CORRECTED:  |
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I had two people who wanted the 2013 coin, but both flaked out, so it is back on the market!
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I dont understand. Other than signature campaigns, what good are hero accounts?
I guess everyone would love to be an Hero. Not as much as we would love to be a Legendary. |
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He's been banned, thanks to malevolent.
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So exactly what caused this 2-day price dive?
It was holding up a bit better before. It's sad to see that it's back to $400, but there is not much that I could do.
If I had a B $ I would probably buy up now.
What caused it? It's just constant downward pressure from people spending Bitcoins (and companies selling it right after), as well as miners attempting to recover money to pay off their multi-million dollar investments in mining equipment and facilities. For some reason, people here try to delude themselves and say that people spending Bitcoins doesn't cause downward pressure on the price "because there is always a buyer", but those people simply don't understand how markets work. |
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Dropped prices again, OP is up to date!
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Is there a rebuttal from the PoS crowd to this: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf... other than "sure, the original PoS ideas were flawed, but the latest MegaUberPoS system gets it right and nobody has figured out exactly how to break it!" I am not the best person to discuss the technical details here, but how do you explain PoW altcoins are easily 51% attacked to death. But then PoS altcoins all avoided this fate, and most of them (the non scammy ones), works and works well. Clearly when put in a equal competition (altcoins), the PoS system came out on top in an equal competitive environment (without early start advantage etc...). Currently top 6 marketcap: 1. Bitcoin (PoW) (early start) 2. Litecoin (PoW) (early start) 3. Ripple (not PoW nor PoS, possibly a scam) 4. BitsharesX (PoS) (DPoS) 5. NxT (PoS) (possibly scam distribution) 6. Peercoin (PoS) (PoW initial distribution) As is typical with those who support PoS, no acceptable answer is given. |
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Abusive admin is back, you are banned for not giving me 1 BTC
Banned this person because saying admin is Abusive Banned for being a sig sell-out. |
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Wait, selling accounts is a thing? For 5.5 BTC? You people are crazy... Must have some neat scams to be willing to buy them for that much.
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my paypal acc was frozen cause i sold bitcoin, why are they having such a sudden change of heart.
Yeah Paypal was terrible for buying Bitcoins, it still is. And their "virtual goods" policy is rarely enforced outside of bullying cryptocurrency users, for example, most text based RPGs sell "donator packs", a virtual good, through Paypal, and they have thriving businesses. I wish they would sort out this hypocrisy. It's all about risk though. And involving themselves as a middleman for Bitcoin purchases is about as risky as it gets. Picture this: A person sells 1 Bitcoin for $500 in Paypal. The seller immediately withdraws the $500 to their bank account, then disconnects their Paypal account from their bank account. The buyer receives the Bitcoin, then immediately issues a refund request, indicating "item not received" or whatever other BS they come up with. Paypal tries to withdraw money from the seller's bank account to cover the refund, but fails. Paypal still has to give the buyer back his $500. So who is left holding the bag? Paypal. And it'll take dozens if not hundreds of transaction fees to make up for this loss. Now I'm sure that Paypal would love to handle Bitcoin transactions (because why wouldn't they love more revenue?), but they know that Bitcoin related transactions are generally much riskier than say, a customer buying something from newegg with Paypal, so they simply eliminate any transactions that are Bitcoin-related to eliminate that risk. You could argue that Bitcoin transactions can be proven via the blockchain, but the only true way this could be proven to Paypal is to have communications done through paypal as to which address would be paid when and how much. Can we really expect Paypal to employ their own army of cyber-sleuths among their customer service department to deduce the truth? Not when they're only getting paid $0.30/transaction to do it. I can't really fault them for doing this. Bad actors in the Bitcoin community brought it down for all of us. The good news is, Paypal doesn't hate Bitcoin at all, they were simply avoiding unmanageable risk. When Bitcoin is integrated in Paypal wallets though, Paypal will ultimately have control and detailed information about what actually happened, what payments were actually sent and received and by whom, etc. Paypal will become a de-facto Bitcoin exchange with no risk to the customer. |
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It's no more far-fetched than they spending astronomical amount of money to attack a PoS system (and without guaranteed success, like attacking a PoW).
