Of course trust is a factor (people with lower credit rating pay higher interest), but the primary factor is opportunity cost.

If I have money, I can choose to either invest it or loan it. If I loan it at no interest, then I have lost any money I could have made by investing it. If you want me to loan you money that I could otherwise invest, it is going to cost you.

On the other hand, if you didn't sell those bitcoins, you would have developed a debilitating heroin addiction and eventually died from an overdose.

So be happy you are alive and move on.

The user database was leaked 2 years ago.

No mention of Bitcoin anywhere in the article.

Option 1: Earn $2 (worth 0.00125 BTC) per hour at a real job. Use the money to buy bitcoins.
Option 2: Earn 0.0000125 BTC (worth $0.02) per hour doing faucets or spamming the forums.

Why is there even a question?

When Bitcoin.com mined a 1+ MB block because of a bug in their code, who was affected? When people found and exploited bugs in the BU client, who were affected?

You wrote, "in a consensus system with multiple major implementations, ..." My ideal is a consensus system without multiple major implementations. As I wrote earlier, there are 83 different implementation being used right now and yet Bitcoin is humming along. The real problem is that a few of them dominate the rest, and a person striving to make Bitcoin more robust would be working to eliminate the dominance of any particular implementation because that implementation is a point of failure.


It is true that an implementation is a precise definition, but is such a precise definition necessary? You write as if Bitcoin does not have a mechanism for resolving disputes between nodes, but it does of course.

Multiple implementations are necessary. If one implementation goes down or has a bug, then only the users of that implementation are affected. If there are many implementations then the effect of one implementation having a problem is minimal.

The fact is that there are already many implementations currently running. This site (https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/) lists 83 different implementations that are currently in use. Unfortunately, they are mostly versions of Bitcoin Core, so they all tend to have the same flaws.

Also, there is an important flaw in the single implementation argument. Whenever the single implementation is updated, a new implementation that could create an accidental fork is published. You can't avoid accidental forks by using a single implementation if you want to upgrade it. In fact, there already has been an accidental fork caused by a Bitcoin Core update.

Bubbles are bad because the resources that a bubble wastes dwarf whatever benefits you may find.

It is a naive fantasy. Even if we could change the POW algorithm to be GPU-only, we would still get this:

You are posting on the wrong site. This is Bitcoin, you want to post on http://digitalnotetalk.org/.

I hope you don't plan on mining Bitcoin with your GPUs.

Mining is an advanced topic. Newbies should have a good understanding of everything else before tackling the details of mining.

Mining is an integral part of Bitcoin. If you destroy mining, you destroy Bitcoin.

TO THE MOON!

or

CRASH!

Pick one.

The timestamp may or may not be accurate. It is up to the miner. There is no requirement regarding the time stamp except that it must be within 1 or 2 hours of the actual time (actually it is a little more complicated than that). Miners may also use it to vary the hash.

It is sad that people are joining this site just to make money by spamming the forums.

Absolutely false. Even with "high tech equipment", it is only profitable if the cost of electricity is low enough.

Please don't suggest cloud mining. Most cloud mining sites are scams and the few that are not are not profitable investments.

Arbitrage is always more difficult, more risky, and less profitable than it seems. Cashaa may find that the cost and difficulty of converting to pounds (or dollars) and then getting their money out of India and Nigeria may account for the discrepancies in prices between those two countries and UK.