If authorities started blocking the websites bitcoin.org and sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/ they could actually be doing the bitcoin community a favor!
A dozen alternative sources for the bitcoin client would spring up. Other conventional websites, .onion sites, .i2p sites, torrents, emule, usenet binaries, usb sticks hidden in geocaches, etc. The bitcoin community can be pretty evangelical, especially when provoked. Shutting down one source at a time would then become a game of whac-a-mole for the authorities, with each major shut down generating free publicity for bitcoin.
It would remove the only single point of failure that remains in this project.
At worst, this would cause the whole bitcoin project to fork into several parallel currencies with independent chains and slightly different clients/rules. But I see that as an advantage because it would mean even more resilience and redundance. Exchanging Bitcoin for Bytecoin is much easier than for USD or EUR; the overhead would almost be as low as for an internal Bitcoin transaction and the exchange rates would reflect the desirability of each Bitcoin fork.
Forks make us weaker. If the combined network has 4000Mhash/sec an attacker needs to match that amount. If it splits in half an attacker can doublespend on both networks with only 2000Mhash. Obviously putting the code out on many sites is only a positive. |
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First adult site to accept Bitcoins. (It has a 18+ warning page on it.) http://www.bitcoinxxx.com/Bitcoin XXX - Amateur Video Downloads! 100% Anonymous! Wow the videos look terrible.  Can I ask where you get content? Would it be reasonable to accept content from people and split the bitcoin payments? That might up the production value of a lot of amature videos. |
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but two blocks in a min or two I don't think I've see so far  It happens, but it is misleading to say it it takes a few minutes. Average time is 10 minutes per confirmation, with wide variation. |
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2 confirmations take a min or two min. the more confirmations the better.
Huh? Why not say it takes 1 second? |
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34k in asks on MtGox. Those are guaranteed and your have 3% of your goal.
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I will bet you 10,000 USD that you can't own 60% of the bitcoin market by November 2011
Why November 2011? What is your expectation for in 13 months time? I could start tomorrow slowly buying BTC. There is a dude putting every day 20,000 and more BTC bids into the market around 0.06. He probably has accumulates A LOT already. He's just moving his order around. There hasn't been a day with volume >20k for a while. Even if his trades were going off you couldn't tell if he was just buying and selling back, either at the same site or different. |
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Yes, there are risks to both, upside and downside.
To buy all BTC or a huge chunk anyway the price will rise a lot , probably 0.5 $ per BTC is not too far fetched
To avoid this, some trading rules would make sense, i.e. limiting BTC possession to a certain percentage of all BTC available. Otherwise someone can easily corner the market.
I could even do it.
Lol, even if it was a good idea how would you do it? ID everyone? Make them register an account. Oh, don't forget that people might reach the max, send them to their mybitcoin account and then earn more. You are going to have to make everyone report the balance and ownership of accounts on their site, including the anonymous lotto, poker site, biddingpond, etc... If you think running the price up gives you some advantage please go for it. |
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Don't think its a big problem, people have a pretty good trust meter already.
When I go to buy gas, I give the clerk $50 and say "$50 on pump #6". No receipt. He could easily just pocket it, or only give me $30 worth. I wouldn't know until I'm out of the store and pumping my gas.
That guy is in one known physical location with lots of relationships at risk economic and otherwise. I'm not saying internet trust is imposable, only that it is a different situation. |
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and one more thing (which I said in our threads):
we need to very quickly bring the bitcoin economy to a much higher level (adding trade, games, services, spread it more to get more people to adopt it , etc.).
the longer we wait, the more risky it gets that some crazy dude will destroy it with just small funds (just think about if someone who fears that bitcoins become huge.. this individual / organization can just destroy the entire bitcoin value for 100 - 200 M$)
It would obviously suck, but it would just verify the disruptive potential and be great publicity for a new go at it, maybe under a different name, maybe implemented somewhat differently to make whatever attack was used harder to do. |
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If he'll sell it for bucks (for example, 100 coins per buck) then all your wealth will become nothing. No one will sell you goods for tens of coins but for hundreds or thousands of them because it will be easy to get them. Which you don't possess.
