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John, I agree with most of your points. The only point I would question is if Bitcoin is truly a zero-sum game. While it does appear that way, I think the aspect of mining or creating ("minting") bitcoins means it is not a zero-sum game. It will be once all Bitcoins are mined, but not in the meantime.
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Send BC and nothing arrives? That would mean either a severe bug in the code, or your pc has been infected with some malware that changes the destination to the hackers address.
Anyway, you can see where your money went with blockexplorer.
The OP is talking about making purchases with bitcoin. For example, I sell you a watch for 20 BTC's. You send me 20 BTC's. I don't ship your watch. Since I'm anonymous, what recourse do you have? Had we made the same transaction under a credit card or paypal, you could file a dispute and likely get your money (or in this case BTC's) back. |
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Do you know what happens when they said the equivalent of TBA. It became a flame fest for them to update every hour. Now if your going to bug them to give you update all they damn time it's very hard to make accurate estimates. Fuck seriously 24 hours? People waited like 13 years for Starcraft 2 through numbers of delays.
At least they update you that they are working on the claim. Wow. There's still some MtGox apologists out there. I thought all you Branch Davidians died in the fire. Good to see some of you got out. |
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Amateurs. How is that they only realized this NOW 20 minutes before launch.
It's the right call, I'll give them that, but to push to the very edge like this . . . these guys have neither discipline nor a fair take on that thing we call reality.
Yeah, 2 guys should be PLENTY to manually activate 60,000 accounts in 2 days lol. You can always jump over to tradehill, I think they have double the workers. I mean if you're comfortable giving your money to four strangers hiding behind a proxy..... Man all these exchanges are such big jokes. |
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The OP has a very valid argument. It's truly sad to see that any perceived negative comments towards BTC is immediately met with hostility (by some). Maybe, just maybe, take an objective view and see that he might have a point. $50 million a year. Where is all this liquidity going to be injected from? And where are all these funds going to trade? On these exchanges with a $1,000 cap? ROFL.
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Personally, I do not see Bitcoins as a stable store of value, and as soon as I can earn enough, I plan to sell them on the exchanges. That's how bubbles work, try to ride the lightning but jump off before you're left holding the bag. It's like a giant game of hot potato. Only with real money at stake. |
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There are many differences between gold and BTC's as have been mentioned. One that seems to have eluded people is that gold is finite while BTC's are not. Let me clarify, Bitcoins ARE finite but everything about this P2P currency is open source. The model is easy to replicate. Show me some sort of patent that protects Bitcoin from copycats. If BTC become successful, what's stopping someone from making Bitcoinz, E-dollarz, P2Pcoins, etc. etc.
Nothing.
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Markets are very irrational in the short term. Due to recent events my guess would be somewhere around $8 by August. Long-term I think BTC's will be near worthless.
I'll probably be labled a troll but whatever. I like the idea and the basic premise of bitcoins but the fact is it's an easily replicable model. I think this is the first incarnation of what will eventually be a feasible decentralized currency. Bitcoin is the guinea pig and we are learning a lot through this experiment. The analogy used in another thread was the success of Facebook. I don't see Bitcoin as Facebook but one of it's predecessors. Bitcoin is probably something similar to asian avenue. Next will come version 2 (Myspace). And finally the one that really takes off (Facebook).
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I find it funny too that the last trade is 15.40 on Tradehill, yet everyone thinks it is going to zero...
Oh, about volume, since it isn't the same volume as Mt.Gox, I guess it would be easier to crush to zero, but jeeze, just doesn't seem to be happening.
It's okay, we'll wait while all the CRASH CRASH CRASH fanatics readjust their theories... comon boys, if it is so easy - why am I not seeing it trade at 1? 0.50? 0.01? I don't think BTC's will go to zero over this but you can't really make an assessment while the largest exchange is in a freeze. You have thousands of users with cash and BTC's that they have no access to. You can't trade what you don't have. |
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Do your sources hand out tin foil hats along with this sort of information? Just curious.
