Under US law, you're not obligated to report a damn thing, and have the right to perform your best Sergeant Schultz impression if anyone asks.
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(1) Do you know how markets work? A thing is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.
You can't seriously be asking what will happen to the value of bitcoin when a particular event happens after people have already stopped using it and aren't ever going to use it. If nobody uses Bitcoin, its value is zero, regardless of all other factors. Bitcoin has value only because people are, in fact, using it right now. Some are using it to buy things and some are using it as a speculative investment, but it doesn't matter what they're using it for; as long as Bitcoin is useful for something, it has value. D'oh! Seriously dude! Goto(1)Seriously dude? Removing my response to your question from your quote, then claiming I haven't answered it? Do you know how markets work? A thing is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.
Yes. And why are people willing to pay for things? Because they want to use it for something!At first I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were ignorant or grossly misinformed about basic economics, but now I'm convinced I'm being trolled. But just in case, I'll reiterate the point you seem to be missing. If someone is willing to pay 50$ for my poo then my poo is worth 50$.
Nobody's going to pay anything for your poo unless they want to use it for something (organic fertiliser, or whatever). And they're not going to pay $50 for it unless they believe the thing they're planning to use it for is worth that amount. This will be my last post on this subject unless you can come up with something resembling a rational argument.
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Remember the dot-com bubble? Remember e.g. InfoSpace? In March 2000 this stock reached a price $1,305 per share, but by April 2001 its price had crashed down to $22 a share. According to your logic: People were paying over $1,305 per share for something that they're not actually planning on ever using. That makes perfect sense.
I may be going out on a limb here, but it's entirely possible that at least some of the people who payed $1,305 for a share of InfoSpace did in fact plan on using these shares to receive the huge dividends that these new Internet companies seemed to be promising. Of course, the huge dividends never materialised, but that's the risk investors take when investing in highly speculative ventures. Most people who invest money in a thing do so with the intention of using that investment to make even more money. The people who bought overpriced tulips planned to use their tulips to make a profit by selling them to greater fools. Not the most sensible use for tulips, and certainly not sustainable, as they found out the hard way, but it is a use nonetheless. Do you know how markets work? A thing is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.
Yes. And why are people willing to pay for things? Because they want to use it for something! You can't seriously be asking what will happen to the value of bitcoin when a particular event happens after people have already stopped using it and aren't ever going to use it. If nobody uses Bitcoin, its value is zero, regardless of all other factors. Bitcoin has value only because people are, in fact, using it right now. Some are using it to buy things and some are using it as a speculative investment, but it doesn't matter what they're using it for; as long as Bitcoin is useful for something, it has value.
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(1) Assuming Bitcoins are widely used by then, there will be lots of trades - and lots of transaction fees. ... or ... (2) Assuming no one will use Bitcoins, there will be no transaction fees.
I'll bet on option 2
Since bitcoins are not backed by anything, they have value solely because they are useful for certain things. If nobody's using bitcoins, they'll be worthless anyway, regardless of how many are being created. Just because there are places where Bitcoins could be spent does not mean people do use them.
Right. People are paying over $10 for something that they're not actually planning on ever using. That makes perfect sense. The places you mentioned are more or less exotic (e.g. a book store for "Document preparing the common competition in french politics sciences" hrmmmm ...). Once I can bay a toaster on Amazon using Bitcoins I will be convinced. And happy You can buy an Amazon gift card with bitcoins. Are you happy now?
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What will happen to Bitcoins, or more specific, to the price of a Bitcoin, once all 21 million are created?
At the exact moment the block reward drops to zero (around the year 2140), absolutely nothing will happen, since by that time the block subsidy will have already been an insignificant fraction of mining rewards for well over a hundred years. Instead, mining rewards will come from transaction fees. Part of the reason for the gradual reduction in the block subsidy is to avoid any craziness happening when it disappears completely. (1) At the moment we all talk about miners, GPUs, ASCIS, bulletin boards are filled with discussions. But once no new BTC are mined, will the price drop to 0? Because no one cares about BTC any more?
Why would no one care about Bitcoin when the block subsidy drops to zero (after it's already been insignificant for over a hundred years)? That doesn't make any sense. (2) BTC is meant to be a currency, right? But can I buy beer with it? Or a notebook? Book a flight? It seems all people do at the moment is trade it on MtGox, etc. - but they don't buy goods. No?
There are already many places where you can spend your bitcoins, and the number of places that accept bitcoins is likely to continue increasing in the future as Bitcoin becomes more widely known.
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The same logic for the paypal email, the bank account...
