Hi, recently two ongoing threads were deleted from the bitcoin subsection. On thread was called "Biggest threat to bitcoin" and the second one was called "Deleted ongoing thread?" or something like that.

Can someone explain who deleted them, and what was the reason?

Thanks.

One of the most common criticisms to bitcoin is that it is a pyramid scheme or ponzi scheme. Whenever you argue with someone about this again, I found this argument to be the most simple answer (taken from another forum).

On the one hand, bitcoin is an admitted pyramid scheme, but no more than any other currency (even gold or silver). Use it or loose it.

I have found no other short answer to defuse this recurrent ignorant criticism so fast. Instead of arguing with the other person, you tell them that they are 100% right, so what. Now you can focus on addressing the next criticism...  

[(Disclaimer: I have no connection whatsoever with MtGox or Tradehill or Bitcoin7. Please trolls and spammers, dont flood this thread).]

(Disclaimer: I have no connection whatsoever with MtGox or Tradehill or Bitcoin7. Please trolls and spammers, dont flood this thread).

I invite you people to regularly post the trading volume ratio among the 3 biggest Exchanges (USD) for future analisys.
Post:

-Date
-UTC Time (GMT Time) as seen for example in http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
-Volumes for the exchanges
-Source
-Percentage Ratio (volume of an exchange * 100) / (sum of volume of all exchanges sampled)

Suggestion: Post data in blue to make it easier to find amids the comments.

It dosent hurt if multiple people post values in a single day (as posts are forever-editable, more post by different people guarantee a better integrity of the data).

(Note: If there is a website where you can check out this historial ratios, please point out, as this thread would have no value as a log, but only to comment on this indicator).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I noticed the last two days after the re-opening of MtGox, the ratio between MtGox and Tradehill volume was very close to 0.10, for 48 hours.

Today the ratio is 0.14.

Does someone have a decent hypothesis for a 45k transaction reccurently showing up in BTC monitor in the last 2 hours? Seems the same transaction slowly going down in price )

Any ideas / guesses?

[delete]

Hi, I got confused because a couple of days ago there were 3 buttons to alter own posts : delete, quote, edit. Now there are only two.

Due to the change in order of the buttons, now sometimes I press quote instead of edit by mistake, and I get a new unintended post that I cannot delete.

Is there any reason for deactivating the delete option?

Hi, I dont know if you hare informed about this, but many analysts are saying that we are effectively in a currency war betweeen many powers in the World.

As you know, the USA owns the worlds reserve currency (aka dollars). How did this happen? Because of a little bit convoluted process called "the petrodollar", by which the USA has been able to "convince" the world to trade oil only with dollars (this was achieved by making a deal with middle east dictatorial rulers, among other moves).

Why is the trade of oil so important? Because all the current worlds economies depend on oil (millitary, agriculture, transportation, and so on). So nobody can afford not to buy dollars if he wants to import or export oil. This makes pretty much everyone in the world dependent on dollars.

But now recently some countries are starting to trade oil in their own currencies, and it happens this are countries the USA cannot invade (for example China, Russia). So the worlds essential oil trade is starting to be done in other currencies as well, changing the balance of power in the world. The chess moves are being made in the whole world to prepare for this big change, when the dollar loses his status as the only worlds reserve currency.

As it was proven, any group with less than $100 million dollars in hardware (as of today) can disrupt the Bitcoin network, by interefering with the honest mining power. So, I want to speculate that powers like Russia, Iran, China, could one day be willing to back the bitcoin network with hashing power, in case it is attacked by someone, as a mean to use bitcoin as a weapon in this "currency war". My reasoning is that these factions in the currency war will think "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". I have seen some indications of this happening allready, as Russia-Today (governmental tv) has given a lot of positive attention to Bitcoin lately.

This are just speculations of course. But it could fill the gap between the seemingly lack of Bitcoin resilience against a powerful hashing power attack, and the long term survival of the system. I dont see Bitcoin survining if key governments dont want to. Of course there could be other reasons for governments wanting to support Bitcoin. Gavin speculated today that agencies like CIA need to pay money in secret all the time (thats part of their job), so Bitcoin is quite great for this in fact.

Tell me if this reasonings and speculations are of any interest to you.

[DiabloD3]

Hi, today the moderator DiabloD3 deleted my posts containing 2 images (annotated market charts), in this thread
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15509.0

He not only deleted my images, but also at least one post of another member replying my thread. The charts where important for the information I was comunicating, and it took me time to get them, annotate, and upload.

1. I would like an explanation for this rude beavior.

2. Is there an appropiate place to report bad moderation practices to the forum owners?

Re-posting inside newbies, so that more people can comment.

I am no trader, but it makes sense to me that many miners or early adopters were waiting for some round number to cash out, and it happened that 30 dollars caused some wealthy bitcoiners to sell massively. Remember that the nature of bitcoin is a bit strange in that the early adopters got massive amounts of bitcoins at practically no cost, so this gives them incentive for selling massively at some point to get filthy rich. When they decide to cash out, massive price drops are to be expected. This in turn caused many other miners and scared weak hands to sell also, and the price to drop further.

