Yes, and as I said, I don't think it will happen, for the reasons outlined in Satoshis paper.
Your proposed scenario results in the attacker gaining a lot of either physical goods or fiat currency (other stuff can't really cause huge losses to the seller), which takes significant effort to hide your tracks, and taking back the original Bitcoins. That's the point of a double spend attack.
But executing large, simultaneous double spends against lots of merchants simultaneously means you get the goods you bought .... and now have a pile of worthless Bitcoins, having destroyed confidence in the currency. In other words you bought the goods legitimately and destroyed Bitcoin in the process, meaning there's nothing else you can double-spend on. You also have a lot of fairly useless hardware, unless you plan to flood the second hand video card market.
The point of a double spend attack is to double spend. It by definition requires repeated abuse. An attack so successful it wipes out the system is a pyrrhic victory.
At any rate, I'd like to see more frequent checkpointing (downloading signed blocks of head blocks from a trusted server) to act as a backstop against gigantic re-orgs.
Well that is the whole point. There is no economical 51% attack. The nature of the network, the huge cost, and limited direct financial benefit means the "danger" of an economical 51% attack is pretty much non-existent. However the danger of a non-economical 51% attack still remains. If it happens then Bitcoin is over. The chaos, and economic losses will end this "experiment" forever. "An attack so successful it wipes out the system is a pyrrhic victory." Unless your intent was to wipe out the system.  A 51% attack will be extremely disruptive, no doubt. I don't think it will kill Bitcoin though. Fork the chain, big deal. Maybe I'm an optimist. I also think it's inevitable. Only a matter of time. Especially considering the miners' collective ability to ignore common sense. Maybe I'm a pessimist. I hope I'm wrong. I would definitely be gone from Bitcoin if there was a 51% attack. It would kill value (down to the pennies of BTC) because no one could trust that their transactions wouldn't be reversed. And once that happens, nearly all mining activities would cease (it would no longer be profitable, at all), making it incredibly easy to continue 51% attacks down the road. Bitcoin would be pointless if anyone with malicious intentions was ever able to acquire more than 51% of the hashing power put towards Bitcoin, because it would just snowball into non-existence. And you think it is inevitable? Based on what? Who has > 10 TH/s of hashing power they could stage an attack with? |
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But stealing data that the author didn't intend you to have isn't free speech.
I don't agree with SOPA, but piracy is stupid too.
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I think that because we're now in the politically-correct mindset that discrimination is wrong, it wouldn't be a problem to get rid of those laws today. A few companies here and there would be discriminatory, boycotted, and shut down from lack of business, but overall, I think we'd be pretty good about "self-policing" those policies, now that we're in the right mindset.
You really believe that? Perhaps you are just thinking about the black minority; after nearly half a century of (on paper) equal rights, I still have my doubts about that. Im pretty sure it does not apply to a ton of other minorities. You really think there would be a big backlash against companies or individuals discriminating against, say, Muslims, or gays, or Hispanics in certain communities? I dont think so. Heck, in many aspects and states even the law discriminates against them. I do really believe that, yes. |
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I think smaller sites participating in a blackout would be pointless, but if the big names do it (namely Google and Facebook), it will DEFINITELY draw people's attention to the problem.
Smaller sites should stay open, so that people not able to access the larger sites can still find someplace to discuss the happenings. Throwing up a banner of support is a good idea though. But the point is already made if the larger sites go offline.
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Don't visit that subforum then?
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Guys, seriously?!! Is it really that hard to figure out? How is a business any different than my home, my bedroom, or my bathroom. If I don't want you there for whatever reason, then you're not welcome. Property is property regardless of it's description and purpose.
Just because you call it a business, doesn't change the fact that it's private property with general, and specific restrictions you set . It would no longer be your property if someone else got to decide what they could do with it. That would force it to be thusly communal and effectuate outright theft, not to mention the enslavement issue.