...implies that PayPal sucks (as if we didn't already know that) and that if your bank sends you sensitive information in emails or allows online banking without HTTPS, then there is something dreadfully wrong with their security and you should withdraw all your money immediately and take it somewhere else... before someone else does. In theory, every Bitcoin address received should be encrypted. However, in practice, this probably isn't going to happen. Just as an example, a lot of the sites here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Donation-accepting_organizations_and_projects have their donation Bitcoin address on an unencrypted web page. If I tried to send a large donation to one of those sites, the Bitcoin address could fairly easily be rewritten upon page load. You mean signed, not encrypted, but otherwise you are correct. Of course, it's not necessary to use HTTPS for this - GPG and Web of Trust works too, assuming people are diligent about verifying signatures. Though obviously you shouldn't sign your Bitcoin address with itself and think you've done something useful... No, transactions are signed with the private key of the sending address. This can be verified using the public key, ie the sender's address. Any alteration to the plain text would make the signature verification fail. This is standard public key cryptography.
Public key cryptography means that one address can send a message aka a transaction out to the network and everybody can verify that the message has not been altered. So a man in the middle attack could only stop the transaction from being sent out in the network by blocking it (or altering it so it would be rejected and never get in a block). Just changing the sent to address is not possible.
Please re-read the original post. This question has nothing to do with modifying Bitcoin transactions, it is about modifying Bitcoin addresses as they appear on a webpage, before a transaction is made in order to trick users into sending coins to the attacker's address.
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This problem isn't limited to Bitcoin, and applies to any kind of financial transaction conducted over an insecure channel, which is exactly why you're supposed to always use HTTPS for financial transactions. I thought everyone knew that already? I think every message is signed with the private key. You can not modify it.
True, you cannot modify a transaction after it has been sent, but the question is about changing a bitcoin address as it appears on, eg, a store's webpage, in order to trick users into sending coins to the wrong address.
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I don't think pirate was very clever. Just that his investors were not.
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I lol'd. And I rarely admit that. Coincomm, if you're going to Hell, I know a great bar on the outskirts of Dis. We should meet for drinks some time.
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Dedeicated asics will destroy the bitcoin. Im sure about that. If it's true the value will drop like a brick from my appartment. There will be too much coins in a short period of time. They raise the dificulty and all the "normal gpu minders" (about 98% of the minders) will quit. The network of mining will than become in hands of only a few big players. I think this is not the meaning of the bitcoin? They will change something to make the asic miners become less good.
That's what they said about GPU mining, and nothing of the sort ever happened. A bunch of people still mining with CPUs complained, but nobody cared, and now nobody uses CPUs for mining anymore, and still nobody cares. It's not clear what you mean by mining being "in the hands of only a few big players". Are you suggesting that only a few people will actually buy ASICs, despite being orders of magnitude cheaper than equivalent GPU or FPGA rigs? Or do you mean that with only one company producing ASICs, that company might put some kind of backdoor in their products to pull off a 51% attack (or some other kind of attack)? The latter is impossible for two reasons: First, miners are in total control of their own hardware, and since all mining operations are completely verifiable it would be impossible for the hardware to alter the blocks being mined in any way without being immediately detected. Second, BFL isn't at all likely to remain the only ASIC manufacturer in existence: as soon as other IC manufacturers see how much money BFL is making, they'll start designing their own bitcoin mining ASICs right away. Also, the purpose of mining (which is often misunderstood) is to protect the network. Back when CPU mining was the only thing around, anyone with a botnet had a decent chance of pulling off a 51% attack, since many of the zombie computers would be more than capable of substantial mining. Now that more specialised equipment is required, it is becoming less and less likely that a successful attack can be made using conventional hardware. ASICs only adds to this security, and this is good. In any case, ASIC mining cannot be prevented. For any concievable algorithm that can be executed by a CPU, it is possible to construct an ASIC that can execute the same algorithm more efficiently, since a CPU, unlike an ASIC, must necessarily have the resources and capacity to do other things than what it is doing at the moment. ASICs will be developed for any cryptocurrency that becomes valuable enough to be worth the R&D costs. Nothing other than worthlessness can prevent it. TL;DR: ASIC mining is not likely to produce mining "monopolies", it increases the security of the network, it is a Good Thing, and even if it weren't, it cannot be prevented.
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Is bitcoin on debian that far behind the main release of bitcoin, or is it just that bitcoind by itself is at a different version number than bitcoin-qt?
