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i cant speak for other people but i can speak for myself. anything that i would have bought with fiat anyway that can be bought with bitcoin instead, I buy with bitcoin instead. since i do believe that the price will continue to go up, i buy enough bitcoins to offset the purchases i make with it. So in the end i have no fewer bitcoins than i would if i hadn't spent them.
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me: i got a message at the top of my my wikipedia page saying that you need donations. I quickly navigated to to the donations page with every intention of contributing only to find that you do not accept bitcoin for donations and unfortunately that is how i do all of my donating. I would ask you to please consider adding that option as not everyone has access to or is willing to use the formal banking system. wikipedia: Thanks for your email and for your interest in supporting free knowledge. Unfortunately we do not accept bitcoins, however, we are aware of bitcoin and we will continue to monitor it with interest. For a full list of other donation options, please visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en. Thank you again for your interest! Sincerely, Michael Beattie Donor Services Associate Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. |
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it only helps a little bit because it only saves the need to store some of the transaction headers. As far as the information inside of the body is concerned, you still have just as many inputs and outputs, its just as much data to be stored on the blockchain.
It could help if it covered time too. If A pays B and then B pays C, then the 2 transactions could be combined to give A pays C. A pays C could have higher fee per kB than A pays B and B pays C, so it is worth it for a mining pool to combine them. This could happen if the transaction pool started becoming a queue. At the moment, transactions mostly get into the chain. If transactions stayed unconfirmed for a while, then you could end up with more opportunities to collapse the transactions. So, a longer queue makes the blockchain more efficient. thats very clever tier |
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I just realized CoinJoin is actually an effective scaling tool; no longer would we have to increase the block size to handle more tx/s. Just bundle them in CoinJoin txs.
it only helps a little bit because it only saves the need to store some of the transaction headers. As far as the information inside of the body is concerned, you still have just as many inputs and outputs, its just as much data to be stored on the blockchain. |
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here is another story. transaction costs become too high, naturally, because distributed ledgers don't scale well. clever entrepreneurs come to the rescue. By building ontop of the existing infrastructure they leaver the advantages of bitcoin in order to create censorship resistant centralized ledger systems. to the end user consumer its virtually indistinguishable from bitcoin except that it has super low fees and instantaneous transactions. and everyone lives happily ever after, except for people who get cancer.
To answer your post, though, Wasn't the problem so hard that it forced the creators of Bitcoin to resort to decentralisation in the first place? If you want an alternative, why not something very simple: a benign leader who is simply has the people's best interests at heart and is smart enough to understand what's going on? Would I be endorsing democratic values, if I said that I was sceptical whether such a person could be democratically elected? Maybe if there were many, smaller currencies... Thats a really good point. So i guess i should say pseudo centralized. basically these institutions would tread a happy middle ground between bitcoins level of decentralization, and a full on "one ledger to rule them all" scenario. Let me explain with an example. Suppose that we have ledger operator a b and c. You want to make a bitcoin transaction with your buddy and you are using operator a and your buddy is using operator b. You broadcast your intention to operator a and b and a and b communicate with each other and agree that everything looks good and then the transaction is complete. A and B store up a balance of payments for all transactions with each other, and once per day, who ever is liable on net clears his obligation to the other using the blockchain. Notice that C never had to download any information relating to this transaction. Thats only a 30% savings in total network load, but suppose we have 100 operators, than it becomes a 98% savings. Using this framework, cryptobanks can pop up on the dark nets. Governments can take some of them down, but they would end up playing a never ending game of whackamole. That is the sense in which it is censorship resistant, and the sense in which it is centralized in that each actor is maintaining his own ledger. There are other ways to make it more efficient also. Such as banks wouldnt need to actually communicate all transactions with each other either. Both banks could bundle their transactions relating to each other into blocks, then hash the blocks and compare hashes, and only explore the transactions in detail if the hashes dont match. Thats just one example, there is tons of creative stuff they could do to reduce network load. and of course the blockchain would still be super great for many purposes. just not buying a soda or a sandwich. |
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Exactly. They don't rip the cells to shreds. They vitrify them. It's like plasticizing. You guys should read up on the newer technology for cryonics. You sound like stock market guys trying to comment on bitcoin :-)
awesome. thankyou for that information. i will look into it more closely. |
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here is another story. transaction costs become too high, naturally, because distributed ledgers don't scale well. clever entrepreneurs come to the rescue. By building ontop of the existing infrastructure they leaver the advantages of bitcoin in order to create censorship resistant centralized ledger systems. to the end user consumer its virtually indistinguishable from bitcoin except that it has super low fees and instantaneous transactions. and everyone lives happily ever after, except for people who get cancer.
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one of the initial reasons i decided to buy bitcoin (thank god) is that i was a silver bug at the time and i heard an argument that silver could potentially be inflated oblivion at some point in the future by asteroid mining. I bought bitcoin as a hedge against that possibility. Just something to think about.
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I'd wager that by the time we get to the 'fall' part; neither this forum nor any of the past or present posters in this thread will still be around to discuss it.
