But obviously tokens, even if not "for" anything, are useful. So useful that they are more widely traded in more volume than anything else unless you count other somewhat borderline-conceptual things such as "molecules" or "atoms" in which case possibly more atoms or molecules are traded than are tokens...
-MarkM- (I dunno though, a LOT of tokens are traded, and atom and molecule are each a token "for" whole families of "things" each...)
Yup, exactly. USD are the best, most useful empty promises on the planet. And they've been empty for nearly 100, 80, or 40 years now (depending on your point of view), and the world hasn't come to an end. I've had the "money is nothing" chat with many people, and I always know when they "get" it because there is always a look of absolute horror on their faces at that instant. And always there is a call a few days later, or a few weeks, when they work through all of the repercussions and come to the conclusion that you can't possibly run a global economy on empty promises. Except that we clearly are doing exactly that, and it works. More or less. That is why bitcoin has such a low barrier for success. Value is meaningless, the key is utility. |
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I actually have. I'm willing to go in and out as many times as needed to get the job done.
* Insert sexual innuendo joke here* |
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I went off on some dude for being slightly rude, which was totally an overreaction on my part, and he sent me a half coin to buy myself a beer with. I don't know if that counts, but the address he used was the one in my .sig line, so I guess.
And someone else sent me 0.03... after I posted in a thread that was substantially similar to this one, that you could have easily found by searching.
Also, according to block explorer, someone else sent me 0.1 BTC for, and I don't remember why.
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I just checked #bitcoin-market, and I still see a big difference between a bitcoin and a buck. About $6.50 difference in fact.
We should be celebrating still, as we not only are still in the act of breaking the dollar parity barrier but also various other currency's units parity barriers. Which national currencies are worth more than 1 bitcoin per 1 of their main unit currently?
Meh. That is pretty much just a matter of convention and history. The value of a unit of currency isn't a real thing on an objective scale, it is just a sort of meaningless number. Since it doesn't mean anything, it could just as well have been any other number. If everyone woke up tomorrow the dollar was worth 10 times as much, with all prices and records (including memories) adjusted appropriately, you'd never notice the difference. In the same way, if the block generation reward was 500 BTC, coins would be worth 73 cents right now. And we would never know the difference. |
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I think the simpler solution to the apparent disconnect between the regression theorem and cryptocurrencies is that cryptocurrencies break the regression theorem. I like Mises and all, but really? People are trying to apply the economics of the 1940s to the monetary system of today...
The regression theorem is account of how money arise from a barter economy. The theorem is irrelevant to bitcoin. That sounds wrong, but maybe I do not understand the theorem, so lets review what I thought it was. My understanding is that according to the theorem money arises when something useful (such as data aka information) turns out to be so useful that lots of people not only agree that it is useful but also start to use it as an intermediary in trade. So, like, maybe once upon a time someone figured writing was so useful that instead of trading a loaf of bread for a shoelace they traded a loaf of bread either for a note saying "pay the bearer on demand one loaf of bread" or a note saying "pay the bearer on demand one shoelace". Pretty soon more and more people were trading items for information in various variations of such techniques. Along came computers, a new medium to write on with new writing tools, so people started trading goods for entries in databases. And so on. Did I get it wrong? -MarkM- Horribly wrong, I'm afraid. You are confusing the concept of money with the concept of tokens. In your example, the notes aren't valuable except as they embody promises that they can be redeemed for stuff, that is, they are tokens. Money (in this context) is something (either actually present or in token form) that is widely accepted in trade. Doesn't matter much what the thing is, or why it is widely accepted, just so long as it is. Kiba is right that regression isn't important here. I would go another step and say that regression wasn't ever important anywhere. Money was in wide use all around the world for thousands of years before anyone thought they needed to invent a story to retroactively rationalize how it happened. For bitcoin to be successful, it just needs to be better than the alternatives for at least one use, and I'm sure each of us can think of several things that bitcoin does better than any existing financial system. By the way, discussing this sort of stuff is really hard. When we say money, we are usually referring to a token (cash in the wallet) or a token for that token (checking account, etc), or something even further removed (ATM card/check/savings account). For extra fun, as we peel away the stack of tortoises, we find out that the bottom token (cash) isn't a token for anything. It is just a token. |
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Try adding a user agent to the curl options.
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The longest reorg I'm aware of was 25 blocks. Someone correct me if I missed one.
The one after the overflow bug was 54 blocks. If all old clients had ignored the longer chain because the split was too far back, then lots of damage could have been done by the attacker. I'm not sure that is a good argument here. While the current reorg logic was certainly a boon in that situation, and future situations like it are easy to imagine, we should recognize that we are overloading that operation to do something that it wasn't intended to do. Maybe we should think of a proper mechanism to deal with nodes that are known to have critical bugs, and allow the block chain logic to concentrate on protecting the chain. |
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Awesome. I would love to see him rape an IronKey next year.
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The other attack is the offline attack, where the attacker does not publish his blocks until his chain is at least X blocks longer than the public chain. In this attack, 51% is indeed a tipping point, because once he reaches 51% he is assured that if he waits long enough, he will eventually have enough blocks saved up to perform the chain reversion.