No and no. Debian stable (squeeze), by definition, doesn't have the latest versions of anything. Debian unstable (sid) has bitcoind 0.6.2 for amd64, and bitcoind 0.6.0 for i386. If you want to install the very latest version of Bitcoin (currently 0.6.3, though 0.7 is going to be released soon), download the tarball from bitcoin.org.
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what category the "go .... yourself" argument belongs to?
That's a command, not an argument. The arguments (if any) accompanying such a command are usually fallacious (but not always - there are more than a few members of this forum who enjoy hurling abuse and sound logic in equal measure, which is always entertaining to watch).
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I'm backing up my encrypted wallet on dropbox, but I don't really trust them with my money. Is an encrypted wallet (default encryption with password in Satoshi client) safe enough to put on Dropbox or should I really add another layer of encryption, like Truecrypt?
Wallet encryption usess AES-256 in CBC mode, which is safe, but remember that only the private keys are encrypted. Everything else, such as your balance, addresses, address book, transactions, etc. is completely unprotected, so you definitely want another layer of encryption if you're concerned about privacy. The default encryption is only designed to stop people from stealing your money, nothing else.
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Argumentum ad hominem: attacking opponents personally and on various unrelated matters, like their own businesses, bets they have or not have placed etc...
I'd just like to point out that a personal attack is only argumentum ad hominem when it is used as the premise of an argument. e.g. "You are an idiot, therefore you are wrong" is an ad hominem argument, but "You are wrong, therefore you are an idiot" is not an ad hominem argument (though it is still abusive). This is one of those things that just irritates me when people get it wrong. I agree on all other points though.
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Pretty genius if you ask me. We should also buy bitcoins in units of 0.1 USD. What's a dime these days anyway? Helps with perception.
Yup. Perception is everything. That's how I became a multi-millionaire overnight by accounting in cents instead of dollars. Genius, right? But now it seems like everything costs 100 times as much as it used to. Being a millionaire isn't quite what I was hoping for.
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Currently miners are compensated for this work with a subsidy. The subsidy declines over time and will be replaced by tx fees.
Once all blocks are found - what happens to offline wallets (paper wallets)? E.g. today one can use to private key to fund his account (e.g. MtGox). But there are no tx fees in this process. Nothing happens to offline wallets. Or online wallets, for that matter. You seem to be seriously misunderstanding something. What do you suppose MtGox (or anyone) does with those private keys? They use the private keys to sign transactions to spend the coins! Private keys have no other function than to sign transactions, and paper wallets (actually, all wallets) have literally no value except for the transactions they allow the bearer to sign. And of course, these transactions will have fees. So will the funds in offline/paper wallets then be lost (because: inaccessible).
There is no way to "access" funds other than signing transactions to spend them, which can be done as long as the private key exists in some form (offline or otherwise). The only way for funds to become inaccessible is for the private key to be lost.
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started with .0001 BTC to a Blockchain wallet on the 9th, followed by a .01 BTC transaction to the same wallet on the 15th or so. It took until the 22nd for both to be included in a block. Fees were included with both (.00004096 BTC for the first, .01 BTC for the second).
Well there's your problem. Transactions less than 0.01 BTC require a minimum fee of 0.0005 BTC to be accepted by most miners, and a fee of 0.0001 BTC just to be relayed on the chance that some miners will accept transactions with less than the required fee. I'm surprised this transaction ever got confirmed at all. You must have gotten really lucky and got a direct connection to a miner willing to process transactions that don't pay the required fee. That's the only way I can see that transaction ever confirming.
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Is it recommended to download the whole block chain before receiving or sending bitcoins?
It's not just recommended, it's required. Because transactions are stored in the blockchain, the software does not even know how many bitcoins you have until it the blockchain is downloaded: if someone sends you bitcoins, the bitcoins will not show up in your balance (and you will not be able to spend them) until your blockchain download has reached the block in which that transaction appears. At that point you can spend the coins before it finishes downloading the blockchain, but the transaction will be labeled as unconfirmed until the blockchain is downloaded, even if it actually is confirmed since the software has no way of knowing that without the blockchain. TL;DR: If you're expecting a payment but haven't received anything, or your own payments appear to never confirm, make sure your blockchain is complete and up to date before panicking.
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When starting Bitcoin after not using it for a while, it can take a while to reconnect to the network and catch up with recent transactions. Whenever you have transactions that aren't confirming, always be sure to wait until it has finished synchronising before panicking.
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The major news of Bitcoin 2 is that they will replace the proof of work with proof of laziness.
What? We have to prove our laziness now? But I'm too lazy to bother proving my laziness!
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