This forum moves at a snail's pace and it pains me. 3 days to come to an agreement over 50btc. What the shit. Seriously, is this normal? Do you make decisions this slow in the real world? Why does this move at such a snail's pace? The dweebs usually make decisions faster than this in more real-time places. I imagine for every post someone has here on this forum, it means they missed out on a real good trading opportunity elsewhere.

I'm waiting on confirmations, Maged. I had no idea you guys would pounce on an unknown third party like that, I thought I was doing good by not escrowing with anyone I have any affiliation with at all, but no, that's just not quite good enough for you, you need someone with "forum reputation". Last time I checked it took 1 username, and one password to exploit an identity here.  I pick a random guy from IRC with several months of good trades to steward what amounts to a single bitcoin block reward for us and you say it seems sketchy. I say troll thread is obvious, here's my bitcoins anyways, suckers.

FWIW the authentication on IRC is most certainly 2-factor ( nickserv and GPG/bitcoin authentication ). We dweebs like knowing who we are dealing with. You guys are all socks AFAIK with nothing to lose, there's no way to establish actual trust here on this forum, regardless of what you might think. The only way I can imagine actual trust being established is to gpg-sign every freaking post. This forum does not prove your identity and has no way of doing so.

Uh.. no, it isn't and no, you're not.

ASIC mining will make it much, much tougher for an entity to borrow a bunch of computing power to attack bitcoin.

For instance, lets suppose BFL sells just $5 million dollars worth of their "coffee warmers". (a highly conservative number that'd probably leave them bankrupt after they paid for the ASIC development costs) That's about 33 thousand coffee warmers, or 234TH/sec. Suppose the attacker decided to requisition a whole bunch of computers to attack Bitcoin, for instance by asking Amazon or Google "nicely" One 4-way Opteron CPU can do about 115MH/s, so for your 51% attack you'll need about 1 million CPU's. If you're renting from Amazon, that's costing you something like a million dollars an hour, assuming you could even get them to let you rent that much computing power. The capital cost of all that computing power is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, heck, easily a billion dollars with server farm overhead.

Finding a whole bunch of GPU's is actually rather tough, as most GPU farms are for scientific computing and use floating-point optimized GPU's that aren't very good at computing hashes.

A final possibility is borrowing an FPGA farm. We could make the rough assumption that the value of the farm's FPGAs will have the same $/Hash ratio as BFL's currently shipping product. So that's 117TH/sec / 0.8GHash/Single * $600/Single = $87.7 Million dollars worth of FPGAs. Intel might have that kind of FPGA farm available - they're used for chip verification - but again, renting it won't be cheap. Also, it looks like BFL is getting it's FPGAs at pretty cheap prices - a $600 single has $2000 worth of FPGAs in it - so with wholesale discounts we still might need to triple or quadruple that $87 million.

With ASIC mining, the cheapest way to computationally attack Bitcoin is probably by doing a run of your own ASICs, and it's not something you can do quickly. All that effort and money just so you can find out the myriad ways that the devs can stop 51% attacks using techniques possible now that Bitcoin is widely established.


For instance, lets suppose the NSA decides to attack Bitcoin. They could probably round up the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing power to make it happen, although it'd be a big hit to their black budget. Chances are within a few hours to days the devs will respond with something like a "coin-age" rule and ask everyone to upgrade. Now blocks get rejected, and nodes blacklisted, if they try to pass blocks into the network that don't meet coin age requirements. Transactions start flowing again, although the price on Mt. Gox has dropped severely, lets say 50%. At the same time the "known-legit" mining pools are also taking steps to protect their investment, by temporarily centralizing a bit, and blocking connections to nodes that aren't on a whitelist; the "most-difficult-block-wins" rule has been temporarily suspended. Note that at this point it's still not possible for anyone to steal coins, and not much more possible to do double spends.

Now, one thing the NSA could do is buy a bunch of coins so their blocks get accepted again. The problem is, now they're basically giving people a way to get out of Bitcoin, and boosting the price on the exchanges, restoring confidence. Exactly what they don't want! If they do nothing, they're still burning at least hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, while the network figures out ways to mitigate the damage.

Honestly, ordering some assassinations on the guys running major exchanges sounds a lot cheaper...

And I realize our developers being assassinated is not realistic, but then again I really really really don't want them all on the same plane on any business trips...  

Why should have anybody bought SC in the first place?
There's a sucker born every minute.

Edit: Are there any exchanges left where SC is traded or was btc-e the last one?

Link?

Well it is the FIRST known public bitcoin contract. Just chill man...we're making history! 

after those who sold into the rally get over their initial euphoria and get a strong visceral sensation
that the dollar ain't what it used to be.

I doubt that there will be much panic buying because of reward halfing.

What counts is what the ASICS owners do with their coins.

Give people some kind of assurance that there isn't a way that the operator of the currency can just start minting bitcoins at will.  It's probably irrelevant at the moment - but imagine if BC$ was as popular as e-gold in its heyday - the owner, if he were less than honest, could essentially be an Internet millionaire spending his own currency at will around the interwebs.   In theory it's possible with any digital currency - but at least, the theory behind the digital gold currencies is that if all else fails, you can call them up and redeem physical gold (I'm referring to c-gold, e-gold, Pecunix, GoldMoney, and probably many others) so you have something 'tangible' as backup.  What is BC backed by?  Just saying, these might be things that a skeptic will ask himself before wanting to use this currency.