http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/08/investing/north-korea-banks-swift-ban/

North Korea has been banned from the swift banking system. Wouldn't it make sense for Kim Jong-un to open up a bitcoin exchange and issue a North Korean digital currency? It would be like btc-e only a hundred times bigger and with tons of margin options and currencies.

p.s. mtjong.com is available 

Could we be witnessing the beginning of The Flippening Chickening? Litecoin already sitting on a $350 million market cap.  If things go sour with BTC/BTU then litecoin could offer the most similar alternative that is waiting for development.  I mean this thing was at $48 once as I recall. How ironic would it be if everyone's favorite punching bag LTC eventually ended up with the #1 market cap.

One of BTC's big selling points is the network effect, and if you split you obviously will have, at least initially, a decreased network.  How bad will probably depend on how split they are.  If it's one chain at 95% of pre-fork hash rate and the other at 5% then I think the price damage will be a lot less then it will be as we'd approach a 50/50 split.  In fact, based on tons[1] of incontrovertible[2] evidence[3], I will create that metric.  After a split, total price (BTC+BTU) will equal that of the pre-fork BTC price multiplied by the percentage of the total hash rate that comes from the longest chain.

BTC_price + BTU_price = (Longest chain hashrate)/(Combined hashrate)

So, if it forks near $1000, then after as the hash rate of the two forks approach 50/50 we will approach a 50% price drop, so BTC+BTU = $500.  But if say the largest chain has 90% of hashrate, then we will see prices around BTC+BTU = $900.




references:
1. http://www.breitbart.com/
2. http://www.foxnews.com/
3. https://www.whitehouse.gov/

I'm trying to have my miner start from a script on start up on a linux 14.04 system (I haven't been using linux very long).  I'm trying to use /etc/rc.local to run it, but nothing happens.  I think maybe because rc.local tries to run the script before everything is booted up?  I tried using "sleep" in the script to give it more time, but that didn't work either.  Any idea how to get this to work? 

As we know bitcoin has 10 minute target block times so I'm wondering what coin has the slowest (i.e., largest) designed time between blocks.  I don't mean coins where the difficulty has dropped off and the block time gets long, but rather where it was designed to be that slow.  Is bitcoin's 10 minutes the slowest?

[How Ransomware Became a Billion-Dollar Nightmare for Businesses]

How Ransomware Became a Billion-Dollar Nightmare for Businesses
One cybersecurity firm estimates that extortive attacks now cost small and medium companies at least $75 billion in expenses and lost productivity each year.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/ransomware-us/498602/

As one cybersecurity company executive told Business Insider last month, banks have started to keep tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin ready in case of an attack. “Buying bitcoin on any one of the U.S. exchanges is a three-to-five day wait time, so we’ve been forced into the position of having to stock bitcoin as if it were computer equipment and have it ready for our use,” Gleinser added.

Wondering when this issue hits critical mass. 

[VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), so call it a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps. It has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second]

according to: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), so call it a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps. It has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second, [1] however they never actually use more than about a third of this even during peak shopping periods. [2]

PayPal, in contrast, handled around 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 tps in late 2014. [3]

Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal. Obviously if we want Bitcoin to scale to all economic transactions worldwide, including cash, it'd be a lot higher than that, perhaps more in the region of a few hundred thousand tps. And the need to be able to withstand DoS attacks (which VISA does not have to deal with) implies we would want to scale far beyond the standard peak rates. Still, picking a target let us do some basic calculations even if it's a little arbitrary.

Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB.

What I'm wondering is what is the total capacity of all currently functioning coins? That is, what would be a rough estimate of how many transactions all crypto-currencies can collectively handle right now? 

If there's hundreds of blockchains then I'm guessing it is in the thousands, which would put it on par with VISA.

[North Korea Linked to Digital Attacks on Global Banks]

Now that North Korea has been tied to the Swift banking hacks, how likely is it that North Korea has also been involved in major hacks of Bitcoin exchanges, etc?

