Does anyone sell TinFoil in bitcoins?  Seriously though, its very interesting to see what is happening here, because the first step is to move to a position where everyone is talking. Nobody really knows the outcome to all this, but my gut feeling is that this is about setting some rules in place. The biggest strength and flaw in bitcoin is its fixed quantity. The bitcoin will inflate in value as all fiat is slowly devalued by their central banks. This means that bitcoin is more of a savings tool than a currency. This might be fixed by matching a bitcoins value to the Dollar, or maybe the Euro. Stability is the first thing to fix. All the other advantages come later. If this scenario runs through to the end, you will basically end up with a digital dollar, a lot of rules, and power shifted to a central bank near you! I am losing confidence that my pension is going to be safe here, but its very early days! |
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Thank you! Maybe I should have pressed the search button - I will do next time!  |
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Being new to this, I may have misunderstood an element of the infrastructure of bitcoins, so with that disclaimer, here is my query. I assume that all coins appear on the blockchain at least once when they have been mined, so, would it be possible to highlight coins which have not been used for a long time or even more than once? Is this possible? If not, I would love someone to link me to a tutorial explaining the blockchain in a way that I may understand! Thanks |
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If someone PwnD your computer, they also can have control and access to anything on it and anything you type.
But isn't that a risk with any computer? Why would this be a bigger risk? Because we assume that you use your normal computer for doing things like clicking links like these (any of which could infect your computer with no input from you). Any virtual machine or encrypted sub-system that you run on your system is just as vulnerable since the remote attacker will have the same privileges as you on the main OS. A USB boot drive is a more secure environment, especially one that comes with no web browser. You install it clean off a LiveCD as I describe above, so it is never potentially tainted. You only type it's password directly into the USB boot OS. The data can be made unreadable by anything other than the boot code on the USB. It's kernel can be firewalled to only accept incoming Bitcoin connections and nothing else. Technically speaking there is absolutely no difference in the security of either a virtual or a LiveCD OS - its all about convenience. However, having thought about the problem again, do we actually need a physical wallet at all? You have a cloud folder somewhere where your BTC files are stored. You just need access to it occasionally to see how much the total is. You don't need access to add to it, and you don't need more than the address to take from it. If you could find out what the total was without entering the wallet, you would never need to go near your wallet. Is my understanding of BTC wallets true? Because on that basis, its going to be far, far safer to leave the data in the capable hands of a data centre, with no access to your private keys! |
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If you placed your virtualised tiny linux wallet in a trucrypt hidden volume, it doesn't need to go on any fancy usb stick - as long as its big enough for the blockchain? http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolumeits going to take longer to write a decent pass phrase than the time needed to set this up Maybe I should write a tutorial? If someone PwnD your computer, they also can have control and access to anything on it and anything you type. But isn't that a risk with any computer? Why would this be a bigger risk? |
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Reading the posts on this thread makes me believe that there are a lot of people with very little idea of how France and the EU actually work.
France loves coming up with new laws - its what they do. What they also do is ignore the laws they don't like. When this happens, the French law makers will adapt the law people don't like so that there is no penalty if the law is broken. It keep everyone happy! Italy is similar, and Greece and the law are rarely in the same room!
Secondly, the EU are determined to get rid of cash in the next 10-20 years. In the UK the maximum amount of cash you can trade with has been steadily dropping to ensure that cash based businesses find alternatives.
A few years ago, you couldn't spend more than £10k in cash, without a letter from the bank to say the cash was legal. Now its £5k, and it will drop to £1 eventually. The first to suffer were builders and car traders who used cash a lot. They adapted. By today, there are loads of businesses which are practically banned from using cash without a lot of paperwork being filled it. For instance, try selling a ton of metal to a scrap dealer and getting cash - its not going to happen!
Strangely, I have a feeling this is an extremely bad thing for Bitcoin because one of the major arguments being used is the anonymous nature of cash, and its use in tax evasion, crime and every other bad thing since Moses was a boy!
It will be interesting to see how this develops!
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If you placed your virtualised tiny linux wallet in a trucrypt hidden volume, it doesn't need to go on any fancy usb stick - as long as its big enough for the blockchain? http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolumeits going to take longer to write a decent pass phrase than the time needed to set this up Maybe I should write a tutorial? |
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The price of bitcoin is anything but stable. We've seen the price double in two months. We have several daily swings of 5% or more per week. Exactly. I fully expect to see a major correction or series of corrections by the end of Q1 or during Q2 because there is no indication the equilibrium price has moved anywhere above $16-17. totally agree! looking over the graphs, I have a gut feeling the price without speculators would be around this figure of $17 -$19, because while the price is going steadily up, the transaction rate isn't. The market isn't getting busier, especially when you take the popular IP addresses out of the equation. On that basis, there isn't any practical reason for the sudden price rise, except for speculation. |
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People with power and monopoly rights to the use of force don't just throw their hands up and say "you got me, I give up" when people find a loophole.
