The chance is probably way less than the chance that a bank's computers and all of their backups will get destroyed and there will be no way of recovering bank deposits. Has that prevented people from using banks?
That is what deposit insurance is for. You think deposit insurance is going to help you if every bank computer and backup is gone? Buy collision insurance? I'll gladly sell it to you for a one time fee of .1% of insured funds. |
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The dollar swings around versus other currencies but you don't go trading them all for Euros when there is a dip.
It swings, but nothing like as much as BTC. The risk of total loss is much higher with BTC in my opinion, which is why I don't want to have any more funds tied up in BTC than I'm willing to risk losing altogether. Me, neither. I would not condone investing more than 5 or 10% of your current "savings" - and then expect to lose it whenever the CIA/FBI/whomever decides to shut us down with a supercomputer or any other of the plethora doomsday scenarios available on this forum. I wouldn't condone keeping more than you immediately need in dollars. Ben doesn't even need a supercomputer to destroy that. |
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I apologize, but I need to warn people to be careful. This seems dangerous.
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Would you trust your money to a bank were the clerk just makes up an account number without checking if the number is already in use?
No but only because humans are really bad at producing truly random numbers. There are currently 329,993 addresses in the Bitcoin network. Say that this number of addresses are created every day for the next 140 years. That's 16,862,642,300 addresses. The chance that at least two of those addresses collided is about 9.7x10 -29, using the formula here. Calculation.I get that the chance is very, very, very small. But unless there is no chance at all there is still a chance. All I am saying is that there should be a check to make sure that a new address does not exist already. This is ridiculous. Do you apply the zero chance rule to anything else in your life? The check is impossible. I don't know if you've used the software, but you can generate addresses offline. Even if this wasn't the case having more people making ever larger numbers of comparisons to protect against one person losing the coins in one address less than one time before the heat death of the universe is crazy. |
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A cryptographic nonce is pseudo-random.
I thought the nonce stared at 1 for everyone and the public key in the generate transaction ensured we were not redoing work. I may have gotten that out of some oversimplified explanation though. |
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No one will trust bitcoin with any large transactions if there is even the slightest chance of an address collision.
False. I trust it. I understand math though ymmv. Not everybody understands (or has the desire to understand) the math. I know that the chances of a collision is so small that it probably will never happen in a billion years. But try to tell that to some non geek. Would you trust your money to a bank were the clerk just makes up an account number without checking if the number is already in use? I can think of plenty of safe methods that don't involve checking all previous account numbers. One of them would be using really long random strings. Another would be adding 1 to the last issued number. I'd actually be fairly concerned about a bank who's procedure was to compare new numbers to a complete list of old numbers. People who don't care enough to learn whether the system is sound or not won't be refusing to use it because it isn't sound. They'll make the decision the same way they make their other decisions, asking: What are successful people doing? |
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No one will trust bitcoin with any large transactions if there is even the slightest chance of an address collision.
False. I trust it. I understand math though ymmv. |
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Lololol, took me a while too.
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w00t! I need an address to send you bitcoins  Sure. 14bfFHNybWP8BQak2iDdHdBC9pmUEthQff I don't want to solicit any more donations now though. Justmoon let me use the 100BTC I had pledged for his video towards the ad fee and I'm more than happy to make up the small difference. |
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Free money? Sounds like "free beer"...
Or like "free speech". I think libertarians will get it. Plus you can get free money at the faucet anyway.  Thanks FreeMoney for making this possible, you rock, dude! Ha, thanks. You rock about an order of magnitude harder imo. Very very nice site. |
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What does it even mean for a company to use something like Bitcoin of their own? If the company has a secret backdoor then it isn't like bitcoin at all. If they don't then why not just use Bitcoin itself?
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This gives me an idea. People want to buy stuff with coins, but the merchant doesn't take coins. Intermediary accumulates orders and bitcoin payments from consumers and negotiates a bulk deal with the merchant. Consumers get to use bitcoin. Intermediary pockets the difference. Merchants get extra sales and eventually take Bitcoin directly.
Easier said than done I'm sure.
I guess it's essentially a sales affiliate who handles currency conversion too.
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Want to modify title to include "(now with bounty)"?
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Hey Everyone, The Agora I/O Unconference seems particularly ripe to me for bringing new people to bitcoin. Seems to be mostly centered on alternatives to the mainstream. Here's their schedule of events: http://agora.io/etienne/scheduleAlso, I noticed there doesn't seem to be a bitcoin-centric speech listed, perhaps someone here would be able to get something together by the weekend? That would be great. Maybe we can get an ad up real quick too. It says $100, I'll start with 15BTC. |
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Buyers want lower prices, sellers want higher prices. This is good and natural. It applies to buyers and sellers of labor just the same.
I know there are some psychological forces in play concerning wages, but laborers who accept a slowly falling wage instead of striking or quiting will do much better and others will learn and follow their lead.
We've been paying a very dear price in real terms for a little bit of psychological pleasure from watching the digits increase.
Imagine a world where apple prices fall every year and people know and expect this. If you tell them that you have a system in which prices will go up in the store over time they might tell you that just won't work, people simply won't buy apples anymore because prices are sticky downward in this world. Yeah, fine, it's a fact about the current world, it isn't a fact about how worlds have to be in order to work. People can get used to stuff pretty easily if it makes them better off in ways that actually matter.
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I have my own independent estimate of the whole network's GHash/Second based on slush's posted GHash/Second and the percentage of all bitcoin blocks found by slush's pool. You can see my estimate if you install my Greasemonkey script and view slush's stats page.
For the first time since I started watching the total network number, my estimate fell below 400 GHash/second today. I assume this is a response to the recent drop in bitcoin prices.
Then I realized something. It is extremely easy to remove mining hardware from the network, but much harder to get new mining hardware to add to the network. I believe the two-week lag we see in the correlation between bitcoin prices and network hash rate only applies to increases in bitcoin prices, since it takes time to get new hardware bought and set up. I would expect that a decrease in bitcoin prices will result in a decrease in network hash rate almost immediately, and I believe we have just seen this happen.
Good observation. There is another wrinkle. Mining has a fixed and a variable cost. When deciding whether to join you consider both, but to leave you ought only consider the variable (electricity). I guess you can sell your hardware, but probably slowly and/or at a loss. This should have a dampening effect on miners leaving. We also might see that a price increase after a drop brings up the rate more quickly than the original climb did because there are now miners who were turned off, but are ready to go any time. |
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I would contact Noagendamarket about what's happening in Aus.
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To put things in perspective, I consider gifts and love in general as very selfish things. Donating to a charity can be extremely selfish.
I agree. I think people who claim selflessness in anything are lying (rare) or very confused (common). |
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Hi I think there might be a problem with adoption because of the relatively high fees people are charging to transfer from traditional currency to BitCoins and back. I suspect that much of it is due to PayPal fees, etc; but it could go against the grain of people if they think "Yay. BitCoins. No Fees." but then find that they have to pay fees to get traditional money in and out. On the other hand, I don't know of a solution. I guess all I can do is encourage people providing those services to please try to do it at the lowest reasonable cost you can. What do you think? Sounds like a problem with traditional money. Maybe people will abandon that. |
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