OpenBazaar is a great concept, and from the moment I learned of bitcoin, I kept wanting to build something like this myself (though sadly I never got around to it).
I think the beauty of the idea is that since it's decentralized by nature, anyone can build their own 'eBay' site/app to list the many products/services available throughout OpenBazaar. It would be like if eBay was open source and you didn't have to ever go to 'ebay.com' to buy/sell anything. I think early on this sort of concept would be best opened to developers to build applications/sites through which the later wave of public users could actually use. At this stage, it's too early for wide usage.
The major flaw though is that there is no incentive for arbitrators because there are no fees. And because there are no incentives for arbitrators, there will be a lot of scams abound ... or you'll have to rely on building trust over time; trustworthy buyers and repeat customers. So, I don't see this turning into eBay per se, but more of a decentralized e-commerce platform for shops, though still, it can easily become scam central.
Really, in the end, unfortunately it will work best for dark markets, which may in effect possibly drive up bitcoin transactions more than legal markets. Regardless of how much the OpenBazaar team claims to be against the sale of illegal goods/services, this platform will be best used for that purpose.
For it to work well for legal goods/services, there would have to be a fee structure with incentives for arbitrators/escrow services.
I agree. And the reputation system at this point seems quite complicated with algos behind the scenes. I am guessing as time goes on, it might get even more complicated. Still, it is the reputation system that will make or break this project. If they figure out a way to make this happen, it can be one of the greatest markets and a true internet 2.0 market. There will be fees to the arbitrators if arbitrage is needed. No fees apply only if the trade goes smooth. I think this could potentially result in arbitrators receiving a higher then warranted level of trust within the community. The arbitrator could "oversee" hundreds of transactions and never have to intervene with their trust getting built up, however their judgement nor their ability to be trusted would be tested. This could result in people being able to scam because the arbitrator does not know how to tell a scam is being pulled off or because the arbitrator is in on the scam It all depends on how the reputation system will work but I find very unlikely the arbitrators will receive any fees nor reputation "points" for transactions that went smooth and therefore didn't require their services. If this was the case then how would escrow services get reputation points in the first place? It has been mentioned there would be "proof of burn" to start with, but what about after that? If the escrow service sides with either the buyer or the seller then the person they did not side with would almost certainly give negative feedback. This would essentially make it impossible for an escrow to ever gain a positive amount of reputation regardless of their honesty |
|
|
|
Have two PCs at home - one online, the other offline. Always keep your private keys in that offline PC. So do I  This is probably the best way to keep your private keys safe for cold storage. It is also, by far the simplest way. You will need to somehow create your private key (on an offline computer), so you might as well keep the keys there. I do admit that there are a large number of very creative ways of storing your cold/offline private keys however you should really remember "KISS" - Keep It Simple Stupid |
|
|
|
Got a 1 m BTC, again.  1 m BTC? That is quite a bit... More than a transaction fee. I suppose they send the BTC accordingly to bitcointalk rank/post number. I think it is more complex then that. I have seen a hero member post 4k+ addresses and each received a same sized input that a full member received for posting one address on the same thread. I would theorize that their algorithm takes into consideration something about the thread the address is posted on among other factors. I would be interested to see any specific research that anyone does regarding how the size of the "advertisement" is deteremined |
|
|
|
... I think the disagreement is what effects both not raising the limit and raising the limit will have on the network and on TX fees
Is there really any disagreement? Everybody I have talked with believes that transaction fees will rise if Bitcoin is successful and the 1MB limit is kept. How much we won't know-- that depends on how much demand for transactions moves somewhere else (fiat currency, altcoin, or some off-blockchain solution). There is a small minority of people who believe that it would be BETTER if transactions moved to fiat currency, an altcoin, or some more-centralized off-blockchain solution. I strongly disagree. I think the disagreement lies within what will happen if we raise the block limit. I think some people think there will be more no TX fee TXs included in blocks because because there would be more room for these TXs in each block. The argument is that this is bad because the miners would receive less total TX fees which will become a larger portion of their "income" as the block subsidy declines over time. I would disagree because the miners would still be doing the same amount of work to confirm a TX in a block and there would be nothing that would force miners to include no TX fee TXs period, regardless of max block size. I think there are a very small subset of applications when off-blockchain transactions would be better, primarily when an off-chain transaction would require a very small amount of additional risk to the buyer (for example someone who already trusts an airline enough to prepay for an airline ticket could deposit funds into an account for pay for in-flight wifi, or someone who trusts a retail store to not sell faulty products to deposit funds in an account to pay for a number of transactions with the retail store, or some other similar situation). If we move primarily to off-chain solutions that are not store specific (or band/company specific) (and are very similar to coinbase) then we have essentially invented a new version of paypal. |
|
|
|
There's an alt called FastCoin. They do 12 second blocks. I haven't checked if that was the case though, just what I've read about them.
