If it isn't completely irrelevant to me whether I keep my bitcoins at Mt.Gox, mybitcoin, instawallet or in my own client, then Bitcoins lose a huge part of their attraction -- namely that I can move them about on demand at my whim, not the whim of my bank/exchange/wallet-provider/government.
If you're concerned about having complete control of your coins, I would suggest keeping them in your wallet until it is necessary to do something with them. Any time you forfeit control over your money, you have forfeited control of your money... |
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Does that solve the problem of an attacker controlling more than half the network? They still have a higher probability of finding the next block each time, though I am unsure what % of the entire network's capacity is required to sustain this.
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This.
Remember those riots in Bolivia a while back after they tried to privatize the nation's water supply to the point of making it illegal to collect rainwater or drink from a stream or lake? I think people are starting to figure out that the corporate way isn't always the best way and that the government way... Well, let's be honest, it's usually the same as the corporate way.
I am struggling to discover the relevance to our discussion, here. Do we drink money? What he's saying is that there are many people who are much less willing than you to follow stupid rules. |
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Godspeed and good grace, Gavin. You've got an uphill battle to fight, but you've got a tremendous potential to do good for all of us, and it has to be done. Bitcoin cannot survive in this country in the form of anarchistic fantasies, as a means of untaxable, unstoppable trade. We're all rooting for you.
Speak for yourself. Many of us desire to use bitcoin precisely because of the difficulty in preventing or taxing trade. If you think government cannot exist without taxation of income, perhaps you should rethink or abandon the idea of government. Hint: there was no income tax until the 1800s off the top of my head. |
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It'll be a fun ride for us in the US, assuming we pick the right moment to step off the train before it wrecks.
Bitcoins will proliferate elsewhere, and it will creep back here one day, when our country realizes that unless it competes with the countries utilizing this superior currency, it will straggle and die off as a world power.
You're assuming that a significant number of people will stop using it because the government tells them to. I think this assumption is less and less valid every day. |
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Why would they need to spend the transactions of others when they can simply freeze all the payments by always holding the upper hand (read: possessing the longer "magical" block)? Their presumed goal is to ruin the project, not to steal people's coins. If they have half of the network's computing power (equal to the honest network) and fail to include transactions into blocks they create, confirmation can take twice as long. I realize that creighto but it's implicitly understood. We're talking about the US government which owns computers powerful enough to create a greater proof of work than the rest of Bitcoiners combined, not some Russian script kiddy in a basement. I really doubt that they have a significant amount of hardware that performs hashes as quickly as a distributed network full of ATI graphics cards. I imagine if they did, it would be rather centralized, and perhaps easy(ish) to take offline through some sort of attack. |
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If you want to understand the hostility, I recommend watching this video. He gives some very concise answers to the questions... What is the Federal Reserve? How did it come to be? What is it supposed to do? Does it do what it is supposed to? What does it actually do? Answers to these questions may shed light on why there is a relatively small group of people in this country that control a vast amount of resources and will do nearly anything in order to maintain that control. tl;dw version: The "federal" "reserve" is banking cartel blessed by law and is neither "federal" nor "reserve". It is the result of a secret (at the time) meeting of bankers that represented a quarter of the world's wealth who found competition to be too difficult. The system they designed was created to benefit exactly two parties... members of the cartel and the government to which it was to be pitched. The mechanism for this is twofold... 1) The government receives free money from the federal reserve by honoring fake checks. 2) The federal reserve bolsters the practice of fractional reserve banking to allow banks to create money out of nothing and charge interest on it. Who are the losers in all of this? Everyone else. This system is the cause of the dollar's 95% loss in spending power over the previous 100 years. |
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With Three Letter Acronym MAGIC of course! They are wizards, don't you know?
From Wikipedia: The main chain consists of the longest series of blocks from the genesis block to the current block.And thank you for making it quite clear who exactly doesn't know what he's talking about. Let me quote your original post which brought me back into this: We don't need The CIA doesn't need to post anything to ruin the project. They have I'm sure they have a fake proof-of-work ready to launch whenever they feel Bitcoin has grown too dangerous. One extra block at that chain's end transferring everybody's money into the CIA account is all what's needed for a clean game over.
Of course someone with hashing power equal to or greater than the rest of the network can probably build a longer block chain. Can they do so forever? Probably not. The part that concerns me and you have yet to explain, is how creating a longer block chain allows you to spend the transactions of others. Would you please explain how they would go about doing so, given that all transactions must be signed by the holder of the private key? |
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Yes tootdr, you are correct. Hoarding is the worst possible thing people can do for Bitcoin. It reduces the entry to the market, which may show a short term increase in value, follow by reduced interest and with it falling Bitcoin value.
Is saving good? How is saving different from hoarding? |
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I would prefer not to continue our previous discussion until you have answered the question I posed to you directly, anisoptera.
You mean this? If you had to choose one service to survive, dooming the other one to failure, would it be Bitcoin, or Silkroad? It's a bullshit question and you know it. Silk Road cannot survive without Bitcoin (or some other pseudonymous decentralized currency). Bitcoin will survive whether or not Silk Road fails. Bitcoin will not survive if there is a central authority that can stop Silk Road from processing payments. |
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This is bad. This is an image we have to shake, by any means necessary.
What means do you propose? What is your aim? Merely to "shake this image", or to prevent some individuals from using Bitcoin to perform the types of transactions which gives us this image? If a large enough people think that violence should be used against some Bitcoin users, and doing so will "shake this image", do you support using such violence? |
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I don't understand why Silk Road is so important to Bitcoin? Please elaborate.
