Don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Any investing is harsh speculation.
My opinion? Buy.
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The most used currency for drugs and terrorism is still (and will continue to be) the US dollar.
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It's probably important for everyone to know what country you're in...
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EDIT: 4000 tps and even 45000 tps theoretically but considering how many we have in the fiat world now despite all its inefficiencies we could easily be looking at 4 billion tps at some stage.
Obviously the technique can be improved a LOT before we would be hitting limits anywhere even remotely near that. And computers that far in the future will also be a lot more powerful. Bitcoin will fail because involved people are lost in the future, instead of focusing on the present. edit: Quod Erat Demonstrandum > http://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/2uovrl/me_28_f_with_my_husband_31_m_5_years_will_not/ "I used to consider him a smart guy and I never, ever thought he would succomb to basically being brainwashed by a bunch of clueless idiots on the internet who seem to know absolutely nothing about finance or the real world."
I don't claim to be a financial guru or anything else. All I see is this technology that can be used as a backbone for so many things. And to open it up to a large as possible public we need it to be as viable as possible for everyone. Including the little guys. For that to happen to need the technology to continue maturing as well as grow. The article you linked refers to someone with a "bitcoin" gambling addiction mixed with very vocal conspiracy theorist that like to bring their political views up at every chance they get. Hadn't heard about the network in the last link before, looks impressive. Thanks. Anytime ![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif) Quite spot on for the rest mate, ... miners rewards Miners need either; lots of transactions all paying a little fee very little amount of transactions paying a large fee Bitcoin needs prefers to be viable for as many people as possible, so a very little fee per transaction over a large amount of transactions has the preference. This is what the "people will use bitcoin without knowing it" stands for. Obviously there is so much more that we can do with blockchain (bitcoin) based solutions/technologies. And I'm very curious and interested to see what the future has to bring.
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EDIT: 4000 tps and even 45000 tps theoretically but considering how many we have in the fiat world now despite all its inefficiencies we could easily be looking at 4 billion tps at some stage.
Obviously the technique can be improved a LOT before we would be hitting limits anywhere even remotely near that. And computers that far in the future will also be a lot more powerful.
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Nobody said the growth would stop, what has been said is: hitting the blocklimit will not cause big trouble because the first thing that would happen would be microtransactions for tiny amounts of money happen somewhere else. So all your doom preaching and urgency is invalid. Hitting the limit will not render btc unusable - in fact it will clean the chain from spammy microtransactions. That's funny. So here you are entering a store, present your creditcard to pay for your coffee..... But guess what? I'm sorry sir, your order is below 5$, you will have to fill up this special "Starbucks-card" first with at least 50$, since we don't accept 5$ creditcard payments here. Give me one reason we would not allow micropayments to happen on the blockchain? They're all fee-paying-payments just like the large(r) ones. If you want the blockchain to be supported by transaction fees at one point you're going to need a lot of transactions. Besides that, why put a hard limit on an open-market-concept? Let the market decide. If miners don't want to mine what in your opinion are "spammy" transactions then they wont. For the rest of us, let us mine what we want to mine, in the end for the miners they are all equal in terms of transaction fees. It would have space for them for a while but at some stage the network wouldn't have space for them and that's with clunky as fsck fiat payment system volume, that would likely go up a few orders of magnitude with programmable money. By the time micropayments are a common thing more efficient means of carrying the out will have evolved but there's not much point placing the barrier of entry artificially high even then. Got to say, after reading up on all the reasons against, space and network limitations, miners rewards, propagation times, all the centralisation issues, etc. the most convincing reason I've seen yet to support a hard fork is all the FUD and empty arguments being put forward against it. If they're so eager to flood this thread with the same kind of crap as the speculation subforum there must be something really good about raising the limit. Let's put a few of your arguments against the fork and line them out; space
