Sounds pretty simple to me? 8MB Rare DataTraveler Datastick with 100BTC = $89. Sounds pretty simple to me? All backed up by ebays insurance policy.
Problem with this is that there's nothing stopping you from keeping a copy of the wallet and spending them as soon as you shipped off the flashdrive. On ebay, you're only allowed to sell physical products, and they won't cover the value of the bitcoins with their insurance, only the arrival of the actual product itself (the datastick). Publish the wallet public address on the add. Potential buyers can verify the BTC are still there. Or bitbills, yeah... This doesn't stop it from getting spent from a) a different address, b) as soon as it's shipped off. Person verifies it's still in wallet. They purchase the data stick. I ship it off at 3 days shipping. On day 2, i spend the coins from my copy of the wallet, through an alternate address. Stick arrives and is in perfect condition, but the bitcoins are gone from the wallet. Ebay won't cover this, as you payed $890 for the physical device, a flash drive, and they make no guarantees about the data on it. This is more of a f2f practice, but given a certain level of trust put in the vendor (let's say 100% 1000+ positive reviews, since we're speaking of ebay) this kind of trade can become enough. It is true that there is a minimum level of trust to put in the emitter for any manner of private key/wallet trading. There's ALSO always this point to consider: The reason people want to see physical bitcoin is to enable BTC payments without being online. This does not do that. If, for some reason, I bought BTC on a CD or USB stick, the first thing I'd do is load the wallet.dat in there onto a computer somewhere and transfer the coins to another address. As long as I haven't done this, the original seller is able to spend the coins at will.
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Sounds pretty simple to me? 8MB Rare DataTraveler Datastick with 100BTC = $89. Sounds pretty simple to me? All backed up by ebays insurance policy.
Problem with this is that there's nothing stopping you from keeping a copy of the wallet and spending them as soon as you shipped off the flashdrive. On ebay, you're only allowed to sell physical products, and they won't cover the value of the bitcoins with their insurance, only the arrival of the actual product itself (the datastick). Publish the wallet public address on the add. Potential buyers can verify the BTC are still there. Or bitbills, yeah... This doesn't stop it from getting spent from a) a different address, b) as soon as it's shipped off. Person verifies it's still in wallet. They purchase the data stick. I ship it off at 3 days shipping. On day 2, i spend the coins from my copy of the wallet, through an alternate address. Stick arrives and is in perfect condition, but the bitcoins are gone from the wallet. Ebay won't cover this, as you payed $890 for the physical device, a flash drive, and they make no guarantees about the data on it. |
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Sounds pretty simple to me? 8MB Rare DataTraveler Datastick with 100BTC = $89. Sounds pretty simple to me? All backed up by ebays insurance policy.
Problem with this is that there's nothing stopping you from keeping a copy of the wallet and spending them as soon as you shipped off the flashdrive. On ebay, you're only allowed to sell physical products, and they won't cover the value of the bitcoins with their insurance, only the arrival of the actual product itself (the datastick). |
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Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?
I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is less than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far. Yes, because the raw coal used to fuel forges for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BANKS ACROSS THE WORLD is less pollutionary than 1 years worth of mildly increased electricity usage. Not to mention the pure GAS GUZZLERS that are required to carry massive amounts of steel and specialized machinery required to produce such secure bank vaults. Quit this purely conjectural bullshit and show some actual numbers. There is 39.3 kJ/g energy from combusting coal. It releases 2.0 grams CO2 per gram of coal. ( sourceUsing this graph, and finding an approximation on wolfram alpha (notice that 1*10^12, or 1 thash/s lines up at a relatively easy to judge spot on the curve, and i'm going from 0 to 85.134 where the graph is equal to 4*10^12, or 4thash/s, the estimated value right now), we find that the average value is 363.637 ghash/s over 2 years. Using the calculation here, 31.42 billion MHashs/day * 0.024 kWh/day per MHash = 754 million kWh or 2714000000 megajoulesConsidering steel requires roughly 8,000 MJ/ton of steel to produce, the entire energy used in the bitcoin network could produce 339250 tons of steel. Considering there are a staggering number of secure vaults (In the hundred thousands across the world), each of which is several hundreds of tons, 300,000 tons of steel doesn't seem like much. And that's not even accounting for the mining, shipping, construction, the energy used by security systems, etc. EDIT: Dear god I spent way too much time on that. |
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If you want, I can do a breakdown of why the smaller pool "Eligius" is better and deserves your attention...
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I highly suggest you research Eligius. Their payout system is far more intelligent and secure, rather than trusting the pool operator of btcmine. They offer more transparency, which will cause a greater confidence in your business proposal. Also, may I buy one share?  |
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Not possible:
1) The odds of 'cracking' one single private key to steal coins at one single address are nearly impossible.
2) There is no centralized algorithm to crack, so the answer is "No".
Attacking the algorithm used to generate public keys in order to find the private keys would be what he's talking about. If you found an efficient way to "crack" these, you could steal arbitrary numbers of bitcoins. The possibility of this happening, however, is slim to none. |
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These cards get 290Mhash clock at 775 mem at 900
What would you price be if you didn't have to ship it? |
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I think the system is secure with >80% chance.
