Good advice.
Using an alternate cryptocurrency client would be a great way to get many people to install a hidden virus that targets Bitcoin users.
If you have a significant amount of Bitcoins, I wouldn't run other clients on the same computer until the alternates have developed trust over a longer period of time... I'm probably on the paranoid side of things though.
These new cryptocurrencies are interesting, and it will be fascinating to see how it will all play out.
Ultimately someone should probably release a product, some hardware such as a thumb drive with an OS which runs in as a virtual machine and sell it to people. Then they just plug it in and install the latest alt-coin for testing. The thumb drive should also include biometric authentication and generate a one time password. It would be the perfect hardware wallet in my opinion. No remembering passwords. You wouldn't even necessarily have to worry about losing the hardware wallet because the actual wallet could be backed up to the cloud or internet and downloaded again as it would be authenticated by your biometric signature which will not change even if you were to lose the device. It would be a combination of a Yubikey, 16-32GB hardware encrypted solid state drive, and finger vein recognition biometric authentication. Push one button and it backs up all your coins to your email, or to the cloud. Put your finger into the slot, enter the 4 digit pin, and you can make a transaction. The reason for the pin is because someone might try to steal your money while you're asleep. Something you know, something you have, something you are. |
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I haven't seen anybody post about what would be my biggest worry if I were trying out alternative block chains. I realize this may be perceived as "Gavin is FUD'ding anything that isn't bitcoin!" (FUD == Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) But I think some of you might be forgetting some basic computer security fundamentals in the excitement to be early adopters.
When I first heard about bitcoin, my questions were:
1) Can it possibly work (do the ideas for how it works make sense)?
2) Is it a scam?
3) If it is not a scam, could it open my computer up to viruses/trojans if I run it?
I answered those questions by:
1) Reading and understanding Satoshi's whitepaper. Then thinking about it for a day or two and reading it again.
2) Finding out everything I could about the project. I read every forum thread here (there were probably under a hundred threads back then) and read Satoshi's initial postings on the crypto mailing list.
3) Downloaded and skimmed the source code to see if it looked vulnerable to buffer overflow or other remotely exploitable attacks.
If I were going to experiment with an alternative block-chain, I'd go through the same process again. But I'm an old conservative fuddy-duddy.
If you want to take a risk on a brand-new alternative block-chain, I'd strongly suggest that you:
1) Run the software in a virtual machine or on a machine that doesn't contain anything valuable.
2) Don't invest more money or time than you can afford to lose.
3) Use a different passphrase at every exchange site.
Multi-factor authentication for all please. Yubikey+Password, Cellphone+Password, Smartcard+Password, Biometric+Password. Never trust a site which wants you to use a password alone. Never trust your keyboard or your operating system. Biometric hardware wallets will become increasingly important for security of crypto-finance in the future and I wish there were more robust hardware and API's for it. I know Bitcoin is intending to support two-factor authentication but please consider supporting the latest biometric technology as well due to the ease of use factor. |
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I always like to develop ideas openly and encourage their theft -- probably have spent too much time in academia. But whoever I pass this to can develop as they see fit.
Very good. You are right. Really my impulse to secrecy is driven by spite, rather than a desire to contribute to society. I'll make a white paper and link it to the wiki. Note to everyone advocating secrecy. Ultimately, talent is much more important to success than secrecy. Disclosure of complex schemes won't help competitors much because they can't easily distinguish between feasible and infeasible ideas. (i.e. they can borrow low-hanging fruit, but complex knowledge is quite resistant to diffusion unless it is accompanied by a whole lot of hand-holding.) Our real competitor is the conventional financial system. They only benefit from in-fighting. No one advocated secrecy. Even you weren't advocating for secrecy or at least I didn't think you were. You did say you'd share it with people committed to Netcoin and delay releasing it to the public. The problem with giving it to everyone at the same time is Netcoin isn't even in development yet so if you put the idea out now it will probably be bastardized by some alt-coin and implemented incorrect. This could give people the impression that the idea was never a good idea to begin with. I think you should release the white paper for sure, but why not release the white paper when the time is right? My reasoning being: In many cases a badly implemented good idea is worse than keeping the good idea to yourself until you can properly implement it or find others who can properly implement it. If the idea really is good like you say it is and you intend to release it to the public then delaying the release of the idea isn't promoting secrecy, it's just giving you the ability to create the first implementation of the idea. That is first mover advantage. My opinion is ideas have no real owners. All ideas shall be reused, borrowed, and in most cases this is a good thing (especially for software). At the same time while I believe in transparency and open exchange of ideas as can be evidenced just by looking at my track record, and I agree it takes skill/talent to implement good ideas, I also recognize that Netcoin itself will need the best first implementation of the idea or why would people choose Netcoin over that other altcoin which has similar ideas such as multiple hashing algorithms and similar features even if poorly implemented? Novel ideas are good when consolidated into one overall product or package as an introduction to the concept. Take the genius behind proof of work, now that we have that idea we can continue to improve on it. But Satoshi had to bring all of those ideas together into Bitcoin, many of those ideas existed already but not in the same context. So the question really is whether or not it's wise to share your ideas prior to development or delay until development starts. Either way there is no secrecy because the community will receive the ideas at some point. I hope development starts soon. It's up to you and Tacotime how you want to develop this idea and who you want to share it with but once it's put into the public domain it's out there. My opinion is there is no rush to put it out there in detail if your goal is to implement it first. I've seen some ideas from Netcoin already get borrowed and unlike the academic world you don't see any attribution to Tacotime. |
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In a few years, it will be interesting to see estimates of how many people were swindled from their money and how much changed hands due to the manipulation of these "infantile" exchanges (meaning that they haven't reached maturity or stability yet).