Currently the blockchain is ~34GB. If it will continue following the current ~0.35MB block average per block we'd be increasing the blockchain about ~30GB/year. Block size average was around 0.17MB in 2013. More or less Moores law. If this keeps increasing at the current rate the cost of storage of the blockchain will remain the same over the years. network limitations 20MB block / 10 min = 2MB/min = 0.033MB/s, common even on very very basic household connections. miners rewards Miners need either; lots of transactions all paying a little fee very little amount of transactions paying a large fee Bitcoin needs prefers to be viable for as many people as possible, so a very little fee per transaction over a large amount of transactions has the preference. propagation times There are already techniques out there like Pieter Wuille's “headers first” approach downloading the longest chain of 80-byte block headers, which is only 25 megabytes of data. The headers are sufficient to know whether or not you have the best chain, and once your node has the headers it can “back fill” by requesting complete blocks from multiple peers in any order it wants, similar to how BitTorrent downloads chunks of a large file from many different peers at once. (source: Gavin's blog) Pieter has also been working hard on ‘libsecp256k1′ — a highly optimized library for performing math on the elliptic curve used to secure Bitcoin transactions. It is undergoing extensive review, and will be rolled out when we’re convinced it is bug-free and completely compatible with the existing, OpenSSL-based code. (source: Gavin's blog) rdponticelli has a pull request to run Bitcoin Core to run with a “pruned” block database. Once you have downloaded and indexed the full block chain, the only reason to store all of the old transaction data is to serve it to brand new peers who are performing the initial download. (source: Gavin's blog) all the centralisation issues Mining centralization? Node centralization? Currently it's already unviable to run a full node on your mobile or your occasionally-connected-to-the-internet-laptop. Full nodes in the future will stay completely possible for the hobbyist, for the non-hobbyist or people that simply don't want to store the full chain light clients will be a totally acceptable alternative.
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This exactly, there will be a time that we run into the 1MB block limit. This needs to be fixed before the blockchain grinds to a halt (maxes out on TPS really) and transactions take forever to confirm.
this is exactly what will NOT happen. The chain will not grind to a halt. You have no evidence to back that claim up. It's just fearmongering/FUD /doom preaching ....The current network can support 4200 transactions per block (estimation) (assuming exactly 10 minutes per block) before hitting the 1MB block limit. After that transactions will start queuing up and you will have to start waiting for your transaction to confirm. Why would you want that to happen?
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Nobody said the growth would stop, what has been said is: hitting the blocklimit will not cause big trouble because the first thing that would happen would be microtransactions for tiny amounts of money happen somewhere else. So all your doom preaching and urgency is invalid. Hitting the limit will not render btc unusable - in fact it will clean the chain from spammy microtransactions. That's funny. So here you are entering a store, present your creditcard to pay for your coffee..... But guess what? I'm sorry sir, your order is below 5$, you will have to fill up this special "Starbucks-card" first with at least 50$, since we don't accept 5$ creditcard payments here. Give me one reason we would not allow micropayments to happen on the blockchain? They're all fee-paying-payments just like the large(r) ones. If you want the blockchain to be supported by transaction fees at one point you're going to need a lot of transactions. Besides that, why put a hard limit on an open-market-concept? Let the market decide. If miners don't want to mine what in your opinion are "spammy" transactions then they wont. For the rest of us, let miners mine what they want to mine, in the end for the miners they are all equal in terms of transaction fees.
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This exactly, there will be a time that we run into the 1MB block limit. This needs to be fixed before the blockchain grinds to a halt (maxes out on TPS really) and transactions take forever to confirm.
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Seems like the majority (consensus) has come to an agreement, let's get this over with. The 1MB hard limit has no reason to stay, why hard limit an open market concept? If we want Bitcoin to continue growing we will need a higher TPS limit. Preferably one that can grow X% each year so we wont have to hard fork again in the future.
Obviously there will always be people that are against such change, mostly bringing silly arguments about that bitcoin was never meant to be used for paying coffee at a restaurant (why shouldn't it? And why wouldn't we let the market decide instead of putting hard-limits?) or relating to the transaction fees per block in the future. I rather see a near-high-frequency trading/sending in the future where miners get lots of little transaction fees (more optimizations will be needed for this in the future) than much fewer transactions resulting in much higher fees per transaction.