North Korea Linked to Digital Attacks on Global Banks

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/business/dealbook/north-korea-linked-to-digital-thefts-from-global-banks.html

Security researchers have tied the recent spate of digital breaches on Asian banks to North Korea, in what they say appears to be the first known case of a nation using digital attacks for financial gain.

In three recent attacks on banks, researchers working for the digital security firm Symantec said, the thieves deployed a rare piece of code that had been seen in only two previous cases: the hacking attack at Sony Pictures in December 2014 and attacks on banks and media companies in South Korea in 2013. Government officials in the United States and South Korea have blamed those attacks on North Korea, though they have not provided independent verification.

On Thursday, the Symantec researchers said they had uncovered evidence linking an attack at a bank in the Philippines last October with attacks on Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam in December and one in February on the central bank of Bangladesh that resulted in the theft of more than $81 million.

“If you believe North Korea was behind those attacks, then the bank attacks were also the work of North Korea,” said Eric Chien, a security researcher at Symantec, who found that identical code was used across all three attacks.

“We’ve never seen an attack where a nation-state has gone in and stolen money,” Mr. Chien added. “This is a first.”

Here is my idea: You have a single coin, with a single wallet, that has multiple independent blockchains. So you'd have Netcoin₁, Netcoin₂, Netcoin₃... Netcoin₁₀.  You could start with as many blockchains as you'd like (although number is set at the start), with a total preset number of total coins identical for each.

This way you would have with 10 blockchains, each an equivalent size to bitcoin's, the same as 10x the transaction volume of BTC. They would all use a single wallet, with a shapeshift like system (or decentralized if possible) for trading between chains that could only exchange 1:1. All coins would be considered equal. This way instead of worrying about increasing the block size, you have parallel blockchains of a smaller size.

This would also incentive miners to keep the hashrates equivalent, as they would jump back and forth to find lower difficulty. The average user could have their coins spread over many blockchains, and the wallet would choose the one that is currently cheapest and fastest to use for any particular transaction.

Obviously this is just a rough sketch of an idea, but why wouldn't something like this work?  

Seems legit 

if you filter days destroyed for only those coins with a minimum age of one year, it looks like a lot of old coins moved recently:

https://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-min-year?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

An exchange accessing a cold wallet or someone preparing to dump perhaps 

I'm wondering why it is necessary to take over the original bitcoin's blockchain over many months? What if XT proponents simply forked the blockchain right away instead and called it BitcoinXT? They could then try to get exchanges to carry it along with the original bitcoin. If at some point more and more people got fed up with fees and transactions on bitcoin core, people would vote with their money by slowly moving Bitcoin core funds into BitcoinXT and raising the price. If the larger block size became preferable merchants might start accepting BitcoinXT as well.

I think bug fixes for bitcoin core at this time are understandable, but block size really isn't clearly a bug, but more like a limitation. Also there is the matter of time; this isn't a change they are trying to institute on a newly launched technology. Bitcoin has been around for many years now and I'm starting to think this could be a dangerous precedent.

So what's so bad about just launching a separate coin called BitcoinXT? 

Wonder just how this is going to work. Imagine a hacker gets into the network with some miners.

http://www.coindesk.com/itbit-reveals-top-secret-bankchain-project-wont-use-bitcoin/

"It is a proprietary itBit protocol, not blockchain based, but is derived off of blockchain. We will also not be using bitcoin as the native token it will be an itBit proprietary token."

Wager sought to underscore that Bankchain is "inspired by" bitcoin's blockchain, but that it is a consensus-based alternative system. Upon release, he said itBit has no plans to open source the code or distribute it outside of participants in the network.

These recent stress tests have made it clear that if they want to, groups can attack bitcoin. Which brings up who in the future would have an incentive to do this.  There could be many groups with an incentive to continue these attacks:

1. Established payment systems.

2. People who want to highlight a weakness in btc and force a change (i.e., larger block sizes).

3. The supporters/investors of a competing alt coin.

4. Bitcoin shorters.

5. Bored billionaires.

6. Exchanges. Any volatility increases the income for exchanges.

So, IMO without a change in the system, it seems like these attacks will continue.