A very good example of why it is not good to have short confirmation times is on the ghash multipool. They have live updates as to how many confirmations each found block of each altcoin has. They often have very long chains of coins going from orphaned to confirmed and back again. The chains are often 10 or more blocks long |
|
|
|
are people still trying to act smart and say its a risk without actually trying to test it out.
go on testnet and try to freeze their blockchain. or try it on a near dead altcoin (theres loads of them that are clones of bitcoin)
On testnet it would probably not work as the monetary incentives are not what they are on a real chain. Those alt-chain-scams are not as competitive as bitcoin neither. I bet many mine their alts just to point to the high hash rate it still has. I would say that the majority of altcoins are primarily mined by the developers of the coin (likely from leased mining capacity). This would result in one of the mining pools (or miners) that the dev controls to find the block and the rest of the mining capacity the dev controls to act "honestly". I don't think this is even theoretically possible with most altcoins. |
|
|
|
The whole concept of interest makes only sense if you have an inflationary currency. Bitcoin has a fixed maximum monetary supply. So it's wrong to expect interest, unless you assume that fractional reserve banking (essentially fraud) is taking place.
Therefore I advise caution when someone offers interest on Bitcoin deposits without offering a plausible explanation. Why do these exchanges offer interest? Why do they need more deposits?
Bitcoin is inflationary as additional bitcoin is created every 10 minutes and will continue to be inflationary for a good ~100 years (depending on how quickly the difficulty rises). The reason that banks are able to pay interest on deposits is because they are able to invest a percentage of deposits in loans to other customers and has nothing to do with the positive level of inflation I dont think you get how it works.. in the end you have to inflate.. you are creating IOUs for future work.. future work will be paid by future labour, thus creating inflationary environment. Getting rid of IOUs will mean you pay for what is needed now, thus it is priced in NOW instead of later. Is it a good thing? Might set us back 10 or so years to start, but in the long run certainly more stable option... The rout cause of inflation is a higher amount of money supply in the economy (although this does not always cause inflation). If there are more bitcoin available to be spent then there is a chance that inflation will occur. The fact that people are able to receive work in exchange for work later does not in itself cause inflation, plus loans are available in the bitcoin world although the lending market is much less efficient then the fiat based lending market |
|
|
|
Not all countries have a "weak local currency" currency policy. Some will let the currency freely float against other currencies regardless of what the market does. The only currencies that will have the problem of being too strong are countries that have net exports as their currency will naturally get stronger as they sell products overseas, bring the profits home and buy the local currency.