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I'd install Ubuntu on that machine and then wouldn't worry about sending anything there.
Problem with XP is that it'd be easy to get infected through USB the moment you plug it in to actually install Armory. Create a watch-only wallet on an online computer so you can see if your coins arrived 'safely' (test with a small amount before you send any large amount if you don't have too much experience!).
Once you see all your coins are safely on your cold wallet using your watch-only computer, you can remove armory on the online PC.
Make sure you always create appropriate (paper) backups.
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I don't remember what those issues are but I remember it sounded somewhat serious.
Unfortunately all sig methods are problematic (whether deterministic or not) and some smart people have shown ways that you can have corrupt software disclose your private keys without you even knowing. I don't think we have any current way to be safe from that. If no one would ever reuse addresses there wouldn't be a problem, which is what everyone should be doing already anyway? Somewhere in the future we will have to step over to quantum proof signature schemes like CMSS40 or GMSS40 anyway. The problem with these currently is that they would take too long to generate and would take too much space.
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I'm going to go ahead and stop replying to a troll, and if it's not a troll simply someone that does not want to learn or understand. Op has a lot of reading to do if he ever wants to even so much as have a grasp of understanding how Bitcoin works. And seeing how he if having problems at understanding even the most basic concepts I'm afraid that might take a few years.
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We just crossed the all time high of last year, at an impressive 95,680 transactions in a day (or 100,000 incl popular addresses)
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Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that.
Again, you're staring yourself blind at the front-door approach. I have now have thousands of the highest value wallets and their keys. And malicious control of the pools. Now I'm emptying all those wallets into a network of new wallets under my control, too complex for anyone without a list of the exact wallets, to decipher. Which will be near impossible, if at all feasible, without preparing for this exact scenario in advance. How often do you change wallets? Every hour? Every day? Every month? How many transactions on the blockchain is purely people changing wallets? How many automatic-wallet-changing-apps are in the public domain? What's safer - a static wallet, or a dynamic wallet? ...Which improves your chances of winning the lottery - always playing the same number, or playing a different number every time? ... See what I'm doing here. Inception. And then reversing it. The bad guys don't. You've been incepted to stare yourself blind at how secure a protocol is that you don't understand yourself, nor tried to circumvent yourself. And then, of course... not to mention that I have remote agents, and plenty of bandwidth, on my own dark net, and on almost every AS on the internet, and a decentralized control system of my own, that only I can control. Using encryption that is decades ahead of what is mainstream or available in the public domain today. You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it
That's about all you need. What's the potential damage value, per minute, per hour, per day? Hard numbers. What's the best hedge against it? Someone has worked it out. Is it in the public domain? No. Is it being tracked in real-time, in the public domain? No. Should it be? Would it be better that only a handful of malicious agents track it... or if everyone was keenly aware of the score? Hey, the score can even make itself back into the protocol, to beef it up even more. The only beefing-up today is against Moore's law and the size of the network. Do you really, truly and honestly believe that that is enough? --- This is the initial point of my post. Everyone is going on about how bullet-proof the protocol is, yet there are gaping vulnerabilities that nobody is talking about. Okay, perhaps they're not "gaping" yet, and perhaps not unique to Bitcoin, save for the fact that Bitcoin could potentially present their highest-value taget... perhaps the little talk about it is more a symptom of them not being an issue ...yet. The protocol is pretty great, yes... but even the ancient Greeks had stories about how fallibility... the Indians were ahead by another few thousand years. Icarus. Jatayu. What kills you? It's what you don't know or don't see coming. Complacency. What is the weakest link in the chain? It's you - and where you save your key. And your limited knowledge of- and ability to control the hardware-, software- and networks you need to utilize it. Which I started mastering before you could speak your mother tongue, which I stole even before you generated it (if you used my wallet software, or OS...) ... and you're still blissfully eating your steak, pretending that me and my world don't exist, simply because you've not come face-to-face with it yet... once you have, you'll be beyond thinking it will go away if you just close your eyes and pretend, you'll be beyond sticking your fingers in your ears... so perhaps all this is, is your assertion that you have not. And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate.
