SecondMarket could make even more money if they had a private source that would sell them bitcoins below market price. That difference in price would be their extra profit.
They do. How do we know this? For one thing, you can call them up and buy/sell to them in 25BTC minimum lots. However, I think these channels are low volume right now simply because SecondMarket purchasing is loosely correlated with rises in the exchanges. And I'm guessing that bitpay isn't doing 1K btc per day right now... less spending more hoarding during the slump I would guess. |
|
|
|
Look. The bet is for 30 days. Not 90. 90 is just a way for Rpietila to try to hegde his bet. The guy is deathly afraid of losing. In 90 days we could retest 270 and be back above 500.
In fact, if we are no longer in a bear market it matters not if its 30 days or 90 days or 4 years, as we will not see 435. However, if are bear, opposite to what Rpietila suggests, then 30 days gives me a chance to prove him wrong and win the bet.
90 days I will not do. There's no sport in a bet where there is 90%+ chance of a tie and 8% in losing.
30 days is fair.
No one is going to manipulate the market. I am assuming a certain amount of honor here.
Can Rpietila also agree to real risk and honor? We will find out. I expect him to make excuses and not join the bet.
As a spectator, I'd say that this bet has more meaning with a longer term and wider spread. Narrow and short is just making a joint statement about the size of your respective d*cks :-) -- essentially saying I am rich enough and bored enough to gamble this on a coin toss. If it means so little to you, why don't you invest it in something that could enhance BTC valuation? But longer and wider is making a statement about whether bitcoin is or isn't going to bubble up again... In other words, windjc if you are a bull-in-a-bear-suit what's the point of this bet? Just to prove you are a good at market timing (who cares) or just to get the adrenaline high you've been missing since Dec (chill, man)? |
|
|
|
I have a few questions about blockchain compatibility.
I think it should be possible to copy a whole blockchain into a new crypto currency, with all the keys and transactions, so that you can restore your transaction history and balances by importing your private key into the new wallet. Is that correct?
Sure. You'd need to import all the private keys from the original wallet (unless you were using a wallet that has deterministic keys, such as Electrum in which case you'd need to import the seed). If yes, could one modify the blockchain to erase unwanted transactions and move balances into nirvana?
In your newly created altcoin? Sure. There are a variety of ways you could maintain balances that you want, and remove balances you don't want. Danny might be correct in the sense you care about. However, you really can't arbitrarily modify blocks within the blockchain because every block contains the hash of the prior block. This is why its called a "chain". So if you modify one in the middle, the hash will no longer match up. But this is code, so you *could* add an exception to your altcoin block validation tool, allowing this broken hash... But it might be better to create a one-time "fork" block that would adjust balances in any manner you choose. It is code after all... Another noob question: If a wallet has multiple addresses, is it possible to tell if they are belonging together or do they all have individual keys, or in other words - can you restore the actual wallet balances?
The addresses all have individual keys. The only way to restore entire balance would be to have all the private keys from the original wallet. Is it possible to send coins using a secondary address, or will they always be sent with the main address?
Bitcoins aren't sent "with and address" They are sent "to an address". You can choose what address you want to send them to. (Actually, they are sent to scripts. There is a particular commonly used script that encumbers spending with a signature from a private key of an address. This commonly used script is called "sending to an address" as a common way to describe it) When spending them, you spend the specific previously received outputs by satisfying the script (which in the case of bitcoins "sent to an address" means providing a valid digital signature). I think that when people speak about "sending bitcoins from an address" the "from" address IS "the specific previously received outputs". So you can't choose an arbitrary "from" address, but using the "coin control" feature in the 0.9.1 version of Bitcoin core you CAN pick which previously received outputs to use for a particular send. Other wallets, like armory let you keep multiple separate "wallets" within the same program. Coins from both wallets are never spent in the same transaction. Some more off topic question about 51% attacks:
Afaik you can take over a chain if you have the longest one in the network (chains, i'm talking about chains!).
As long as your chain satisfies the other requirements of the protocol? Sure. Would it be possible to speed up the calculation of the chain for such an attack by modifying the block time in the source code and then start calculating, so that you can override far into the past until the last checkpoint?
