As a result, is it really the chain with the more CPU effort rather than necessarily even block length that ought to be recognized? I'm just curious if that is implemented as a check or not in the current network client? A sum of the difficulty level of the chain might suffice here as that additional sort of check, which would defeat a hacker group bent on churning out a whole bunch of corrupt blocks. Difficulty level is something that would be hard to spoof as it would be directly related to the "proof of work" hash on each block.
Well, isn't difficulty easy to guess with the hash of the block itself ?? I mean, difficulty is related to the threshold the hash must be inferior to in order to be accepted. Therefore, the smaller the hash, the bigger is the difficulty (although it's rather a majoration or something). |
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I'm gonna go a bit off-topic but honnestly I kind of doubt that working is the best way to earn money in life :/
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Do you plan on publishing your production numbers and how it will have been distributed amonst participants ?
I'm quite skeptical about pool mining but maybe if you can show me it actually works I'll be convinced to join.
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This is a problem that would be nice to have, where Bitcoins has grown so much so fast that we have to use the full granularity of the protocol as it currently exists.
So true  |
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As for the scientific progress concerned, Bitcoin is still at the experimentation phase, I'd say. I don't really see why the main author doesn't submit a journal article somewhere, as writing such an article is pretty easy, if you know what you are talking about. Figuring out what to write usually takes a lot of time, but writing down your research should be easy.
I doubt bitcoin can be considered as "scientific" and personnaly I think that edition as you seem to understand it is not much needed nowadays. I think Satoshi's white paper was quite good, and it is already publicly available. I appreciate his pragmatic attitude consisting in actually doing stuff instead of claiming and waiting for other people's help or recognition. |
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Whats the hardest thing about walking in a fields of dead babies.
Your penis.
Dude, is that supposed to be funny ? |
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So this is definitely something we need to keep our eye on as Bitcoin begins to take over the entire world economy.  We're not here yet Anyway I believe granularity could be increase without too many difficulties, whether by a change in the code, or by the use of 128-bit processors. Also, other cryptocurrencies could be used for small transactions, same as silver and copper were used during gold standard. |
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Please bear with me with this as I am by no means an expert.
If there are only to be a set amount of Bitcoins produced to stop inflation, then presumably instead of mining more bitcoins, people will start using up all of the 8 decimals i.e. breaking up bitcoins into ever smaller chunks and renaming them
This seems to me to have the same result as inflation, does it matter if we call 0.001BTC a bitcoin or 1BTC a bitcoin, its only a name? Is there a way so safegurd against this or is it even a big deal?
And if we were to break down all bitcoins all the way, how would the total amount of units compare to the total units of say the dollar or euro?
Intrigued and bewildered.
Has anyone ever succeeded in selling you 1g of coffee for the price of 1kg ?? More seriuosly, bitcoin is nothing but a unit of measure. At some point, well talk about centibitcoins, microbitcoins and "coins" (the smallest unit, which is 10 nanobitcoin). Here is a summary : MegaBitcoin : 1 MBTC = 10^6 BTC KiloBitcoin : 1 kBTC = 10^3 BTC centiBitcoin: 1 cBTC = 10^-2 BTC milliBitcoin: 1 mBTC = 10^-3 BTC microBitcoin: 1 µBTC = 10^-6 BTC coin: 1 COIN = 10 nBTC = 10^-8 BTC "coin" is a exception to the naming convention because it's how Satoshi call it in the source code. |
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Because if you use more violence than necessary:
1. You will involve some kind of court system, which may or may not rule that your property is valid for taking.
2. You are creating complication in the common law system. This make the law less predictable.
3. You may create more cost than benefit, leading to a downward spiral of societal and rule of law.
Agreed. The good thing with commercial exchange is that it allows people to interact without killing each other. Commercial exchange should never involve any use of violence. If you got screwed in a commercial transaction, it's not the end of the word. Don't ask society to raise hell just to repair your mistake. |
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Then, doesn't having to use an escrow service basically introduce a transaction cost that is several order of magnitude more expensive than what we have currently with the existing financial system?
There is no magic in the existing financial system. If you can get your money back, it means THERE IS an escrow service included. You've just not been consulted about it. But it does exist and its price is part of the transaction cost. Bitcoin system just makes the two processes (money transfer and compensation) more clearly separated. |
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Cash can be re-appropriated if stolen. A bank account can be confiscated. A bitcoin hoard can't be. That's a big difference.
