@mjc

Oh no!. Sorry about that, if you can think of anyway of reducing it's potential for inflicting pain then please let me know.

@Max29

Thanks for the positive feedback Max.

@Aahzman

Hi Aahzman, thank you for your contribution. I have added 'IANAL'.


Also added; 'Tragedy of the Commons', 'Proof Of Work' & 'Proof Of Stake'

So who had their money on -
Hash rate and transactions will sky rocket but price remain the same?

People feel safe inside their little walled gardens.

When you tell them your gona pull the wall down it terrifies them.

@ReubenMetcalfe

I'm glad you found it useful and thank you for taking the time to post. If you have any ideas about how this list maybe improved then please let me know 


@uk1

Thanks again uk1, added 'Mining Rig'.


Also added 'Finney Attack'.

Edit; + 'Client', 'Thin Client', 'Satoshi Client', 'Node' & 'Full Node'

Happy having day, may Satoshi be with you  

An international holiday.

Looks like we are ahead of schedule, maybe GPU miners are having one last bash?

Edit: 12 remaining.

I think a good tradition would be to cut something in half. Even if it's just a bad habit.

Happy halving day everyone!  

@buttersstotch &  bello5678

Thank you both for taking the time to post. I do like positive feedback   

@uk1

Added; 'Shitlist'

@Portnoy

Hey, it has been stickied   

Added; 'Crack', 'Brute force' & 'Sticky'


Also added; 'Margin', 'IRC', 'Paper Wallet' & 'QR Code'

I was thinking about the ways of reducing the cost of running a full node. The only solutions I could think of also reduced the hashing power.

For example, if we could split the network into two clusters and each of those clusters had 50% of the hashing power, would they have enough to remain safe?

At what point should the clusters be split or merged?

@niko. So how much money does a potential attacker have available to them? How many times stronger is the network than it needs to be?

Thanks!

Could you use the images in the 'Lets count to 21 million with images' thread as the count down?

It doesn't mater if you want to measure it in dollars or terraFLOPS. To get the relative strength you still need to compare it to something. In this case we would have to ask, what is the maximum amount of money a single entity is prepared to spend in order to attack the network. This might be a harder value to determine.

The point I am trying to make here is that we can't say anything about the relative computational strength of the bitcoin network unless we have something to compare it to.

If you know a better value to key off, then please tell me.

@MAC

Thank you very much for taking the time to post, your words are encouraging, as I have been wondering if anybody actually found this thread to be useful.

Although all the entries on the list are common on the forum, some of the definitions are indeed humorous as humour is something that is also common on this forum.

If you have any ideas about how this list may be improved, then please let me know.


@Portnoy

Thank you for your continued effort 

Added - 'Taint', 'Jelly', 'Randian', 'TANSTAAFL', 'Faucet', 'Bitcoind' & 'Krugman Fallacy'

Although I have edited down your definition of 'Krugman Fallacy'. What can I say, editors gonna edit 


Also added - 'Ask', 'Bid', 'Limited Order', 'Market Order', 'Wall', 'Martingale', 'Vanity Address', 'Vanity Generator' & 'Brain Wallet'

I am not suggesting a 51% attack is the greatest threat to bitcoin, quite the opposite in fact. A redundancy of 29 is overly redundant a wasteful. I would sleep well at night if it only had a redundancy of 8.

What do you think a good level of redundancy would be?

What redundancy give us is a means of judging relative computational capacity. You could use redundancy to judge the relative growth or contraction of computation strength over time without having to cancel out the effect of Moors Law.

How close are we to a low level network attack, and how are you calculating that?


@hazek. Why have you moved this post to mining? It's about judging bitcoins relative computational strength not mining.

Is the bitcoin network dangerously under powered and on the verge of being subjected to a 51% attack?

Or is it overly redundant and could afford to have the hash rate drop to a fraction of it current value and still be secure?

My instincts tell me we are safe, but where are the numbers?

Hash rate alone doesn't help us because we do not know the potential hash rate of an attacker to compare it to. The problem is determining the greatest amount of processing power that is in the hands of one single external entity.

Currently, although I may be wrong, the most powerful computational machine external to bitcoin and controlled by a single entity is the Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which puts out 10.5 petaFLOPS.

According to BitcoinWatch, the equivalent rate of petaFLOPS for the bitcoin network is 307.94. Now I know your going to moan about comparing flops and hashes but we have no choice here.
 
If we stipulate that the computational power wielded by the largest know potential attacker is always equal to a redundancy of 1, then we can say the bitcoin network currently has redundancy of just over 29.

redundancy = bitcoin capacity / max know external capacity
29.32 = 307.94 / 10.5

Or to put it another way, an attacker would require more than 29 times the processing power than that know to be controlled by a single external entity in order to have more than 50% of the network processing power.

Although this gauge is not perfect, as it ignores unknown entity's and pools, it does at lest provide a benchmark.

Thoughts?

https://blockchain.info/wallet/

Apparently their UK withdrawals are down at the moment but should be up again soon, might be worth contacting them.

Has anyone setup an officiial block party irc channel yet?