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I think it is more like stealing Euros or Yens in America. It's not the officially recognized currency, businesses are not forced by law to accept them. But does it make stealing them irrelevant? Of course not!
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he's right and you all are too invested in this stuff to believe it
I am not. I am not here for the money. I am here for the fun! |
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What if you don't believe in mind body dualism?
It could be something like "the software"? Is music more than the configuration of sound waves? Is colors more than the configuration of electromagnetic waves? Why does the soul have to be more than the configuration of the body/the brain? "Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot" ("Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.") |
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Windows is safe, it's the people that use it that often are idiots
Yes, as I said, it is not easy to do things safely with it. If you shut it down, nobody will break in! But setups very a lot in how easy it is to get some security. Same is true for other systems, with trash I was also referring to hardware. Computers are full of crypto to prevent you from copying a DVD, just imagine you would have control of it! |
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It's not easy to do anything safely with most of the trash computers that people sell you (especially with Windows).
Fees don't have to rise, because the number of blocks per hour will be constant. As the number transactions goes up, the reward for generating blocks goes up as well -- without per-transaction fee going up.
And when bitcoin spreads around, it will go up way faster than the fixed mining reward gets down.
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I am wondering how that is anything other but the most obvious thing I've ever seen. |
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I agree with the original poster. I see the price slowly dropping off. Interest will soon get lower as mining is just not worth it.
Speculators will soon leave when they see there will be no fast easy cash to make with bitcoin.
If the OP was right, bitcoin would be a ponzi scheme by definition. But it isn't. It's a logical fallacy. New people made bitcoin value rise, but lack of new people does not need to make it decrease. To get bitcoin have value, businesses must be started. |
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Proven by history? Take a logics class!
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It bothers me, but that has nothing to do with bitcoin.
There still has to be an exchange, even if the money exchange is easy. Drugs must be transported somehow, terrorism is not done by a monetary transaction either.
And child porn? I don't believe that there actually is a market. I think there are only communities of child porn consumers sharing their files. How would you stop them from doing that by making payments harder?
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If you control 52% of the network, you must use one of your blocks to negate a legitimate block 48% of the time. So 48% of the network is producing legitimate blocks, 48% of the network is negating those blocks, and only 4% is left producing new blocks. The network would only produce 5.76 blocks per day.
So you are essencially admitting that such an attack would render the system useless, as long as the attack is sustained. Only until difficulty is recalculated. |
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To reverse a 1000 blocks and to catch up then to make the longest block chain takes way more than 50 %, if you want to get it done in a decade.
Not really. With 67%, you can reverse 1000 past blocks in a week. Reversing 1000 future blocks takes a week with 52%.
You can't do it faster, because the difficulty will increase. If you generate a lot more than 6 blocks an hour nobody would accept that chain because the difficulty does not match.Forget that, of course you can generate as fast as you like blocks with timestamps from the past. |
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To reverse a 1000 blocks and to catch up then to make the longest block chain takes way more than 50 %, if you want to get it done in a decade.
If you have more than the rest of the network combined (so more than 50% of total power including you), you can grow the alternative chain indefinitely as long as you are ahead. If you have 1% more than the network, you will be 1.44 block ahead per day. If you have 10% more, you will have 14.4 blocks per day. If you have twice the current Bitcoin network, you will reverse 1000 blocks in less than a week. If you want to do as much of a mess, grow your chain, and wait until the rest of the network caches up with the speed. And then release the alternative chain. If you want to do that in secret, you will have your own difficulty, which means that the others are twice as fast. If you don't do that in secret, and you reject blocks of others, they will discover you very early. |
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Do you have any good anti-atheist books you want to recommend?
The best book I've read on the subject was given to me by a bi-polar friend of mine. I respect her opinion because she has actually experienced 'god' first hand and can not deny the experience, even though she is able to rationally discuss her condition, etc (as an example, I accompanied her to report a 'vision' to the arch bishop of the Vatican in Jerusalem). The Spiritual Brain A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul By Mario Beauregard, Denyse O'Leary It starts with the fascinating thesis that "a brain is an organ which connects a mind to the rest of the universe". The research evidence was unconvincing and ultimately the author started to get annoying in his boxing these and those 'types of thinkers'. Nobody doubts that the soul exists, the question is what the soul is. |
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Fees don't need to get higher. As the number of transactions gets higher, the amount of fees for a block goes up automatically.
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I agree. For one thing it relies on encryption and a public log. Encryption can be broken and with bitcoins as is, you can't force new encryption standards on old bitcoins. As for the public log, if someone branches from it or introduces their own log then we loose credibility of the currency.
Bitcoins is a good proof of concept, but I think the concept will be taken over and improved upon by companies who don't respect the same level of anonymity that Bitcoins and Tor promote.
Good luck breaking SHA 256  SHA256 is irrelevant in that context. Good luck breaking ECDSA. |
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Personally I mostly fear the following scenario, which anyone can do at home (if he has a billion dollars lying around):
1. Short lots of bitcoins.
2. Build a huge mining cluster and completely mess up the block chain.
3. Watch prices drop as panic ensues.
4. Profit.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You have to explain what you mean by 2. For starters, he can create a new branch with none of the transactions from the last 1000 blocks. Or he can bypass X% of blocks as per your original post, which is not very dangerous for merchants but will piss off miners who wish to be rewarded for the blocks they find. And so on, he can get creative. It can be done but it require 1)a backup of the old blockchain 2)enough miners that know what to do
Bitcoin never deletes blocks, so everyone will still have copies. The pools can be updated in no time, and they represent almost all of the network's hashing power. Assuming a consensus can be reached not only about which chain is the real one, but also that discarding the computationally longest chain in some circumstances is desirable. To reverse a 1000 blocks and to catch up then to make the longest block chain takes way more than 50 %, if you want to get it done in a decade. |
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If you say you are an agnostic, you say you don't know. If you don't know it, you don't believe it. If you don't believe it, you don't believe it. So you're an atheist. Have the balls to say so!
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Personally I mostly fear the following scenario, which anyone can do at home (if he has a billion dollars lying around):
1. Short lots of bitcoins.
2. Build a huge mining cluster and completely mess up the block chain.
3. Watch prices drop as panic ensues.
4. Profit.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You have to explain what you mean by 2. |
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When if an attacker has more than 50 % of ressources And what if the Earth explodes ? And what if the aliens invade ? And what if I am my own grandfather ? And what if we're all living in a computer-generated virtual reality while being used as thermal-electrical generators (which would be extremely stupid because humans are extremely unefficient as powerplants but what if) ? ... (continue as you wish into infinity, with absolutely no purpose) - you don't understand, what the word "if" is for
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How realistic(practical) this attack is ?
Very doable if you can afford to spend 10/15 millions of $ Any rich guy could happily do it without problems... But due to Sathoshi's genius clever design, would-be-attackers are instead incentivised to use their resources as legit miners instead, thus increasing the strength of the main block chain. Yes, private attackers could be persuaded by the reward for honest mining. But banks and governments who are willing to invest to just shut down bitcoin are still a danger we should be aware of. I don't see any chance for them to get sabotage done, and it will get harder as bitcoin gets more users and miners. But we should always have the possibility of attackers in mind, who don't care about money but about hurting bitcoin. |
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