I'm curious how susceptible the litecoin network is in relation to bitcoin. I read that it cost around $5000 to stress test bitcoin and cause a backlog of transactions. How much easier/harder would it be to perform a similar stress test on the litecoin network? Any idea how much it would cost?

I've noticed how popular the signature campaigns are that pay people btc for every post they make on here. Many of the posts I see seem made just to collect this btc. I was wondering if anyone has tried automating the process using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to make the posts for them? Would this be economically feasible? 

Let me begin by saying I'm not sure this question makes any sense but in case it might I will proceed as if it does.  

What I'm wondering is if we look at human tests of probability theory at the most extreme, presumably those involving super-computers, when will bitcoin perform a calculation of even lower probability.  (i.e., confirming that theoretical predictions of probability theory do indeed continue to work at a new extreme).

I've read that Princeton, for example, tested to see if people could influence random number generators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab

I'm not endorsing that but along those lines lets say instead of humans being able to influence probability, that at some extreme human tests of probability break down.  Not because of psychokinesis or anything like that but because of some unknown cosmic law. Hypothetically then will bitcoin difficulty test this beyond any previous measure?

As a wild guess I would think the calculations done at the Large Hadron Collider may be the greatest tests of extreme theoretical probability to date.

When do you predict the Winklevoss' ETF will be available?

What effect will this have on price? Do you think it will be priced in by then?

I assume this will happen before their Gemini exchange is open.

update: Obviously the Gemini exchange did open.  Still waiting on the ETF.

[Dollarcoin]

Introducing

Dollarcoin

                                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                                           

The World's first Consensus Fixed Valued Cryptocurrency (CFVC)

Preliminary Mission Statement: The primary purpose of Dollarcoin [DC] is to provide a non-volatile cryptocurrency capable of maintaining a price stability of 1:1 with the U.S. Dollar by the adoption of Consensus Fixed Value [CFV] (as well as several other possible methods utilized by a Dollarcoin Foundation along with the Dollarcoin community).  What is CFV? CFV is the voluntary yet implicit agreement that no one shall sell or buy Dollarcoin for any value greater than or less than the value of 1 U.S.dollar.  Why? Because it is Dollarcoin.  

There are many potential benefits inherent in Dollarcoin, primarily however, it is to provide a digital currency of stable value, that gives the end user ease of use, security and functionality.

Status: Obviously Dollarcoin is a project in its earliest of stages so there are many decisions to be made. But this also provides anyone interested a chance to get in on the ground floor and be a part of Dollarcoin's creation and future. It would be best if we could use this thread at first to discuss the general outline of what we want in Dollarcoin and the technical specifications necessary to make that a reality. The way the coin is first distributed through mining will be of paramount importance.  Premining/IPO type distribution will not be allowed.  The aim will be to get as many smaller gpu and lower level miners involved as possible, as well as other creative and transparent ways of initial distribution.  A good goal would be to have the most creative and fair launch of any cryptocurrency to date.  This is an essential step in cementing Dollarcoin into its 1:1 value status with the U.S. Dollar.  Once we have a handle on the specifications and distribution process we want to utilize with Dollarcoin there will be bounties issued.  It's time for something different than pump and dump price manipulation.  It's time for Dollarcoin.

"Dollarcoin, because it's time to make history."

First issues up for debate:

Symbol: [DC] or [DOC] would seem appropriate. Thoughts? looks like it will be [DC]. Eventually Dollarcoins could be referred to as "DCs."  

Algorithm: Pow/Pos?

Total coins: One idea might be 10x BTC for a total of ~210,000,000.  This would provide a quantitative link with BTC while providing enough money for bounties, etc.

Distribution: ?

The items to list in this list that are up for debate: ?

  

"Hot" as in once been stolen. There have been many large and small thefts of bitcoin.  Any idea what its rate of theft or total stolen coin % is? (and how that would compare to other currencies.)