Ostracizing, and boycotting unconventional personal proclivities and behaviors probably works well enough, so leave well enough alone. Of course, what's ostracizing or boycotting if it isn't discrimination. In fact, forcing people to serve others they otherwise wouldn't, is equally as discriminating, except now your doing it at the end of a bayonet, or wasting resources defending it in a court of law. People should just grow up.
I don't like arbitrary, capricious or mean-spirirted discrimination, but I like thought crimes and social engineering even worse.
I like your thoughts, and I kind of said the same thing earlier on, but the free market had centuries to cure various forms of racism, and never did cure some of them, as P4man pointed out. Unfortunately, it seems the only way to change the majority mindset on some of these subjects is to be told by the government what is right and what is wrong. So, Ron Paul's answer to this is that the discrimination was being enforced by the government. The anti-segregation laws came into being at the same time the segregation laws were outlawed. He attributes the success of the civil rights act primarily to the latter (outlaw government-enforced segregation), while many people attribute it to the former (enforce integration). Second, he asks if these laws are necessary today. Would any contemporary business be able to survive if it was out and out discriminating against blacks, or would boycotts take care of it? That's basically what he said here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbJBHhqftcI'm not sure if I completely buy it, but I follow his reasoning and it is not racist. I think that because we're now in the politically-correct mindset that discrimination is wrong, it wouldn't be a problem to get rid of those laws today. A few companies here and there would be discriminatory, boycotted, and shut down from lack of business, but overall, I think we'd be pretty good about "self-policing" those policies, now that we're in the right mindset. |
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On that note, I wonder what would happen if someone released a modified Bitcoin client that doesn't drop the block reward, ever? Would more than 50% of people gravitate towards it and use it? I doubt it, but it's possible... IMO, that would be the best route to go, but it would surely be a disappointment to everyone who was looking forward to Bitcoin being limited to 21M coins.
Clients would need to upgrade. Clients who may not mine and know inflation reduces the value of the coins they hold. Also unless the change is nearly unanimous both networks will continue to exist and that will create huge usability issues and new user confusion. I don't think we will ever see a breaking change to the protocol with maybe the exception of a flaw being discovered in one of the algorithms used by Bitcoin. It would certainly take an epic campaign to try and convert as many users as possible. And yes, it would fork things badly, cause a lot of disruptions ("are you using the old Bitcoin or the new Bitcoin?"), etc. The only way to do it seemlessly is to get nearly everyone to upgrade their client before the block reward drop in 2012. But, too many people believe in a deflating currency to make such a change. Despite the fact that a currency that neither inflates nor deflates is the best way to go, and having the block reward stay the same would eventually create perfect non-flation. Oh well.  |
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Guys, seriously?!! Is it really that hard to figure out? How is a business any different than my home, my bedroom, or my bathroom. If I don't want you there for whatever reason, then you're not welcome. Property is property regardless of it's description and purpose.
Just because you call it a business, doesn't change the fact that it's private property with general, and specific restrictions you set . It would no longer be your property if someone else got to decide what they could do with it. That would force it to be thusly communal and effectuate outright theft, not to mention the enslavement issue.
Ostracizing, and boycotting unconventional personal proclivities and behaviors probably works well enough, so leave well enough alone. Of course, what's ostracizing or boycotting if it isn't discrimination. In fact, forcing people to serve others they otherwise wouldn't, is equally as discriminating, except now your doing it at the end of a bayonet, or wasting resources defending it in a court of law. People should just grow up.
I don't like arbitrary, capricious or mean-spirirted discrimination, but I like thought crimes and social engineering even worse.
I like your thoughts, and I kind of said the same thing earlier on, but the free market had centuries to cure various forms of racism, and never did cure some of them, as P4man pointed out. Unfortunately, it seems the only way to change the majority mindset on some of these subjects is to be told by the government what is right and what is wrong. |
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I don't think we should set ourselves up for "a double spend is the end of the world". Payment reversals are so common in every other form of payment that "no reversals ever" is a standard far higher than it really needs to be. Miners are a way of managing risk. For instance, I think it'll be common in future for people to pass around free transactions without broadcasting them, until somebody in the chain of payments decides they can't totally trust the sender and broadcasts the entire chain, using the miners to lock it down.
