To you it's real money. To me it's somethjng that's potentially valuable. But the banker wants to see more in the way of trabsacting before he considers it a "currency".

My real question is, with so many of us declaring Bitcoin to be the end of banks, what does his opinion matter? What could he or his employer do differently if they thought it was a "real" currency versus not?

I mean, I've suggested in the future that banks could offer safekeeping services in the form if BTC denominated deposit accounts for people who dint feel they're capable of securely holding their coins themselves, but that suggestion is laughed off as out of hand if not derided altogether...

So if we won't give btc too banks to hold or to lend, their primary businesses, what does their opinion matter?

I can see where he's hung up on the "general use" issue.

Just as I can't pick up a pebble and trade it among my friends and say its a currency since it's not generally accepted as such, Bitcoin as a global currency might not be there quite yet; with 7 billion and change people on the planet, less than a million people using it, it's not exactly at saturation point. That's not to say it won't be in the future, nor that bankers aren't watching it, but as far as general use, I don't think any of us can argue its reached that point yet.

What are bAnkers missing by not recognizing it yet, though?

Should they offer Btc denominated accounts, or something?

As opposed to mining farms, which are developed and owned by the destitute?

You either don't get it, or you do get it and you're trying to pull one... I think the second.

Not to mention, your a newbie... who in the world do you think will trust their coins to you? No offense...

I send you Bitcoin, and then you paypal me money?

Once you receive bitcoin, how can i force you to send via paypal?

How do i have assurance you won't later reverse it?

Why would I want to deal with any of that uncertainty, when i can go to an exchange, sell, and have next to no risk that they'll reverse the wire of my proceeds?

They could say "i bought something from the seller, but they never delivered", and with Bitcoin, it's impossible to prove otherwise - you can show the transaction on the blockchain, but you can't prove the person at the other end had control of the address that received it.

"My kid sat at my computer and made unauthorized transactions"

SO many options. The short version is: don't sell bitcoin for payments that can be reversed, at least not to people you don't know. There is zero downside for them, just upside in the form of receiving bitcoin and not losing the funds they used to buy it.

Yay! First time in all my time here that I had a post deleted... And now, I have no trust in this company.

I forget, miners being forced (if they want to remain competitive) to continually throw away old hardware and but new hardware a positive thing?

And yes, people with larger balances that they can stake will earn more than people with smaller balance, but everyone would have the opportunity to earn proportionate to their balances,, rather than the mining world which is getting more and more consolidated.

If it's just about income, people will migrate to services that share more of that income with their depositors/investors, or else be actually motivated to hold their own coins.

If it's consolidated power, such a set up would allow the community to have a say; if they saw that one exchange or wallet service was accruing too much power, it would be trivial to shift their coins elsewhere to balance things out. Far more democratic than the mining cartels were or are. Way back when, we basically had to take friedcats word that ASICminet wouldn't account for more than 30% of the network, but no way to keep them in check.


None of this sounds bad, and in fact sounds preferable. If course, there is huge vested interest that will be opposed to such an idea. Mining pool operators. Miners themselves. Who will either say if you want POS, go for a different coin, rather than try to envision a way forward fir Bitcoin itself; I still think that ASICSZ were detrimental to the community, as it drastically reduced the democracy of the ecosystem, replaced a single investment in a set of GPUS with a never ending cycle of buying newer and newer asics to what end? Security? I don't think the network is anymore secure if it requires an attacker to invest $2bn in Gpus rather than $2bn in asics

While i think this could be good news for Bitcoin, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves.

This is a great use of Bitcoin - making a payment that is normally a one-way payment; people don't chargeback their tax payments, and only the absolute rarest will put a stop payment on a check. Bitcoin fits in perfectly for that. More and more, tax payments are e-Payments, and with each payment going to a unique address, verifying that a payment was received on such and such a date would be trivial.

It doesn't signal that e-commerce via Bitcoin is ready or feasible for the masses. Nor do I think that this move would actually spur additional demand for bitcoin - I don't think that people will go buy bitcoin just to pay their taxes with.

Sure, it'll give Bitcoin additional "legitimacy" in our eyes, but to the public, the reporting is already neutral to positive, I would say... compared to a couple years back, no one is implying that people investing or speculating with Bitcoin are criminals. The thing holding people back from bitcoin isn't a question of what the government thinks, more it's the lack of places to spend it (yes, this is one new venue), uncertainty about the currency and how it works, and the lack of userfriendliness...

SO even if both states adopt bitcoin for tax payments, I don't think the demand will necessarily increase nor will the price get much upward pressure.

That's just my thought, though...

So I can't just backup my datafilee and move them to a new computer?!

IF an attacker is in the position of being able to copy the wallet.dat, they're also in a position to do nearly anything else, key logger, etc, and will therefore be able to walk away with those coins anyways...

Funny... I sold coins on eBay too, and within 6 months of my sales, nearly every transaction was charged back.