The problem is what happens when other countries manipulate the foreign currency exchange rate. Do they still follow an off-hands policy or do they intervene in the market? Most will still follow a hands-off policy. When a currency market is intervened in, the impact is almost always temporary as intervention only slows the appreciation of the currency not reverses it over the long term. well boj has caused usdjpy to bottom out... and eurchf is holding above 1.2 for years now... getting pretty cose but I agree... however with jpy i think they will enter a period of inflation (maybe hyper inflation) because of what they did.. i think instead of jpy being so strong it will become super weak because of the choices they made.. there is no happy between now.. they went to extreme measures to do major interventions and now rate is climbing but it will either fall back down or go through the roof to hurt their economy again. Japan has been going through a period of deflation for over a decade now. They are in dire need of inflation. The Japanese government has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars (if not trillions of dollars) over the past 10+ years but the yen still appreciated against the dollar from trading at ~120 yen per dollar to less then ~80 yen per dollar Preach it to the choir. Like I havent seen a chart? They messed up by signing the plaza accord. Now they are backtracking and made mistakes by intervening... that is the essence of the convo not dire need for inflation... they get more inflation than they can handle btw your number are off they didnt buy hundreds of billions of dollars.. that is a lie. Give me a link. The amount of intervention are probably understated. In October 2011 the JCB (japan central bank) purchased ~$100 billion of dollars to weaken the yen in one day and purchased ~$20 billion of dollars in early November 2011. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/01/us-japan-economy-azumi-idUSBRE85003L20120601BOJ UNDER PRESSURE AGAIN
Tokyo spent a record 8 trillion yen ($101 billion) in unilateral intervention into the currency market last October 31, when the dollar hit its record low against the yen, and another 1 trillion yen in early November on undeclared forays into the market. Authorities have stayed out of the market since then. I would say that if they spent that much over the course of a few weeks then it would be easy to assume that they purchased a trillion dollars over the course of a decade. |
|
|
|
In your example: When "bank loans 90 BTC to customer B" those can only be tokens representing BTC.
Why must an token be loaned? The bank has 100 BTC. It loans 90 of it. It doesn't need to lend out a token. The banks rely on the fact that loans are eventually redeposited into the banking system. This fact allows banks to lend out as much money as they do. The banks should have enough assets (both cash and money owed to them - loans) to cover all their liabilities (deposits) at any given time I like that you wrote "should"... you know the score deep down  The account balance you see in your bank account IS a token amount, it isn't real money yet, because 90% of that money exists in the form of unpaid debts, most of this 90% new money does not even exist as deposits in said bank, most account holders have it out in the real world paying for real stuff. If everyone at Bank_X logs into their account and queries their "available balance" then that value presented on screen IS a token, because it's NOT available to everyone viewing the balance, this is a fact. As an example: If every user of Bank_X wanted to withdraw at the same time then they many would realize that the number representing their bank balance was a token, representing money that may (or may not) be deposited into the bank in the future. If only ~10% tried to withdraw at once then the remaining ~90% would have to wait until the future loan repayments hopefully trickled in. Of course in reality all banks club together to cover each others asses to prevent a "run on the bank". The recent spate of banking bailouts have proven just how brittle and fragile some FRB banks are becoming, even the buddy system mentioned above failed. It needed government to step in and order the printing of new money at the expense of every holder of said money. If you held said money at the time or expect it as a wage in the future then YOU paid for the fuck up! If you can climb a ladder faster than the platform to which it is attached is falling then you will appear to make headway, but the final result is inevitable. A money and banking system with no fixed base is exactly this, the foundation for the dollar was destroyed in 1971, history has shown that EVERY money system that goes fiat ALWAYS fails. We are witnessing the end times here, most of the liabilities are being pushed into the future, into the derivatives market. The final crash will be blamed on some "natural" disaster, but remember it was planned all along, bankers aren't stupid or incompetent, they KNOW their game make no mistake, been playing it for MANY generations. P.S. don't worry, it's not the end of the world, it's happened many times before. The money does exist in the form of an asset (accounts receivable - loans). If the bank was prudent in underwriting their loans and took on an appropriate amount of risk then the NPV of the assets held in addition to cash will be positive (meaning the value of the loan is more then the amount lent - meaning if the bank had to sell the loan they would realize a profit). The reason that banks are able to lend out ~90% of their deposits (they actually lend out much less today due to lack of demand for quality loans) is because depositors do not need to spend their money at any given time. |
|
|
|
Note: Getting consensus that we actually need to change something NOW will be harder; it will be much easier to get consensus after we hit the 1MB blocksize limit and transaction fees spike up. It would be lovely to avoid that panic/pain.
Have you run any tests on the testnet (or a scamcoin/altcoin) to get some kind of idea as to just how much TX fees will increase when the 1 MB block size limit has reached? I would have the same question with how TX fees would change after the block size is increased? I think this would be valuable evidence to provide to help your argument to increase the block size. I think it is more or less agreed upon that the block size limit will eventually be reached as it stands, however I think the disagreement is what effects both not raising the limit and raising the limit will have on the network and on TX fees |
|
|
|
Simple question. From where I'm standing it seems to be doing neither so I'd like to hear some facts and perhaps some opinions.