The cheaper he sells them the quicker he'll run out. What if he sells them for .000001USD/BTC! I'll just snap buy them all, resell some when it gets back near equilibrium. But flooding would be pretty dumb of him, he'd sacrifice a lot of value. Did you see the MtGox "flash crash"? That guy could sold coins as low as ~.035 when waiting 15 minutes would have got him .06. It was just a gift. The guy I'm thinking of only had about 10% of coins, who are you talking about? |
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MtGox has the ostacle to forbid withdrawals before 1 month has passed so a lot of bitcoins are blocked for a while.
and the volume on bitcoinmarket is in my pov rather low
People (me) will trade there if there is a good arb opportunity. At the right price you can do a lot over there. |
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No one will be motivated to do anything if you just take without compensating the creators.
Money is a great motivator, but this is just wrong. Most of what I do in a day is not motivated by money, and I don't think I'm unique at all. People love to create and share. |
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Yay for poker! Got a timeline?
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Maybe I just want to join the free state project  The thought of jumping through beauracratic hoops to do my own thing doesn't appeal at all. I would rather get a flight in a cargo plane full of chickens than fill out paperwork .  I'm with you man. Paperwork is soul destroying. |
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Damaging someone's property is an extremely arbitrary category and that is where a lot of the difficulties are going to arise. It will be really important for an organization like this to spell out quite clearly what situations they will not cover.
That aside, yes I do think this is something which would be a good idea. Whether as an insurance company or as a legal defense fund.
My point was that the property damage was the crime as there is an obvious victim while smoking a joint has no victim. The state cant be a victim as it does not exist,except in people's minds. Also putting someone in jail means people are then forced to pay taxes to support them sitting in a cell rather than allowing them to make their victim whole financially which means the victim suffers and the state gets to look like its "tough on crime". That's a pretty warped system we have. No victim= No crime. Its not that hard to judge So you wont cover copyright infringement? That's one of the areas that bitcoin has been proposed as a facilitator. It is abhorrent that someone thinks they are entitled to your property because someone else broke a contract with them. I would not be opposed to defending people accused of copyright infringement simply because they downloaded a file and didn't profit from it,this is no different to your friend sharing it with you. Someone who actually profits from a content creators work without fare compensation is a different story. There is nothing magic about profiting in money. Do you care if the file they downloaded made their girlfriend happy and they got a BJ? What if the music helped them focus during their poker session? Or is it only bad if they explicitly trade it for money? What if it makes up part of a preference? What if the performance was a talent show with a first prize only and they didn't win it, but could have? If you really think someone is free to put whatever pattern they want onto their hard drive I don't see how doing something productive with it makes it worse. In fact if I was King Insano I'd say you can download whatever you want, but you HAVE TO profit from it (and ship me 8%). |
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Could this be the base project for a bitcoin enabled file sharing service as discussed in the other thread?
It could be....I cant find an api for the project. Contacting them directly might be the way to go. Good idea. Note that this is Washington University research just published less than a month ago, and the program version is only 0.7, even though it has been used for a year and has been downloaded a hundred-thousand times. I think this OneSwam has great potential because (1) it allows customized privacy per-file and per-search, (2) has performance almost comparable to regular bittorrent, and (3) is compatible with regular bittorrents (so there is already a large base of files connected to the network from the get go). But yeah, this could be the base project for a bitcoin enabled file sharing service as discussed in the other thread. Anyway, I haven't even tried this out yet myself. I would be happy to friend anyone on this bitcoin forum (preferably those with at least two stars under their name)... Oh, am I not downloading anything because I have no friends? |
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This seems to be a problem for many people.
Either there are too few bitcoins created so far and the USD value is too low.
or
People could buy enough at the Bitcoin exchanges but don't trust them enough to buy big chunks of it.
I don't think it is either of these things. Sure a million dollar house would have the first problem right now, but not a <$1000 computer. And MtGox has a pretty good rep, and you don't take risk vs other traders. And even though you could get burned by a personal PayPal transfer on bitcoinmarket, I don't think it has happened yet. |
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Do you read FOFOA at all? The latest post is mostly a reprint of an older one, but it is very good imo and relevant to this discusion.
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It's not loading the file for me? What could be wrong? Should be a popular file and it came up in search.
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