it's risk/reward, noone is getting swindled. The risk being 2x counterparty: anonymous exchange + issuer, and 1x market: bitcoin/usd. The reward being on the off chance dividend actually gets paid and the exchange doesnt disappear in a few months, the return is well above market for the same risk compared to other products in the established markets. In term of standard fixed income ratings, it's probably triple c or non-investment grade/junk bond, maybe a little lower than that, but the reward is better than most junk bonds on the market and sure as hell a lot better than buying those asic vaporwares with a difficulty countdown clock against you. I wouldnt put a lot of money, but a little bit as part of the high risk/lottery pool isn't the worst idea. Bought around 1500 shares tonight, will probably get another 1500 after they start hashing/dividend if the price isnt too high by then. That's around $1500-$2000 - the max i am willing to throw into this. If the exchange goes offline couldn't the issuer move it to a decentralized exchange? Bitshares? Mastercoin? etc? |
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There is absolutely no reason to put bids and asks in the block chain. You don't need consensus on bids and asks, just the resulting trades. A better model is to broadcast bids and asks, and have miners or other agents only commit matched exchanges. This is the approach we are taking with Freimarkets (and we do so avoiding direct pairwise interaction or trusted third parties, and with off-chain transactions as an option). The use-a-block-chain-for-everything mentality is somewhat bizarre - a very scarce public resource should be only be used conservatively and when it is absolutely needed. Why not use off-chain mechanisms. Any mini blockchain would work right? |
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Why not keep it private? Do what is best for Netcoin. People need a reason to use Netcoin and also there is no point in putting everything up for the attack of the clones. Netcoin should set the standard not chase it. |
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Early this week must have meant Wednesday....
if early meens not_late then you're right. Something is wrong, I guess its time to sell now and buy back later. |
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Duh, same for bitcoin  air Bitcoin price is in a bubble, when the price goes down the labcoin price in theory should shoot way up due to increased liquidity. Right now people are buying their Bitcoins from MtGox and they are paying $130. Good luck for buying shares with ridiculous prices like that. |
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https://btct.co/disclosureBTC-TC is not a real-world stock exchange and does not offer opportunity for direct real-world investment or profit. While we fully expect listed virtual companies to follow through with their virtual business plans, please KEEP IN MIND AT ALL TIMES -- shares purchased on this virtual stock exchange simulation do not entitle you to legal real-world rights to a listed virtual company as you would expect from a real company. Public Beta - Disclosure Statement
We will do everything in our power to protect you and your virtual goods. However, the exchange is NOT responsible for ANY bad things that happen to you, your virtual assets, or your BTC. Continued use of this site constitutes an understanding and acceptance of these terms.
Full Release - Disclosure Statement
BTC Trading Corp Stock Exchange (BTC-TC) is a fictional fantasy stock market simulation in which participants trade for entertainment and educational purposes only.
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Do you all even know that Martin Armstrong was managing $3 Trillion (the most ever) and that is why the bankers locked him maximum security prison for 7 years without a trial on a bogus contempt charge, because his computer was helping capital outsmart the bankers. Luckily he had too many well connected friends, so they had to back down, after they almost succeeded to kill him in prison.