Any given assurance contract is relatively small (for just one block). If the contract fails because nobody cares about that level of security, speeds will fall a bit until enough people care. It's self adjusting in that sense.
A double spend is the end of the world for Bitcoin in my book. One of the key features of Bitcoin is that it can't be messed with or manipulated. As soon as a double spend happens, then anyone who thinks about submitting a large transaction has to worry about it being reversed, either maliciously by the other party, or as a side effect of someone else doing a double-spend elsewhere. You (and any companies that deal with Bitcoin) would have to start tracking all spends and receipts to make sure none of it gets reversed. And with a blockchain that is lightly and very variably defended, as it would be in the case of assurance contracts, it'll be all the more easy for someone with malicious intentions to overtake it. If you only get 1 BTC per block in donations for your contract, then we suddenly only have 200GH/s protecting the network, which is a heck of a lot easier to attack and double-spend against than 8 TH/s. I really don't think you'd find enough people volunteering to give up their Bitcoins to secure the blockchain. That's like allowing people to send in whatever they feel like contributing to the government come April 15th. There's a reason why taxes are forced, not voluntary. We all benefit from the uses of tax money, but we're not all willing to contribute towards those benefits voluntarily. Too many people just like to freeload on whatever is given to them. Anyway, I'm still of the opinion that transaction fees will be the only way to support miners in the future. Hopefully, the number of transactions per block will have increased greatly by then, and the fee per transaction won't have to increase by much. On that note, I wonder what would happen if someone released a modified Bitcoin client that doesn't drop the block reward, ever? Would more than 50% of people gravitate towards it and use it? I doubt it, but it's possible... IMO, that would be the best route to go, but it would surely be a disappointment to everyone who was looking forward to Bitcoin being limited to 21M coins. |
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I don't know. I don't think I have enough math skills to figure this out lol. Has the genious who came up with this figured out how to solve Q1?
Absolutely depends on transaction volume. If the price of 1 BTC is $2.50, and there are no block rewards, and there are 25 transactions per block on average, then I figure a transaction fee of $0.50/transaction will still provide around 1 TH/s of hashing power, which I believe would be sufficient to secure the network if the entire currency is worth $50M. I calculated this all out in another thread, but that's the result. I don't think $0.50/transaction is an unreasonable cost to pay - it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than a wire transfer. And that's basing it off of today's transaction numbers. 5-10 years down the road, when the block reward really starts getting small, we may have a lot more transaction volume. If we had 2500 transactions per block, we could still maintain around 4 TH/s per dollar price of BTC, and drop transaction costs to around $0.05/transaction. The yet-to-be-determined factor is how much hashing power we actually need to secure the network. In my opinion, 1 TH/s is plenty enough to secure the network with each BTC worth $2.50, but the goal should be linear growth in hashing power relative to price from there. So 10 TH/s if each BTC is worth $25, etc. Once we figure out that factor, then some hard numbers can be calculated for transaction fees based on current transaction volume to reach a target hashing goal. The current rules make that impossible. Nobody would pay $0.25. Nobody. They would pay the absolute minimum to get the transaction processed which is closer to 1 satoshi. It will require protocol rule changes to build a functional fee economy. Oh I absolutely agree. I'm sure the transaction fee rules will be changed as we get closer to the time where they are needed though. Right now, transaction fees are purely experimental. They aren't necessary at all. |
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Proof of work is what keeps the network "honest".
I suggest you actually READ Satoshi paper. Read it from beginning to end. Now stop. Don't post. Just think. Now read the entire paper again because likely what it said and what you thought it said aren't the same thing.
The block chain is a consensus much like voting is a consensus process.
The key question (which wasn't solve adequately prior to Bitcoin)
How do you reach a consensus among untrusted peers?
