i'm new to btc and was involved in discussions about murder-bounties and silk road because i want to find out for myself if it is compatible with my moral to do btc. asking more experienced users to not take part in those discussions sounds pretty silly to me.

with btc, electricity consumption will likely go up to 3GW in a year - so what? Visa and Co. need more.
with btc and tor you can set bounties to assassin people - so what? you can do the same with dollars or gold.
...

getting to the right reply is the point of these threads.

in order to not have to explain 51%-weakness over and over again, point to a wiki and improve the explanation there.

I agree on the fact that some politicians, countries and companies do unjust things involving but not not limited to killing people. The world economic system is plain slavery in my eyes actually (why I suggested to have BTC with a redistribution of 1%/month of all coins to all citizen-accounts). Now the big players have to convince the majority within their society that they are doing things for a better world and any harm is just collateral murder damage.

With an anonymous website and an anonymous currency there would not be the need for such diplomacy. Evil means would be much easier accessible. While the message would be much more honest, the messenger could stay hidden.

Thinking about it I wonder if maybe the "new" way would be worse at all.


I strongly oppose to the position that any murder that is not the result of a legitimate trial is a good thing. For example the assassination of Usāma ibn Lādin was not in any way rightful.
Bounties on the legal defence I would consider a good thing but the risk involved doing it openly would be much lower in almost any case.


hello? is freedom of speech that far already in your country? are you afraid of being sued or even brought to guantánamo over hypothetical discussions of the malicious potential of some new software? maybe it is time for this forum to go underground, too. tor hidden service. invitation only. and don't forget your tin foil hat!!1!

This thread is spooky.

Actually such a site or the business model involved would be a big threat to BTC and TOR etc.

Imagine bounties for
* 10 jews bombed
* a dirty bomb killing at least x people on Berlin
* an A-bomb somewhere.

That directly leads to bounties for
* not setting off said A-bomb: "Country XY put forces together to find the bomb! If by [date] there are x coins on that bounty, I will let you find the bomb." With the said service people would trust that the guy will only get the bounty if he actually has a bomb. Spooky, isn't it?
* not killing hostages: I kidnapped person x.

Send money to address ... to see him alive is clearly easier than to meet in the park to hand over the money. Oh ... how boring all those action movies will get

Actually cryptography makes all dirty crimes easier. Of course bounties to kill dictators might again be much easier to be payed by so called democratic states so maybe they see an incentive for such services, too.

I hope such services involving people getting killed will face the moral of enough hackers to take them down individually. Maybe a bounty to take down the bounty site anybody?

lol for the model
did your model cope well with what happend  throughout june? pause, then 20%/day ....

Wen interessieren denn Dollars? Fakt ist, dass ich 30% weniger von der wahren Währung bekomme

wie viel platz hat's denn da am fluss noch so?
bau auch grad selbiges mit selben fragen ... netzteil und so. aber linux ist zum glück seit jahren mein täglich brot

This so called "attack" is plain ridiculous. Sure throwing so many dollars at Bitcoin sellers that they drown in them will most likely make them and others rethink their BTC-buyings =D

I would not consider a 30% redistribution of BTC a "basic income guarantee" in the sense basic income guarantee is discussed elsewhere.
6M BTC are worth now no more than 40M$ (try selling 6M BTC)
30% that of are 12M$
per month that would be 1M $
How many are we? Are there numbers on MtGox accounts? 50k enthusiasts with some $ left to spend? That would be 1M/50k per capita and month. 20$ per month hardly is worth being called a basic income guarantee. For a Sri Lanka citizen things would be different though. He might open such a citizen account without putting $$ in. But through spending locally he would also solidify the currency in the overall economy. Taking our BTC would not be possible. As citizen accounts would need to also be subject to redistribution, the only way to profit would be by spending the coins. Accepting them would only make sense if the intention is to spend them again. A currency for paying, not for hoarding.

