~10% daily growth!
For now. Keep in mind that we've had several bubbles already, and a 10% daily growth rate screams "bubble!". |
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This is a really sad article by Gary North. He claims that Bitcoins can never become a real unit of exchange, but never really offers a reason why not. The old austrians are proving to be very disappointing in the capacity to imagine change. |
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Its planned - and therefore in Austrian terms, its not money. Please don't debate semantics on an article that you recommended.
I know I'm being nitpicky here, but while I agree that (in an Austrian Economic sense) Bitcoins are not money, the reason for that is not because it is a planned/designed currency. That would be because the currency unit itself has no alternative use outside of the context of being a currency. (the counter-argument about the use value of the settlement network notwithstanding) For example, the British Pound was once a planned currency unit, but the actual coins were minted from real gold or silver, so they were also a money. The definition of what "money" is might need adjustment to include a deliberately designed 'free market' currency system, but probably not. Most people don't really know what "money" really is, and don't care about the details. In Western countries, the biggest killers of the very poor are diseases caused by too much food and diseases caused by too much leisure. You can argue that things might be better but in terms of economies doing the stuff I want, things are fine.
I not sure who actually said this, but the part I highlighted is actually a myth. While it's true enough that a great many final causes of death can be traced back to poor personal habits, it's also true that everyone dies of something. The reality is that, in Western nations, the vast majority of people die from complications related to living much longer than a natural lifespan permits. People get fat because they eat too much, but many get fat because they are too old to practially exercise and have the means to enjoy too much food. Some people get heart problems because they smoke, most get heart problems because they have lived long enough. Simply put, if you live long enough, something is going to break; the fact that so many official causes for death are related to officially avoidable things does not change the fact that Americans live so much longer than we used to. |
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I think it's also important to point out that in debates/commentary like the Schiff clips posted in this thread, the term "intrinsic value" is not being used in its strict financial definition. What Peter Schiff is talking about is "value" being modified by the general adjective "intrinsic".
The actual technical term "intrinsic value" does not actually mean what he's talking about.
We've actually been over this point to a great deal. |
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I think, when discussing the possibility of attack with people (even engineers) new to Bitcoin, it is important to mention both. There is the level of security provided by the truly staggering power of the network, in the sense that it is fair to say that even the NSA and world governments could not attack it with their general-purpose supercompute assets; and then follow that up with the caveat that (1) we're all watching quantum compute developments very closely, because they change things, and (2) in the meantime there are ASICs, and then quickly discuss exactly what gmaxwell just stated, and note that while perhaps there is not the necessary supply in existence for an organization to buy enough Avalons etc. to perform an attack, the cost is within some extreme budgets (extreme for people, but not organizations). I'll add a (3) to that as well, which is that, while estimates based on trying to buy ASIC hashpower at retail may result in a $15M order and a long backorder, it would cost less than that to hire an experienced ASIC design team for a year and to have your own ASICs spun, if you personally wanted that kind of volume. My team could have tapeout in 3 - 6 months, implement a usually-necessary metal revision in another 1 - 2, and I can guarantee it would equal or outperform the best on the market, all for probably $1.5M in total engineers' salaries and another few million (2 -3 maybe) for the silicon. I may be vastly overestimating the complexity of putting these functions on an ASIC, so probably it could cost less, or just be engineered to a T and mop the floor with the current entrants. I haven't looked closely at it because Broadcom and our other two primary contract-employers have never tried to pay us to do it  The US government in particular "owns" a large amount of (mostly rad-hardened) ASIC fab capacity itself, probably more than enough than is necessary, if they wanted to use it. We're safe from all the probable attacks, and most of the improbable ones. There are a couple outlandish scenarios that are possible, like that one. The question is why they would attack the network when more money is to be made in securinghashing algoit, which is one of the key design principles laid out by Satoshi in the first place. Until someone can demonstrate a method in which this is false, we only need to worry about the Joker showing up ("some people just want to watch the world burn"), with the resources to do it. Addressing all three of your points at once. Not only did Satoshi foresee the quantum computing risks concerning bitcoin, he provided a path to deal with such issues. There is an upgrade path for the primary hashing algo, including "hooks" in the existing code to permit a second algo to be added in series to the current SHA256. Whatever algo that best deals with the most likely threat, be it quantum computing or private asic farms, cna be chosen to be added to the system without so much as stopping the blockchian. A similar algo upgrade path was provided for with regard to the address keypair algos. (the leading charachter is currently always a "1", this tells the bitcoin network what address version is in play, although currently no other choice exists) |
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Could you elaborate on how it is more complicated? I am interested in the precise way to calculate the proof of work of the chain.
