preferablely new or well cared for used.  I need it in Kentucky, United States.

Well, you have a point there.


Those are exactly the conditions that I would expect a big drop, due to the eventual popping of a bubble.  And that is largely what happened.  Honestly, I expected it weeks before it happened, and lost a small fortune short selling with a stop-loss limit  at $72.  It never eeven got back down to where I thought it made fundamental sense, so I would have lost it anyway.


It's much like the point about violence and terrorrism; terror attacks make big news but not really big body counts, as a nominally "free" US citizen is 9 times more likely to die by the unwarrented actions of a police officer than a terrorist.

Really, the perception of risks are out of prooportion with the reality of those same risks.

From my own perspectives, the block chain split was of zero consequence.  If it were not for the activity on this forum at the time, and my interaction with this forum, I (personally) wouldn't have even noticed.  The same would have been true for most users who either don't spend bitcoins on a daily basis or don't fret over the time to confirm.  Once users are competing for blockspace, a 24 hour long time to confirm will become more commonplace for much more mundane reasons.  And the price crash wasn't even the worst crash that I've seen since I've been here.  On a percentage basis, dropping from about $250 to about $50 over the course of a week or two isn't as bad as dropping from $32 to $2 in 2011 (2012?), although it happened much faster.

I didn't claim that he was some kind of oracle.  You have the right to disagree, and to be wrong in any other number of ways.

Excellent video Mike, but there is one thing that you might be able to improve on your identity+rock=realestate_owner analogy.  You said that no society would ever do this, but once upon a time, the British had a system of sovernign gold debt using sticks.  What they would do is when the king/government desired to borrow gold (usually to fight a war) he would require that goldmongers (early bankers) exchange the gold for a stick that has been etched on both ends with the debt amount, and then broken in half.  The treasury kept the long end, and the "lender" kept the short end as the record of the "exchange".  Theoretically, anyone who had the short end of the stick could come to the treasury in London after the repay date and claim the gold in deposit by matching up the broken ends of the stick.  In practice, the king just declared ursury illegal and ordered the treasury sticks burned.

But a society would, indeed, do something like this.

EDIT:  BTW, that is where we get the term, "left holding the short end of the stick".

EDIT:  Any gold bug worth his salt, and  particularly Ron Paul himself, should know this history, BTW. 

Yes, I do; and much more.  No, 10 watts per person isn't enough to maintain anything near current standards.  It is enough to maintain current standards for 10K+ households, however.  Alternatively, it's enough to keep a million cell phones charged and the local infrastructure running.  More likely, however; one quarter that number of cell phones and refrigeration for foodstuff is where the dust settles.  Communications and hygiene are two high priorities for our society, and there is no form of mass communication more effective than the Internet.  People will make special efforts to make sure that their cell phones work and the refrigerator is cold.  Which of those two things is more important depends upon the generation of the person you are asking, but there is no doubt that those two are most important.  In places where the flow of water requires power input, that would be high on the list of priorities for rationed hydropower as well, but in the long run people simply move out of such areas.  In addition to the hydroplant, Louisville also sits right on top of the largest self-replenishing aquifier in the United States, and it covers more than the county.  As I sit here at home, the water table is no more than 26' below the grass, which is why I can't have a basement.  I have considered, in the past, buying a driven wellpoint and a hand operated well pump just to keep around should I ever need it, but I have never gotten around to it.

EDIT:  My kindle uses a tenth the power that my android cell phone uses, and both can run for a long time with their transceivers off.  Did you know that there are apps that permit you to download the most commonly accessed Wikipedia articles in English, and save them to your phone for offline use?  And the long term educational and survival value of an e-ink based e-reader cannot be overstated.  Literally a one-pound library that can be maintained with a 2.5 watt solar cell, and still not take too much sun time to prevent you from charging your other devices.

"Collapse" is in the eye of the beholder anyway.  There is a minority of peoples and sub-cultures in the United States that Kunstler's version of collapse would have near zero effect upon anyway.  And there is a much larger sub-set of the population that collapse would have relatively minor effects upon.  The city of Louisville, Kentucky (where I grew up) is a city of just about one million people with it's own 10 Megawatt hydroelectric plant less than a mile from the downtown district.  Some sub-cultures and some locales are better suited for the coming "collapse" than others.

The ideal flat tax income rate is zero.  That's exactly what it was up until 1913, and then they knew a constitutional amendment was necessary.  Even so, the Supreme Court has twice ruled that the amendment did not alter the definition of "taxpayer", which up until that time included foreign nationals doing business in the United States, and citizens of one state working in another.  You wouldn't know it by how such events unfold these days, but according to legal history, a natural born citizen working for a labor wage within his state of residence is exempt from federal income taxation.

Not that I'm stupid enough to argue that point on my own tax forms.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/smack-down-time.html

Normally, this guy is very intuitive.  But apparently all of the media hype about Bitcoin came at him, and he felt the need to comment on it without his usual due diligence.  I've been trying to comment about that on this blog since Monday, but I just can't manage it for whatever reason.  Maybe I'm banned, but it doesn't say that.  Let's see if some of you guys can manage it.  Amazingly, none of the regular commentors ever came around to challenging his take on Bitcoin.

Do what you will, gentleman; but remember that this guy is an another fellow traveler despite his lack of understanding.

Riiiight!  Welcome back, Satos... I mean, Bakada.

This entire thread is wild speculation.