could you re-do the example with percentages that aren't above 100% please
No need. In this case risk drops to almost zero right after the 1st confirmation. Excellent info. Do you have a handle on what the risk is like if the transactions are, say 5 minutes apart, but no block has been hashed yet? |
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Yes. But surely that's basically theoretical.
No one can realistically have 150% the hashing power of the Bitcoin network. Yes, the risk of double-spend never goes away completely, but it gets vanishingly small very quickly. The merchant is more likely to have a fatal accident with the fridge door than have a double-spend problem after a few confirms.
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IF we do succeed then these prices will seem like nothing (do the math regarding the float). If we don't succeed then I'm sure we still took part in one of the greatest experiments in recent history. Think about that - governments and wealthy individuals have always controlled money. This is the first step away from that (that I can think of). Still nice to say, years from now, that you tried to do your part to change things. And if things really take off, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it is truly all about sharing. I'm game when that time comes, we are all in this together. (Emphasis by Pzi4nk)
I like your overall message but I wonder about the part I highlighted. Do you really think bitcoin is immune from the manipulations of wealthy people, much less governments? Not to be inflamitory but it seems to me wherever there's a market it can be manipulated by great wealth. The thing is (at least for me): parasitic governments currently have (at least) two major ways to milk the populous: taxes and "the hidden inflation tax". The latter one will not be possible with sound money. This means governments will have to produce their income from visible taxation. They also have to act responsibly fiscally (just like every other entity) because they wont be able to just borrow in a virtually unlimited fashion. This hopefully results in leaner, more responsible and more accountable governments and a overall better situation for the people living under them. That's exactly my hope too. Smaller governments. 100 years ago people only interacted with the government to get births, deaths and marriages registered, and perhaps a passport. Today governments are constantly in the face of every citizen. Clearly they should be slashed by something like 50% or 75% until they only make up 10% of the economy. Everyone would have vastly improved freedoms and quality of life. Once the massive distortions caused by the debt-based money and shadow-banking systems are eliminated national economies would hum along smoothly. Will it happen..? |
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.. The journalist clearly went out of his way to find a Bitcoin angle: not a single quote in the article supports his thesis that Bitcoin has been on anyone's mind when making decisions in the US corporate bond market.
It's the pathetic cartoon. They wanted to stick a cartoon somewhere. Had a couple of column inches spare, so asked a writer to do an intro tying in the drawing. Years ago I read the FT every day thinking it had pearls of wisdom. Now I realize it is just the equivalent of the Soviet Pravda, a mouthpiece, but for the central banking fiat bankster complex instead. |
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Not to open a can of worms or anything, but this is the issue with zero-conf that everyone is so happy to argue about. And the check analogy is almost perfect. Zero-conf transactions are like saying "the check's in the mail." Yet we have websites, on the internet, accepting zero-conf like it's perfectly fine. Ever tried to pass a personal check these days? Either they have scanners that debit your account instantly, or they take your ID.
Hopefully brick-and-mortar stores that accept zero-conf (probably very few) understand it's no better than a personal check** and that they should take ID to reduce risk of fraud. Websites that do this should think twice about how well they think they understand the protocol.
** Actually it is slightly better, because as notme pointed out, you can't reverse a bitcoin transaction once it's been properly confirmed. So the risk of fraud is smaller with a zero-conf and perhaps some folks think it's fine to accept zero-conf from an untrusted party for this reason. I don't agree (that the risk level becomes manageable for that reason), but we'll see who gets burned.
Zero-conf has got to be better than a check if no double-spend is detected within 5 or 10 seconds. By that time every Bitcoin node should have seen the first transaction. If a 2nd one appears then its time-stamp will be seen to be later by all nodes. So the later one is unanimously rejected. Yes. You could pay at a restaurant, walk out clicking a buy button on a website for some shoes and have your ASIC farm churn away to produce a block with your shoe transaction invalidating the restaurant payment. But what an effort! Surely restaurants have walk-aways and shoe-shops have shoplifters far more frequently than such a double-spend scenario could happen. |
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Just saw that volume on BTC China is equal to the volume on Mtgox...