No. Do you? If so, please enlighten me.
Actually BTC mining payed off big deal so far. People had their hardware payed for in a month. ATM this is even getting shorter than longer. Still BTC is not doomed over that "free money".
In 2011 the total BTC will grow from 6M to 8M. That is 30% inflation and equivalent to keeping it at 6M and redistributing 30% based on CPU in a way similar to what I suggested based on heads. 30% inflation does no harm to bitcoinat all. It is vastly overcompensated by the BTC economy growth.
On the long run I would not redistribute 30% but rather 10% based on heads and rely on fees paying for the block creation but I strongly believe it would work with 30%, too.

If you accept citizen accounts for all the world's citizen you could consider this currency a mean to fight poverty in the world. I would very much love to put $$ into such a currency.

If again envy is your concern, make it less % and limit the citizen accounts to your country. Any foreigner may open anonymous accounts but would not profit from the redistribution.

I'm all with you that some guys getting rich is no reason to stop this experiment as this applies to any currency. Still I dream of my version that simply has a strong incentive to give away coins rather than to hoard them.
This also prevents the exchange rate from fluctuating like crazy as it evenly distributes coins to all citizens on the long run rather than having the potential to see all coins accumulate in 5% of the accounts.

guys how stupid are you??? begging those that have 6 blocks worth of mining to give to you?? wtf?

look at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ People mining all throughout 2009 all have mined coins worth +100k$ today. If it was one miner taking 90% this guy now has 30M$ and growing in BTC for the investment of a HD6970 and a year of electricity.

For me the biggest down sides of BTC are
1. I envy the *real* early adopters that mined throughout 2009 with a combined power like my HD6970 and are maybe mainly one person.
2. I fear the system to collapse through regulation.

If governments put together starting a second chain with one additional rule:
Everybody may register one citizen account plus an unlimited number of anonymous accounts and per block a certain percentage of all the coins of all the accounts get redistributed evenly to all citizen accounts I would definitely switch to that as it would not be a speculators currency but rather designed to be used to pay stuff and it would have the backing of governments.

In that sense: Yes I see an option for a competing BTC2 (2 for 2%/month), ...

Why should governments do that? Well it would be one way bring the good of BTC to everybody while at the same time making big style money laundry less attractive due to the cut that goes to every citizen.

(Some consider the deflation of the BTC also a good aspect of it but it renders BTC into a good nobody is willing to give away easily.)

Yes, it is easier to counterfeit bank notes. It is easier to counterfeit 2 bank notes and use them on the flee market.

No, it is not easier to steal significantly many users without getting caught.

Worms that do all kind of things are daily business in the Windows world today. If such a worm sends all the money of wallets it finds to the thief's wallet, there is no way to charge back or find the thief.

Above mentioned counterfeiter would even risk to get caught on the flee market. The BTC thief has almost no risk at all for a good chance to make millions.

Still I think that such worms are not a threat to BTC as a whole as people would call that bad luck for those not locking their wallets away or using other precautions.

In the beginning the standard was the CPU miner. Sure if you already have big rigs, you would not want to see a card come out that does 300Mh/J rendering your 1.5Mh/J-cards more or less worthless but if that technology exists, you can only hope it will not be sold to the fed exclusively.

pardon me? 50% of the network can effectively stop all further transactions of the other nodes.

We are now at 7Th/s. That is "only" 20,000 HD6970. I confess the calculus doesn't give a large window for action given a 5% growth per day as even now topping the GPU power would cost 20,000*(300+200)€=1,000,000€ (rough estimate) of rig hardware. On the other hand there must be data centers of that scale of GPU power somewhere (although I must confess I only found hints, no proofs).

So I would give it a chance to either get taken down by such an approach either this year or never.

given the BTC rises 20% per day while the network "only" grows by 5% per day, AMD would profit more from running their hardware selling the mined BTC than from selling hardware, wouldn't they?

i expect an abrupt end at some point.
some countries will fight BTC with legal threats to the users and miners but at some point they will realize that they can stop BTC with as little as some million $ to crack the 50% network barrier. If this happens over night, there is no way to recover. The block chain will be finished. This rogue subnet will be kept at 50% and BTC is history. Maintenance will quickly go down as running a miner with 0 output will not pay off for most of the other users. This person behind such an attack would not even have to justify his action and could well be some rich guy protecting his hard earned dollars from becoming obsolete.