No, I don't think that it's paypal buyers being dishonest, i think that people with stolen PP credentials were scanning eBay looking for suckers selling Bitcoins. Bid on auction, send PP payment of funds that aren't theirs, receive Bitcoin and go on your way... Then a month or two later when someone opens up their CC statement, they say "i didn't order that, that wasn't me", and call either their CC or PP, and complain.... And as a seller of "digital goods", there is zero way that you can prove that the coins you sent were received by the CC owner... You can show a transaction on the blockchain, you can show the eBay messaging, but at the end, you have no legs to stand on...

Somehow, recalling my own experience, I'm not believing you. EXCEPT, if you were selling for 10 or 20 a piece, you were probably a year before me, so maybe its' just that scammers hadn't picked up on Bitcoin quite yet... That's the only thing I can think of, tbh.

Every price level on the way down, people say "once bitcoin goes through that level, it will trigger buying which will stabilize the price". AT some point, the people doing the buying will be all out of dry powder...

Chomsky has a great lecture, I only wish thT I could remember which it is. But his point is that corporations are uninfluencable by the non-monied, whereas the government and public institutions are. We might not be happy with our government, but the behaviors of corporations have nothing else to keep them in check but public institutions. Take away that bastion, and I think history already shows that we would suffer far more than we do today 

Yes, the government isn't perfecf.

Yes, it is in desperate need of change.

No, the answer isn't for there to be no government at all. Well maybe in a utopia type of reality it would be but we're not there.

That's specifically why I suggested that this should be separate from the Blockchain... a medchain instead;

it won't have the hashing power of the bitcoin network behind it, but I suspect that that much power isn't necessary in a closed system (i.e., the general public won't/shouldn't be allowed access to a system like this in any meaningful way - you don't want hackers wiping things out, if they were able to 51% it, nor do you want patient information getting disclosed, etc).

Interoperability could also be an issue, but one could describe system and access requirements for participants - if a drs office wants to participate, store patient files (WITH patient approval), they could, but they would need to use the "approved" client software, most likely from approved locations.

Storing data is one thing.

Securing it with a block chain is another.

Access control - that's the biggie; you don't want unauthorized people to gain access to either the whole system or to individual records within the system. Encryption would need to be centric - if someone did get their hands on the medchain, you don't want them being able to decipher everyones details. Per users access would need to be grantable and revocable. And again, the sheer data requirements would be astronomical for each participating physician/hospital.... If everything was on one chain.

Next though - each client gets their own blockchain.

Lowers the data requirements.

But then the real question would be, how worried are we about peoples files or histories being altered after the fact? Is a blockchain even necessary, as opposed to journalling or revision control?

I think I got ahead of myself and should shut up.

sorry!

I've been wondering that; I know I took a hiatus and my account stopped growing for a bit, but how can I guesstimate when I'll achieve the next "level up?"  Any ideas?

I think hippa is a BIG concern, and I don't think that a system tracking treatments for multiple patients should be accessible (writable) by patients. I also don't know if it's appropriate to track all that sort of stuff on bitcoins blockchain, both from privacy and for the health of Bitcoin itself; why not devise "medchain", a block chain built from the ground up for storing an unalterable record of patient treatments, rather than build it into or off of the main block chain?

Why are you so eager to part with your bitcoins?

I can predict your end result:

You sell all the coins you have for sale collect via PayPal, and the 3-6 months later all your sales are charged back.

I'm trying to figure out your end game, but I won't post my speculations.

Yea. Wee still passing the buck, though. "Developed weren't strungent". YaDa yada yada. Point being that random numbers are only as random as the computer has random inputs; virtual machines are terrible entropy wise.

Yes, implemented correctly, Bitcoin is very strong. But an attaxker wnt attack the strongest point, they'll attack the weakest; I'd wager that any implementation running on a VM is going to have a lot more potential vulnerabilities, whether it's memory dumps or recreating the pool of entropy sources in order to "back into" the private keys.

That goes for services running in VM's, VMs that people create as pseudo cold storage devices or even (and ill have to read up more) keys generated on Tails live Cd's now that electrum is included.

It's easy to look at the reference white papers and say "implemented correctly, Bitcoin is as close to 100% secure as is possible", but know that no attacker will attack the strongest point. We need to review examine and discuss all of the weakest links and see how vulnerable those point are, and bring those to peoples attention so they know to avoid those.

The android RNG flaw for example; everyone assumed that Googke wouldn't release shoddy code like that, so android was trusted, people only looked above that later, it was inly after a lot of coins went missing that people realized that the platform itself was the problem.

High end retailers, jewelers and the like, might refuse cash for numerous reasons - not having $20 or $50,000 cash on hand after concluding a sale could be a good decision both to deter robbery, or, more likely, embezzlement. Plus, it's not just banks that are subject to currency transaction reporting requirements- any business thT accepts over $10k in a single or related transaction is supposed to fill out paperwork to report it. And given that most of their customers probably want to charge the purchase to their Amex, taking the next step and saying "we don't accept cash" is a logical next step. Certainly not for all retailers, but high end ones, yes.