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?
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There are two ways for an attacker to do a 51% attack.
The first is a "live" attack, where the attacker publishes his blocks as soon as he gets them. In this version, his chances are not very good, even with 51% or 60% or 70% of 80% of the network hashing power, because the odds calculation is %^Blocks.
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.
This attack can be countered by changing the calculation for deciding which chain is valid. An exponential function would solve the problem.
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I agree about burning bridges, and how it's probably not a good idea. However, I'll journey down this thought experiment a little more: The BTC destruction script mentioned in (1) could include a list of transaction IDs/hashes of the forkcoins that are taking their place. If forkcoin is anything like BTC, the forkcoin minting process (even if completely different than BTC) should still have uniquely identifiable coinbase/creation transactions where currency units are injected into the system. Then you can easily get a 1-1 mapping of BTC destroyed to forkcoins created.
Yeah, my thought was that as long as people are using it, to not burn the bridge. Further, all newly created forkcoins must come into existence through the central bank; otherwise it can't ensure the 1-1 mapping of BTC held out of circulation by it to forkcoins it has released into circulation. But if the exchanger is merely holding onto the bitcoins, no one will trust it.
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That isn't how investigations work.
They don't need to prove that step, they just need to be able to follow the connection which will surely lead them to stuff that they can prove. And there is always something that can be proven.
Hes emphasizing the words in bold, so they must be true. Ask Martha Stewart if you don't believe me. Or spend some time talking to actual cops (investigators).
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New problems.
1) The exchanger needs to be able to prove that it has destroyed the bitcoins, or no one will trust it.
2) The exchanger needs to be able to prove that it has created no more newcoins than the number of bitcoins destroyed, or no one will trust it.
So, the exchange needs to be a trap door, or the whole thing falls apart. But, by being a trap door, it brings fear back in, since no one will give up their bitcoins unless they are pretty confident that the new system is not only viable, but will eventually dominate. Most people would be better off using a floating exchange, at least until the question of dominance has been settled. Neither of these are problems: (1) Coins can be verifiably "destroyed" by creating a transaction script that can't ever evaluate to true. This transaction enters the network and becomes public. Everyone can see it, and see that the PkScript is impossible to satisfy, ever. That's pretty good "proof". And since it's a custom script anyway, they could even include a message in the script which explains exactly the source and purpose (and signature) so that there is no confusion about whose coins were destroyed and why. (2) If the new currency is anything like BTC, then similarly, the currency is all public information. Unless we're talking about non-decentralized currencies... all units of the currency should be traceable, both in time and quantity. If it's not, I don't see how this currency can really "compete" with BTC, since centralization and closed-ness would pretty much make the "fork" a non-fork. Except that #2 requires that the entire network follow the new chain, plus the old bitcoin chain so they can verify that creations match destructions. And that the two points together form a trap door that essentially causes the same faith problem that this entire proposal was intended to solve. The way to get people to commit to the a new system is not by having them make an irreversible decision to burn their bridges back to the old system.
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That isn't how investigations work.
They don't need to prove that step, they just need to be able to follow the connection which will surely lead them to stuff that they can prove. And there is always something that can be proven.
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I agree that it seems sensible apart from the hex digits and non-standard exponent, the only virtue of the exponent is that it would discourage people from storing the values in IEEE floats, which are susceptible to rounding error. The hex thing is just plain unforgivable and should rightly be as ignored as hex floats are.
edit: the semicolon thing should also be ignored IMO. Everyone is used to ampersands whether Tim Berners-Lee likes it or not, we're used to parsing them by now.
I can see two ways around the incompatibilities, either label this as version 1.0 of the standard and rename the amount parameter to something else (send?), or have someone rewrite the entire thing, debate it, then actually submit it as an RFC to be forever set in stone.
There are also other things aside from the URI scheme that are worth defining if they haven't been already, for example an XHTML microformat for sharing addresses inline in HTML, plus a way to embed addresses in a vCard or address book.
