]Osama Bin Laden famously made the argument (others may have as well) that there were no "innocent victims" in the 9/11 attacks since Americans participate in the subjugation of other cultures through the taxes they pay into the US government. Essentially, that makes every tax payer a valid target. Regardless of the validity of the argument itself it is brilliant for exposing the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. During the last decade the US military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians all over the world and justified this as "collateral damage". If the killing of civilians by the 9/11 hijackers was evil, then the US military is a few orders of magnitude more evil. If the US military is justified in killing civilians then the same arguments they use to justify doing it would also exonerate the 9/11 hijackers. |
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I also think that most transactions can be handled off-blockchain Off-blockchain transactions defeat the purpose of using Bitcoins in the first place as they reintroduce the possibility of prior restraint and do not have the same security and irreversibility guarantees as the main chain. Off-blockchain transactions don't help users in any way - they just make the lives of thieves and control freaks easier. |
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All I have to say is this: Within the next 8 hours the price will crash. Hopefully it is still crashed tomorrow morning when I have dollars available to buy with. |
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This means that answer to question what could the government do to defeat bitcoin? is probably nothing. They could balance their budgets, allow the banksters to be prosecuted for fraud and racketeering, stop the emission of unbacked credit, repeal the AML/KYC laws which prevent banks from offering the services their customers actually want, and basically reduce the appeal of bitcoins by making national currencies not suck. In other words, nothing they are actually willing to do. |
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They can just prohibit paper money forcing everyone to use bank accounts only. That's a good reason to hold all your savings in BTC and only maintain a bare minimum in local current, just enough to meet your living expenses. |
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If I have a "SlowCoin", which generates a block per 60 minutes, does that mean 1 confirmation will be sufficient? "Sufficient confirmations" means the resources needed to successfully orphan the branch containing a given transaction are more expensive than the transaction itself. 6 confirmations is a number that somebody pulled out of their nether regions back when the network was small and people were still CPU mining, and nobody has since then come up with a better answer to the question. |
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Wondering if Bitcoin can scale to three or four magnitudes larger than the largest global payment network is just silly. As Bitcoin scales it becomes increasingly more difficult to introduce changes like new block versions that would support that kind of growth. It's much easier to put algorithms in place now that are sufficiently efficient to scale to those magnitudes well before they are needed. Avoiding this discussion in the present is a good way to help people who want to prevent Bitcoin from ever succeeding to that degree. |
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On edit: you updated storage
I accidentally hit the Enter key with the focus in the wrong part of the screen and submitted the post before I was ready. |
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Other than needing storage space which grows by 35 TB per day you are all set. 1) It's not necessary for every node to keep a copy of every transaction forever. 2) It probably isn't necessary for anyone to keep all the prunable transactions forever. 3) A 12.6 EB drive should cost less than $1000 by 2030. |
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I think the wiki article for Scalability is not ambitious enough; Bitcoin should be capable of processing 1 million transactions per second by 2030. This allows a population of 10 billion to each initiate 100 transactions per day. Can it be done on hardware expected to be available to average users in 2030? What changes would need to be implemented to allow Bitcoin to scale to this level? Using the ratio from the Bitcoin wiki, 1 million transactions per second requires about 4 gigabits per second. If Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth holds until 2030 this amount of bandwidth will be start to become available to home users by 2022, and should be a small fraction of the average 2030 user's connection. Broadcasting 1 million tps through the network would not appear to be a problem by 2030. Transmitting blocks as they are currently constructed would be a problem, because right now they include a complete copy of every transaction so require a burst bandwidth much higher than the average in order to distribute blocks in a timely fashion. There's no reason this must remain the case, however. Assuming that all nodes have a method of retrieving transactions which are not in the memory pool, the block could consist of a header and a list of hashes. This reduces the size of a block by a factor of 16 (512 byte transaction / 256 bit hash). A miner could reduce the requirement for burst bandwidth further by pre-announcing the transactions which will occur in their block so that only the nonce and final hash would need to be broadcast when they solve a block. CPU: If a common 2012 CPU can process 4000 tps, then a 2030 CPU should be able to process over 100 million tps by Moore's Law. Storage: Requiring each node to store a complete copy of the entire blockchain back to the genesis block is excessive. A distributed, redundant, content-addressable data store could serve the function of storing history and broadcasting transactions. We already have an example of such a datastore in Freenet. Freenet's datastore is useful for this application because nodes automatically specialize without any explicit configuration, and the inter node routing adjusts to demand in real time in order to converge on an optimal configuration. Commonly-requested data is intelligently cached and the store has a provision for pruning unneeded keys when a node runs out of storage space. The P2P aspect of Freenet is slow due to it being optimized for privacy, but without that requirement other performance enhancements are possible. |