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Assuming this is legit, I'm really sorry for your loss. security problems are going to be the end of bitcoin. I agree. |
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Only difference is that this religion will actually save lives when the world's fiat currencies start collapsing whereas others will tell them to pray for a change. How will bitcoins save you? So let me get this straight, the fiat currencies collapse essentially causing mass panic and destruction but 1) you have electricity, 2) a working internet and 3) someone willing to exchange tangible goods for survival for your bits of code. Hookay. Goodluck with that. |
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Do you have any idea of the maximum limit to the difficulty increases? No idea. Do you? There is no problem here, unless the upper limit of the difficulty increases can be realistically attained. Exactly, which is why I brought up the subject. If the maximum limit cannot be obtained, then there is no problem. However, IF the maximum limit can be obtained then we have a pretty big problem. I think those taking offense are assuming that I'm making some sort of statement. I'm not. I'm just trying to think of potential scenarios/pitfalls and see if people can shoot holes through them. My basic concern is this, if computing power can grow exponentially, how can the developers of Bitcoin account for this over the long-term (read: decades). Unless they have a crystal ball, I don't see how that's possible. Remember, the BTC model is already in place, they can't go back and modify it at some point in the future to account for unforseen events. |
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The data is at top500.org if you need me to quote it. Thanks for the link. So if I'm reading the data correctly, in November 2010 the Chinese Tianhe-1A was the #1 supercomputer at 2.57 petaflop/s. Roughly six months later the K Computer was over 3 times faster at 8 petaflop/s. With that type of growth rate, it's still hard for me to wrap my mind around how a technology created now (fluid or not) can account for the ever increasing power of technology. In the short-term (which we are in) sure. But out a couple of decades? |
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Once we hit that vertical increase, the 10-minute interval assumption goes right out the window. Thoughts? the interval assumption is not really an assumption - it is the way the software is designed to work through difficulty increases. over a long period of time the 10-minute/block value should hold up to pretty much any technology advance. It's designed to increase difficulty but isn't it at a static rate? What I'm trying to figure out is if mining difficulty increases at a static rate but technology increases at an exponential rate, wouldn't there be a point where technology surpasses? Isn't that basically inevitable? |
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its not encryption, its called hashing. get your terms right before you post.
Fine hashing. Are you now going to contribute anything or are we going to continue to play semantics? I'm pretty sure you understood the premise of my question. |
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Transistor density doubles roughly every two years, as Moore's law attests. Information technology therefore advances exponentially.
Some are of the opinion that mining will become increasingly more difficult thus limiting the supply of BTC entering the market. While this may be true, short-term, it does not account for the exponential increase in technology. If Moore's law is correct, wouldn't it be rather easy for technology to keep up with the ever increasing mining difficulty?
One could possibly even argue that at some point, technology will surpass and SHA-256 may be cracked all at once resulting in a flood of the remaining 21 million BTC's in a very short period of time. Mathematical weaknesses in SHA-1 were found back in 2005, who's to say another breach in the current encryption will not happen? The 2033 target date assumes perfect intervals. Moore's law seem to contradict this expected curve.
Remember, we're talking about exponential growth. If you haven't seen a graph of exponential growth, think of a hockey stick. A long near horizontal line followed by a very rapid vertical increase. Once we hit that vertical increase, the 10-minute interval assumption goes right out the window. Thoughts?
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Trolls, trolls, trolls. Run. Hide your children, trolls.
Ostrich, Ostrich, bury your head in the sand, Ostrich, nothing is wrong lalalala. |
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Did something break? lol. I think the better question might be, is anything still working?  |
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The window for gaining public acceptance was destroyed by the fiasco we are witnessing. No regular person being introduced to Bitcoin by an article on its use to sell hardcore narcotics, and now, exposure about its complete crash within minutes and the resulting scandal regarding propriety at the largest exchange through which it was traded, is going to touch it with a 10-foot pole. Cry all you want, mainstream adotion - with all the funds it could inject into the BTC economy - is a necessity for its success. That window was not only closed, but slammed shut, boarded up and graffiti-covered by the insanity unfolding over the last three days.
Given the open-source nature of the existing infrastructure, any serious pioneer of digital currency would just run a do-over with different branding altogether and, learning from the mistakes of Bitcoin, shore up the obvious security-holes immensely. Call it e-bill, iDollars, or whatever you want. Just not the trainwreck known as "Bitcoins". Wow. Someone actually gets it. Could not have said it better myself. |
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