You had better listen, he has never been wrong.
He has never been wrong? No one on this earth has "never been wrong" He may be right or may not be, but the best way to find out is to put his ideas to the test and compete against other ideas. The best ideas will win and evolve. |
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Legal issues will always be a problem when we live under a corrupt system. We could follow the law and it could be changed or reinterpreted. The truth is we live in a lawless society where no one knows or can even agree on what the law is, it is selectively enforced, and entirely detached from morality. This makes the 'law' irrelevant if someone in power considers you a threat.
The only defense against corrupt enforcement of the law is publicity and providing a good to society that is so in demand that the government is unable to outlaw it.
The true purpose of our company is as a free market solution to fighting the most common crimes in our society: identity theft and fraud in the financial industry. You cannot overcome government by 'fighting the government' because they can always claim the 'moral high ground' of fighting crime and 'protecting people' from 'money laundering' and ponzie schemes. Well, we are claiming that high-ground first. If they want to fight us, they are going to have to claim that our efforts to fight identity theft and financial fraud are a bad thing. That grandma doesn't deserve a safe ROI on her savings, and that people should not have free and easy to use secure communication software.
So our goal is to provide people the services they expect from their government, but do it without shoving a gun in their face. So people expect the government to regulate the financial markets to prevent fraud and abuse. To insure deposits at banks. To provide counterfeit resistant identities. To provide postal service. We will provide those same services and do a better job in an entirely transparent manner.
If governments want to claim the high ground, they will have to start actually doing the job they sell themselves as doing because they will look very foolish attacking us we will achieve what they have failed to do... regulate financial markets and secure identities. Besides, wall street will be able to make a killing with this system so they will probably not push for it to be outlawed entirely nor for us to be put in jail.
It is all a public relations game.
I agree with your philosophy on this. |
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No one! That is the key point of it being decentralized and algorithmically autonomous.
Everyone owns the blockchain. You could say it's left libertarianism but not centralized authoritarian socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism. Disagree. Collective ownership is SOCIALISM!!!!! My gosh how could you not miss what the definition of collectivism is?
Bitcoin is collectively owned, but it's not typical socialism. I don't believe it's socialist at all, I see it as technologically applied libertarian socialism if I had to try to put any political ideology on it at all and even in that instance many people would completely disagree. Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism[1][2] or left-libertarianism)[3][4] is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic society without private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialists believe in converting present-day private productive property into common or public goods, while retaining respect for personal property.[5]
Bitcoin is public property owned collectively by the Internet itself and the miners who support the blockchain. This is necessary or Bitcoin could not exist. Since the miners own the means of production (the mechanism to produce the Bitcoins), then you can say it's applied libertarian socialism. It's not authoritarian socialism though, and as long as it's not authoritarian socialism it's not taking anything from anyone else. Private property is respected, and Bitcoin is a open property similar to stuff licensed under the creative commons or the GPL. In case you haven't caught on to the real innovation here, it is the creation of decentralized ownership of decentralized, for-profit, businesses. Names & Exchanges are just two such examples of what is possible.
Exactly. I don't think he is grasping the concept that you can have private property as a decentralized group. Bitcoin could be considered private property, owned by the community itself. If you want to stretch it you can see it as a libertarian socialist type thing, but it's not socialist in the sense of the word where there is some authority in control of it. |
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Another Chinese IPO bites the dust. Is there a possibility that LC could face legal issues in the future?
LABCOIN is registered in HongKong with Chinse/European team, boss is Italian. After all, I think these canceled IPOs failed not only because of legal risks, their ASS is not very clean. FYI, Firedcat is also located in China. No one knows his identity. |
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Collecting funds from the public is illegal in China? Does this mean no IPO occurs on their stock markets? In fact how can they even have a stock market if the public can't participate? As anywhere else, only the company approved by the regulation authority can Launch IPO on the stock market in China. Collecting funds (or even goods) privately without approving is illegal. However, if the company does not cause the loss of the investors, normally it will not be sued. That's why AM is relatively safe now. Their have only direct shares and most investors are satisfactory. yep.you are right Labcoin is an italian company. |
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At least make a twitter account and a Facebook page.
Twitter and Facebook are proprietary platforms, have been compromised by the NSA to spy on their users, and don't really offer any useful functionality beyond what can be achieved with a web site, email list, and forum. But that is where the people are. A lot of people use and are on twitter and for communication purposes its just fine. What does it matter if the NSA sees some tweet telling people the software is passing some milestone? But that is fine, where is the mailing list? As you can tell from this thread the mining algorithm is still under flux, but the goals are as you stated favor CPU over everything else.