There is no (trivial) cost to form a node. With some web hosting contract I could form 2/3rds of the Bitcoin nodes for a token amount of time, resources, and money. Under you system I winz. I control every transaction, can double spend, can halt the block chain, can prevent transcations from being processed.
The blockchain is a based on a vote.
In an election you have 1 vote = 1 person. To work you must identify each person and ensure they vote only once.
In a stock motion you have 1 vote = 1 share. To work you must identify each share and ensure they vote only once.
Bitcoin is an anonymous network. A single person could have one node, 100 nodes, 100,000 nodes or 99.99999999999% of the nodes on the network.
How can you ensure 1 vote = 1 person/entity? Simple answer. YOU CAN'T. Satoshi didn't even try.
He made it 1 hash = 1 vote.
I think what he was getting at is that many people would buy web hosting contracts, and snatch up IP's for nodes. Kind of like one person would dominate the current model if they were the only one mining with a GPU farm, but because many people mine with GPU farms, no single person has complete control. Web hosting is a non-trivial cost, especially as IP addresses become more scarce because everyone is trying to snatch them up for nodes. Now, if you based it off of IPv6, then you're gonna open up a new can of worms. But with IPv4, and the same level of activity in "mining" as is currently happening with Bitcoin, I think you could be pretty certain that no single person would have control of > 50% of the nodes. I like the hashing method better, but I *think* an IP-based method could work too, simply because IPv4 addresses are becoming scarce, and the costs are not trivial for said addresses. |
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I don't know. I don't think I have enough math skills to figure this out lol. Has the genious who came up with this figured out how to solve Q1?
Absolutely depends on transaction volume. If the price of 1 BTC is $2.50, and there are no block rewards, and there are 25 transactions per block on average, then I figure a transaction fee of $0.50/transaction will still provide around 1 TH/s of hashing power, which I believe would be sufficient to secure the network if the entire currency is worth $50M. I calculated this all out in another thread, but that's the result. I don't think $0.50/transaction is an unreasonable cost to pay - it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than a wire transfer. And that's basing it off of today's transaction numbers. 5-10 years down the road, when the block reward really starts getting small, we may have a lot more transaction volume. If we had 2500 transactions per block, we could still maintain around 4 TH/s per dollar price of BTC, and drop transaction costs to around $0.05/transaction. The yet-to-be-determined factor is how much hashing power we actually need to secure the network. In my opinion, 1 TH/s is plenty enough to secure the network with each BTC worth $2.50, but the goal should be linear growth in hashing power relative to price from there. So 10 TH/s if each BTC is worth $25, etc. Once we figure out that factor, then some hard numbers can be calculated for transaction fees based on current transaction volume to reach a target hashing goal. |
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Keep thinking! Nothing wrong with a good brainstorming session every so often...
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Let me get this straight:
- For each transaction, each validation node gets an equal split of the transaction fee.
- One person could potentially control thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes.
- For each node that gets a split of the transaction fee, a new record of said split of the transaction fee being distributed to the node needs to be recorded (i.e., for 10 nodes, you'd need 10 records of 1/10th of the transaction fee being distributed to each of the nodes).
- Suddenly, you have hundreds of KBs of information being recorded for each transaction, because the transaction fee is split between hundreds of thousands of nodes.
- Fail.
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lowercase 'L' instead of uppercase 'I' in the domain name.
Lol'd. I got taken. |
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1 BTC/hour?
Considering there are a few billion working-class people in the world, and only 21 million BTC to potentially pay them with...
I'd say there's bound to be some riots when companies can't cut their employees paychecks at the end of the month!
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Interesting indeed.
I wouldn't have expected a scammer to continue defending himself at this point after such a long period of silence, which almost leads me to believe that there is something to what TW says.
"The government's secret service". Which government? If the US, aren't the secret service only responsible for protection? Not for fraud/theft/virtual security investigations?
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The free market can take care of unfair discriminators rather quickly and efficiently.