Then go read the code. Sorry, I thought it might be possible to express as a formula in a forum post. For example, if a blockchain has two blocks, then the total work T is equal the difficulty of block 1 + the difficulty of block 2 or perhaps if the work, W, is a function of the difficulty, d, then then the total work is: T = W(d1) + W(d2) where d1 and d2 are the difficulty of blocks 1 and 2 Close, but you have to understand that the difficulty is a human friendly expression of what is going on, and isn't exactly how the clients handle it. If you want to know, you really do need to understand how it's done by the client. |
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The fact that they are attacking must mean they feel threatened.  Too late. |
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Can you get around paying taxes on bitcoin if you buy things directly instead of converting to fiat? Also, how would the government know how much you should pay if there is no record of what price you bought your bitcoins at?
The real question isn't can it be done. The question is, are you willing to break your local laws? |
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Perhaps you could find out where & when the next geek meeting is happening, lan-party maybe? Crash the party and enlist the boys around you to help you in your photo. There are a number of video game related vendors here that might be interested in such a viral marketing ploy.
I'm sure that you know how to get a few gamer geeks to do what you want.
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Well I can do anything but nudity. I will not do any nudity under any circumstance. I was just trying to show what I look like by the way, not how the sign would look.
I understand, and I'm wouldn't recommend nudity anyway. I mentioned that event only to highlight what has happened before. You could get creative with outfits and such. Perhaps a steampunk game-show style letter mover with an adjustable sign? Perhaps find a partner, and hold up a large bilboard-ish sign in a well known public space? |
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I would like to congratulate everyone who were the early adopters, investors, and accepters of Bitcoins. Despite the naysayers, you all kept were patient and held on to your Bitcoins, now you are reaping benefits that many thought were imaginable. I am a late starter with Bitcoins, and just started accepting it as payment for my products and services (which I'll reveal in a later post), and I am very happy I made the decision. Maybe a movie should be made about the early adopters who became wealthy from Bitcoin, make it into one of those "underdog beats the odds" stories. Just a thought.
You are not a late-adopter. Bitcoin's market share is what? 10 Billion dollars? That's chump change for just an online payment processor such as Paypal. We have a long way to go yet. |
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Honestly, I think that you might want to redo that example photo. Viral marketing requires a bit more than a photo of you holding a single sheet of paper with a handwritten message. Perhaps something on a plain white t-shirt? You're not the first forum member to come up with a similar idea. When I was still a mod, we had to deal with another female forum member who was willing to sell advertising photos of messages written onto her bare skin. Many of those ads were not safe for work. I'm not suggesting you do the same thing, but you're going to have to be more creative than a semi-goth girl holding a sheet of notebook paper.
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When the protocol was created nobody envisioned that one bitcoin could go to $1000. That's not true at all. Many, if not most, of the early movers around here expected to see a $1000 bitcoin eventually. I don't know if anyone expected to see $1000 per BTC before the second block reward halving, however. I certainly didn't. |
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I believe value of current 0.0001 btc is cost about 10 cent usd today. This would be huge if many small transfer are made or business that have small margin.  Yes, but Bitcoin wasn't designed to be a micropayment system, per se. That may or may not (more likely not) occur using less common transaction types, such as using a single send-to-many transaction for weekly payroll or a household's monthly bills. That said, the minimum transaction fee has been repeatedly reduced as the value of a bitcoin has increased. I expect that the transaction fee will drop back down to around a cent or less with the next client code update. |
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Could you elaborate on how it is more complicated? I am interested in the precise way to calculate the proof of work of the chain.
I'm not really the right person to elaborate. |
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Is this literally the arithmetic sum of all of the work of each block in the chain? (as opposed to some other function)
(also, is it equivalent to sum up the difficulty associated with each block)
Yes it's literally the arithmetic sum of all of the work of each block, and it's equivalent to the sum of the block difficulties upto rounding (difficulty is a floating point number presented for human friendliness). EDIT: BTW, the current bitcoin network is running at an estimated total computational power of just over 62,000 petaflops. It's risen by about a thousand petaflops per day over the past week or so. The fastest supercomputer on Earth (not classified) was benchmarked at 33 petaflops this past summer. That computer system took three years to construct and sits on roughly 40 acres of land. Bitcoin is way past the point that it's at risk from a falsified blockchain attack of any sort.