Now, why are you throwing random, arbitrary percentages around? I'd like to see how you arrived at that number (unless you admit that it WAS arbitrary and gut-instinct, then I'll let it slide.  ) If someone asks me how secure I believe a system is, what other than an estimated infimum on success probability is a reasonable answer?  Of course, I have to use a conservative number; if they don't hold on average, my predictions would be worthless. I think 80% is a number I could bet on, under reasonable circumstances (network size, BTC gaining acceptance, exchangeable crypto schemes). So, it was gut-instinct? Carry on then. I thought you were trying to say that SHA256 had an 80% chance of remaining secure, and there's simply no data to support that. |
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Well, that should dampen the effect at least. But I don't think there is any doubt that a lower exchange rate means lower profit for miners. So if the fall in value is big enough, the scenario in OP is still feasible I think.
Also, there is no guarantee that such transactions would exist in every block and there's no point wasting energy on unprofitable blocks. So the miners incentives would actually be to wait for the fees to pile up until it gets profitable enough to mine, but then the next block would be unprofitable again.
This also assumes that miners are directly converting their bitcoins to USD. In all probability, with the volatility of the market, by the time we reach some kind of equilibrium (become a "sticky" currency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_%28economics%29), then miners will be dealing directly with bitcoins themselves to pay for most of their expenses, rather than having to convert them to some other currency. |
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I have been reading around and I must say, I am pretty excited about bitcoins. However, I'm not seeing much talk about the integrity of the coin itself, I understand that there are some risks from the end user perspective such as getting your wallet stolen, but what about the network? There may be a lot of 'advanced' cryptography going on, but doesn't that really mean it will be just a matter of time until someone finds a hole? I'm curious to hear from some the developers as to how confident they feel about this system. (Of course all are welcome to input their opinions)
Dear god, posts like this are getting created faster than blocks on the network. >_> The bitcoin network is built on battle-proven technologies such as DHT and SHA256. Tor, Gnutella, and hundreds of banking, gaming, encrypting, transfer protocols, security measures, SSL, etc all use the same principles that bitcoin bases its security off of. I doubt bitcoin is going to provide much more motivation than the banking credentials of the entire world for someone to find a flaw, so this isn't bitcoin related. If someone could have done it by now, they would have. If a new attack vector becomes discovered, bitcoin is the least of our worries. So yes, it's fairly secure. Also, usually I'm not a stickler for this, but really, there's a post on the FIRST page about this. http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10661.0I think the system is secure with >80% chance.
Now, why are you throwing random, arbitrary percentages around? I'd like to see how you arrived at that number (unless you admit that it WAS arbitrary and gut-instinct, then I'll let it slide. ) |
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With that explained, this thread is pointless. Please close/delete. Also, stop bumping it.
Yes sir, Mr. Forum Police Chief Sir! |
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bwahahahaha
Come, come, gimme more noobs that think mining is cosmetic and deflation is evil. Feed the evil goat, feeeeeed me!
You're going to be one fat pig, there seems to be an endless supply of them. =( (Also, don't I remember you around here from last july/august? I haven't been around at all, just got back into the community) |
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There are two things :
1. multiple encryption or security.
the money have multiple security. if money based only one encryption, then one day we face the problem the encryption is cracked. the true currency should be prepared to add new security measures over the time.
We can implement this without having to switch over to a new block chain. 2. drop mining
mining sound like a fair way to distribute fortune. however, it is a wast of energy and the true result is only a few will control most of the bitcoins in a mining model.
the true problem of a on-line currency is to control the total among, and to distribution them evenly. I do not have exact ideas how to do that, but a system base on pure luck and some game like activities will be better.
You missed the entire point. Mining is definitely NOT to distribute the currency evenly, that defeats the purpose of an economy. The entire system RELIES on mining. |
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"I solo mined block ______" would also be pretty e-peen worthy. |
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You should offer the "I bought this when bitcoin was worth..." shirts! |
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this is going to turn out just like the may doomsday. once it flops, the guy is just going to vanish.
BitRapture. |
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Ah, of course.
If I'm not mistaken, most effort has gone into "single" SHA256, and though the composition of SHA256 operations would seem harder to crack, one never knows.
Not that I think the Twitter guy is likely to succeed, but in general I see too little attention placed on the strength of Bitcoin's cryptography and too many explanations that fail to mention its theoretical vulnerability. Or citations in support of its strength, for that matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Cryptanalysis_and_validationSHA256 isn't JUST used in bitcoin. It's used in SSL, in banks all over the world, wireless encryption, cellphone encryption, encryption/verification for thousands of open source projects, etc. If you need a citation for it's strength, it's been used for 10 years in all these fields without any likely attack vector found. |
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Oh, wait, so is it safe to go back to mining?
Er... No... bitcoin is dead, but i'll buy all your bitcoins for $1 each. |
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Aspie, hacker, part-time CompSci+Psychology OU student, pirate party member, AI geek, Assassins Creed fanatic, pseudo-transhumanist
Ultimately, it looks like he's some young hotshot who thinks he understands everything, considers himself a "hacker", and thinks he can best the worlds top mathematicians because he's 2 years into an associates degree at a shitty college. I am dissapoint. |
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