my password was shorter than 9 characters. but I tried again with a longer version and it did the same thing. I think it maybe because my password had a '#' in it? I tried a different one and it worked.

I get " there was some sort of problem. Try again." when I try to register.
Are these European or American style options?

nice.
You should really switch it so the prices are quoted in USD rather than BTC since that is what everyone is used to thinking in. It is a bit annoying to have to go 1/x on everything.

Yes you can withdraw EUR from mtgox.

oh just like how no social network could possibly overtake friendster.
or no payment method could overtake paypal.
I see your point.

yeah this happens with stock all the time people don't get confused. Best make the change now. Prices will always be quoted in whatever we call the smaller denomination. Might as well make that thing be bitcoin. It will be more confusing if there is this extra UBC thing floating around. People will constantly ask "well what is a bitcoin then?" "oh that isn't used anymore" huh?

Cusipzzz: I'm pretty sure he means either use UBC or change how many bitcoins 1 BTC equals. So there would be no such thing as UBC.

trippy: If you follow the thread you see that in bitcoin you don't need to make 50% of the bitcoin users dishonest. There are maybe 3 people that need to colude to break bitcoin or more likely 1 government.
In this proposal you could pick 100 or 1000 random forum users and you would be *way* safer. If you bothered to be more discriminating and actually picked people you knew you would be even safer still.

Also there isn't a way for someone to figure out who you have chosen to trust. (Trust is the wrong word. These are people you don't think are working together. You can actually choose all people taht you know are corrupt as long as they aren't colluding)

Yeah this is the best idea I think. No real need to make up a new name. Just change the display in the client.

creighto: Even if you are correct that there is some hidden pool of mining waiting to be put online it doesn't change my original point that bitcoin as it is now depends on everyone trusting a few random people. We are implicitly trusting a couple large miners and a couple pools and your secret hasher.
My argument is that we might as well make this trust explicit. It will be much more efficient, and way more secure.

mtgox.com

kjj:
So let's assume an attacker controls 60% of the network.
He makes a big transaction that is sent to the whole network.
He stops generating blocks on the legit network.
He now starts generating a new chain without the large transaction but not sending it to the rest of the network.
His fake chain will eventually grow longer than the real chain.
At some point of his choosing he publishes his longer chain to the real network.
The fake chain is now accepted as real since it is longer.


This doesn't help. It is trivial to just send from a new peer.

Mike Hearn:
If you want to become a merchant yes you should enter in some nodes that you trust. If you are just a random person checking out the software then there is some bootstrapping process (like there is for bitcoin) that gets you connected to the network. At that point everyone you connect to will tell you the hash of the current ledger. If you notice a discrepancy then yes you will have to jump through some hoops. Come to the forum and ask for a list of trusted nodes or something. But again this level of trust is very low. You could pick 100 random forum users and be fine.

You don't have to trust a particular miner but you do have to trust that artforz and deepbit aren't conspiring. Which is analogous to having to trust that more than 50 of the random forum users you picked to trust aren't working together.

kjj: I don't think so. You can steal the vast majority of blocks from then on by storing up blocks you generate and release them only when someone else also solves one. Not sure if you consider that meaningful or not. (There was some long ago thread about this that I can't find now) You could double spend by getting one block ahead of the good network and then just stay ahead until you are ready to drop your one block longer chain.

Mike Hearn:
A new person could run the client fine. You don't have to enter in anyone that you trust to use it. You only need trust to resolve issues when there are two competing ledgers. And that should be a very rare event.

Yeah I know but that isn't actually how it turned out. Like I mention above we actually are trusting the big miners and also trusting that some government or corporation doesn't stick in X million of hashing power and compromise the network. I feel like this system is actually more secure.

I actually don't think it has different trade offs. Is there some other advantage to the current bitcoin that I'm missing?

goatpig:
I think you aren't exactly understanding the proposal.
You have a list of nodes that you trust. These guys are the only ones who's vote you listen to. The idea is that if there are enough people you trust online it can't be compromised. A good amount of nodes you trust will be online at any given time. So they will see first hand if transactions should be added to the ledger or not. You are not relying on who they are trusting in turn if that is what your issue is.