uh. Bitcoin does no "flops" at all. Flop numbers are now bad projections from matching up what a GPU could do when it wasn't mining Bitcoin and they're now irrelevant. While I agree that direct comparisons to standard computer metrics is fraught with error, I disagree that the metric is irrelevant. It's an estimate of how fast a conventional computer would have to be to match the bitcoin network as is. Granted, no one is going to use a conventional computer system to do this, but it also shows the futility of trying to even redirect existing hardware to the task. |
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I have very hard time trying convincing my dad to put some money into Bitcoins. The biggest issue so far is my ignorance.  Basically, all i need is an answer to a question- where is the value in bitcoin? Don't try to convince your family of anything. But you could ask your father, where is the value in US Dollars? His understanding of that factoid should be instructive for both of you. |
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Imagine a bitcoin network of 1 computer for the past years of bitcoin's existence.
Theoretically and practically this 1 computer could calculate a blockchain that was just as long if not even 1 block longer than bitcoin's current blockchain.
You're confused by the definition of "longer". The chain selection is based on the sum of work, not the number of blocks. (The whitepaper was mostly written from the perspective of constant difficulty, under which the two are the same). ? (as opposed to some other function) (also, is it equivalent to sum up the difficulty associated with each block) If I understand the statement correctly, yes. The "longest" blockchain is the one that required the greatest amount of computational power to create, and that is determined by the client by suming up the difficulty of all the blocks created. It's just a bit more complicated than that, as most things are, but that is a fine way to think about it. EDIT: BTW, the current bitcoin network is running at an estimated total computational power of just over 62,000 petaflops. It's risen by about a thousand petaflops per day over the past week or so. The fastest supercomputer on Earth (not classified) was benchmarked at 33 petaflops this past summer. That computer system took three years to construct and sits on roughly 40 acres of land. Bitcoin is way past the point that it's at risk from a falsified blockchain attack of any sort. |
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I was considering that, too. Having the softener occasionally give me a full pot of salted coffee or a salty shower is a pretty significant reason not to use it. Big issue with our setup is rust. It's like the "water" is literally 10% rust.
The salt in the water promotes rust in steel water pipes. I've literally never lived in a home with steel water pipes, and didn't even consider that. If you have rust, you're water softener has already destroyed your plumbing, and it should be replaced with PVC plastic water pipes, or copper lines if that scares you.
Without the softener, the sulfur smell is quite pronounced (hot showers are unbearably smelly). However, whether the softener is on or off, there is still a significant amount of rust in the water (obvious by how quickly brown-orange rings form in the toilet bowls and the smell which still exists).
We don't have sulfer issues here, mostly calcium in the water. Which is actually good for you, and my tap water tastes very much like bottled water for the same reason. Perhaps a filter system would work better for you?
If the Kinetico people give me a load of nonsense, I think I'll just replace the macro and micro filters (which haven't been replaced in... way too long), bypass the softener, and see how that works out. Maybe it'd even be worth it to go full-retard on the filters and double the number of them (one for large, one medium-large, one medium, then the micro), but filter costs always give me sticker shock.
If your primary concern is the smell of sulfer (it won't actually hurt you, BTW) then a single filter designed for that would be the most cost effective, perhaps an activated charcoal filter? |
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Buying online won't be a problem, buying in a pub or even a small shop might be.
I heard about a bitcoin accepting pub in London that had problems with iPhone users because the default setting was to send coins without a transaction fee, resulting in people waiting hours for their drinks...
Credit cards aren't instantaneous but are treated as such, but the get to the equivilent of 1 confirmation faster than bitcoin does. That's not true. As far as the transfer of funds, Bitcoin can do it within 5 seconds anywhere in the world. It's the settlement part that takes confirmations. Credit cards often take 30 to 60 days to properly settle a transaction. It's possible for a meatspace vendor to accept zero comfirmation transactions at face value without much risk, due to the fact that a double spend attack while one is sitting inside a pub is very difficult, and that competing transactions on the network can be detected. Timing is everything with a double spend attack, if the attacker sends the competing transaction too early, the vendor's client is likely to see it before the purchase has been made. If the attacker sends it more than 5 seconds after the vendor's client does, it doesn't even matter that the double spend was even attempted, as no one will ever see it. Also, if a double spend attempt is detected, the vendor could simply tell the customer his bitcoins have been denied in very much the same way that a credit card can be denied. While no one would be willing to accept anything less than several confirmations for something like a car, it's not unreasonable for in person purchase values of less than $100 at a time be accepted zero confirmations at face value, if the transaction is valid and no competing transactions (double spend attempts) are detected in the first several seconds. |
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