No. Also, although people say the "longest" chain, its really (AFAIK) the "most difficult" that is chosen. For all normal cases these two concepts are the same but this is why an attacker can't hack the code to artificially reduce the difficulty to 1, create a chain longer than the rest of the network and have everyone switch over. |
|
|
|
|
who are you? who is in this society?
|
|
|
|
|
The first rule of Bitcoin when in China is: YOU DON'T POST ABOUT BITCOIN IN CHINA!!!!
|
|
|
|
|
How does the liquidator sell the 200k BTC for $50 when the market price of BTC is $500 and not get sued?
|
|
|
|
|
margin shorts and longs both being closed out on bitfinex but shorts are the lowest in months at 6.5k btc. Longs still on the high side at 14million.
|
|
|
|
|
u want to generate the gaussian who's two points that are 1 std dev from the center fall on the 2 predicted points. normalize the curve so Y is 1 at those pts. Plug in the actual BTC log value and then divide by the width of the prediction to favor narrow range predictions. highest number wins.
|
|
|
|
That would be FAR worse, for me at least. I plan on retiring and paying 0% taxes! How can I do that if they class it as a currency?
That's very smart of you! Are you from US? If so, not paying your taxes is. Ot only a crime, but it is what SCUMBAGS DO! If you love your country, then don't we need money for schools? What about the road your car drives on? Or bridges? How about parks? He'll...what about that Submarine currently looking for the MH370 plane? Listen, paying taxes suck! But it is necessary in modern societies. You can debate all you want how crooked politicians waste our tax income, or how taxes are too high...but one thing you SHOULD NOT DO IS NOT PAY YOUR TAXES! That is one of the dumbest AND least patriotic things you can do! If you love your country, then you must pay your taxes. Period. LOL, if married you pay 0% cap gains rate if your total income is < $70000... its a tax break for retirees. |
|
|
|
ok, my last comment on the matter here. I think it should be recognized that, if one wants to discuss the future of financial systems, one needs an in depth understanding of economics. people who are ignorant of a topic want to isolate the discussion by making Bitcoin all about cryptography/a technical matter, completely overlooking how social systems are designed.
this is the perfect example. using proofs or audits (outside the system) to move balances is not a good idea. movement of currency/capital requires considerations of liquidity and supply/demand. the pricing mechanism of a market allows speed of movement, by adjusting the rate at which balances (bid and ask) match. which is why we have financial markets (and a market economy for that matter). these systems exist for a reason: they perform certain measurement functions. a buyer of a car does not need complete information about the car, and the seller doesn't need to prove that the car has certain qualities. if we would have to prove completeness in all transactions our economy would not work. these kinds of things tie in together with information asymmetry, signaling, and a host of other issues studied in economics, which unfortunately standard economics gets mostly wrong. pegged fiat currencies exist and one can study the history of those to understand why they often quickly collapse (look at the histoiry of ERM for example). eventually such schemes evolve around partial central planning of some sort. "auditors" and fraud proofs would be central points of failure.
hand-waving about Open-Transactions is very unconvincing (ethereum does the same). as if you could somehow attach markets on top of blockchains. that will never work, because the blockchain design fundamentally is not a system which allows for such transfers. a market is a system where order of events is crucially important. the blockchain creates an order of events in blocks. that's the whole point, to create a partial order. this is the same reason why Mastercoin doesn't work, which should pretty obvious by now.
What we are proposing here is analogous to moving money between Bank of America (BOA) and JP Morgan Chase (JPM). Technically you are correct, we really ought to say we have 10000 BOA_USD or 5000 JPM_USD and there should be a market to trade these. But so long as more convenient mechanisms exist to transfer the money in and out of these institutions on a 1 for 1 basis people do not bother. And look what happened to Mt. Gox. As soon as it became very difficult to move USD into/out of Gox, a "market" (on these forums people made offers) sprung up which was valuing GoxUSD differently than USD. And this happened spectacularly formally (with an explicit web-based exchange "btcbuilder.com") when both USD and BTC flows were shuttered. [Personally I think that the history of that was an awesome display of the power of markets and if I was an social economics PHD I would be studying it] So given 1-for-1 why would you prefer your USD to be in BOA vs JPM? Maybe BOA has some essential feature that you need. Maybe a better web banking interface. Maybe a close relationship with a bank in timbuktu (where you do lots of business) so transfers happen instantly to there. But I don't WANT all my USD converted into timbucks, or I'd just transfer to the tumbuktu bank. Same thing with these side-chains. It will be some piece of side-chain functionality that encourages people to move BTC into them. I want the functionality without the sketchy currency -- its useful to have my money near timbuktu, but not useful enough to risk holding timbucks. So all we are really doing here is dramatically reducing the friction to move BTC between "institution" chains, if you will. Today banks only do wires (market free transfers) between trusted banks. Will we have "trusted" chains? No. We will replace this trust with cryptographic proofs that at a minimum protects the BTC blockchain from shenanigans happening on the sidechain. |
|
|
|
It was all very strange. Soon after I posted this message, suddenly the network came back to life, and caught me up rather quickly. So now I'm turning on CPU mining, so I can earn some development coins, and also contribute to the other developers out there.