Based upon my most recent thoughts (pending experiments) here is what I expect:
If the algorithm accesses the memory in random order that invalidates the CPU cache, then memory bus bandwidth will be the bottleneck. After thinking about it, the memory bus is something that could be optimized out by an ASIC so this is not a desirable situation.
The algorithm needs to be 'fast to validate' which also implies you do not want to be memory bus bound.
The result is that I will probably target the hash memory requirements to near 8 MB (Core i7 CPU cache) which means that your best performance will probably be from single-core operation (multiple cores would start cache thrashing). As Intel releases new chips with more cache you can start using more cores to positive effect.
A GPU has several different memory classes (global, shared, and local) and the global memory is much slower (like CPU to RAM) than the shared or local memory which behave like CPU cache. So an algorithm that will fit in cache on a CPU will result in cache thrashing on a GPU. This cache-thrashing combined with an unpredictable fetch pattern means the GPU will be stalled waiting on data most of the time. GPU shared and local cache sizes are under 1 MB.
Based upon transistor count, I would expect the highest end FPGA with 8 billion transistors (compared to 1 billion for an i7) to have a maximum gain of 8x assuming the ratio of transistors to execution units and cache was the same and there is no transistor count overhead or clock frequency disadvantages in the FPGA compared to an Intel ASIC. By relying on Intel's AES instructions for 90% of the hash, you already have an almost ideal ASIC right in your computer.
So to answer your question: CPU cache and AES hardware instructions will determine mining performance in one case, and memory bus speeds in the other.
Note that the real protection against ASIC will be the community consensus and will to change the hashing algorithm to keep it CPU bound.
What is to stop it from becoming centralized by virtual machines? One thing virtual machines are not good at is random number generation. Maybe you should find a way to make people use real cpus? Otherwise you'll end up with even more centralization than you'd have from ASICs. |
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Amazing company.  Big bubble! Looks like it's gonna hit 0.004 over the weekend. Someone must know something to be buying this much ahead of the monday announcement. |
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I don't know how i would ever get anything done hanging out in an IRC channel all day. We have our web developer actively working to setup forums dedicated to this project and until then this thread will be the one were conversation on this topic will be focused.
At least make a twitter account and a Facebook page. Hi bytemaster,
I finally took a look at your whitepaper; this latest version of your project is much more ambitious than I had imagined! The sheer scope of what you are attempting boggles my mind.
Do you have a feeling for when mining of bitshares will begin? Am I correct in assuming that mining will begin well before the planned feature set is complete? How much code has been written so far?
Best of luck!
This software will be released in phases testing the less critical aspects throughly with a large user base of 'Bit Message' and 'BitShares ID' users who can use it for communication without really risking much financial value. The goal is to have the Test Network up by Thanksgiving and hopefully launch the live network as soon as we can go a month without any major new bugs showing up. The blockchain should support short/long, options, and cross-chain trading, multi-sig, and simple escrow at launch, though full support for the escrow system will be built out over coming year. While the block chain will be ready and usable with an RPC / command line interface, the GUI will take longer to mature. Our schedule is highly dependent upon finding good developers and testers! Can it be a web app? What about a high level API so we can program for it in Python or Ruby? |
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Are you telling me that gold speculators don't have to pay capital gains?
They don't pay taxes on unrealized gains. Correctly until they realize said unrealized gains. IE: when you cash out. This is where bitcoin is going to go. You aren't going to be able to say someone owes a certain amount of taxes in their bitcoins. When they exchange bitcoins to USD or another currency it will be exposed to the taxation of that currency. Easiest down-the-middle I can think of. Yeah, but what are dividends? Income? Capital gains? http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/12/how-are-capital-gains-dividends-taxed-differently.asp |
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It can be argued that the government should get their share of capital gains, whether or not you have converted back to fiat. But then that means we should be able to account for capital losses too.. and I can just see them acknowledging that  riiight No, that would be straight up unconstitutional. Private currencies are not legal tender. It's impossible to report a capital gain on stuff like this anyway. |
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This seems overly complicated. Is there any reason why Bitcoin isn't private enough as it is?
You presented a hypothetical situation which has not occurred yet. It's not perfectly private but compared to credit cards and banks its very private. It's almost as private as cash.
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