So its the free market that "ended" racial discrimination? barbarousrelic hit the nail on the head. Let me requote him: It's important to note that one's race or sexual orientation are things that they have no control over, whereas one's membership in a violent racist group is the product of a conscious decision. Refusing to serve a neo nazi is IMO fine. Refusing to serve someone because he is of German descend, is not. And no, free markets wont solve that, not when the people being discriminated represent a (small) minority. You make some good points. I'm confused... what about all of the signs that businesses post up that say "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason". Couldn't the Jewish owner post a similar sign, and simply refuse service to the guy while pointing at it?
Should he have the right to post up that sign? That is the question and premise of this thread. Got it. So right now, it is perfectly legal (in the US) for a Jewish restaurant owner to refuse service to a skinhead. But the question is, is that legal right ethically right. No, it is not, in fact, legal for a Jewish owner of a restaurant to refuse to serve a skinhead, with or without a nazi swastika tattooed on the back of his head, if that said skinhead had not (yet) committed a known criminal offense against the owner, other patrons, or establishment and he has the funds to pay for the meal. The reality is that the clause of the Civil Rights Act that RP objected to at the time, and still does, made this (admittedly unlikely) scenario a matter of civil rights. It granted the skinhead a right that does not exist, namely to be served equally by one who does not wish to engage in business. This is one example of the inevitiable, yet unintended, consequences of federal laws such as this one; that charge the federal government with the task of selective enforcement of positive rights. And yes, this is selective enforcement, because the right of the Jewish owner to not engage in business with someone he doesn't wish to is borderline slavery. This isn't a thread about the moral aspects of this scenario, for the moral aspects are obvious enough to anyone who isn't a skinhead. And the scenario remains rare, because skinheads (like most people) prefer to self-segregate, and thus wouldn't likely enter into such an establishment without a hidden motive, also likely malicious. Because of this, if a Jewish owner refused to serve a skinhead, he would more than likely get away with it, but the skinhead could then sue under the Civil Rights Act and likely win. Thanks for the explanation. |
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I'm confused... what about all of the signs that businesses post up that say "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason". Couldn't the Jewish owner post a similar sign, and simply refuse service to the guy while pointing at it?
Should he have the right to post up that sign? That is the question and premise of this thread. Got it. So right now, it is perfectly legal (in the US) for a Jewish restaurant owner to refuse service to a skinhead. But the question is, is that legal right ethically right. I say, yes. It should absolutely be a person's choice to provide service only to those who they wish to provide service to, for whatever reason they like. If someone want to refuse service to me because I have blue eyes, then I'll laugh at them, find a different place to do business with, and badmouth that first business as much as possible. The free market can take care of unfair discriminators rather quickly and efficiently. |
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Then you should stop using bitcoins. You are a hypocrite statist who believes in anti-freedom. You have no business using market evolved money based on freedom and decentralization. This is what Ron Paul stands for, and this what bitcoiners should stand for aswell.
REALLY? SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
nuff said, -_- Edit: People like you HURT Bitcoin, and you don't even realize it... Bitcoin does not belong to you, or any political ideology for the matter. It doesn't have "favorites" and unlike your post, promotes TRUE freedom from all of the existing establishments including the one that your hero RP is part of, whether he likes it or not... Thank god that Bitcoin has no bias... And what establishment is Ron paul part of? If your ideas are not based on liberty, then you have no business being in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is about freedom of choice in currency, and freedom of choice principles. It makes you a hypocrite if you are pro-state, pro-centralization, pro-banking establishment monopolies, pro-surveillance state, pro-war, pro-war on drugs, and against civil rights, yet still want to use Bitcoins. Those are all against the principles of liberty. Let me ask you, what principles do you adhere to? There's nothing hypocritical about it. Bitcoin doesn't have to be about principle. If I want to be pro-war and use Bitcoins, it doesn't make me a hypocrite. It simply means I like war and I like Bitcoins. *shrug* |
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