You can do many things with guns, indeed. Maybe at some point governments will torture citizens to obtain passphrases. Anyway cash can not always be re-appropriated, because it can just have been spent. There are many irrersible ways of spending money. So again bitcoins are not much different from cash for that matter, really. |
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Tyler's answer was way funnier than the joke itself !
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I'm a rothbardian libertarian myself, so you don't have to convinced me of the problems of having a government judge deciding who should own some property.
But even without considering the world we live in today (which is already a stretch), in a free society there would still be judges that adjudicate disputes, and thieves that need to be expropriated to compensate their victims.
How is this possible in a system where no one can take away the money illegitimately acquired by a thief or fraudster? This is a major problem that I see with bitcoin being suitable as money.
Realistically, this problem could cause bitcoin to be made illegal in all major countries, the same way e-gold went. No legally abiding business could accept it in a transaction, and even though no one could completely eradicate it due to its peer to peer nature, it would be relegated to some black market usage, and loose significant market value, along with any credibility of becoming a real currency.
Basically, this is a fundamental problem with bitcoin not being compatible with a civil law justice system?
Bitcoin is not worse than cash, for that matter. The concept of money doesn't provide any security nor insurance for your transactions. Yes, some governments might dislike bitcoins. But the whole point of the design of bitcoin is to make them incapable of doing anything against that. |
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Thanks for your reply.
I'm trying to play devil's advocate here, because I think bitcoin is a great idea, and worth considering:
1) Even if a client was redirected to fake other clients, then he would probably retrieve a ridiculously short block chain. This would look much suscpicious. 2) DoS attacks are indeed an issue. It is partially resolved with transaction fees mechanism. And remember this could in no way result in acquiring other's bitcoins. I think it might allow double spending, at worst. 3) All transaction history is in the block chain. 5) Hum... About this I confess I don't know. I guess it would result in the irreversible fork of bitcoin into two separate cryptocurrencies. For your final point, remember that bitcoin transaction are irrevocable. There is no way you can force someone to give you your money back. And, no, this doesn't make it unsuitable for commerce. Some compensation/escrow services can be used for that. |
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Huh? If by free you mean 'no cost', it is free I just installed it. If you mean some particular flavour of open source code, I can't help there.
Indeed I meant that it's not under a free software licence. I'm a FOSS integrist, therefore I can't install it. |
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There are many ways bitcoin could be used in physical stores.
Some guys here are planning on creating printed bitcoins, using QR code or stuffs like that.
An other possibility would be to do everything wia wifi, for instance using smartphones running a full bitcoin client, or using a web interface such as mybitcoin.com.
I personnaly think the best would be if each store could act as a bitcoin bank. Basically you would have a bitcoin account in the shop, and you'll use with conventionnal banking-like transaction for every day purchases. You would only transfer bitcoin something like say one in a month, just to fill up your account. Such accounts could also use David Chaum's digital cash, so that stores could act like private money issuers.
I don't think bitcoin will put a end to banking system. On the contrary, it will democratize it.
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http://osiris.kodeware.net/index.phpI found this interesting project today. It is a serverless forum where each forum user is a node and if one user get taken down it doesnt affect anyone else. It looks pretty cool even though most of the instructions are in french. I made a bitcoin forum after I downloaded it but Im buggered if i can understand the instruction manual lol If you can set it up and work it out it might help us all. The whole forum actually resides on your local machine rather than needing a central server. I thought in the spirit of bitcoin it was worth checking out. Wow I was just wondering if something like could be possible... I'll check it out immediately. Decentralisation of internet is going fast ! PS. Just checked it. It's not free software. So I can't install it. |
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Bitcoin isn't indestructible. The reason why gold is good is because its a molecule. its hard to change/destroy molecules.
IMO the bitcoin chain is probably the most indestructible piece of Data on the Internet. (and gold is not a molecule) |
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Well done Bruce,
you were quite intimidated at the beginning, but once the dialogue was instaured, it was actually a very pleasant conversation to hear.
Great promotion for the network,
PS. It's too bad bitcoin.org was not more mentionned, though.
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The phrase 'intrinsic value' doesn't mean that something has value as an intrinsic characteristic, but that it is valued because of some characteristic intrinsic to the thing, as opposed to value due to derived from the promises of a third party.
Exactly. |
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