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Yes, Bitcoin is just like SDR.
It's issued by a central authority.
It represents a claim for a basket of fiat currencies.
That central authority dictates to everyone what they can and cannot buy with bitcoin.
That central authority dictates with whom you can trade bitcoin.
Everyone using bitcoin obeys those rules.
A bitcoin transaction takes several days.
Nobody is using bitcoin for anything apart from storing value.
Its supply is variable.
Great analogy!
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So whoever controls the whitelist controls the flow of money - negating the main advantage of bitcoin, that this is done by predefined algorithms, not people.
Your intentions might be good, but how do I know I can trust you in the long term (or whatever bureaucracy ends up controlling the whitelist)? How do I know that this central authority won't start awarding itself Groupcoins by indirect means?
Also, the whole point of a block chain is to eliminate the need for trusting a third party. But if you are reintroducing this need, why use something as inefficient as a block chain? You may as well just record the signed transactions in a database on your server and publish the database regularly.
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Yet another thread with the word "imminent" in the title...
Yet another poster with secret "sources"...
This is starting to get old.
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"However, pragmatically it is necessary to understand that the majority of people now do see the government as legitimate and, if Bitcoin was banned, would not use it out of a desire to be good upstanding citizens. The Bitcoin economy would lose 90% of its user base and the value of Bitcoin would crash. Therefore, Bitcoin needs to become a viable currency for legitimate business transactions."
I'm not so sure about that. Yeah, perhaps they don't litter in the park, but as soon as lots of money is involved, even "good upstanding citizens" start misbehaving. At least half of the people I know would dodge taxation if they could get away with dodging taxation. Even though they think of themselves as "good upstanding citizens". Half of the people I know who can get away with dodging taxation do dodge taxation. In less "developed" countries this number is much higher. People in South America for instance view government in a much more cynical light than in the US or Northern Europe. In Brazil there is a saying, "that law didn't catch on". I can so see that happening to a bitcoin ban. |
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None of the above. Two of my expected bitcoin failure modes are listed, but not the one I think is most likely: we will learn how insecure the average computer really is. Until now, they was no direct way to steal money from somebody's equipment. People are already working on a client that splits the private key between a secure server and your computer. Other people are working on secure liveCDs. This won't be an issue long term. Hardly anyone is going to store a wallet.dat file on their windows machine 1 year from now. |
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You practically don't need courts of law of you have escrow and GPG web of trust.
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If this is true, then if I wrote a bitcoin client that colluded to give miners more coins, they would use it. I don't think that's the case. I think people can understand that if they do these things, the coins they are generating become totally worthless because noone has faith in them anymore.
They wouldn't use it because it's not compatible with the existing clients on the network, and most people would reject their forked chain. In your system, collusion to award yourself more coins is compatible with the existing clients on the network. Your system allows a gradual, creeping corruption. It's a bit like a badly enforced law that initially gets broken by only a few opportunists, but after a while even "nice" people who (in principle) agree with the law start breaking it because they feel cheated by the opportunists. The current bitcoin implementation is highly resilient because of network effects. A gradual corruption is not possible. You can't go from a situation where only 1% of miners use the corrupt client, then a week later 2%, then 10%, then 50%... no, network effects will very quickly drive the number down from 1% to 0%. Corruption in the current implementation can only be revolutionary, ie. >50% of users (not just miners!) updating to the corrupt client simultaneously. That is extremely unlinkely. Also, 50% inflation a year as a result of Moore's Law is still a lot better than allowing people to vote themselves richer, causing hyperinflation. |
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sweden isn't a big surprise really. I guess the news is spreading there quickly.
What I'm waiting for is for the giants in Asia to wake up and smell the bitcoins. Looking at China and India specifically.
there are some fairly draconian laws in china about the use of any kind of cryptography. it's hard to say how they'd react to the use of the essentially unbreakable crypto in Bitcoin - but poorly, i would think. china might be the first serious test of a Bitcoin v/s a major government scenario. the reg'lar folks in china... they sure do like their money... China is very lax on VPN though. Perhaps it's because big business can't operate without VPN. |
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The hope is that enough people will realize that is an extremely stupid idea and be detrimental to widespread adoption, and instead carefully vote in a way that gives them some kind of appreciation, but not so much to scare away future newcomers.