RFCs are written (or at least should be written) after a sizable body of working code exists. I would feel free to ignore a spec on a wiki page, but try to avoid gratuitous incompatibilities. In this case, adding E notation in addition to the existing X notation won't be ambiguous for many years, hopefully plenty of time for the X notation to vanish. And as much as I hate to admit it, accepting hex values for compatibility is pretty easy, however silly it is to generate them.
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Because they can print RMB at will.
Expect to see that blow up in their faces in the next 5 to 10 years.
Same as FED printing USD, and that pegged exchange rate is not fixed, I remember it is 3.x in 80s, 8.x in 90s, now 6.x A pegged system could be aimed by hedge funds. Soros crashed bank of england and some aisan countries, but he was defeated by the HongKong government when he played the same trick, because chinese government had much more USD reserve than he could leverage. As long as an economy scale is small, maintain price stability is difficult Not even remotely the same thing. China is printing RMB to balance a massive influx of dollars in a futile effort to keep the value of their currency low to keep sucking manufacturing into the country. Google "mercantilism". And a having a peg doesn't mean that you can't change it occasionally. It just means that the PBC is ready, willing, and able to convert any quantity of USD into RMB (or the reverse) at whatever the official rate is that day.
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yeah it seems that way, but the dates dont add up, it seems they are sent to MT GOX straight away after transferring to mybitcoin.
Can you post some of the direct addresses that you personally used to send your coins to mybitcoin?
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Connect to every node in the cloud, discoverable via sweeping/IRC/get_peers messages. The first IP to consistently relay transactions for a given identity, is the given identity.
There are many ways to defeat this. The simplest is: 1) Never relay local transactions to nodes that connected to you. 2) Only make outbound connections to semi-trusted nodes. 3) Always send transactions to the same node. 4) Always send transactions to a different node (just one).
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WTF? A billboard for fiber transceivers at retail?
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Nice!
Maybe set it to show the ad numbers in the payment lists. A1+, A2-, etc.
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Anyone trying to peg the BTC to anything will get pegged To OP's point... have you ever researched what has happened to countries that peg their currency to the US dollar? It works for a while, then it gets really ugly really fast. China has been pegging RMB to USD for decades, it still goes on Because they can print RMB at will. Expect to see that blow up in their faces in the next 5 to 10 years.
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If he wins the bet, he gets $20,000. If he loses, he gets nothing, the $10,000 winnings would go to MemoryDealer's charity, and $10,000 wager would go back in MemoryDealer's pocket.
Nope, neither party can ever get any of their money back. That is in the agreement on the site. It is a tax-deductable charitable donation the instant the agreement is completed. The resolution of the bet only decides which of the two charities it goes to.
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Just so everyone knows, he is offering to make the bet using longbets.org. So far, no one has accepted, and the details have not been completed. In either case, the money from both parties will go to a charity chosen by the winner, not into anyone's pocket.
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I think I have an excessive level of paranoia, because I rejected all general purpose computers (like phones, tablets, etc) because they are too connected. I want something that ONLY knows bitcoin JSON over serial.
Whispercore will save your ass if someone physically steals your phone, but I don't think it'll help if the phone gets owned from the inside.
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Ahh, I get it now.
New problems.
1) The exchanger needs to be able to prove that it has destroyed the bitcoins, or no one will trust it.
2) The exchanger needs to be able to prove that it has created no more newcoins than the number of bitcoins destroyed, or no one will trust it.
So, the exchange needs to be a trap door, or the whole thing falls apart. But, by being a trap door, it brings fear back in, since no one will give up their bitcoins unless they are pretty confident that the new system is not only viable, but will eventually dominate. Most people would be better off using a floating exchange, at least until the question of dominance has been settled.
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Your link is broken.
So where'd you find it?
Bah, silly forums don't like quotes around URLs. Link fixed. A coin dealer put it together for me from bulk parts, so there is some confusion about which parts are really involved. I think it is a "H" sized ring holder with a black 38mm ring. Except that the H sized holders on air-tites.com aren't the right size. If you live near a decent coin store, you can ask them, or look for a retail package with a 38mm ring. I think coinedbits might be looking to order some in bulk to offer for sale along with the coins, but you'd better wait for them to say it.
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Except that if it had been a short, it would have been a wildly successful short, not a failure.
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