If this theory is right, we should be just in a healthy correction, meaning bitcoins are changing hands from a first generation adopters owning dirt cheap bitcoins in massive amounts, to second generation adopters, owning less amounts of relatively more expensive bitcoins, and should see the price start rising again soon. The more early adopters sell their massive amounts of bitcoins, the healthier the bitcoin economy will be, because people who buy at higher prices dont have so many bitcoins, and are expecting to see more profit before voluntaily selling.

I am no trader, but it makes sense to me that many miners or early adopters were waiting for some round number to cash out, and it happened that 30 dollars caused some wealthy bitcoiners to sell massively. Remember that the nature of bitcoin is a bit strange in that the early adopters got massive amounts of bitcoins at practically no cost, so this gives them incentive for selling massively at some point to get filthy rich. When they decide to cash out, massive price drops are to be expected. This in turn caused many other miners and scared weak hands to sell also, and the price to drop further.

If this theory is right, we should be just in a healthy correction, meaning bitcoins are changing hands from a first generation adopters owning dirt cheap bitcoins in massive amounts, to second generation adopters, owning less amounts of relatively more expensive bitcoins, and should see the price start rising again soon. The more early adopters sell their massive amounts of bitcoins, the healthier the bitcoin economy will be, because people who buy at higher prices dont have so many bitcoins, and are expecting to see more profit before voluntaily selling.

https://i.imgur.com/tdLpH.png

https://i.imgur.com/tw8Pc.png

[Is decentralized mining power important for the security and long term independence of bitcoin?]

Hi, as a newbie I want to move a question I put recently in the middle of another thread, because I think it deserves its own discussion. Sorry if this thing has been answered before, I have been reading the forum for several hours so far but did not find the answer yet. If it was answered elsewhere, please post the link.

Is decentralized mining power important for the security and long term independence of bitcoin?

I have read a lot about transactions being decentralized as a built-in feature of bitcoin, but what about decentralized block creation? The bitcoin architecture does not guarantee decentralized mining at all. In fact, the network could in theory work "as well" with nothing more than one powerful miner, or pool of miners. Am I right?

If concentration of mining-power increases (because of bitcoin difficulty increasing faster than moore's law, leading to bigger hardware investments needed to be in the game, profitability decreasing, and economies of scale kicking in) ^(Note1), can a few miners produce all the blocks in the network without compromising the security and independece of the project? Is it possible to avoid excesive concentration of mining power? I dont see how in the current configuration of the system.

I read somewhere that Bitcoin assumes never a 50%+ of the mining power will be concentrated in one hand or in one cartel. That's the principle behind the honesty validation of the longest chain by "proof of work". Correct me if my newbie understanding is wrong on this. To assume that this concentration of computing power will never happen is ludicrous to my current level of understanding of bitcoin and human behavior.

This raises some further questions. As difficulty changes every 2 weeks, what happens if a Google-like company with bad intentions gets into the game suddenlly with 10x the total combined power of current miners? Could this sudden change of rules endanger bitcoin? Destroy it? I mean lets consider this wild posibilities. For big corporations this move would be peanuts. Powerful states overthrow smaller goverments all the time, big corporations eat small corporations all the time.

Hope to hear some thoughts from the experts out there.


(Note1): Thinking about the issue of increasing bitcoin difficulty, let's remember that  by design difficuly increases when mining power increases, in order to keep the creation rate at 10 minutes per block. So, any powerful organization that wanted to gain control of Bitcoin, could do it easily by injecting enormous amounts of mining power to the network, and by doing so, effectively reducing the rest of the miners relative power, and at the same time putting them out of business, because the difficulty would be so high, that mining would be generated below cost (subsidy). Knowing the enormous level of concentration of economic resources in the current world, this hypothesis seems in fact the most likely outcome. Predatory competition is a reality in todays market. I predict honest miners will be subjected to predatory competition if powerful economic powers decide to take control of Bitcoin.

Following this line of thought, I see Bitcoin could never become what it promises: a descentralized and free currency, if it is left alone in the wild "free market". I hope someone can find flaws in my arguments, or present ideas to correct this flaw. By the way, I have a decent amount of money put in this project, so I feel sad to become aware of this potential vulnerability. If people agree this is a serious vulnerability, lets get into "troubleshooting mode".

EDIT:

For those interested, I have been searching previous threads where this issue was specifically covered. I will post them here for convenience:

Stopping an attacker who has >50% of the hashing power
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7166.msg105218#msg105218

Bitcoin resitance to network failures
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=4575.0

What's the plan about the Sybil attack?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8051.0

Is it possible to detect double spending in the > 50% network takeover scenario?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1481.0

50%+ Attack Nodes
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=435.0

Manipulating the mining system via strategic scheduled withholding of CPU power
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11133.0

If an attacker gets more than 50 % of mining power
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24996.0;all

POLL: What are the most likely things that may cause bitcoin to fail ? (merged thread)
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=25026.0

My Response to Ben Laurie’s ‘Last Word’ on Bitcoin
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=25760.0

This thread (and the link inside) covers some problems by too powerful pools. Remember this dosent fix the more fundamental problem of hashing power attack, because as already discussed in this thread, you dont need to own a pool to attack the network. But is goes in the right direction of reducing the vulnerabilities.

The 50% total hashing power - pooling flaw?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11424.0

This thread discusses a different problem that could have implications to this discussion, what happens if the internet partially fails, or different parts of the world become isolated because of some temporal connection failure. Gavin gives an interesting answer.

Bitcoin resitance to network failures
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=4575.0