Why would a government impose as legal tender a currency that it can not print and therefore can not profit from it?
Usually this happens only after a catastrophic collapse involve great bloodshed. But it does happen from time to time. |
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that will cost money to get it running... and the end result is how does the organization that put it together make a profit?
Fees. You did notice that exactly the same system was invented once already, right? And it can already handle multiple currencies and do automatic conversion? All that is missing is for them to accept BTC. The opportunity exists today to set this up, but the window will close the minute that Visa or MasterCard or Discover realizes they are missing a market. |
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"The bitcoin will be back to around 17.5$/BTC after we rollback all trades that have happened after the huge Bitcoin sale that happened on June 20th near 3:00am (JST)."
How would this even be possible if the buy orders have been removed???
That will be the "last price" reported on the system when it comes back up. It will change as soon as the first new order matches.Hey, putting my text in giant red letters like a jackass was kinda fun. I should do it more often. |
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You don't have to lie about buying real products with Bitcoins any more.
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Excellent! Great to see you guys growing, hope things keep getting better and better for you. Now make more black shirts.  |
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The block is right. The parser is wrong. SHA256 works on 64 byte blocks, so messages get padded and salted before hashing.
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How about this for a novel argument - bitcoins has the seeds of its own destruction - instread of a level playing feild where everyone is encouraged to expand the concept to the real economy the early adopters use their wealth to pump up and hype the idea to speculators, dooming the concept and enriching themselves. Is that plain enough for you?
The only thing plain about your argument is just plain dumb. Without argument,your reply is more dumb..Truth craker has some solid points..There is too much speculation ongoing and it may likely crash and burst the system.. Amusingly enough, bitcoin today is inflating at a furious rate, roughly 40% per year. Clearly the rampant speculation of today has nothing to do with deflation. |
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its only worth what someone's willing to pay for it  Which is what concerns me. Is there anything that is worth more than someone is willing to pay? A surprising number of people think so. |
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My issue is that you are introducing path dependence in the chain. For example, if the attacker aggressively connects to new clients and pushes them onto his chain, he can stick them on his chain and they won't switch back to the main chain, even if its difficulty is greater. This could cause someone using that client to believe they had received some BitCoins, believe they're confirmed for a few blocks, and then still ultimately have them rejected.
You are trying to make the client 'sticky' so it gets stuck on the main chain to prevent it from getting diverted to a short-term side chain that will eventually collapse. But in exchange, you run the risk that a newly-started client that is catching up before the fork can be duped by a malicious client onto a side chain and it will stay on it longer even as the main chain exceeds its difficulty. The attacker can continue to build the side chain and the main chain has to get further and further ahead of it to win.
Yes, you make it very hard to push the client over to a side chain. But you also make it very hard to get a stuck client off a side chain that is being slowly grown by a malicious attacker.
I actually don't care about one node, or even a small percentage of all nodes. Nodes are expendable. Their operators will figure it out eventually. I want to protect the network from accepting a bogus chain grown in the dark to overturn transactions long thought safe. Oh, and I only see your scenario working as a very targeted attack. There is no way an attacker could place themselves in a position to take on all 8 connections from even a tiny fraction of random new nodes. |
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By the way, did you check the file for your account info? Did your password hash start with $1$?
$1$ doesn't help. FreeBSD MD5 doesn't protect weak passwords. With a simple dictionary attack, I cracked more than 500 passwords in one blow. Total amount of cracked passwords I got so far are now over 2000. What is the longest so far? When the csv was released I was interested in what kind of passwords people used for 'financial' institutions. This is what I got: $ for i in `cat .john/john.pot | cut -d : -f 2` ; do echo ${#i} ; done | sort | uniq -c 98 10 36 11 46 12 4 13 4 14 5 15 1 4 111 5 864 6 454 7 640 8 182 9 5 15 char passwords. Nice. How about the longest including at least one digit? |
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#1 you can sue anyone for anything
in this case, breach of fiduciary duty
That term has an actual meaning, and it doesn't apply here, unless you are Canadian. |
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By the way, did you check the file for your account info? Did your password hash start with $1$?
$1$ doesn't help. FreeBSD MD5 doesn't protect weak passwords. With a simple dictionary attack, I cracked more than 500 passwords in one blow. Total amount of cracked passwords I got so far are now over 2000. What is the longest so far? |
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I´m really interested in what this powerfull mashine really calculate.