there are testnet faucets try google |
|
|
|
The attack fails because of the quieting period during which anyone can step forward and provide a reorg proof showing that the claimed return peg is not the most-work chain. The attacker would have to either overpower the honest chain, or by some magical mechanism DoS every single observer of the honest chain, preventing them from telling bitcoin about the real chain.
the quieting idea has issues as I understand it. Intuitively relying on an altruistic third party or require coin owners to be online 24/7 to protect a spend to sidechain seems dangerous. specifically, an attacker colluding with a bitcoin miner could choose to not relay the reanimate txn until it solves it in a block. another issue this raises is what happens if it happens? There are now fewer backing btc on the blockchain than on the sidechain. like musical chairs the last one to spend back into btc blockchain loses. this could trigger a run on the sidechain. |
|
|
|
ok technical discussion: Though I'd like to see something deployed that didn't force merged mining. I think having the flexibility to do other things is good.
When I first read the chat transcript proposal my first concern was as follows: Coins are spent from bitcoin to chain A. Attacker has some service that briefly owns coins on chain A and spends them to someone else (maybe a mixer, but exactly what does not matter) Now the coins are floating around chain A, for a very long time, potentially forever. Attacker has this entire amount of time to privately generate a completely fake 100 or even 1000 deep SPV proof, starting from his ownership of the coins. Attacker submits it to bitcoin blockchain. I believe that this attack fails due to merged-mining. Or in other words, the bitcoin blockchain should only accept the merged-mined blocks found on the bitcoin blockchain as evidence of difficulty. Because the bitcoin blockchain miners cannot be sure that the non-merged mined blocks are real or even that the represent meaningful work if chain A uses a different and unknown (to the bitcoin blockchain) mining algorithm. This has ramifications on how often blocks can be moved from the sidechain back to the main blockchain. If you have 1% merged mining, you will get 1 merged-mined block on the bitcoin chain every 1000 minutes (16 hrs). However, with the strength of the bitcoin blockchain and my supposition that both chains will be unwound if the bitcoin blockchain unwinds a fork, I do not think you need 100+ confs as suggested in the email. What do you think? Does this analysis make sense? |
|
|
|
And so there would be free-market merged mining of the sidechains? Choose a sidechain you wish to mine, and pay the additional storage cost for maintaining the chains you perceive as valuable?
Correct. To put some numbers on that, the namecoin chain is currently about 4GB of data, and its mined by >80% of Bitcoin's hashrate. Though I'd like to see something deployed that didn't force merged mining. I think having the flexibility to do other things is good. Whats interesting now that this has had some press coverage is that people have piped up and pointed out places where they'd invented substantially similar things in the past. So we're now up to ~5 independent inventions of the core idea... perhaps a good sign.  If I'm not one of your 5 you can add me to the list :-) [emphasis added] ....
If the bitcoin protocol evolved into a fractal blockchain, where the larger, slower, blockchains do not verify every transaction of the smaller, faster ones it will solve both interplanetary (extremely slow) and regional (high frequency) transactions. Note that on a single planet, "regional" would not have to refer to a physical region -- it could be any social network; in fact "regional" blockchain membership could be created automatically by looking at transaction history of the parent blockchain.
Essentially we'd end up creating blockchains both slower and faster then the current one.
It would be possible to do this with multiple independent "coin" chains but then you'd have the friction of independent markets that trade these different coins. Just like we have today with gold -> USD. This is what "litecoin" is attempting to do. A "better" solution would be to allow the same bitcoin commodity to transfer into and out of the slower and faster blockchains and have the greater blockchain verify some invariants (such as total quantity) of the lesser blockchain -- but not verify every transaction on it. An additional advantage is that periodically the leaf (final state) of every account in the lesser blockchain could be "committed" to the greater chain, and then that entire chain (the entire history of transactions within that chain) could be restarted.
If you are confused, imagine a "tree" of blockchains...
