There is a more in-depth article with a chart showing the discrepancy here:

http://www.coindesk.com/most-mt-gox-bitcoins-were-gone-by-may-2013-report-claims/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoinDesk+%28CoinDesk+-+The+Voice+of+Digital+Currency%29


Is this description really accurate? The chart displayed on the above article I posted shows that the coins were stolen (either hacked or not) in two distinct events rather than continuously over the lifetime of Mt. Gox. For example, you can see the lines diverge immediately and instantly after the 424,242 BTC transfer in June 2011 followed by a "slipping" of reserves during the first half of 2012. Then the rest of the trend seems normal, save the two events which caused the line to be much lower than it should be:

Prisoners aren't allowed to have Internet access in the United States but that doesn't preclude them from not being able to maintain blogs, Twitter accounts, or other online channels of information. Check out this blog for example which is (was?) authored by a prisoner serving life imprisonment in one of America's highest security prisons:

http://paulmodrowski.blogspot.com/2011/06/week-of-prison-food-june-25-2011.html

He writes his blog posts on paper which are then checked by authorities before being mailed to someone on the outside who uploads them online. He can also receive mail by readers of his blog too but the process is done in reverse (i.e. your comment online gets converted to a paper copy, is inspected, and then mailed via the post).


This is also possible.

Provided that the recipient has some way of receiving the bitcoins, then I would think it's easier than using cash but it also brings a lot of downsides as you rightly point out. Cash can still leave a trail which conventional tools used by the government can easily uncover. And when it comes to cybercrimes which is what the OP is about, using cash isn't really a realistic option.

For most people, in order to get cash in the first place, you need to get it from a bank or a bank's ATM, or collect it by doing business activities. This isn't a huge problem if you're dealing with hundreds or a few thousand dollars worth of cash but it becomes unrealistic when you're dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. More significantly, the IRS has been known to clamp down on businesses that deal mostly in cash and signs that the business is avoiding taxes by using cash to pay its employees can still be discovered during an audit.

Finally, the IRS also encourages people to report employers who try to avoid taxes by awarding whoever reports it with a small percentage of the seized funds:


Source: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Whistleblower-Informant-Award

With cash, this would be easy for the IRS (and by extension, other branches of the government) to achieve. With a typical Bitcoin wallet, this would be difficult. Even if you had terrible security practices in place and your transactions gave away your identity, it would still be highly difficult to track down and prosecute since conventional tools and techniques that the FBI and IRS use to detect illicit fiat transfers obviously don't work with Bitcoin. And with a properly secured and encrypted Bitcoin wallet, this sort of stuff would be impossible.

One big problem with oracles is that by their very nature, they must either be completely trusted or semi-trusted. One of the advantages of smart contracts and the blockchain concept in general is decentralization, immunity to outside attacks, and the lack of a requirement to trust third parties. By using oracles to monitor, verify, and sign claims, you're adding a certain amount of trust into the mix. Sometimes, it might not be a huge issue: e.g. an oracle that monitors the price of a certain asset on a particular exchange and uses publicly verifiable code that both parties in the contract have agreed to beforehand. But not all cases where contracts are required are so clear-cut. Many contracts in the real world rely on data that is sketchy, subjective, or open to interpretation and/or manipulation.

How will smart contracts deal with and enforce such cases?

I'm definitely not 100% sure about this but don't many altcoins also use the same genesis block as Bitcoin? I believe this was an intentional design built into many altcoins by their developers as a way of thanking Satoshi for having invented cryptocurrencies in the first place. Assuming this is true and also assuming that they don't also suffer from the same glitch that makes these coins unspendable, then having the keys to the Bitcoin genesis block would allow you to have access to the genesis blocks of many other altcoins, no?

I've dealt with MySQL databases before and sometimes they can grow to become really large. I once had a phpBB database take up 1 GB. Blockchain bloating could be a real problem. Datacoin (link) was an altcoin that served a similar function (storing raw data) and it failed for many reasons, but blockchain bloating was definitely one of them.

And what incentive would nodes have to host this database anyway?


You would need to find a way to selectively prune some data whilst retaining other types of data. Otherwise, you would have things like blog posts, comments, user accounts, etc. disappear after a certain length of time depending on how often it's pruned. This could probably have some uses but it's not really something that most people would want for their blog/forum/whatever.


I proposed a similar idea about putting forums, imageboards, textboards, BBS systems, microblogs, etc. into a blockchain here. The website-on-a-blockchain idea works best for sites which have low storage requirements and are regularly pruned.


Doesn't WordPress also support SQLite as well?