Sadly, all the calculations are intentionally pointless. It's "make work" for computers. Basically a lot of random numbers are created then thrown away. It's fishing the ocean of numbers for the smallest fish (hash) still left to find. I'm very pro-bitcoin, but disappointed that its visionary developers haven't yet come up with a way to pair an actually useful computation with the fantastic amount of hardware and electricity we've amassed. The project itself is extraordinarily valuable, however. The proof-of-work concept that powers and regulates it has in fact brought about a practical worldwide cryptocurrency and that is an astonishing feat. And in the future when mining becomes unprofitable for power-hungry GPUs and shifts to optimized, low-power devices, we may see the system self-adjust the frenzy downwards to a much less wasteful level. Or we may see a transition into a useful substitute for hashing which yields profits while simultaneously maintaining the reliable flow of BTC. Otherwise the costs of all the electricity and periodic hardware replacement may make bitcoin more expensive than some other alternative, which might then overtake it. What could be more important than proving the security of a global money system? Finding unlikely hashes can't be faked. Any other system would allow the possibility of cheating. |
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Without persistence, yes, 1 GB is enough. With persistence, I'm not sure.
If you want to try it, make the first partition a bit bigger than the ISO image, but leave as much space as you can for the second partition. Or, just get a 2 GB drive, so that you can work with round numbers and save yourself some hassle.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding, this means that two clients that both see precisely the same blocks right now may choose different chains because of what order they saw the blocks even if the two chains have different difficulties.
Yes, exactly. This prevents a miner with a lot of power from building their own chain and keeping it private until it is longer than the real chain. And X is chosen to make it unlikely to happen during normal operation. Oh, okay. You're trying to prevent a different attack from the one I'm imagining. I'm much more worried about an attacker who only changes four or five blocks. (So if you're willing to wait an hour, you're good IMO.) Yup. And if a transaction is worth paying to have reversed, it is probably also worth waiting for. Oh, but keep in mind that these two nodes have to be isolated from each other, but still in contact with enough mining power to produce blocks in reasonable times. That means totally isolating part of the internet, and keeping it isolated for a minimum of about 2 hours (assuming the mining power on each half of the divide is equal). The less equal the division, the longer the isolation needs to last before the fork becomes permanent, and also the less difficult the manual cleanup after will be.
I don't see why. The two nodes can be talking to each other directly and each 100% agree on which blocks are available and still pick different chains. Your algorithm only makes any difference if some client at some point knowingly chooses a chain that is not the longest one on the basis of how it got to that point. Any other client that starts up during this condition, lacking that same history, will pick the longer chain. I'm not sure from this part if I'm misunderstanding your meaning, or if you are fuzzy on how the current chain dispute resolution protocol works on the network. As soon as a block is found, the miner announces it to every attached node, and they broadcast it to their attached nodes, etc, until it spreads across the entire network. The spreading across the network takes some time, but not much. Another node might also find a block at roughly the same time, and announce it too. Now there are two "next" blocks on the network, both legitimate. The nodes handle it by trusting the one they get first, since the difficulty will always been the same (otherwise one or the other would be invalid). When the second block arrives at a node, it is stored as an alternate. On the network as it is now, this happens roughly once per 200 to 400 blocks by my estimation, that is, every couple of days. So, now all the miners are working on the next next block, but the next next block they are working on corresponds to whichever next block made it first to the node running the miners. The next next block that is found will determine which of the two previous next blocks wins the race. As it spreads across the network, it will cause a single block reversion on those nodes that had initially seen the other next block first. Unless, of course, a second next next block is found and announced before the first next next block has had enough time to reach every node. In this case, every node now believes one of the two chains, and keeps the other around as a potential alternate. I'm ignoring the chances of the fork forking here, but that just restarts this phase of the race. I estimate by multiplication that this happens about once every 40,00 to 160,000 blocks. It can go on from here, of course, but the odds are already stacked against it. Of the first pair, one of them was probably slightly sooner than the other, and the network is probably not very evenly distributed, so most likely one block will be on more nodes than the other, which means that more miners will be working on one of them and the next will probably be found sooner for it. The second pair has all of the same imbalances, plus it started off on a lopsided network. The more blocks are involved in the fork, the more the coincidences have to pile up just to keep the fork from resolving. If my 1 in 300 estimate is even close to right, I won't live long enough to see a fork get to 4 (and probably not even 3). |
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By the way, did you check the file for your account info? Did your password hash start with $1$?
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You have to type your old password to reclaim your account. The password you enter has to match the one that formed the hash. Most likely, they inspect the password for complexity when you send it to the reclaim form.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding, this means that two clients that both see precisely the same blocks right now may choose different chains because of what order they saw the blocks even if the two chains have different difficulties.
Yes, exactly. This prevents a miner with a lot of power from building their own chain and keeping it private until it is longer than the real chain. And X is chosen to make it unlikely to happen during normal operation. Oh, but keep in mind that these two nodes have to be isolated from each other, but still in contact with enough mining power to produce blocks in reasonable times. That means totally isolating part of the internet, and keeping it isolated for a minimum of about 2 hours (assuming the mining power on each half of the divide is equal). The less equal the division, the longer the isolation needs to last before the fork becomes permanent, and also the less difficult the manual cleanup after will be. |
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