You can't set the price. The price is determined in the market by supply and demand. As for coming up with some formula for determining its value, good luck with that.

If feel like that is major overkill. Randomness is not the primary goal.

In a brute force attack, the attacker uses their knowledge of any biases to reduce the search space. A purely random number has no biases, so it is an effective tool. But, it is not a necessary condition since a lack of randomness does not necessarily give the attacker any information.

Suppose, I have a hardware random number generator that tends to set some bits to 1 and some other bits to 0. If the attacker does not know which bits are biased and what their biases are, they have no information that will help them.

You can say that flipping a coin is not truly random, but it is effectively random to the attacker unless they know the exact conditions that were present when the coin was flipped.

Suppose I take 256 coins and set a number of of them to heads and the rest to tails, and then I arrange them in a certain order. Assuming that the number of heads vs. tails and the order of the coins makes no difference to me (i.e., I have no obvious biases), the result is effectively random to the attacker even though it is not random at all.

You forgot the most important one: be skeptical. Most of the claims that you will read are misguided, unsupported, or just wishful thinking.

I have no doubt that if a central bank develops a cryptocurrency, it will be centralized (or at least federated) and they will track every cent that you spend.

The are many explanations of the SHA-256 algorithm. Here is one: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@f4tca7/introduction-to-the-sha-256-hash-function

Keep in mind that the input is arbitrary and unbounded. I suppose that it might be possible to describe each bit of the output as an explicit function of the inputs in some standard mathematical notation, but I doubt it would be practical or even insightful.

I believe that the word "coin" was originally used to mean what we now call a "transaction output". That seems to explain why the original uses of the word here and in other contexts may seem odd.

A BIP-39 12-word phrase can represent 2¹²⁸ seeds (it contains a checksum). As noted above, an HD wallet can normally generate 2⁶⁵ private keys from a seed. Thus, the 12-word phrase can generate 2¹⁹³ private keys, which is 2³³ times the 2¹⁶⁰ possible addresses.

SHA-256 can be used on any data. I suggest that you avoid the details of the block header. Otherwise, your essay could get out of control.


It is much more complicated than that.


Another suggestion: narrow your topic down to how a hash such as SHA-256 can be used to prove something, and just mention its uses in Bitcoin as examples.

The ability to be used for money laundering won't prevent its use as a global currency because only governments care if money can be used for money laundering, and Bitcoin exists outside of the control of any government.

I'm skeptical of your claim. Do you have any evidence to support it?

Are you one of those "look at the price -- it must be manipulation!" people, or are you one of those "everyone knows it's manipulated!" people?


Oh, I see. You're one of those people who don't realize how little they know.

I don't understand how the angular resolution of the eye can be a factor in the diameter of the sun. Also, every eye's angular resolution is different and a camera can have a higher resolution than the eye, so, wouldn't that affect the diameter? Sorry if you have explained it already. A summary would suffice.

I think it is a mistake to assume that OTC trades don't affect the prices on exchanges, and vice-versa. The two markets are not exclusive, and supply and demand in one affects the supply and demand in the other.

The primary issue with address reuse is privacy, though there is also a small security risk. There is no benefit to reusing addresses, so why do it?

Roughly speaking, your portion of the block reward is equal to your portion of the total hash rate. If your hash rate is 244,800 TH/h and the total hash rate is 360,000,000,000 TH/h, then your portion is 0.00000068 of the block reward, or 0.000051 BTC.

However, that calculation makes several assumptions. xhomerx10 describes how to get the actual expectation.

What about flipping 256 coins all at once? I would expect that to be a lot faster.

Please watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFTRwD85AQ4

It depends on the token. Bitcoin, no. EOS, yes. Others, maybe.

My thoughts:

I believe that the slowest operations are the signature checking operations. So, the most time consuming transaction would simply do OP_CHECKSIG repeatedly (with a couple of stack operations in between).

Since there are no loops, each instruction is executed at most once. So, the execution time is roughly proportional to the size of the transaction, which means that if you want to be a nuisance, you are going to have to pay for it. Furthermore, ss cryptography becomes more prevalent, we are going to start seeing cryptographic operations in hardware, which should speed up the signature checking operations greatly.

I believe the second quote is just saying that enforcing a valid UOT requires a hard fork.

If 8333 is blocked, you can use a different port, but if the router or ISP allows only white-listed ports, then you are probably stuck.