So... what's the reaction time on that? Microseconds? Hours? Days? Weeks?... How many of the blockchain downloaders are actually running metrics on it? 5? 10? 100? 1000? How many of them are sharing their metrics with the world?... How many people use randomized pool lists...? Because what if I even engineered those?... Don't you want to know more?... BTW... have you checked the p2pool code yourself? Which client and server versions? Downloaded from where? Who can you trust.... ? MUHAHAHAHA. I'll mail you a postcard from my island... where the only currency I need is bananas and boobs. I'll reply a little bit right now and some more later. Not that you've actually even attempted to understand what I wrote but that's ok, you're starting to look more and more like an elaborate troll. I don't think you've fully realized yet that even with 99% of the entire network under your control you cannot move or empty anyone's wallet. You do not have the private keys of those people. Without the private key you cannot move any funds on the blockchain even if you had 100% of the network. I don't have to change wallet since my private keys are secure, if someone would take control of the network I would just simply be relaxing and wait out the storm since my coins are secured by MY private key that YOU don't have access to. It's not a lottery, you cannot crack my private key. This image will explain it to you... ![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnandbit.com%2Fdocs%2Fbitcoin-sun.jpg&t=665&c=-Bdg7fDT4NK7hA) Then let's move on to who would see your malicious attempts... Well, pretty much anyone that's running a full node on the network. Doublespend attempts are easy to recognize and there are hundreds of people constantly looking at transactions on the blockchain, so yes, it will be obvious, and it is monitored in real time. The potential damage would only last for a few hours, since miners will step over to p2pool, which is decentralized. And yes, people are constantly looking at the security of that OPEN SOURCE code as well and thousands of hackers have tried to attack it. You can try to steal my private keys, but sadly for you all of them are offline. If you really are that good at hacking I recommend you start with coinbase, they have some nice hot wallets and just like Bitcoin their system is constantly tested by hackers. Write me back when you're in (although I'm sure we'll read in the news about it) and then post your "loot" on this thread and perhaps someone will believe you. Public keys are open domain so feel free to try and crack a private key from a public key, you can find some public keys here: http://blockchain.info/I feel like you have a lot of reading to do. If you would like to learn more about cryptography you could read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algorithms-Source/dp/8126513683/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415981394&sr=1-1&keywords=Applied+Cryptography%3A+Protocols%2C+Algorithms%2C+and+Source+Code+in+C
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Moore's law is already cracking, from the perspective that IPC increases out of AMD and INTEL have been strictly nominal for the past few years. So from that narrative, which I think also holds strong (looking at the supercomputer list when you normalize some combination of flops/kw or cores/kw) in the proprietary chip market also (e.g. IBM).
So what's going to likely happen moving forward is that sha256 gets slowly eroded, which is basically what has happened to every other industry standard cryptographic algorithm.
In the ASIC chip industry, people are already down to 28 and 20nm. Soon enough (e/g 1 year) when everyone in the industry has reached down to 20nm you'll see a plateau in computing power between chips. The competitive advantage will dissipate between manufacturers as everyone optimizes their chips at 20nm.
So the point is that there is basically no likelihood of a zeroday event where someoen ramps up enough computing power to brute force out sha256 tomorrow.