I don't see that. Do you have a graphic of recent daily vols? |
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Even if I have to buy a million dollars worth of ASIC machines I will (Basically all my bitcoins).
The fact that you can purchase ASICs and use them to confirm your own and others' "dust" transactions is proof that this isn't censorship. That makes no sense, that is like saying, a country is censoring the people inside but you can overthrow them so it isn't censorship. You seem to think you have the right to demand that the miners do something for you for free. It costs as much to transmit the same number of bytes whether it is for a 1000 BTC transaction or a dust transaction that does nothing except benefit you, for whatever reason you want it, and otherwise just clutters up the blockchain. Why should your nearly worthless transaction be entitled to the same consideration in getting into a block as one that actually benefits the network in general? Because where do you draw the line? First it's the dust transactions then they may block one dollar transactions, next thing you know no-one will accept transactions unless you pay a fortune in transactions fees... The line is being drawn between 0.5 and 1.0 cents because this mirrors how the fiat world works. It also reduces abuse of the blockchain as a data-storage waste dump. That's it. Many people have written here in support of that. No one is talking about raising this line above one cent (except you). |
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Most people here are new and don't remember.  2011 was Crazy Awesome the atmosphere on the forum as we slide down closer and closer to 1$ was ecstatic!  I wasn't there but I can just imagine how people were so happy and falling over themselves to buy shedloads of BTC at $5, $4, then $3, then whoohoo $2! |
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Not this again.
There is no reason to not "start another currency that has no hard limit on quantity" you can do it. It is easy. I dare you to start it right now. In fact, such shitcoin is sorely needed. It would be great to have all inflation lovers to start using their own inflationary currency and leave us Bitcoiners alone.
Yes. Anyone desperate for "another currency that has no hard limit on quantity" should just load up with XRP instead of bleating that Bitcoin lacks this "feature". |
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Excellent work dree12. I was wondering about this when Cyprus was in the news.
One predictable observation from the stats is that the top 11 countries have a large percentage of their population literate in English.
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Printed money is shitty for long distance transactions. Bitcoins are great for long distance transactions. Bitcoins are shitty for face to face transactions, printed money is great for face to face transactions.
Yes, BUT, paper and coinage change is also a hassle. And most of the face-to-face transactions are for small amounts. *Sigh*. If only they had created a $9.95 banknote it would have made shopping so much easier. |
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It's called a descending triangle. I don't think this is anything but noise, though.
Yes. That spike on May 10 now looks like it was purely technical. All the TA traders looking for a breakout, but the fundamentals hadn't changed to support it. Fair price at $115 until more news and major investment. |
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Thank you all, rpietila and company, for treating us to such a great weekend.
If rpietila measures quality of time by BTC earned, I measure it by progress toward freedom, and these four days are among the most valuable of my whole life. Only in the Bitcoin world can you find people with as varied and enriching a conversation as the delegates.
And to the others: LOL. The only physical harm I was in danger of suffering was staying in the sauna for too long.
OK. So what was this "considerable force" used against Risto at his conference? |
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If you want to let your enthusiasm off its leash, then just draw this trend-line forward a few more years. It will plateau eventually. But when? If it is in 8 years then Bitcoin would be a major world currency used in most transactions.  |
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..Bitcoin is fatalally flawed in that mining and verifying the block chain wastes resources. If mining ever became unprofitable it would taper off..
Bitcoin mining is the problem with Bitcoin.