And here lies the problem. A system that relies on hope. The current bitcoin implementation, despite all its flaws, has one feature the gives it a huge amount of resilience: A decision that is in the selfish interest of an individual user is usually also in the interest of the bitcoin network as a whole. It doesn't matter who the user is or what his motivations are. Bitcoin is agnostic to things like hope and ideology. In the system you're suggesting, a decision that is in the selfish interest of an individual user is detrimental to the network as whole. It's a tragedy of the commons of sorts. I'm not saying such a system can't work, but it's a lot more vulnerable than the current bitcoin implementation. |
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Voting will make the number of generated coins highly unpredictable. You are setting up a system prone to positive feedback loops that could create even more price instability.
I don't think that most people will vote altruistically or in the name of economic stability. A lot of miners will just vote for a very high number hoping to bring the weighted median up so they can make a few more coins. Once people get used to the fact that the block award keeps rising, they will vote for even bigger increases hoping to make up for the loss of value of their coins. Hyperinflation could result.
Even your idea of "vetoing" for upper and lower bounds will be "abused" for selfish means: Many miners will set lower bounds (that they keep raising) simply to make sure other voters don't bring the median down again.
Here is a much less corruptible scheme that addresses your concerns:
Number of coins awarded per block = Difficulty
Simple, predictable, easy to understand by everybody, and likely to lead to (more or less) stable prices because difficulty is roughly proportional to the size of the economy.
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why does windows even allow access to the MBR, even with administrator rights?
Because you need to modify the MBR if you want create partitions, for example. |
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The order book is very unreliable. It's only a snapshot. There are lots of buyers and sellers with BTC or USD sitting in mtgox who don't place orders until the last moment. There are dark pools. There are large trades going on on bitcoin-otc. And finally, mtgox doesn't publish most of the order book. Only a narrow range.
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More than 600k USD in the order book. and that's just in the visible range of approx. 16-14 USD. The real number is prob something like 2M USD.
I have never seen the bid side of the order book this full on mtgox. Something is brewing.
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... der Einführung eines Geldwäschebeauftragten für alle Betriebe mit mehr als neun Mitarbeitern ...
Die sind ja nicht ganz bei Trost. Wozu braucht zB. ein Theater oder ein Kindergarten einen Geldwäschebeauftragten??? Wenn das so weiter geht, dann braucht jedes kleine Unternehmen einen: Klimaschutzbeauftragten Jugendschutzbeauftragten Spielsuchtbeauftragten Drogenbeuftragten Rassismusbeauftragten Suizidbeauftragten Urheberrechtsbeauftragten Erdbebenbeauftragten Schweinegrippebeauftragten Elektrosmogbeauftragten usw. die dann natuerlich alle auf Kosten des Unternehmens geschult werden muessen. Wer hat dann noch Zeit etwas zu produzieren? Kein Wunder dass so viele innovative Spitzenkraefte ins Ausland abwandern. |
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Don't keep your computer switched on overnight.
Dang then how do we mine  I'll fix that to cater for miners. |
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Bitcoin doesn't have to be anonymous.
Exchanges won't be affected by this law because they already know the bank details of all their customers.
Merchants of physical goods know their customers' names and addresses, no matter how they pay.
The only businesses hurt by this law are sellers of virtual goods and services, such as MMOGs, but there is no particular reason to buy those in Germany, even if you live there.
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2) Split your big wallet to 15+ small wallets
Why so many? 15 seems like a lot of work. Won't about 5 suffice for the average user? |
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Thanks for your feedback. -When deleting an unencrypted wallet, that file must be shredded. Of course this will mean explain what shredding is and why it is important.
It has been pointed out that shredding is not effective on modern operating systems. I think it's still better than nothing, but does it give people a false sense of security? -Recommend a good password manager to help (I vote for LastPass).
Password managers create a single point of failure. Do you think this is secure enough for protecting wallets? I prefer to encrypt my savings wallets with different, independent passwords. |
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It is difficult enough running your own business. Running a bitcoin exchange is even more difficult, because in addition to the normal crap a startup has deal with, you are taking a personal (not just financial) risk.
It's something I would never be capable of. Exchanges provide a vital service to the bitcoin community in the bootstrapping phase. Every exchange operator (not just mtgox) is a hero in my eyes.
I am thankful for mtgox, despite their mistakes and screw ups. I have no reason to believe that their intentions are dishonest. That's why I will keep supporting them (and other exchanges).
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