Doesn't matter, all these macroeconomic data improvements only satisfy the wealthy, most people will go on wit their shitty lives. Economic growth has nothing to do with living conditions in a country. Economic growth is irrelevant. Employment rates and personal debt rates matter course of a country's economic growth is very influential in the welfare and growth of the business sector in the country, with a growing economy will give rise to new entrepreneurs that will improve the welfare of the people in that country, with the emergence of new entrepreneurs will open new jobs, hopefully with economic growth will be in line with the increase in social welfare ... Generally speaking the rate of economic growth has a positive coloration with the overall standard of living in a country. This is due to the fact that as GDP rises, more goods and services will have been produced (this is the definition of GDP) so more labor hours will have to have been used to produce the additional goods/services. More labor hours means more income for the working class. |
|
|
|
The whole concept of interest makes only sense if you have an inflationary currency. Bitcoin has a fixed maximum monetary supply. So it's wrong to expect interest, unless you assume that fractional reserve banking (essentially fraud) is taking place.
Therefore I advise caution when someone offers interest on Bitcoin deposits without offering a plausible explanation. Why do these exchanges offer interest? Why do they need more deposits?
Bitcoin is inflationary as additional bitcoin is created every 10 minutes and will continue to be inflationary for a good ~100 years (depending on how quickly the difficulty rises). The reason that banks are able to pay interest on deposits is because they are able to invest a percentage of deposits in loans to other customers and has nothing to do with the positive level of inflation |
|
|
|
he drop in U.S. workforce participation since the financial crisis is largely due to the aging of the American population and will not reverse even if labor markets improve, this and the fact works are getting automatized and you get what we have.
I agree that the drop in the labor force participation rate is a serious problem for the US. It will prevent the US from realizing it's full potential and is creating an unknown level of slack in the labor market, which will make it very difficult for policy markers to know when to adjust monitory policy as it is not known when/if these people will return to the workforce |
|
|
|
|
blockchain.info controls the tags. I highly doubt that someone at the FBI/USMS would tag the addresses as they were, so common sense would tell you that someone at blockchain.info tagged the addresses
|
|
|
|
I feel like Circle.com is the first step of making bitcoin much more publicly accessible and with ease. BEing able to buy BTC instantly with just my cc is a godsend. No more waiting for bank deposits to complete, etc.
U feel this because u have not yet seen the scammers jumping on Circle to exploit the CC advantage. I wonder why people in Bitcoin dont understand that Bitcoin and CC cant go hand in hand. They are not supposed to handshake by design. CC is considered a cash advance transaction when using the CC on Circle. It's not reversible. At least this is my understanding. If a credit card cash advance is not authorized then the transaction will be reversed. The fact that the type of transaction is more expensive for the borrower does not affect the reversibility of it. Circle is taking a huge risk by accepting credit card payments |
|
|
|
For Bitcoin or any other cryptographic purpose, you want to make absolutely sure that your random number generator is solid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generatorFlaws in random number generation have made certain Bitcoin applications vulnerable in the last year or two. Obviously if you don't intend to use a generated key for anything serious, it doesn't much matter how good your RNG is. I think it would be less of a "I will use this keyset to store thousands of bitcoins" and more of a "I created a bitcoin keyset in Minecraft"  I should certainly hope so! But I felt it was good to put a warning out there for anyone who just doesn't quite get it... I understand the advice but I assume anyone with the technical knowhow and knowledge in cryptography enough to build a key generator in minecraft would know that it should be used to store large funds. This would not be a good idea. minecraft is not open source so you do not know exactly what you are running when you create and store a key minecraft. Basic security principles state that any software you use to create a private key and to store a private key should be open source so it can be reviewed by the community I agree. You have the potential to either lose your private keys or they somehow will be leaked to either another user or leaked to the maker of minecraft. You should always generate your keys yourself with a proper RNG |
|
|
|