Again, isn't this just addressing the "front-door" approach, that everyone seems to stare themselves blind at? Let's try this differently, how centralized are these pools? Discus Fish GHash.IO KnCMiner AntPool ( https://blockchain.info/pools) What will it take to take them out, and if done, how long will they be down for? Another scenario - how elaborate a hack will it take to link them together to do a 51% attack to empty some big wallets? How many layers of security would you need to get through? How many stolen ssh keys will it take? 5) Add to that security. Who holds this metric: How secure is each GH?
restored to a previous point.. ?? im not even going to comment on the stupidity of having restore points as thats the fungability argument. bitcoin will continue on as it should, as you say it would require a hell of alot of things in combination to cause the bitcoin ledger to be re-written and governments would not waste resources or risk fiat catastrophe based on bitcoin. after all there are over 100 FIAT currencies.. do you see america trying EMP explosions in russia and china to stop the BRICS development. as for your comments on how secure is GH.. well better than KH better than MH, but not as good as TH and definetly not as good as PH.. so dont worry about the small stuff we are over 25% nearer to EH than dropping all of the way back to GH What I mean, is, how easy is it to gain access to the largest mining operations and pool control structures? On the physical layer? On the OS layer? On the social engineering layer? What I mean is, how easy would it be to disrupt the 5 or 6 largest pools, and take half the network hashrate offline? How feasible is it? And as with anything, surely a cost can be attached to that... and a reward. Does it even out? Has anyone done a qualitative calculation? At what price point will it become feasible? Where is this calculation? Or do I have to do it myself...? For someone claiming to have read into the matter and know a lot about network security you certainly don't seem to know too much about the Bitcoin protocol. As I've answered before, taking down those pools would technically be the best possible thing you could do for the health of the network, since within hours all miners will step over to DECENTRALIZED solutions like p2poool, since none of them want to be missing out on potential mining profits. I wrote this before but I doubt you read it. Now lets step over to the social engineering part of it all. Ok, so congratulations you've hacked into all of those pools and you can now unleash your evil plans on the blockchain... One problem, you can't STEAL anyone's wallet! WALLETS ARE SECURED BY CRYPTOGRAPHY STRONG ENOUGH THAT IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THE ENERGY OF THE ENTIRE SUN FOR ITS ENTIRE LIFESPAN TO CRACK. Having 51 or even 99% of the network changes nothing about that. You could prevent transactions of your choosing from gaining any confirmations, thus making them invalid, potentially preventing people from sending Bitcoins between addresses. You could also reverse transactions you send during the time they are in control (allowing double spend transactions), and they could potentially prevent other miners from finding any blocks for a short period of time. That’s really about it And all of this would be blatantly obvious to people monitoring the blockchain. Miners that notice they're mining on a malicious pool would step over to a different pool, or simply to p2pool. Once miners step over you and your evil plans will be left in control of nice pools.... controlling exactly 0% of the networks hashrate. There is nearly no profit is obtaining 51% of the network through hacking except for doing some doublespends after which miners stop providing their hashing power to mine for your evil plans. In short, you'd be doing the network a favor since people will finally step over to decentralized mining pools.
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What hacker?
THE hacker. :-) Kidding aside, what OS were you using? Was it online? What wallet software? As was stated above, look up cold storage, that is what you want. the wallet: i download it from the forum, Bitcoin Core version 0.9.3 ,my computer system: WINDOW 7 when it was update the new block date i left,when i came back,it completed the updated,the same time ,the coins was transfered. In this case your computer is compromised. Consider your email and any private documents on your computer as public domain. Format your PC and change all your passwords to all websites. Also think about what you downloaded or ran on your computer that could've contained viruses or Trojans.
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The hacker stole my bitcoin two day ago,a small amount , less than 0.2BTC, I want to know how can I protect my coins,if a large number of bitcoins I know I use offline wallet, but a small amount of Bitcoins,I only set the password, but it seems not enough.
We need more information, like where were your bitcoins kept? Did you share a password anywhere else? I was also a recent victim of a bitcoin hack to the tune of 2 bitcoins. I know how it feels. ![Undecided](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/undecided.gif) i kept it on my computer, the password was knew noly myself. yes , fell sad for the lost Although the number is not much. And again barely any info..... In this case your computer is compromised. Consider your email and any private documents on your computer as public domain. Format your PC and change all your passwords to all websites. I still think OP made this post to boost his post count.... Still rather useless thread.
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