Unless you really think we're going to see negative prices by 2015, stop drawing straight lines on a linear chart.  |
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The 51% attack cannot "collapse the whole system" Yes it can, with a 51% attack bitcoin becomes instantly useless. It becomes instantly useful again the moment the attack ceases. They can only fraudulently reverse or modify their own transactions, not anyone else's. They can (temporarily) prevent other people's transactions from being confirmed, but not modify them in any way or reverse transactions which were already confirmed before the attack What? With a 51% attack you can replace the current blockchain with your! And that blockchain can for example start being modified since a year ago. This means that since a year ago all the blocks were found by the attacker. This means that he own all these bitcoins and that no other transaction has been confirmed since then. You mined your coin 6 months ago and spent them? No more, he mined these coins! Not you! So your transaction disappear. It never existed. That would require a lot more than 51% to do in any reasonable timeframe. For example, to rewrite 1 year of transaction history within 1 year would require 67% of the hashing power. That's a whole year of continuous mining with double the hashing power of the rest of the network before you can even begin your attack. And that's assuming no checkpoints. With checkpoints, such an attack is completely and utterly impossible. the attackers can only do anything during the time they are actively mining with 51% of the hashing power This rely on your hope that the attack eventually would stop. Why it should? After a government start the computers, it can leave them attacking for whatever time it want! The attack will stop if legitimate miners can upgrade their equipment faster than the government does (which the government has to constantly pay for). Also, I didn't know the government got free electricity. Yes, if the attack stop then we can fix everything (lot of people keep a backup of the current blockchain). But that is a big if!
Double spends can't be fixed by reverting to a back-up blockchain, but apart from that (which is probably not a major problem anyway, since nobody will trust any transactions that occur during the attack), nothing will need fixing anyway. As disruptive as a 51% attack would be, the disruption is only temporary (though even a temporary disruption might still be economically disastrous). |
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You've got some more reading to do.
The 51% attack cannot "collapse the whole system", and in fact attackers are very limited in what kinds of damage they can do. They can only fraudulently reverse or modify their own transactions, not anyone else's. They can (temporarily) prevent other people's transactions from being confirmed, but not modify them in any way or reverse transactions which were already confirmed before the attack. They cannot steal other people's coins (except for sending his own coins and taking them back), and cannot create coins out of thin air. Such an attack would also be extremely obvious and users would be warned not to perform any transactions until it is clear the attack has stopped.
Also, the attackers can only do anything during the time they are actively mining with 51% of the hashing power. As soon as they stop mining, or if legitimate miners summon enough resources to regain the majority of the mining power, the network will resume normal operation, all transactions which the attacker blocked would soon start being confirmed, and it'll be almost as though nothing had ever happened.
That's not to say such the 51% attack is nothing to worry about. It would cause a total (but temporary) disruption of all Bitcoin services and probably a loss of faith in the currency resulting in a massive price crash, and it may take a long time to recover, but it's not the end of the world either.
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Can I turn off all avatars?
Yes. |
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So how much can I make with a normal single PC in a day or 2? say a dual core 3.0Ghz machine,
Depending on your graphics card (the CPU is useless for mining), you might make a penny or two per day, minus the increased electricity cost of constantly running your computer at full load. Unless you have very cheap electricity, you'll be making a net loss. Is it more feasible to collect bitcoins through free bitcoin advertising sites or to mine them yourself?
Probably, unless you're willing to spend some money on more specialised mining equipment (FPGAs or ASICs). Also where can I buy bitcoins in stupidly small amounts like £1 (GBP), £5 etc? Does a service for this exist yet?
Don't know, sorry. Also when you print bitcoin money it has the private key on it right? does the printing of that private key compromise the whole wallet or just that payment address?
If you're talking about a paper backup of your wallet, allowing anyone else to see it compromises the whole wallet. If you're talking about PrintCoins or Casascius coins and other such things intended to be circulated as cash, then only the address is "compromised", but you want it to be compromised: the idea is that people who receive such bills and coins can use the private key to transfer the bitcoins to their (digital) wallet, after which the bill/coin is worthless and is taken out of circulation. and what effect does it have on the blockchain, will people printing bitcoins and taking them out of digital circulation ultimately ruin bitcoin?