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Its like another Federal Reserve on steroids. You are not in control of Bitcoin only few people can mine Bitcoin which is also being controlled now. You just don't know from where, how can bitcoin come into the market. Its just a number and they can put any Number on the screen. Translation: I don't understand how Bitcoin works, therefore neither do you. |
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Ditching a three-year-old policy of protecting senior bondholders and large depositors, over €100,000, in banks, Mr Dijsselbloem argued that the lack of market contagion surrounding Cyprus showed that private investors could now be hit to pay for bad banking debts. Translation: Because of the extreme market contagion resulting from this policy we must work quickly to seize the remaining deposits before the peasants have time to withdraw them. |
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But I don't see why there is the need for hostility. Because you're being disingenuous. Despite having this pointed out multiple times in countless threads you are still propagating falsehoods. "Bitcoin can not scale to high transaction rates on affordable hardware" is false. "Bitcoin requires improvements to the way it stores and broadcasts blocks in order to scale to high transaction rates on affordable hardware" is true. |
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And stop saying BS, please. These banks are going down, some people are going to lose money. Better it be those who invested in said banks than tax-victims who had nothing to do with the problem. Even worse would be forcing all EUR holders to pay.
Of course, for the 100th time, the bank shareholders should lose all, they should not be saved at the expense of their clients. And ideally those who made riskier investments should be cut before those who simply held checking accounts. And every creditor or client of the bank that loses something should receive a proportional share of the bank's assets in return. There used to be this story called a "capital structure". According to this story every stakeholder in a company was assigned a certain preference so that if a bankruptcy was to occur the losses would be felt by the different classes of stakeholders in a pre-defined order. People who believed this story used it to calculate risk. Some people decided to accept a lower return in exchange for a safer position in the capital structure, other people decided to take a less senior position in exchange for a higher return. Everybody made their decisions based on the idea these rules would remain objective and unchanged. Then 2008 happened and reality decided to tear down this pretty little fantasy. Much to the dismay of the investors stupid enough to believe in the "rule of law", the way it actually works is when a bank becomes insolvent the losses are eaten by the group of stakeholders who have the least ability to bribe the regulatory and lawmaking apparatus. Your actual position in the capital structure depends on your political clout at the time of bankruptcy. Congratulations, you just learned an expensive lesson in what it means to live in a centrally-planned command economy. Welcome to fascism. |
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Well, in that case, why not have a Chrome plugin that holds a PGP key and uses that automatically for cross website logins, and the service would merely confirm with bitcointalk or another known site that that was the true owner of a signed key for example?
http://gpgauth.org/ |
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Well your numbers were...lets call them "large"  but the meme that "Bitcoin should scale to handle a high volume of microtransactions" is rampant in here and I think it's worth pointing out that handling that volume is not really practical in the Bitcoin paradigm. It adds zero value to the discussion to point out that the existing implementation can not scale to the necessary values. Everybody knows that already. Currently Bitcoin utilizes bandwidth and storage space in the least efficient way possible. Of course it can't continue to do that and scale to a million transactions per second. Nobody is suggesting that it can, so stop pointing out the obvious as if you are bringing something useful to the table. |
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This leads to question: Can deflating currency gain spenders? Ones that do spend their coins? That question shares the same answer as this one: Do people buy products that deflate in price? Why would anyone spend money on something today that's going to cost less tomorrow? |
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ask, "What changes would need to happen for Bitcoin to allow 10 billion people to each generate 100 transactions per day by 2030?" Due to the broadcast nature of network and the way that storage grows in proportion to O(M*N) where M = number of transactions and N = number of nodes, it doesn't seem likely that Bitcoin in its current incarnation (regardless of cosmetic changes) will scale to anything near that level. Serious question - why did you even bother to post that? |
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Premise: It is not sustainable that billions of users send millions of transaction through the block chain every second. It will just grow too much. Instead of just accepting that premise, why not instead ask, "What changes would need to happen for Bitcoin to allow 10 billion people to each generate 100 transactions per day by 2030?" That's an upper limit of about 1 million transactions per second. |
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