Okay - am coming around to your point of view now - but one point still bothers me which is the *hacking point*. With PoW you can't *hack the proof* you have to "do the work" (unless a fundamental flaw is found with SHA256 which would probably screw up all cryptos that exist at the moment). It may be much easier to *attack the wallets* of stake holders (via keyloggers, etc.) in order to gain the stake without having to spend "astronomic amounts" of money. I'd argue PoS miners are much more security minded, since they have to pretty much keep the wallet hot (online), even if briefly, in order to mine with it (though I believe in DPoS system you don't have to, since mining is delegated to the delegates, you can put your funds in cold storage). Also they are very much de-centralized, instead of concentrated in a pool, can you imagine how hard it is to obtain the identity of 10,000 PoS miner, their IP address, and then some how access their mining PC etc... I'd be much more worried that discus fish and ghash.io getting hacked simultaneously (imho a much more likely scenario) and the attacker instantly gain 51% in Bitcoin. Keeping your wallet "hot" by definition is going to make your funds vulnerable. If any PoS coin ever had any meaningful market cap then the miners would be under constant attack, likely to the point they would choose to no longer mine and exit ownership of the coin. Not really, you will only get constantly attacked if you are running a website with the hot wallet. If your PC is not running any service, not install any trojan/virus, and the network is properly firewalled, the chances of getting hacked, is practically zero. If it were that easy to hack someone, no one would be using Bitcoin anymore, since majority of the Bitcoin users are not using cold wallets neither, and the average Bitcoin user is much less security minded than a PoS miner, who probably has taken the correct security measures to keep his PoS mining PC safe. Plus the hacker would only be able to obtain an encrypted wallet, that he then have to try to crack, probably a fruitless effort. Usually a Bitcoin user gets hacked due to 1. unencrypted wallet, 2. backs up wallet + password in the sameplace (ie dropbox), and account gets hacked. 3. installed wallet stealing malware, and password got keylogged. Non of these will happen to a correctly set up PoS miner. So you need a dedicated computer and internet connection to mine in a PoS schema? Isn't that trending back towards the whole "wasteful resources" thing? Certainly not using gobs of electricity, but it does dictate a hardware requirement of sorts. |
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Pffft, of course. Sorry to waste your time with that!
My bad.
No problem! My number was a complete guess anyway, based on the fact that OP said it would cost "hundreds of millions" to gain enough hashpower for 51% attack. You did the math, and it seems like $300M is almost spot-on. |
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I cannot count the number of times that firstbits would have been useful to me personally, and I imagine to many others as well, so I would like to get serious about revitalizing the firstbits website. I'd like it to be open source as well, so anyone can help improve the code or host a copy down the road. The code should replicate the behavior as listed here: http://firstbits.net/about.phpBasic logic should be as follows: 1) Gather all Bitcoin addresses from a block. 2) Compare first two characters of first address in the block to firstbits table. 3) If a match is found in the table, add another character of the address and repeat. 4) Once it is not found, add temporary firstbits into an array and move on to the next address. 5) At the end of the block, compare all temporary firstbits found from addresses in the block to each other. Resolve any conflicts by adding characters to conflicting addresses. 6) Add completed list of firstbits to firstbits table. Other requirements: - Must store data in a MySQL database - Must use either PHP or python (or both) - Must be able to connect to a bitcoin daemon (bitcoinQT) to gather the addresses - Must be able to compute and store firstbits with additional length (i.e. 1sgtspike and 1sgtspike5 must both return 1SgTspiKe5HHkjdSeD72q9WsiJhRiaxf9) - Must be publicly hosted to github upon completion Bounty: $200 of BTC. Now I realize the bounty is low for a job of this complexity, so if someone else wants to help chip in a bit more to the bounty, please do so! It would be greatly appreciated. Any questions? Any volunteers who wish to code this? ABE is open source and has this functionality Good point. I'll have to take a closer look at this. In either case, it would be nice to have an implementation solely focused on firstbits, since a full block explorer is incredibly resource intensive. EDIT: Forgot to mention, I have someone who has set out to build the system and claim the bounty. |
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Assumptions:
- The cost of a 51% attack is currently $300M
I would like to know how you got to this calculation? I believe the figure is about 1/2 of this. You need just over 50% of total hash rate, and then need to house, cool and power it for a day. Using an AntMiner S3+ with no discount for bulk purchase, and the price of $0.08 / kWh, we are talking about approximately $157M, or roughly the cost of 3 x F18 Hornets. You need 101% of the current network hashrate to beat the current network hashrate. |
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With your parameter tx estimated/needed what do you refer to, tx per block/10minutes?
Yes, tx per block is what I was considering in the spreadsheet. |
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What exactly is the incentive to 51% attack the network? What could someone hope to accomplish financially with a 51% attack? Because I tried to figure out a scenario where someone could make hundreds of millions of dollars with a 51% attack, and have thus far failed to see one. Please enlighten me.