This is what I can't overlook, and therefore I can't take the rest of the content in your posts seriously. Mining is a brilliant solution for controlled currency issuance. The tapering geometric progression in the block reward and encryption of block headers with the Merkle root of a current transaction set is also brilliant. As a package Bitcoin is doing so well that difficulty is now 10 million, an extraordinary value to reach in just 4.5 years. The only time mining was unprofitable was in 2009 when Satoshi kept the faith and Bitcoin alive until wider participation really kicked off in 2010. It has not looked back since. Block verification by mining nodes is massively reduced by using pools. If you think mining will taper off then you cannot deny that difficulty will have to fall. But there is no sign of this happening. Difficulty could only fall if the fx rate fell to catastrophic lows. The fall from $266 to $50 had a negligible effect on the next difficulty (probably even if it were sustained, not brief). The fees market for block space is comatose because it is dwarfed by the block reward, however, once blocks average 20 MB each then the fees market will start working properly. By the time blocks are 100+ MB the block reward will be a sideshow. Why would most/all people stop mining when a solved block could yield the equivalent of $100,000? Answer: they will keep mining. If you are worried about electricity costs then ASICs use less electricity per hash than the prior technologies. A future generation of ASICs could be made with reversible gates which means that electricity use will be negligible and fans obsolete. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_VHDL_99/tran888/lecture003-reversible-logic.pdf"Power dissipation of reversible circuit, under ideal physical circumstances, is zero."Bitcoin in a nutshell:  |
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... This pull request is the first step towards a market between miners (who want higher fees) and merchants/users (who want lower fees, but also want their transactions confirmed). Miners can already control what fees they accept, this pull lets users control (very clumsily, improvements on the road map) the fee they are willing to pay.
Great work Gavin and team. I support this approach 100%. |
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I would really really like to use bitcoins every day, for every day purchases, and as a merchant.
What is the solution to this?
I can only really see an system that accepts an amout of risk, or you have to send bitcoins to a merchant and then they issue a value card.
but how to overcome the slow confirms, you can't just stand in line for that long, or is bitcoin going to be a reserve currency, for buying houses and such like?
over to your views/solutions
Consider that there are two types of transactions: a) Wait for confirm. Where the merchant can wait for n confirms, based upon their appetite for risk, and size of transaction, before delivering goods. This works for most on-line purchases. b) Can't wait for confirm. Where the wait time can't be any longer than existing fiat systems, say 10 seconds, such as when buying petrol or paying a restaurant. These are usually face-to-face. Zero confirms seems acceptable for small value transactions, less than $20 perhaps, but might be unacceptable for anything larger. So your problem comes down to face-to-face transaction confirmation where product delivery needs to be immediate. The best solution I see is improved merchant-version Bitcoin client software which connects to a lot of nodes in order to detect a double-spend attempt as fast as possible. At the moment nodes silently ignore double-spends so that they don't go into blocks, but perhaps this could be changed so that they are propagated for a short time, but flagged as double-spends. Merchant nodes will detect these more reliably. The other solution is a personal bitcoin guarantee card up to a limit. Might be a continued role for banks in a Bitcoin economy. Banks would need a fee for insuring against fraud when these cards are used. |
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I don't think Google pay Mike Hearn to work on Bitcoin, he moonlights on his own.
That's incorrect. He does it as 20% time, which is a google program where they let you devote 20% of your paid time to a project of your choosing, but approved by management. I have spoken to google employees among my friends and acquaintances and they say coming up with a good 20% time project is actually really difficult because finding one with the right balance of innovative, novel, and still valuable to google is quite hard. Your 20% project idea can be far out, like google's self-driving cars, but it still has to be something that google could plausibly profit from in the future. For what it's worth, Pieter Wuille also works for Google as a Site Reliability Engineer, but unlike Mike he apparently does work on Bitcoin purely in his spare time. Yes. Mike's efforts are valuable, such as recently getting Bitcoin extension in HTML5. |
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Self-employer, thus opted to be non-insured....
Perhaps time to cash in a few coins from the Bit-stash and pay a private hospital to remove the offending stones? |
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why hasn't the price of BTC dropped substantially as a result of this announcement?
Because nobody really cares that they'll have a hard time sending less than $0.0062445 (5430 satoshis @ $115/BTC). There's always been a lower limit on divisibility. Lets just make up more stuff. I am pretty sure the price didn't drop cause most people don't understand how the regulations will be hurting bitcoins in the long term. The market is dumb, their is a few really smart people in the market, but for the most part, as a whole the market is dumb. Wow. It's the opposite. The market is smarter than any single human. It works like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU |
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