The blockchain will have fewer transactions, as people conduct some transactions offline, but the bitcoins won't stay offline forever (see above). You might as well ask, "Will people withdrawing cash from their bank accounts ultimately ruin banks?", to which the answer is no, because the cash almost always gets deposited again at some point. Note also that lost or destroyed bitcoins are not a problem, as this simply has the result of increasing the value of all remaining bitcoins (slightly decreased supply + same demand), and bitcoins can be divided to 8 decimal places. Even if so many bitcoins were lost that only a tiny fraction of a bitcoin remained, the economy would still function just fine on that fraction of a bitcoin. |
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I see there "cgminer.exe". That indicates a Windows program. Is there a cgminer for Linux?
Yes. |
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For example, a piece of the NY Fed will bring in far more than a piece of the St Louis Fed.
I thought the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank has a history of more prudent action than the others. Which is exactly why it is worth less. For a central bank, "prudent action" and "making money" are mutually exclusive. |
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Check out page 9 after the yacht ads. This demographic being advertised to knows whats up and why they don't want other nosy people in their business.
you talking about the Virtual Offices? No, that is rookie stuff. I am talking about the stuff by CMC on page 9.  That's page 7, not page 9. |
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He's talking about Bitcoin-Qt's rarely-used (and for good reason) built-in miner It was removed more than a year ago if i remember well. You remember incorrectly. Only the option in the GUI was removed, due to its uselessness. The miner is still present, presumably for the sake of being a complete implementation of everything needed to run the Bitcoin network, and can be invoked by starting Bitcoin-Qt or bitcoind with the gen option (either as a command line argument or in the configuration file), or with the RPC command setgenerate true (and setgenerate false stops mining, of course). |
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Yes, but it only uses your CPU, not your graphics card, and is therefore completely useless (which is why the option was removed from the GUI). It will take you many years or even decades to find a block this way, if ever. If you actually hope to ever make even a small amount of bitcoins, download a real miner such as cgminer and join a pool. What? About what option are you speaking about?
To solo mine (bad idea anyway lol) you need to run qt as server
He's talking about Bitcoin-Qt's rarely-used (and for good reason) built-in miner. Running as a server is not required when mining this way, though it is an astoundingly bad idea. |
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Spending bitcoins is what helps the community, trading it for usd, not so much.
What's the difference? How is buying and selling dollars fundamentally different from buying and selling anything else? Moreover, if nobody traded bitcoins for dollars, where would new users (which is what the community really needs) obtain them in the first place? |
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Who receives the fees?
Miners receive the transaction fees in additional to newly mined bitcoins. This is to ensure that mining (which is necessary for the security of the network) will still continue even after all 21 million bitcoins have been mined, with mining then being supported entirely by transaction fees. Is this an income opportunity?
Yes, anyone can mine, though powerful hardware is required if you expect to make a decent amount, and you have to consider your electricity costs as well. Mining is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and in fact you are likely to make a net loss unless you have very cheap electricity or specialised mining hardware. |
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Ignore woolybit. He's just angry that they don't take PayPal or credit cards. I've been using SpendBitcoins for nearly a year now and they've never once ripped me off. Their fee really is only 10% (and worth every cent - their service is second to none). |
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VGA? WTF?
More correctly known as a 15-pin D-sub RGB video connector, commonly referred to as a "VGA connector" because it was first used on ye olden VGA graphics cards (though some VGA cards used the earlier 9-pin connector). Of course, nobody uses VGA cards any more, but the connector is still the most widely supported today, which is probably why it was chosen over DVI or HDMI. |
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This forum is where I learned of the Dead Cat Bounce effect. Two steps forward, one step back. Drive on, Bitcoin.
Actually, it's the exact opposite of a dead cat bounce. This is a live cat. Bouncing off the ceiling. In an attempt to break through it. Dead cats don't do that (unless you throw them real hard). |
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I'm not sure, but for me it intuitively seems that if we didn't have any built-in mechanism to make illogical decisions, we'd be permanently "chasing our tails" and unable to snap out of a particular chain of thought whenever a problem is logically undecidable. Machines don't really 'need' to deal with that but it's pretty much the definition of a crash and humans don't want to wait forever. Did you even read the article you linked to? A problem is undecidable when there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and no way to tell which is which in all cases. If there are multiple answers with no way to pick between them, but it doesn't really matter which answer you pick (ie, there are no wrong answers), it is not undecidable. Computers do have a way to decide such problems. It's called a random number generator, and it is in fact routinely used to solve such problems as collision avoidance in networking. Contrary to what you might think, it is trivially easy to program a computer to decide randomly between equally good choices, or to add random factors to break out of an infinite loop. |
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