People publish their node's public key you can add it to your client if you want. There are enough people even on this forum I would add. Keep in mind that you don't really have to trust them. You just have to trust that >50% of them wont be working together for some nefarious purpose.

This scenario wouldn't be two competing ledgers it would be a ledger that is trusted by 99% of the legit nodes and a ledger held by a million fake nodes that no one trusts. You aren't the only one that wouldn't believe their BS ledger. No one legit would. So they aren't really a "part of the network."

It is the same thing going on right now with bitcoin we are all implicitly saying we trust deepbit, artforz etc.
In the new system you would just add them to the your list of trusted nodes if you wanted.

If you still don't see how it would work could you please describe a specific attack that would compromise it?


BitterTea:
 Yeah I have a method but I want to make sure there are no holes in this first.

goatpig: This isn't one node one vote. You only trust the nodes you trust. If someone sets up a million nodes that all trust each other you don't really care.

You can't change the ledger in any illegitimate way without the current pool of trusted nodes noticing and rejecting your change.

BitterTea: It also doesn't mater how energy efficient the card is. They will just use more cards to mine then.

I would argue that it will be even more consolidated. There will just be a few large mining operations and some big pools. This makes the issue of trust even worse.

Just because it is less wasteful than another wasteful thing doesn't make it not wasteful. You are basically saying: "The model-T is much faster than the horse. There can't be anything faster!"

So I've been thinking...
 bitcoin mining seems like such an unfortunate side effect of the system since it is so wasteful. It will be a bit obscene how much will be spent mining if the network ever gets large. It would be cool to come up with a bitcoin that doesn't need miners.

There are several issues but I’ll ignore how coins are distributed and focus on the central problem of creating some way to trust the central ledger*.
Currently this is what mining solves. The network trusts the ledger with the most mining done on it. So now to trust bitcoin you have to trust that >50% of the current mining power is "good". And actually the way the network has evolved with pools we are actually trusting that every large pool operator is “good” since even if the pool isn’t over 50% the operator could have non-pool mining going on bringing the total over 50% or two pools could collude to defraud the network etc. Also if say some government decides to wreck the network it wouldn’t be that expensive for them to do so. (This is all discussed in other threads so no need to go into this here) My point is that although the current network uses mining as a way to solve the trust issue it really doesn’t since you still must trust the large pool operators.

My idea is to make this issue of trust explicit.

Let’s say a node has a public key that the client generates for them. There is no connection between this key and a wallet key. It just allows you to be sure you are talking to the node you think you are.

So when you run a node you choose which other nodes you trust. So you could say “I trust my 3 friends’ nodes, Gavin’s node, and these 5 businesses’ nodes.” This trust just means that you believe these people will never participate in a double spend attack or otherwise manipulate the ledger. 
The ledger would basically be like the current bitcoin block chain but it would also have a list of what nodes believe the current ledger to be valid. <hash of current ledger signed by node’s public key> (This list doesn’t have to be complete. Nodes can just collect this list as needed. They could even just ask the nodes they trust if they think the current ledger is valid since those are the only ones they care about)

Transactions are still sent to all nodes connected to the network. There would be a network wide timestamp. Transactions would only be accepted if they were within a certain time period of the network timestamp. So you would need to wait maybe 10min before you could fully trust a given transaction. After this waiting period you could be sure those coins weren’t double spent.

If a node ever encounters two conflicting ledgers it would just go with the one that was validated by more nodes that it trusts.

So there should always be a consensus among the trusted members of the network.

There would be a way to look up particular nodes in the network and ask them questions. (I’m imagining this whole thing running on Kademlia, a DHT)

So obviously this is still vague because I haven't had time to work out all the details. I’m hoping someone else will be inspired.

ok rip into it!

*(I guess you could try to come up a way to get rid of the central ledger but I have a feeling that might not be possible)

I'm all for it.
I miss the days of throwing around huge amounts of bitcoins. This will bring that feeling back. 
And come on UBC/USD parity...