Ok, the bleeding money makes sense now. You consider the value not being added for additional persons investing in Bitcoin to be bleeding. I can agree with that. I also agree that PoS would increase the value of current holdings vs the reward essentially going towards paying for mining. That said, I don't think PoS is a valid long-term solution, simply because it encourages too much holding/hoarding. Rewarding the holders will only serve to increase the rate at which holders hold. But, time will tell. If PoS is truly a better solution, then BitShares or a comparable will eventually emerge as the winner of the cryptocurrency race.
I think you could think of it this way. If it cost $1B to attack/cause huge trouble to a country like say Slovenia with no repercussion, no country in the world would do it, because it's not worth it. But now if I tell you if you spend $1B, and you could attack/cause huge trouble and loss for the United States of America (and still with no repercussion), I would bet at least several dozen countries in this world will do it in a heart beat. My point is, as you become large and powerful, then the cost to attack you MUST also rise, it can not be cheap. Otherwise, someone WILL attack Bitcoin, just so he could say I did it, and if Bitcoin does get that big, I think the existing established banks/creditcard/governments have PLENTY of incentive to do just that. Now the advantage of a PoS system, is that it's naturally resistant against a 51% attack. To attack a PoS eco-system, you must have resources several times the value of the eco-system, otherwise, you WILL fail. On the other hand, to attack a PoW system, you just have to buy enough hardware to overwhelm the current miners, which currently cost about only 10% of Bitcoin eco-system value. This is why there has been exact ZERO successful 51% attack on any PoS alt coin, while plenty of PoW alt coin has been attacked to death. Fair points, and well explained! |
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1) I'm assuming you're including the block reward as part of the transaction "cost". That's not a valid comparison, since that is money injected into the network. Even if it was, upon reduction to negligibility of the block reward, that number will drop dramatically. The free market will eventually settle on what makes a fair transaction cost is in absence of a block reward.
Yes, when block reward is gone, that number may drop dramatically, but what then? what about 51% attack? Right now a PoW 51% attack on Bitcoin would cost hundreds of million dollars too, if the block reward is gone, then transaction fees better make up for it, otherwise a 51% attack would become very cheap. Now if the transaction fee does make up for the block reward, then we are still back to to the original problem, hundreds of millions of dollars bleeding from the community each year, and paid to hardware vendor/electric company. You're too short-sighted. If Bitcoin is still around by the time the block reward is insignificant to miners, then it's going to be worth a lot more than it is now, and a lot more transactions are going to be pushed through it than are pushed now, upping the reward per block. Transaction fees aside, think about it - the price only has to DOUBLE in 4 years to maintain the same value of reward to miners. In the last 4 years, the price has gone from $0.0025/bitcoin to $500/bitcoin. That's 200,000 times the current value. Now certainly, the value of Bitcoin cannot continue rising indefinitely, but one thing is for certain: if Bitcoin is successful, then block rewards will continue sustaining mining for decades to come. If Bitcoin ISN'T worth a lot more by the time the block reward is insignificant, then the Bitcoin experiment effectively failed, because the current value isn't enough for a significant number of people to be using it for transacting and storing value. And you've still failed to convince me how money is "bleeding" from the community. What does that even mean? What do you expect miners would be doing with their money if mining wasn't available? Finally, what's the correct level of security that Bitcoin needs? A 51% attack would be detrimental, but it wouldn't mean the end of Bitcoin. There are ways to counter and mitigate it, and the worst that would happen is a suspension of transactions until the attack is resolved. So, what's to say that $10M of attack prevention isn't enough? Currently it would cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions, but is that really necessary? I'd be interested to see some analysis in that regard. If Bitcoin eco-system is to become that big, say 1 Trillion, then the mining cost MUST also rise to match it, otherwise the incentive to 51% attack the network is too high, since it would be cheap to do so. Why money is "bleeding" from the community? I thought it's pretty clear. Someone is paying for the hardware and electricity, correct? on the surface, the miners are paying. But then the miners gets paid by block reward, which they probably immediately sell to cover their cost. Those who buys these newly minted Bitcoin are paying. The existing Bitcoin holders and eco-system did not gain any value from this process. But with a DPoS system, since there's no need to pay hardware vendor and electric company, they money is used to directly purchase the currency, and the existing currency holders and eco-system all benefit from this inflow of money. What exactly is the incentive to 51% attack the network? What could someone hope to accomplish financially with a 51% attack? Because I tried to figure out a scenario where someone could make hundreds of millions of dollars with a 51% attack, and have thus far failed to see one. Please enlighten me. Ok, the bleeding money makes sense now. You consider the value not being added for additional persons investing in Bitcoin to be bleeding. I can agree with that. I also agree that PoS would increase the value of current holdings vs the reward essentially going towards paying for mining. That said, I don't think PoS is a valid long-term solution, simply because it encourages too much holding/hoarding. Rewarding the holders will only serve to increase the rate at which holders hold. But, time will tell. If PoS is truly a better solution, then BitShares or a comparable will eventually emerge as the winner of the cryptocurrency race. |
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1) I'm assuming you're including the block reward as part of the transaction "cost". That's not a valid comparison, since that is money injected into the network. Even if it was, upon reduction to negligibility of the block reward, that number will drop dramatically. The free market will eventually settle on what makes a fair transaction cost is in absence of a block reward.