Wasn't there one theory that said Mt. Gox began operating on a fractional reserve because of the $5 million fine that they were forced to pay by the government? I think the theory stated that the fine was paid by converting BTC into fiat and when BTC prices skyrocketed, it became increasingly difficult for Mt. Gox to pay it off. Does that theory still have merit today or has it been discredited?

Also, as the article points out, it was proven on June 2011 that Mt. Gox had control of 424,242 bitcoins which was around the same amount that it was supposed to have back then. This is corroborated by the chart in that article. What isn't explained is the massive drop in BTC reserves immediately after that. If you look at the chart, the line for "actual BTC" follows the line for "expected BTC" almost perfectly except for the drop in 2011 which happened just after the 424,242 BTC transfer and a minor slipping in the first half of 2012.

That puts to rest the "slow drain" theory that the exchange constantly lost hundreds of bitcoins per day over the span of many years. If Karpeles and Mt. Gox were unaware of the event in 2011 which caused the expected BTC reserves to diverge so rapidly, then it's very much possible that the discrepancy would have gone unnoticed.

Hi hilariousandco. Apologies for not being active for the past 2 weeks. I was a bit busy since I had to move house and get all my stuff organized and taken out of storage. Can I confirm that I am still in this campaign?

Thanks.

But what about this part:


Why does coblee selling his LTC not constitute an acknowledgement that LTC is a failure and yet Satoshi selling his BTC does?

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:


Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal.

Hi, I'd like to sign up for this campaign if there are any free spots available for senior members.

Username: Bizmark13
Posts (including this one): 739
Activity: 364
Rank: Senior Member
Address: 1PFMGybSCDnoq8bHtzQD2vUfyHohsH8FF5

Thanks.

That reminds me... One thing that does kind of annoy me is that any links or pictures won't show up properly after a post is edited using that option. You have to refresh the page to see your post properly. It's not a huge deal in most cases but for posts with lots of links or images, it does get rather annoying.

Also I'm kind of surprised to see that some people haven't noticed it. It's a pretty old feature although I guess it can be hard to see especially for those with larger displays.

Actually even with free electricity, it will probably never pay for itself. You also have to take difficulty increases into account.

USB miners are unique in that the only realistic way to profit from one is to obtain one for free and mine with free electricity. And even then, it's unlikely that you will ever reach the pool's minimum payout threshold.

LOL.

Your 2.4 GHz i7 makes about 50 MH/s. That's good for a CPU but terrible compared to high-end GPUs and ASICs. In comparison, a used Block Erupter ASIC can be purchased for $5 on eBay and is capable of 333 MH/s. An Ice Fury ASIC can be purchased for $5-10 and is capable of almost 3,000 MH/s.

According to this Bitcoin mining calculator, 50 MH/s can generate 54 satoshis per day, 1,540 satoshis per month, or 18,480 satoshis per year assuming that the network difficulty stays the same. 18,480 satoshis is worth just over 4 US cents. Since difficulty tends to increase, it's far more likely that you will get less than this amount.

Your GPU fares better but even so, GPUs are obsolete when it comes to mining and Nvidia GPUs aren't really suited for Bitcoin mining anyway (although they can be useful for mining altcoins - more on that later). The GT755M is capable of ~200 MH/s. This is roughly four times the hash rate of the CPU so you will get roughly four times the coins - i.e. ~16 US cents worth of BTC per year assuming that the difficulty stays the same.

The reason for this is because of ASICs. ASICs are specialized circuits that are engineered from the ground up to perform the computations required for mining bitcoins. General purpose computing hardware such as CPUs and GPUs can't compete with ASICs. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm which has ASICs developed for it. You can't mine other SHA-256 coins like Peercoin with CPUs and GPUs either. Litecoin's scrypt algorithm also has ASICs developed for it which means that other scrypt-based coins such as Dogecoin can't be mined with CPUs and GPUs.

However, some coins use algorithms that don't have ASICs developed for it (yet). For example, you can still mine Primecoin using a CPU. For a list of coins where mining with CPU mining makes sense, see:

http://www.cpucoinlist.com/

Also, keep in mind that just because mining CPU and GPU mineable altcoins is less unprofitable compared to mining bitcoins doesn't mean that it's necessarily profitable after electricity costs are taken into account. Even if you normally keep your laptop running 24/7, the increased load on your laptop's components will increase your laptop's power consumption. Even worse, it could also stress your CPU/GPU and decrease your laptop's life expectancy.