Interesting attack indeed but h4xx0r who did you quote with the idea of giving to the next miner a share of your coinbase tx? It's trivial to give to the next miner outside the coinbase transaction by sending the reward as a transaction using one of the current inputs. Sure, then you have to scrape the bitcoins from elsewhere. To recap the attack in laymen's terms: If somebody paid 10,000BTC in transaction fees, miners would not care about block rewards for the next 10,000/25=400 blocks. Any miner that thinks it could outrun the biggest other miner would try to do so. If there is a draw between the top miners, such a battle could take a long time. If the top miners hold 10% of the mining power, they might try even when the other had a head start and was slowly building a chain that's growing faster than the own chain as they could still call their friends of other pools to team up catch that guy, essentially to the point where all miners took one side or the other and the weaker group gives up. Also the attack does only work if the biggest selfish miner is bigger than the total of his run-up competitor with all non-selfish miners, so it assumes a pretty corrupt mining landscape. The attack's effects: During such an episode, massive re-orgs would happen, clients would act strangely, Finney attacks would be slightly easier etc. and we would have a slightly higher level of drama. And we will never know who sponsored that drama but it would not be a cheap endeavor. In additional to Danny's point above, you also have the issue that someone would need to incur the financial burden to pay these TX fees in the first place. There would be little economic benefit for someone to offer such a large TX fee, especially considering that the benefactor of such attack is unclear (therefore anyone attempting to profit off of an attack may or may not actually benefit in the event such attack is successful in slowing down the network). IMO this attack vector would be something that is very easy to fix - simply fork the blockchain to institute a maximum TX fee on a per block and per TX basis, the max TX fee on a block basis could be a rolling average (plus some additional margin) of the last 'n' blocks and the max TX fee on a TX basis could be "x" times the min recommended TX fee, and if a TX would warrant larger then the max TX fee then the TX can be split up into smaller TXs. it would be a State actor or a someone who stands to lose alot to a technology like bitcoin who would carry out an attack like this. The purpose of the post isn't fear it's education. i think the goal is clear. a currency not controlled or easily defeated by malicious actors. State actors do not usually attack a currency that is not backed by an enemy of theirs. A country will generally only launch an attack against an economy or a currency as part of a war. Since bitcoin is not backed by any country no country will ever be at war with the country that backs bitcoin |
|
|
|
I started a new account on btc-e to keep certain things separate relating to my bitcoin trading and ended up getting 2.5 coins stuck in a new account that cannot withdraw coins for 3 days. I have been trading these coins and others, multiple times a day, and need access to these coins in order to fund interest on my existing positions.
I will probably have to trust alot for this transaction due to the complicated nature of this issue, so I'd prefer if you are a well trusted member.
I value these coins at more than 2.5 due to their potential the next three days, so please make me an offer.
Thanks
I don't see why you need to borrow from a well trusted person. You are not offering any collateral so you would not be trusting the lender with anything. I call a scam on this one |
|
|
|
One thing i couldn't agree more on what is written in the article is that enthusiasts especially only focus on the positives, and to certain extent blinded and completely ignore the dark side. For the coin to progress we need to see the whole picture, admit the flaws and find ways to overcome it
Flaws have been pointed out and addressed appropriately multiple times. People just don't understand how to actually research a topic before posting an article about it. A lot of the writers are paid on a per article basis and on a per "view" basis so if they make something that attracts a lot of attention they are paid more. As a result they have an incentive to make shit articles like this that have a good chance of getting a lot of attention despite it's lack of research. This is very similar to signature spam that we see on the forum |
|
|
|
Newcomers are so desperate to earn bitcoin wherever and however they can, creating opportunity for the scammers.
Yeah, they act like bitcoin desperado junkies hell bent on getting their coin fix, it's pathetic. Seeing the way some people act on this forum, they are virtually asking to be scammed.  There is somewhat of an argument to make people take a quiz before signing up on here, or to otherwise make it much more obvious that the forum does not moderate potential scams. I think that people are just so used to there being consumer protections that do not appear in the bitcoin world. They assume they will be protected from scams when they are not and as a result they do not do sufficient due dilligance |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
