Or that bitcoin can work without the Internet.

Huh.  An online 'pig in a poke' game.

Interesting.

Hotlinking to Silk Road, or any other site that would generally be considered illegal activity where this forum server is located (United States) is verboten.  Google is your friend.

This really doesn't parse, but the whole Mt.Goatse thing was a perverse running gag, like your photo.


Legally, yes.  We (mods) have never been the kind to be so concerned about legal demarcation lines.  Breaking social barriers, however, will get you attention.  We all know that you post that kind of stuff to get an emotional response, and that's trolling by definition.  This isn't 4chan.

http://thefnf.org/donate-bitcoin/

Give freely, gentlemen.  Think of it as an investment into Bitcoin infrastructure under our own control and with our own values.

We had a blockchain split, due to a database bug.  We have naturally occuring blockchain splits all of the time, but the network is normally self-correcting.  The bug was preventing a self-correction. It was a big deal only to the developers, as their reputation was impacted.  Users weren't impacted except for some short term confirmation delays.  If you weren't trying to move funds at the time, you woudn't have noticed.

The computational power doesn't back the bitcoin economy, it secures the blockchain against a brute force attack, commonly called a "51% attack" here.  Even a successful 51% attack would not "bring it down".  More like aggravate the legit users for as long as the attacker can keep it up, and maybe perform a double spend against a particular user the attacker recently had a transaction with.  If that user isn't you, then your coins are safe even during a 51% attack, you just can't spend them while the attack is ongoing.

That's a very old report you were reading.  The current data can be found at www.bitcoinwatch.com, down near the bottom in a pie chart.  BTW "other" is a collection of unknown miners, that may or may not be a single entity, but probably not.  No single group comes close to 50%.

I've noticed a change in common terminology over the course of this thread.  For the past several years, this forum has been dominated by US membership, thus the most common exchange prices were almost always quoted in US $.  That has been noticablely changing over the past few months, as Europeans continue to join the forum, and now it's at least as common to see a price quote in Euros and I occasionally see them in British Pounds as well as less commonly in South American fiat currencies.

Personally, I find that to be bullish, in a growing bubble kind of way.

I'm afraid that your wrong about that this time, MtGox was originally a trading site for card gaming.  I was here when that site started as a bitcoin trading site, before it was hosted in Japan.  It most certainly stood for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.

You make a good point, I should have locked this thread already.  In my own defense, I'm inclined to let posters speak their mind as much as possible, even those who too readily let their crazy out for all to see.

But with that, this thread is now locked.

Nonsense.  The innovation of Bitcoin isn't it's decentralized nature.  Paper cash is moreso.  The innovation is that the transaction settlement system is automated, unstoppable and cannot prevent new players from entering into the network.  Anyone can offer mining services, even when Walmart has a mining cluster, if they are willing to mine at a loss.  Many are and can.  I do, as I have a GPU based mining rig I bought used last fall that is offsetting a portion of my heating demands for my detached garage.  I'd be using that electricity anyway, but I can't make a business model out of waste heat from a mining rig.  Even if Walmart and Target are fighting over half of the network, they can't stop me from participating at whatever level I desire.  Central banking is about control, not centralizatin per se.  If you really view it as a problem, don't use it.  No one is asking you to, much less compelling you to.  Just go back to your legal tender and go pay your taxes like a good little socialist/capitalist/Morman/whatever.  That's real slavery, and you don't even realize you're already part of your own solution.

Satoshi believed that there would be few professional mining outfits, and that most users would not often have to pay a transaction fee, because in a future that bitcoin had adoptence and success near the level of a minor national currency, most businesses would be accepting them.  For major retailers such as Wal-Mart or Target, accepting bitcoins via free transactions would be a comparative advantage they could wield over smaller competitors because these major retailers could afford to either build their own mining farm or sponsor a professional mining outfit by contract, so that their free transactions could be favored by those same contract miners in the same way that fee paying transactions can be expected to be favored over free transactions now.  The same kind of arrangement could occur between bitcoin "banks", who agree to transact off-network between their members whenever feasible and to mutually favor each other's userbase regarding free transactions within their own transaction/mining pools.  Thus, the market for transaction fees was expected, from very early on, to compete with partial trust parallel payment networks built up specificly to avoid direct blockchain transaction fees.

Therefore, few professional miners as mining without sponsors or some other off-network method of income would eventually become difficult; and mostly free transactions (to consumers) because the primary burden of paying for the network would shift to the corporations that desire to get you to spend in their stores.

And, yes, that is the short version.

Oh, I doubt that.  There are not many assholes quite like me.  I havn't even put any effort into this one.


Because it's not a problem, and you don't see why.  Start with the above summary, but there is much more to it.

Of course not.  How could I?  You had not provided such a link in the post I quoted!  Do you really think that you're opinion is so highly valued that we actually read everything you write?  I still won't read it, and I still know you didn't get it, because of this statement...


Yes, I do.  Hell, I was here.


Not even close, buck.  I've had this conversation so many times, I feel like a third grade teacher ready for retirement.  You really have no idea.  Please, for the love of God, use the search function!

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but a bitcoin can, at present, be divided down to 0.00000001 of a full bitcoin.

A link to all of them.  Dude, put it in!

You didn't understand why he said that.

Here, you're the latest inspiration for this...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159349.msg1684347#msg1684347

We seriously need a stickied topic for newbies that collects all of these regularly recycled "I'm a newb and I am the first person to think of the Great Bitcoin Flaw (tm)" subjects.

So I'm starting it right here.

First off, before you post anything about the GBF (tm) that you have thought of, read the whitepaper here...

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Once you're finished, go get a coffee, use the restroom, and come back and read it again.

Then sleep overnight, and in the morning, read it again.

If, at this point, you think that you understand Bitcoin, you don't.  Read it again.

Only once you get to the point that you start to think, "WTF?  How does THAT work?!"  and "How the hell does that contribute?!" are you finally starting to 'grok' Bitcoin.

At this stage, come back to the forum and use the search function on those terms that you found.  Ask some questions.  And in about two weeks, give or take, you'll begin to have a functioning grasp of how the system actually works.  Ask more questions.

Hopefully, this process will allow you, Sir Newb, to understand why you're not the first person to think of your Great Bitcoin Flaw; why you're wrong; and perhaps even how the community has progressed past or mitigated whatever it was you were imagining is wrong.

It's also provablely false that Bitcoin isn't being used as a medium of exchange, so where does Krugman file that inconvient little fact?

No broadly useful enough, sorry.