The bitcoin block chain is not intended as a payment processor - it is a worldwide scheme for obtaining consensus about the flow of a currency.
You can easily build payment processors on top of this, which either do transactions internally, or provide assurance against non-confirmation and block chain splits, for a cost.
How would such payment processors work without the end-user giving up their anonymity? I would expect that any online payment processing service would require that its users credential themselves such that the payment processor feels that it has established a level of trust that it is comfortable with. Then end-users have given up their pseudoanonymity which one of the main advantages of bitcoin. It is a trade off. A transaction processor really only needs to know who the user is if they are extending credit to them, and thus might need to haul them into court some day. If the user values their anonymity, they could pre-pay the processor. |
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If there are a variety of different subsets of the possible sript rules and opcodes permitted by subsets of each of these sets, how can anyone from set (1) feel confident that emitting anything other than the most basic script types will make it all the way through these 3 (or 4) groups?
It seems to me like there will be very, very strong pressure for bitcoin peers from all groups to maintain the lowest common denominator script rules and opcodes; and unfortunately, the lowest common denominator has already been established in the form of the current widely distributed client. How will this ever change?
I'm not worried about that. Look at web browsers. Decentralized development led to an explosion of features, rather than a drought. And with enough nodes on the bitcoin network, it is pretty much a sure thing that any scripting feature that is supported by more than a tiny fraction of the nodes will eventually get through to a miner willing to verify it. And as the transaction rate grows, node clients will abandon checking sigs as pointless, since they will specialize in communication, leaving the verification job to specialized mining clients. Plus, we have the advantage that a very small set of opcodes can support a very wide array of possible verification schemes, so the useful opcodes will certainly be supported in most places. Compare that to the endless and redundant array of options and methods for formatting a document. |
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If you use bcrypt, make damn sure that your system doesn't have the sign extension bug.
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Mt. Gox, Tradehill and Bitcoin 7 should all be "up". There should be no single point of failure in our network. If we have no way of converting USD to BTC and back, Bitcoin is practically sealed off from most of the world.
The more exchanges there are, the better it is. There can also be competition between them, leading to better prices.
And more importantly, competition between them will lead to better practices. |
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No exchange ratio of BTC/USD is any more or less appropriate than any other exchange ratio. The ratio could really be anything. There is no telling whether it will go to 1% or 1000% of its value. The reason the exchange ratio is arbitrary is that it has no value except in exchange.
My interpretation is that this is essentially what Peter Schiff was saying and Donald Norman agreed.
That was pretty much how I heard it too. On the other hand, the exact same argument could be made for every other possible ratio, be it dollars to gold, or gold to chickens, or chickens to apples, or whatever. Even people that are really good with economics get caught up in these traps. They mistake the ability to eat something (or whatever) with the notion that it has some sort of stable value in relation to something or everything else. |
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Unless you signed a private contract with them stating otherwise, all you can do is trust them and ultimately they're in control. Again, the reality of the situation.
I don't follow the logic of your argument. What do you think is special about a signed contract? If I walk into a store that has a sign, "Bubble gum, $1" and I hand $1 across the counter and ask for some bubble gum, do you think there's any legal, moral, or practical difference between the sign being up and a signed contract? In contract law, there is a requirement for an offer and for an acceptance of the offer. In almost all contexts, including retail, a sign or a price tag is not considered an offer. It is an advisory that the other party is likely to make the offer at that price if asked, but they are not required to. |
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A huge BTC market cap could a have small number of only low value transactions requiring very little network security. Similarly, a small BTC market cap could have a large number of high value transactions requiring a lot of network security. So I still don't think the network security needs have a lot to do with BTC price, but I do see your point that the network security needs have a lot with how enticing it would be to steal by reverse&respend. I am now thinking that the network security needs are most closely related to the value of transactions being performed. Anyway, I still don't see how how the supply of computational power (i.e. BTC price) always happens to exactly balance out the demand for computational power (i.e. value of transactions). This is like asking if your safe could have a weaker lock. Probably yes, but lets not.
I see your point about more security being good, but another way of looking at things is to question whether it makes sense to pay $4,000,000 per year for an ultra secure safe to store $10,000,000. In this example it might make sense to “have a weaker lock”. If you view the Bitcoins being awarded to miners as a network security costs, you can calculate the percent of the Bitcoin market cap that goes to pay for network security. For example, currently bitcoins are being awarded to miners at a rate of 10,500,000 bitcoins for the first four years (i.e. 2,625,000 per year) and the current total number of bitcoins is 6,615,750. This seems like a huge portion of the market cap going towards network security and so I wonder if it is really necessary. It just seems like a lot to spend 2,625,000 BTC in a year on network security especially since I don't believe there has been one report of a reverse&respend. A lot of people want to look at two factors and try to make a decision about which one is first, and which one is second. Things are rarely that simple and direct. Bitcoins are valuable because the network is secure, and the network is secure because bitcoins are valuable (that is, because there is an incentive to increase security). The two chase each other endlessly and cause each other. You can't pick one and say that it is the cause and the other is the effect. If you are thinking in terms of the safe analogy (which isn't really very good), remember that everyone in the world is free to use this safe. Having it be far more secure than it needs to be will invite more people to use it, which makes the safe itself more valuable, which makes the safe more secure, which invites more people to use it... And since the network is distributed, no one person gets to decide how much security is appropriate. If you think that $4 million per year is too expensive to store $10 million, you are wrong, because the rest of the planet has voted, and the consensus is that the cost is exactly right. (Yes, I know, made up numbers. Think of them as references to the current cost and current value, whatever they happen to be at any given moment.) That is exactly what difficulty is, a worldwide consensus about how much effort we are collectively willing to spend to protect what we have. |
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The point of scripts is to allow a transaction sender to create their own custom rules that define, in a totally arbitrary way, who gets to redeem it. Currently, only two styles of scripts are supported, but eventually there will be many, to support things like embedding escrow directly into the chain, etc.