That's an easy one. The true value of bitcoins to a person who wants to make illegal purchases is the ability of bitcoins to be used for any transaction, however shady, with total safety. There are a lot of people in this thread who want the goods on Silkroad and consider Bitcoins a means to that end - that is, they consider the Bitcoins only virtue to be unrestricted transactions for any good or service, however the legality. Tell me, which authority decides which transactions are allowable and which are not? In what method do they have this control? All I am saying is that if anyone has this authority, Bitcoin has been reduced from a free currency (the original intent) to yet another somewhat novel payment mechanism for fiat money. |
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@LulzSec just took a $7k BTC donation and announced it was using it to buy servers to pwn the FBI lol
Oh, jesus. This is bad. Why? Presumably they're turning that BTC into USD in order to buy the servers. U.S. DOLLARS USED TO FUND DOMESTIC CYBER TERROR GROUP! |
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If you had to choose one service to survive, dooming the other one to failure, would it be Bitcoin, or Silkroad? This is a false choice. Silk Road(s) cannot exist without Bitcoin. Bitcoin cannot exist while also prohibiting Silk Road(s). |
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I am a single, small and un-influential voice in this community, and I want you gone, Silkroad. This has nothing to do with my personal views on unrestricted trade among consenting adults, and everything to do with the fact that the united states government in its totality has every motive to discredit, damage and disable Bitcoin by any means necessary, and that if Senator Charles Schumer's current actions have any weight to them, the machinery for this has already been set into motion, using you.
You, Silkroad, are a tremendous liability to Bitcoin, and while the users here who are interested in Bitcoin purely for black transactions will disagree vocally with my opinion, your assocation with us is extremely damaging. You can and will be used against us, and I for one want you gone. I do not wish to purchase illegal substances with Bitcoins. I want Bitcoins to be the image of moral progress to the people in my country, and as public opinions stand, this cannot come to be for as long as puppets like Schumer can gleefully call Bitcoins "the black market currency". I want you to drop Bitcoins as an accepted currency and terminate all association with Bitcoin.
You are, collectively, a huge threat to the Bitcoin movement, for purely political reasons, and I have no doubt in my mind that the cause Bitcoins represents is socially and economically many orders of magnitude more important for mankind's well being than you, Silkroad. I only wish more Bitcoin users here would recognize the danger of your association with us.
You seem confused. Charles Schumer (and those like him) are the problem, not the Silk Road. Why don't you "want you gone, Charles Schumer"? |
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While I don't suggest SR or Bitcoin would actively participate in acts of overt violence. I still think we need to ask if selling tar heroin to a young teen isn't a from of violence in and of itself? It's none of your business or mine, only that of the child and guardian. In exactly the same way, I consider religious indoctrination to be a form of child abuse, but its none of my business if others indoctrinate their children into their choice of religion. |
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With Three Letter Acronym MAGIC of course! They are wizards, don't you know?
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Note about eliminating govt, it's often a choice of evils. Shall we surrender civil society to blood-thirsty thugs, as is happening right now in parts of Mexico and Latin America? Is that our future? You seem to lack a basic understanding of the cause of the cartels' rise to power. Let me give you a hint: they love the war on drugs. Governments around the world (urged/coerced by the U.S.) have made drugs illegal, essentially handing a monopoly of drug production and distribution to violent individuals. Somebody is going to control (and profit) from drugs no matter what. If the production, distribution, and use of all drugs is legal, legitimate businesses will form to fill these roles. They will be protected by police and/or private security. Look at alcohol prohibition and the end of the same in order to see how a market run by thugs is transitioned to a peaceful one once it is no longer forced underground. Perhaps SR is something of a stepping-stone out of this quagmire. I'd be interested on what, if any, role they envision for govt. if there were to be significant changes to current laws. Or, does Silk Road consider itself above the law? It is a stepping stone. The government will either end the prohibition of drugs or go bankrupt trying to fight against sites like Silk Road. |
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Seems to me government has already abandoned drug control In what sense? From Federal drug control spending by agency: (Budget Authority in Millions) [...] FY 2010 Request [...] $15,069.1 15 billion FEDERAL dollars spent on drug control in the United States. From FBI arrest statistics: The highest arrest counts among the Part I and Part II offenses were for drug abuse violations (estimated at 1,663,582 arrests), driving under the influence (estimated at 1,440,409), and larceny-theft (estimated at 1,334,933).
The arrest rate was 4,478.0 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants of the total estimated United States population. The arrest rate for violent crime (including murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) was 191.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, and the arrest rate for property crime (including burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson) was 571.1 per 100,000 inhabitants. That second point isn't specifically drug related, but it's interesting to see that violent and property crimes account for a very small portion of the number of arrests (17%). Wonder what the rest were from... the actual number of people caught and drugs interdicted are but a small fraction of the total consumer market. That just means that their enforcement is not effective as per their stated goal. They can still be effective at ruining the lives of a significant percentage of the population simply for choosing to attain an altered state of consciousness or helping others do so. A market SR and Bitcoin seem to embrace, despite the low-life thugs and psychopathic killers who populate it. Utter bullshit. Using Silk Road dramatically lowers the chance of having a drug trade turn violent. Furthermore, its use of reputation, escrow, and arbitration dramatically lowers the chance of fraudulent behavior by either party. |
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If you, Phenomenon, eliminate government's role in drug policy aren't you then simply advocating the status quo and encouraging the prison-industrial complex along with a host of other serious social, economic and humanitarian problems? Somebody is going to control the drugs. Who or what do you recommend?
What? If the government abandoned its drug control policy, who would be arresting people and putting them in jail for drug manufacture/distribution/use‽‽‽ |
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