Finally, if you do choose to mine altcoins then it doesn't mean that you have to be stuck with it. Don't like darkcoins? No problem. You can trade in your altcoins for bitcoins on any altcoin exchange that supports your altcoin. To find the most profitable altcoin for your hardware, use Coinwarz. A good exchange to trade your altcoins is Cryptsy.

Young voters may support marijuana legalization but old voters don't. And young voters will eventually turn into old voters. The people who currently make the important decisions mostly grew up in the 1940's and 1950's and came of age in the 1960's and 1970's when revolution was in the air. They smoked pot, they resisted the draft, they organized street marches, and then... they settled down and morphed into the yuppies of the 1980's. I predict that the topic of marijuana legalization is something that will be debated for a very long time. The generational divide has always existed and will always continue to exist as long as the fiery torch of adolescence continues to be passed from one generation to the next.

I posted about Storj in another thread but I'll repost it here:



He's probably saying that the variety of applications that could benefit from blockchain technology are exaggerated and that the proposed benefits don't really exist or aren't significant enough to warrant an entirely new tech. I admit he might have a bit of a point, but the examples given in the article don't qualify in my opinion. Cloud storage, smart contracts, patents, and voting are perfectly well suited applications of blockchain technology (the second one especially).


Well the site probably gets most of its money from ads so it would be a bit mean to copy and paste the whole thing even if the source was attributed.

Can you clarify this point? One of the key innovations of Bitcoin's decentralized consensus model is that it does away with the need to trust third parties in a transaction.

Is it safe to use WordPress for anything involving BTC? There was an exchange called AllCrypt that recently got hacked due to a vulnerability in the WordPress software which resulted in the website losing users' funds and being forced to shut down.

EDIT: Found the link which describes the hack in more detail:

http://www.allcrypt.com/blog/2015/03/what-happened-and-whats-going-on/

Since the OP wants a faucet that pays directly to the user's bitcoin address, I'm guessing this probably rules out scripts which use microwallet services like Coinbox.me and Bitchest.me. Instead, the OP would have to run an instance of bitcoind on a server or use Blockchain's API to process withdrawals. How would this affect the faucet's security (if at all)?

What many people here seem to be missing is that decentralization has a very real additional cost associated with it which would make it uncompetitive against centralized competitors except in very specialized applications. Money is one example where decentralization has concrete benefits over centralized solutions but there aren't that many others I can think of.

Consider YouTube as an extreme example. Could we decentralize that? Well, yes, we can create a decentralized YouTube where the blockchain consists of videos that people have uploaded but the end result would be slow, cumbersome, and above all, bloody expensive. Videos on YouTube are hosted on centralized servers. While a decentralized version would be far less prone to censorship, the fact that every single video would have to copied over and over ad infinitum would mean that the resources required to host even a small collection of videos would make it very expensive to operate. Consider the electricity and bandwidth costs involved across the whole network and you can see how expensive and horribly inefficient the whole thing would be compared to its centralized rivals.

Or if you want an actual real world example, compare Freenet with the wider non-decentralized Internet. Freenet is slow and bandwidth-intensive because websites are copied over and over again and stored on many different computers around the world. In contrast, centralized websites such as YouTube and Facebook are very fast and comparatively far more efficient. Freenet does have its advantages but the wider public likely won't care.

Obviously, Satoshi didn't wake up one morning and create the whole idea behind Bitcoin from scratch. What actually happened was a series of multiple developments which built on top of each other. Hal Finney's reusable proof of works was already quite similar to Bitcoin and that was way back in 2004. Adam Back's Hash Cash and Wei Dai's B-Money are even older (1997 and 1998, respectively) and thus more primitive but they still share many of the same characteristics with today's cryptocurrencies. It's interesting to see that the creator of Electrum also had the same ideas and it's not something that I was aware of previously but the news doesn't come as a huge surprise since the concept of decentralized money was a goal shared by many in the cypherpunk scene.

I can see that Voegtlin's proposal looks very similar to these early proposals although the requirement that the private keys of both the sender and the receiver are required for a transaction to occur is interesting. Both his proposal and Szabo's Bit Gold are vulnerable to Sybil attacks which was a flaw that Bitcoin was able to remedy by using proof-of-work as a means of consensus. The other major improvement that Bitcoin had over Bit Gold was its adjusting difficulty algorithm which allowed for fungibility of coins in spite of increasing processing power.

Finally, there isn't enough information about the "decentralized emission system" on that page to verify whether or not it's based on proof-of-work. I can't find any mention of it so I'm curious to know how he would have tackled this problem. I suppose the currency units would be "just there" and initially distributed on a pro rata basis since the presence of an issuing body would make it no longer decentralized.