You mean, besides the ones rich enough to get cryopreservation? Immortality = 40 Bitcoins at current exchange rates (Cryonics Institute).  Bu it doesn't work. one way to find out! who goes first?  They cannot unfreeze living cells without ripping them to shreds. I like my cells unshredded thank you very much! this this were true than there would be a very good chance that cryogenics could work. unfortunately the cells are ripped to shreds when then are frozen not when they are unfrozen. |
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As most of you are probably aware bitmit is closing down. The service that bitmit provided is pretty important to the heath of this community so this begs the question, where do we go now? I know there are alternatives so first lets make a comprehensive list and then weigh the positives and negatives of each choice. https://cryptothrift.com/As the founder of cryptothrift, I would definitely love to hear the negatives to see how we can improve our services... We've already received a huge amount of reviews and recommendations and we're working on getting most of them added/fixed by the end of the year, one at a time  wow cryptothrift looks pretty good. I've been testing coingig and so far have found it to be rather buggy. do you guys do escrow? what are your fees like? how do you deal with scammers? also a bit off topic but i like to bring this up to entrepreneurs doing this sort of work because i think its amazing http://nashx.com/HowItWorks and could be accomplished in a trust-less manner using multi-signature transactions. *edit* first experience is this error message when i try to log in using google |
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Isn't it pretty clear that the block chain, or a decentralized model in general, cant be the final product here? I mean there is no way that is ever going to scale to facilitate global mainstream adoption. It seems to me that we are going to be forced to move to doing most of our transactions off chain whether we like it or not.
Now that is hardly a strike against bitcoin. Bicoins decentralized model is revolutionary in its never before seen quality of censorship resistance, but it is precisely this that we should be focusing our efforts towards levering, not anonymity. Bitcoin has the ability to act as a decentralized backbone upon which centralized ledgers can be built and in so doing and by levering the censorship resistant properties of bitcoin, creating a new censorship resistant centralized ledger system.
So then the real question is not whether we can make the decentralized ledger anonymous, but whether the entrepreneurs who provide centralized ledgers will be able to make those anonymous, and whether they will be able to prove that fact to us.
Anyway i would be interested to hear you guys thoughts. Is it possible for operators of centralized ledgers to make transactions anonymous? Is it possible to create technology that could prove to the customers that these ledgers are anonymous? do these technologies exist? if not is anyone working on them? if so who?
p.s. i wish there was a better place for this than off-topic but it doesnt seem to fit anywhere.
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Do you wan't to know what I as a foreign 'hear' a lot?
"criminals"
"terorrists"
"money laundry"
"computer crime"
and once even
"child pornography"
To me it seems the undertone of that conversation is to associate 'bad things' with 'digital currencies'.
How far is this TV program spread accross the US? Do many people tend to watch this?
99.9999% of Americans do not watch the channel this is being broadcasted on. However, the news will probably do soundbits focusing on child porn, money laundering, terrorists/ These are the branches of law enforcement talking to the law authors. All they will talk about are the criminals and their ability to catch them. This testimony will not be watched by anyone unless they are VERY interested in bitcoin. So far it has been VERY good for bitcoin. All these folks are bragging about how great they are at getting the bad guys. The folks holding the hearing are the ones that author the laws. The main issue is whether they need to write new laws to help the law enforcers stop bad things from happening... so far the law enforcers are NOT asking for new laws or more power, with the exception of maybe more funding for their current programs (but those should be well funded already by the seizures made this year), the lawmakers also get to decide on spending. This is 100% positive for bitcoin so far in that there is no new damaging output requested. There may even be some positive effect if there is a more structured refinement of the FINcen pieces which are currently overreaching depending on how they get interpreted. its funny, i learned a lot about government today. there is little to no organization, no cooperation, definitely no interest in "bringing down bitcoin" the only thing these department heads are interested in is panhandling. They seriously couldn't care less about digital currencies, they are just trying to use this as an opportunity to say "look we have done such a great job, look how many bad guys we caught, please either A) give us more money or B) increase the scope of our bailiwick. |
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this edward lowry fellow hasn't answered a single one of the questions he has been asked.
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I use 20 paper wallets to keep the amount of BTC low in each wallet and store copies at two separate banks.
If BTC address are compromised through cryptography, BTC wil be worthless anyway. No point in spreading to a lot of address, just spread to a few different places. Depends on the compromise. Bitcoin can adapt to certain compromises. And some compromises will affect some schemes but not others. Still, similar to what DeathAndTaxes said, it depends in part on what counts as a wallet. If I keep a single text file with a bunch of private keys, independently generated with a true random number generator, on a USB drive in a safe-deposit box, is that one wallet, or many wallets (or no wallets)? From a cryptographic standpoint, I'd say that counts as many wallets. Whereas if you're using a single BIP 32 chain based on a single parent key, I'd say from a cryptographic standpoint that counts as one wallet. Um, no I wouldn't think so, because cryptography is the mainstay of the whole bitcoin system. When the P=NP puzzle is solved or when quantum computing reduces P to NP, then basically bitcoin will become worthless. It's a main reason why so many of my mathematician and computer science friends won't invest in bitcoin. That's why so many white hat hackers are stating that passwords, encrypting, hashing and salting are going to be dead in the future. possible. but its also possible that we will see signs and anticipate the breaking of encryption before it is actually broken and employ quantum resistant cryptography before it becomes a problem. |
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possibly the marketplace section of this forum tbh. i bet there are some early adopters who are looking to take some profits with out waving a giant neon sign outside of the capital building of their particular government.
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at the end of the day, if you want to know what bitcoins true ultimate number one utility is, the one utility that makes it so that even if it had not one single other use case than it would still be valuable, this news article makes it pretty obvious. http://autos.aol.com/article/gold-bars-hidden-car/THIS is why bitcoin changes everything. |
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yes this is the resource that really made it "click" for me. it was like a puzzle and all the pieces were close to the right places and you could see what the picture was supposed to be but after this video it all fell into place. |
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the moment you double your money sell half your coins and put the money back in the account. then you will have 6 bitcoins and your parents will never be the wiser |
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