But this attack is so easy to detect that it makes no sense to try it. You mean like everyone would notice if 7 blocks get swapped all at once? Yeah, we would notice, but they would be the correct chain then, so what would we do about it? Sell their bitcoins!!! This attack can be countered by changing the calculation for deciding which chain is valid. An exponential function would solve the problem.
Interesting idea. IIUC, this makes it such that the deeper the reorg, the higher the barrier for it to be accepted. Which means that you effectively force the >51% attacker out into the open (they have to publish their blocks or their private chain will quickly become virtually impossible to get accepted) and basically force them to periodically build off of other's blocks...and you effectively require miners (and all nodes really) to take steps to ensure blocks get widely distributed. However, if there is a temporary split in the network, doesn't this run the risk of a temporary split becoming permanent? I suppose you could come up with a non technical means of resolving such a split should it ever occur...it might be an acceptable trade off considering that this proposal might have a huge benefit (in the sense that it would severely inhibit the damage that could be done by a miner with >50% could do). Yup, you understand correctly. If you require reorgs with more than X (six might be a good value for X) blocks to require 2^(Y-X) difference in difficulty, a recipient can wait 12 blocks and know that unless the attacker has 64 times more power than the rest of the world, the transaction won't be reversed. Or they can wait 26 blocks and know that an attacker would need more than a million times as much. After a day, I would be pretty confident that not even ET could reverse it. The risk of splits isn't as great as you might imagine. If the network was cut in half (weighted by hashing power), we would have about 2 hours to notice the problem and fix it. If the network was cut 90/10, we would have 10 hours. The less even the network break, the more time we have until it becomes a problem, and also the less effort will be needed to fix it. And yes, resolving a permanent split would require human intervention. Essentially, the minority network would be forced to discard all blocks since the split if they wanted to rejoin the global network. Personally, I think the potential cost to individual miners and nodes is a small price to pay to protect the network as a whole. |
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You can do a chargeback with a prepaid card just like with a normal card.
The chargeback rules are enforced by VISA/MasterCard/Discover/etc, not by the issuing bank.
you can't chargeback cash that the exchange pulled out of an ATM. Ahh, cash, good point. That would work, but it won't scale. |
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The IronClad is nifty, but I think the minimum order comes in because they are bound to a specific IronKey Enterprise server license key when they are made, which would make them unsuitable for a group buy. Also, they use whitelisting for applications, which would make them even more unsuitable.
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You can do a chargeback with a prepaid card just like with a normal card.
The chargeback rules are enforced by VISA/MasterCard/Discover/etc, not by the issuing bank.
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I love my Ironkey, but I don't imagine it to be secure unless the attacker is a mere mortal. Google "Christopher Tarnovsky" and watch his videos from Blackat. A FIB is not exactly a common piece of hardware, but you can rent time on them in any major city, and in a few years you could probably build one in your garage.
Also, flash chips fail, without warning. Keep backups.
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I would like to be able to limit logons for my account to just the two IPs I use in person, and the API to just the one IP I use that from. If all three change at once, I'd be screwed, but that seems unlikely.
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Read this. I describe a way to incrementally detach the wallet from the client. Read the rest of that thread too. It describes my notion of a hardware client, and as an added bonus, Gavin describes a service that would provide a lot of security for regular folks. Actually, the thread was Gavin's, and all of my stuff was off-topic, but whatever. Also, read this thread. And while you are at it, read natman3400's posts, particularly on his project, BitClip. We don't always agree on the details, but his project looks pretty good. |
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Hey Bruce, I really hope you are wrong. It would be nice if this was all just a big misunderstanding and it ended with most depositors getting most of their coins back.
He doesn't appear to use these forums at all, so it is quite possible that he never thought to come post here. And yanking a server for a full forensic analysis isn't exactly unheard of in cases like this, however bad it looks from the outside.
But yeah, having local law enforcement tell him not to leave town before this is all sorted out is the best insurance.
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So don't trust it, "Nemo". Set up a cron job that will sell back to it any of its coins that manage to somehow come into it's reach that will sell them back to the politburo or developer or promoter or cult or whatever that claims they are worth something.
You can tell how much they think they're worth by how much they'll buy them for, that is how markets work, isn't it?
Do you believe World of Warcraft (or Diablo 3 or whatever_ actually plans to buy back WoW-Gold (Or diabloons or whatever) for anywhere near the number of dollars people (or even they themselves) sell it for?
If not, then how close to the amount they sell it for will they buy it for? (What is their "spread"?)
Does anyone trust them to buy it back?
Does anyone buy it at all? Even at less than a dollar for a million coins?
Do you trust Berspank / the Fed? If no, then you won't be buying or accepting any federal reserve notes, hmm?
Etc.
I thought I read somewhere once upon a time about trust having to be,,, uh,,, something... uh... uhn... uhn'd?
I wonder if that was anywhere near the place where I read something about the predictive power of the past...
-MarkM- (Do you people trust pyramid schemes to pay off for them? Do they buy into them?)
P.S. Notice that many of the "new" blockchains are not yet open to the public, specifically due to concerns about the expense of mining compared to the relative stregnth of potential "enemy miners". Once all their coins are minted, or maybe before, more access to the blockchain might well seem more economically viable than it does during startup periods in which they might feel relatively vulnerable to predatory miners.
Do you want to try this again when you are fully awake, and after you've read the thread? P.S. Who is "Nemo"? |
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