This architecture relies on the premise the the network has the "scale" property. That is the premise of localization of payments (i.e. that the majority of payments happen locally); if the average user paid randomly across the entire network (a "scaleless" network), the largest blockchain would see more traffic then the local ones and there would be little point in a fractal design. I think that bitCoin is "scaleless" as used today, but will become very scaled if mobile payments take off.
A big problem with shoehorning this into the existing system today is the BTC mining award. There is no way today's blockchain could recognize coins "mined" on other blockchains... so the lesser and greater chains would have to rely entirely on transaction fees.
The sidechain would not be allowed to create any bitcoin, so the current mining "subsidy" would not exist.
Thats not strictly true. In that a side-chain could have a subsidy created by stashing coins in compulsory fees on coins crossing the boundary, or by not having a 1:1 value relationship with Bitcoin, or by issuing credits for future fees or other mechanisms. I don't list these things to suggest that any of them or good or that I've considered them in depth— I'm just pointing out that there are more possibilities than you may have considered. Yes, maybe it was unclear but by "subsidy" I was referring exclusively to the coinbase txn, not the txn fees or myriad other ways... |
|
|
|
There needs to be one change to bitcoin to support all side chains but then you can have as many side chains as you want and the side chains can do whatever they want, including risky things. Who would define which chains are those which allowed to inter-operate? bitcoin-devs would have to select side-chains / teams who are allowed to participate (otherwise one would have side-chain scams). Its hard to imagine a scenario in which it makes sense to integrate such a selection process into Bitcoin. @benjyz: Are you a software engineer? No disrespect; I'm just trying to figure out how to couch the idea. Nobody would define which chains are allowed. We are talking about a distributed system here. Essentially there is a protocol (an API, if you will) and any chain that can talk that protocol can join. But that protocol is going to be requiring specific information that some services (sidechains) may not be able to meet. Its similar to you asking who defines what services run over the web? The answer is ANY service that can be defined in HTTP. For example, a forum can be defined in HTTP, an Auction site. A virtual computer. But the act of skiing cannot be. Yes you can advertise and sell skiing tickets over the web, but you can't sell actual skiing. |
|
|
|
the first step is to capture multiple things in one blockchain and allow 2+ transfers to happen atomically. once you do that an exchange is just a glorified forum... it is not even a money transmitter so no reg necessary!!! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=565342.0 |
|
|
|
3D printing to give gold the final blow?
How so? Ordered by Cypherdoc, here's a good data point. Hopefully near the bottom! :-) the silverbox update (comparison from the beginning of this thread, March 13th, 2012, gold=1690, nasdaq=3055, Bitcoin=5.4): Bitcoin is 439.00 (442.90 btcChina in USD). Gold is 1318.00. Nasdaq is 4000.00 Bitcoin: 8029.63% (8101.85%) Gold: -22.01% Nasdaq: 30.93% Gold Diff: 10324% advantage BitcoinNasdaq Diff: 6109% advantage Bitcoin |
|
|
|
Image width MUST = 314 otherwise your sacrifice won't count. Any similar symbol juxtaposed with any pony will work.  Are you retarded? I think he got a railroad spike rammed thru his brain and survived. it causes unique thought patterns. |
|
|
|
So miners who 51% the side-chain can steal coins?
no but good observation: they could prevent the coins from being spent, including being spent back into the main chain. PS, in case you don't know, in general a 51% attack can't steal coins. But they can claim EVERY block reward which is what happened to CoiledCoin. For alt-coins that have block rewards that could be seen as a problem. For the proposed merged-mined sidechain implementation, there is no block reward so nothing to claim. |
|
|
|
there will undoubtedly be Bitcoin naysayers from the free altcoin distribution who will dump their new found "free altcoin" for cash or other coin on the open market. the devs are then just as free to scoop these up at bargain prices.
Also tech-savvy bitcoiners will hold/scoop them, and so we have a nearly instant gauge of market valuation, which will reflect on exchanges. So the initial distribution does not really matter much. I hope Ethereum or some other unique altcoin devs will first take up this proposal voluntarily so we'll have a proof of concept. The clone route is a bit nasty. this is exactly what we hope will happen. this is a deterrent, or hammer, so to speak. the altcoin devs would be wise to think through the economic incentives proposed here very, very carefully. i only hope they come to the right conclusions. Unfortunately, the right conclusion for an alt-coin dev seems to be to keep going with the alt-coin but hedge your bets by making sure your BTC converts and perhaps also buying some spin-off coin if the value price tanks. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
