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Is there any reason to use both? Is there any advantage in proof-of-work over consensus?

Hi guys

Is USA debt repayable? Or are governments just hiding the truth - that infact western governments can never repay their debts, and that eventually sovereign bonds will collapse.

Does anyone actually have an answer to this? Is USA government heading down a road of responsible payback of its debt, or a road of full-on Keynesianism that will eventually lead to financial catastrophe.

I know that it would be in government's interest to hide the fact that debt was , at current economic growth rates , unrepayable. But I just want to know the truth. Lets assume USA economy continues to grow at current rate and deficit continues to grow/shrink at current rate. Where are we in 10 years? Is the debt repaid, halved or has it grown more?

Side question - If the debt is repayable, panic over. If it's not, how long will it take for markets to reflect this. Also - If anyone has some numbers, all the better.

Cheers

 

Ok, let's clarify one thing.

This claim that getting a miner having 10% of the hashing capacity to be able to reject transactions is referring only to being able to get six blocks in a row.    This is no different than coin flip trials ... yes eventually you will get six tails in a row.  Eventually you will get sixteen tails in a row.    Eventually you will get six thousand tails in a row (though chances are none of us would live long enough to see it happen).

Now, because there is a financial penalty for each failed attempt (as you are using expensive hardware and consuming elecricity, but not earning any bitcoins on the failed attempts) then there is less and less chances that you will make this attempt.  The logic is, if you have 10% of mining capacity you might as well mine and earn 10% of the bitcoins issued.

Next, let's say that someone does take their million dollars worth of ASICs and do this to prove a point.  OK, so they try for an entire month and do actually get six blocks in a row.   They won't get seven though.  Not with only 10%.  So at best, this attack will cause double spending to occur for transactions in the first block for each side of the blockchain fork.     But the attacker is going for an entire month of trials, not knowing which block will be the one that the attacker follows by mining five more in succession.  

So sure, you might get six blocks in a row.  But you aren't going to be causing much financial harm as a result.  Every exchange has AML policies requiring identity for any significant amounts of funds (e.g., amounts over $1K USD per day withdrawal).   You might be able to get a withdrawal out.  It won't be a significant amount though.

So yes, an evil miner with 51% attack with 51% of the hashing power would be terrible for bitcoin.  

But an evil miner with 10% of the hashing power and a good string of luck would simply be providing a learning lesson (e.g., for an exchange/E-Wallet provider to start requiring more than six confirmations for larger transfer amounts ...  something one might realize might have already been put in-place. if you have your ear to the ground.)

Ripple doesn't look like scam, too much effort put into it by quite a reputable community members, they have official company registered to do it, and the idea is very promising.

It's great that more people will understand nature of money they use everyday (most of them are in fact IOUs).

So we have potentially decentralized alternative to the current financial system (IOUs and XRPs are alternatives for fiat money, BTCs - alternative for gold).

I don't quite understand how the Ripple protocol works though, how scalable, secure and reliable it is.

I am curious if there is any advantage of Proof-of-work vs Consensus. Is it possible for Bitcoin to adapt "consensus" mechanism from Ripple to allow instant secure payments?

All of your criticisms are factually accurate, and I agree that these are the strongest negatives that Ripple has. I think the positives outweigh the negatives and that there are ways to mitigate all of these issues. But these are definitely fair points as Ripple currently stands. For many of them, my response would be -- wait and see.

People are always hesitate to fully accept bitcoin because of lack of trust.

Ripple tries to solve this by developing a p2p IOU mechanism. (..., which seems to me an immature solution).

However, it is often neglected that a trust involves two parts: trust between users and bitcoin, or trust among bitcoin users..

As for trust between users and their preferred currency, no solution is better than bitcoin. Bitcoin solved the problem of "double spending" by creating a universal account book (block) with p2p network, by which books, coins, transactions are all unable to counterfeit. No currency in the history does that. Therefore, bitcoin is now perhaps the single currency that users can absolutely trust.

What is uncomfortable is the trust among currency users, which, in my opinion, is in fact out of realm of technology. No technology can force a fraud to be a honest individual, or vice versa. For centuries, people have been trying to solve this problem, by building bank, issuing credit cards, and only end up to little.

In a word, people just blame bitcoin with a flaw that doesn't belong to bitcoin at all.

However, there is a possible solution: time. One day, when there're enough users who openly use bitcoin with their true identities and do not care about alleged "anonymity of bitcoin", trust would be prevalent.

Hello!
I have decided to become a re seller of casascius coins.
Currently I offer shipping within Sweden and EU, I am looking into shipping worldwide as well.
I have a order of 100 0.5 BTC coins and 50 1 BTC coins that will arrive sometimes next week.

If you want to buy some coins head over to
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My current plan is to ship smaller amounts in envelopes and bigger amounts in packages.
If you have any suggestion of suitable packaging then PM me

If you have any questions,comments or feedback please respond in the thread, this is my first time in retail business so any help is appreciated
//DeaDTerra

1 bitcoin = 100 bitcarat
1 bitcarat = 100 bitgrain
1 bitgrain = 100 bitnano
1 bitnano = 100 satoshi

Who manages all the funds that go through it?

0.0001 BTC (Bitcoin) =  1 NAK (Nakamoto)

1 mBTC = 10 NAK

They would need to start a new ledger for this. It is not improbable.

That is one of the great things about Bitcoin.  You can be your own bank.  This is useful in the same way it would be useful to have a vault under your house to store gold and a Star Trek transporter to send that gold to whomever you wanted to instantly.   Very useful.

However, as an everyday way of making payments to other people, not very useful (unless you already have tons of them and your friends and vendors have tons of them).   In order to buy a pizza with Bitcoin, I need to find a merchant that accepts Bitcion, and then I need to find a way to get my money to an exchange (at a fee), then buy Bitcoin on that exchange (at a fee).    That's a lot of work and expense to buy a pizza.   Now I might be ideologically inclined to go through that work, but most people won't be.  Most people are going to whip out their debit card and make a payment to the pizza guy with their fiat currency.   That simple.

Whatever the legal tender of the land is, is what people will use, unless their is a reason not to (ie - transactions that are illegal with the legal tender, etc.).  The only way to get a new currency to move with existing currencies is to make the addition of those currencies TRANSPARENT to the majority of the people involved (not the hard-core people like Bitcoiners).   This is what it will take for mass adoption.   To avoid this issue is folly.

Opencoin says Ripple is open-source, but there are no sources in public. They should replace all "open" with "close", until that Ripple is scam.

Maybe a mbtc (which already exists)? 0.001 btc is 1mbtc.

Shows a complete lack of understanding on how Bitcoin (or more generally crypto-currencies work).  One can't "peg" anything without centralized control.  If you have centralized control you have no need for the overhead of the blockchain and you now must have implicit trust in the issuer/controller.

I saw this article yesterday. 

I thought maybe we should start an archive of articles to pull up if and when BTC becomes mainstream.  It could be really funny to read then!