This will also tie into transactions in the future. The idea is that a miner will be able to look at the transaction fee and the script, estimate how much work it will take to verify it, and decide if the fee is worth the effort or not.
In my opinion, the best thing about bitcoin is that there are these strange features that don't appear to make any sense when you first look at them, but then when you dig in, you find out that there are several nuggets of awesomeness buried there.
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The miner only has the block header, which is not useful without the actual block that goes with it. The completed work must be returned to the pool (node) that issued it.
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Gold and silver have long histories of being valuable. Actually longer than history itself. You can hardly fault a guy for preferring it over this newfangled unproven thing.
But give it time. Bitcoin has virtues that aren't always obvious.
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amount sum is 237,457.099. total sum is $1,321,904.20618504.
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No pool would be able to do that twice.
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Are we looking at the same data? I've got 2967 rows (including the header) totalling 237457.099 BTC.
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With regard to the 500'000 bitcoins........these weren't necessarily real bitcoins, it could have been the BTC units within MtGox's own system....which suggests more was hacked then they are admitting.......which actually makes sense because they don't have a fucking clue anyway......hence the long delay while they get some kind of Sec infrastructure in place.
Since the sell off happened on mtgox's order books, the 500,000 coins could not have been real bitcoins. They were accounting units internal to their system. I still haven't figured out why people think it was some sort of master wallet, or collective account that was involved. It was purely an internal representation, and this is obvious because only their internal representation can participate in their order matching. |
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The only mechanism for it so far is the scarcity of ATI cards. I don't believe that enough computing power exists in a purchasable state right now for anyone to pull off this attack.
But many have proposed suggestions to prevent the attack. My personal suggestion was exponential difficulty requirements for a long chain reversal. Pick a number that is slightly higher than the longest likely legitimate chain battle, like 6 maybe. A node will do a straight difficulty comparison if a new chain appears that is 6 or less blocks long. A reversal longer than 6 blocks will require not just more difficulty than the existing chain, but 2^(num_blocks - 6) times as much difficulty as the current chain.
It has many advantages, and only one gotcha, that being that a legitimate network partition could get into a state where it is not possible to reconcile the two halves manually.
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Tell me who in his right mind would spend 500,000 away NOW just to fool around.
Think again, they weren't in a wallet, they were in MtGox.
I see it is simply a logical gap in your brain, unfortunately there are no patches for faulty brains.
The standard story so far is that the person that spent the 500,000 now just to fool around was not their legitimate owner. I have no idea what you are referring to in your wallet comment. As far as I can tell, you think that I think that the coins were in a wallet, and the wallet was lost. Which is silly, because not long ago I was trying to explain to you and niemivh that wallets and mtgox accounts are totally different and unrelated concepts. Precisely, that's my point. Huh? What is your point? Which part? |
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Tell me who in his right mind would spend 500,000 away NOW just to fool around.
Think again, they weren't in a wallet, they were in MtGox.
I see it is simply a logical gap in your brain, unfortunately there are no patches for faulty brains.
The standard story so far is that the person that spent the 500,000 now just to fool around was not their legitimate owner. I have no idea what you are referring to in your wallet comment. As far as I can tell, you think that I think that the coins were in a wallet, and the wallet was lost. Which is silly, because not long ago I was trying to explain to you and niemivh that wallets and mtgox accounts are totally different and unrelated concepts. |
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Transactions are not address to address. They are transaction to address.
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Why wouldn't the next guy just pay 1500 BTC to reverse the 1000 BTC "earned" by the first miner?
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Why the fuck would the exchange have an account in their own system that signified the collected accounts of all of their users? Don't you understand that their site doesn't operate by moving bitcoins around? When you make a trade on the site, no fucking bitcoins change hands or change wallets or anything of the sort. Do you think that 500,000 BTC can be obtained from thin air? Under the assumption that it really belongs to a single user: - If they were acquired when Bitcoins where worth 0.01, it would still had been a significant investment: $5000 USD
- If he didn't buy it and farmed it, the farming of 500,000 BTC signifies that he knows the intrinsic value of it, so he was quite dedicated on the project.
Both scenarios make very implausible that the owner would suddenly forget about their generated/purchased bitcoins, it shows interest, dedication, appreciation and/or faith for the bitcoin economy. In the event of forgetting about it for a while, that hypothetical person wouldn't neglect that the prices increased more than 200,000% from the time he acquired/generated them. And certainly everyone who is marginally related to bitcoins must have heard about jumping to $30 USD = 1 BTC. IF he had forgotten, that news might have reminded him that he was awesomly rich. Such news sparks interest again towards the bitcoins. Who ever was/is the hypothetical owner, MUST HAVE KNOWN about his WEALTH. Considering all above, the "Ignored and abandoned" argument is highly, very highly implausible.Yes, 500,000 BTC can be obtained from thin air. In fact, more than 10 times that amount has been created from thin air. A good portion of it by people that screwed around with the project for a while and then left, never to be seen again. You don't know a damn thing about bitcoins, nor about how an exchange market works, so maybe if you repeat your assertions bigger, they'll seem less stupid |
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