Yes, when block reward is gone, that number may drop dramatically, but what then? what about 51% attack? Right now a PoW 51% attack on Bitcoin would cost hundreds of million dollars too, if the block reward is gone, then transaction fees better make up for it, otherwise a 51% attack would become very cheap. Now if the transaction fee does make up for the block reward, then we are still back to to the original problem, hundreds of millions of dollars bleeding from the community each year, and paid to hardware vendor/electric company. You're too short-sighted. If Bitcoin is still around by the time the block reward is insignificant to miners, then it's going to be worth a lot more than it is now, and a lot more transactions are going to be pushed through it than are pushed now, upping the reward per block. Transaction fees aside, think about it - the price only has to DOUBLE in 4 years to maintain the same value of reward to miners. In the last 4 years, the price has gone from $0.0025/bitcoin to $500/bitcoin. That's 200,000 times the current value. Now certainly, the value of Bitcoin cannot continue rising indefinitely, but one thing is for certain: if Bitcoin is successful, then block rewards will continue sustaining mining for decades to come. If Bitcoin ISN'T worth a lot more by the time the block reward is insignificant, then the Bitcoin experiment effectively failed, because the current value isn't enough for a significant number of people to be using it for transacting and storing value. And you've still failed to convince me how money is "bleeding" from the community. What does that even mean? What do you expect miners would be doing with their money if mining wasn't available? Finally, what's the correct level of security that Bitcoin needs? A 51% attack would be detrimental, but it wouldn't mean the end of Bitcoin. There are ways to counter and mitigate it, and the worst that would happen is a suspension of transactions until the attack is resolved. So, what's to say that $10M of attack prevention isn't enough? Currently it would cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions, but is that really necessary? I'd be interested to see some analysis in that regard. |
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My reasoning: * Each transaction in Bitcoin costs hundreds of time more than a credit card transaction to process. (currently this is subsidized by inflow of capital into the eco-system, so users haven't felt the full effect). * Hundreds of millions of dollars are paid to mining hardware vendor and electricity company. This will continue year after year, and only will grow more and more as Bitcoin grows bigger. The Bitcoin community is being bled dry. The price action this year shows that even with massive amount of big name adoption and good news, the inflow of capital is having trouble to keep up with the insane surge of mining cost. * There are better ways to secure the network, for example Bitshares's DPoS system. Money is re-invested into the eco-system and community, instead of paid to hardware vendor and electric company. * If Bitcoin doesn't drop PoW and embrace the much more efficient DPoS system. I can see Bitshares eventually overtake Bitcoin. Simply because Bitcoin eco-system is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and the DPoS re-invests the money and grows the eco-system/community each year. Btw, you can hold BTC in Bitshares  1) I'm assuming you're including the block reward as part of the transaction "cost". That's not a valid comparison, since that is money injected into the network. Even if it was, upon reduction to negligibility of the block reward, that number will drop dramatically. The free market will eventually settle on what makes a fair transaction cost is in absence of a block reward. 2) So hundreds of millions of dollars is better paid to people who hoard Bitcoins? Won't PoS this only increase the problem of hoarding? And honestly, I don't care if miners have to sell 100% of their coins to make a buck. So be it - the market will settle on an appropriate price for Bitcoin with the increase of Bitcoin supply on the exchanges, and that will be that. There's no such thing as "The Bitcoin community is being bled dry", as you would like to suggest. The price is being held down, perhaps, but is that the only stick with which we should measure success? To me, it is an excellent thing, because a lower price means a better distribution of Bitcoins among people. More people holding Bitcoin = better long term success of Bitcoin. PoS would encourage fewer people to hold Bitcoin (because fewer people would want to sell) = lower long term success. 3) I disagree, for the reasons listed in #2. 4) If Bitshares proves itself to be a better system, then so be it. The free market will decide. I don't see any reason to fork Bitcoin away from what it is not to match another system that already exists. Let each system with its unique variables stand on its own, and we'll see which is the better system simply by watching what the free market decides. |
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