Ain't that the truth! |
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I love that I managed to get two into the list, but my vote goes to: Open Change +1.01 |
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Some very interesting feedback. I think DeathandTaxes is the most realistic in highlighting that many of the issues that are going to cause problems are not yet on the horizon. That 10 fold increase which is so easy to say, but so difficult to do is legend in the way it kills companies who overtrade. I really don't see how bitcoin is able to scale in a way that could make it work in the way that would value it at $x gazillion etc! However, where the value might be is in learning to to make it work. That is priceless and is going to benefit the users of this forum far more than the bits of digital currencies currently in their wallets in the long term. Looking at the way that technology develops, an idea that is currently in the lab, will be on the high st in 30 years. Electronics takes half that time, and software half again. All this seems to indicate that crypto currency is 7-8 years away. However, as mentioned earlier, Google took a few years to grow too, but if we are comparing bitcoin with search engines, I would be far more likely to call bitcoin Yahoo. Ripple may be Google, but more likely AltaVista. But using history to predict the future was never that easy! |
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The more I look into bitcoin, the more I realise it is going to be the crypto currency that pushes the barriers, but will also most likely die in the process - think of it like napster for digital money. However, thinking that now is the time to set the definitions is wrong. That comes far later, and to be honest, it is not the early adopter who gets to make that decision. That happens when your local political representative starts talking about it with other non technical people. Their understanding will come from other mainstream users who will talk about it as money - so that definition of it as currency will be implied, and that is good enough for law makers. To see this in action, just think of the way that so many definitions have been created thanks to the mainstream taking ownership of the internet. We had it with the lawful status of email, the introduction and lawful usage of a digital signature. Another example is the way that the data protection laws are manipulated by organisations to their own agendas etc. We are living in interesting times! |
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While there are a large number of new currencies popping up, it might make sense to split them up based on their technical ideology.
As an examples - Coins that need mining in one place, ones which rely on networking in another etc
The nature of the current situation is that we are still trying to work out what scales best for mainstream appeal. While Bitcoin is the winner at the moment, we only need to take examples from other areas of technology to see how fast a popular name can disappear (Old Linux distros are a great place to look!)
It might also make it easier to pick the best features of each to build the next generation of crypto currency?
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I have been known to have a creative idea now and again. How about: - Like Cash, only better!
Cash 2.0 or money 2.0
digital cash - simple!
Money Made Better
If you are looking for a tagline, I would have thought it needs to be a positive message to grow usage rather than to push an ideological idea which may do more harm than good. Its not that its a bad ideology, its just that an idea which isn't put into context will get a life of its own. That is where forums become useful! |
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Some interesting - if outlandish - predictions in this thread. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't mind it one bit if my 500BTC end up being worth $500,000, but I just don't think that's realistic, especially in less than five years.
There's a lot to be said about crypto-currencies, but we are still in the early days of such things. Developers need to understand what users want, users need to understand what the cryptocurrency is, and merchants need to understand how to deal with them. A settlement network must be developed (which I guess is what Ripple is trying to do) and a lot of work to set rules, develop regulations and perhaps even laws will have to be put it.
Right now, we're in the wild, wild west. But we can't stay the wild, wild west forever.
Having heard the term wild west for while but it's very true. Great post |
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As someone who has seem the internet grow from nothing to what we have today, as well as been involved with a large number of ideas and fads that went nowhere - I find it fascinating to see what drives others into making their predictions.
Considering that the whole global bitcoin market capitalization is no larger than the turnover of a single medium sided niche retailer at $300000000, there is a lot of noise about how bitcoin is going to take over the world tomorrow. This ignores the actual size of the mountain it needs to climb to be on par in value with a single mainstream currency.
If there was only enough dollars in the world to buy Google (Total Market valuation of $265Bn), and we converted them to bitcoins, each coin would be worth $12000. If you want bigger numbers, if you put the market value of all the US companies in Europe together, you would need $5482966911657. Again, if this was the total number of dollars in existence, and we wanted to convert them to bitcoins, each coin would be worth $261000. The total number of dollars in use is far greater than this.
With this in mind, I can understand that we have to start somewhere, and that is why I am happy that a Bitcoin is currently worth £30.
But how far forward are you valuing your coins?
Do you think we will ever get to the sort of value needed to make the replacement of the dollar scenario a reality?
Are we looking 5 years ahead, or 50 years?
Or is the value of bitcoins purely down to its value as an idea rather than anything practical?
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Love this idea.
It will be very interesting to see the different world viewpoints on bitcoin in one place.
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Its far harder for someone in India to be able to afford a single bitcoin, than an American or a German. This means that there will be a competing crypto currencies for less developed counties... No. No in what respect? |
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This is definably a trolling attempt! Nobody could be that blinkered without an agenda! While it would be nice to have a free market, I don't think the world has ever seen one, although the early days of the US were close to it. today nothing happens if it isn't supported by the corporatist system. The reality is that there is no start for an economy where everyone is equal. Thinking that its unfair is just naive, and ignores the core element it is to have a human society. The biggest difference between people and other animals is that we build on the efforts of the previous generation. So, if your father decided to work hard and earn loads of money, you are going to be in a better place to compete than your neighbour, who's dad was a bum! BTC has got noble intentions, but while it is a free market currency, with no central control, it does suffer from the economies of its supporters, guiding its value. Its far harder for someone in India to be able to afford a single bitcoin, than an American or a German. This means that there will be a competing crypto currencies for less developed counties, and it will be free market economics that choses which one will be the winner. However, believing any of the nonsense in the first post as a reason for not contiuning with the BTC project is just silly! my 2 BTC |
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Bitcoin in 5 years is not going to be that different to today.
2018 is going to see the western economies starting to show a rise in confidence, and most of the companies who have been limping around since the 2007 crash will finally be dead.
Bitcoin will have been superceeded by something else, which has yet to be invented, but probably a mix of bitcoin, ripple and something else!
There are too many problems with bitcoin for it to just grow and take over the world like a few posters would like.
Think of it as the year 1994 and someone asks you how do you think Netscape Navigator will change the world?
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