A cure for speculators - LockMyCoins™ (Just an idea, I don't have the time to develop it right now) Client-side javascript that does the following: 1. Generates a new private/public key pair --> INCOMING_ADDRESS. 2. Accepts a RETURN_ADDRESS from the user. 3. When it detects an incoming transaction to INCOMING_ADDRESS, the service creates and broadcasts an nLockTime transaction 1 year into the future (configurable) to RETURN_ADDRESS. 4. When the browser window is closed, the private key is forgotten. The purpose of the service is to allow someone to lock away a certain amount of coins for some time. This self-handicapping is done to prevent oneself from day-trading. It's meant for people who are long-term bitcoin bulls, and want to rest assured knowing their funds will be waiting for them in the future without being expose to the temptations of short term speculation and day-trading. |
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There have been several well known bitcoiners that tried to convince J.R.Willet to move Mastercoin to an altchain, instead of using the bitcoin blockchain. Willet's opinion is that Mastercoin should stay on the blockchain, and I fully concur. Here is my reasoning: It is easier to implement Mastercoin on the blockchain. The entire concept of mining "vanishes", or actually is satisfied by Bitcoin miners. This means the security of Mastercoin is on par with Bitcoin (up to potential bugs) ... there is no way to 51% attack it. The same could be implemented using merged mining, but no matter how you look at it, merged mining is technically a more complicated solution, because it requires an entirely new blockchain one needs to reason about. You need to think about the hashrate of this separate blockchain and to encourage miners to merge-mine it, things that are just not needed when you directly encode things into the Bitcoin blockchain. As far as software development goes, I'm super lazy - I do not like to do something complicated if I can do something simple that serves the same purpose. Now, it is true that this "burdens" the blockchain ... in the same way that Satoshi Dice does. However, this burdening is something that Bitcoin users and developers will just have to live with. Nobody is the boss of Bitcoin, and any standard Bitcoin transaction (like Mastercoin transactions are) are legitimate transactions that Bitcoin simply has to learn to deal with. There is just no feasible way that I see that Bitcoin developers could ban such transactions (please enlighten me if I'm wrong). Bitcoin is the future of finance, resistant to hacking, government censorship and regulation. Do you really want to base that future on asking other people to pretty please "not abuse it for you own purposes"? This is not the answer. Bitcoin has to be made scalable enough to meet its role as the one major, global, world currency. Mastercoin developers have no intention of disrupting Bitcoin, and will gladly adapt to any friendly encoding that the brilliant minds of these forums will propose, as long as it doesn't harm Mastercoin (using non-standard transactions that are relayed more slowly is not an option at the moment). The Bitcoin blockchain must and will remain neutral, and if Willet hadn't come up with Mastercoin encoding, someone else would have created something similar sooner or later. |
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Hello everyone, I created a list of non-profit Bitcoin organizations around the world (wiki). Right now, from lack of time and knowledge, I only put the Bitcoin Foundation and the Israeli Bitcoin Foundation on the list - please add other relevant organizations to this list. Try to include contact information whenever possible. |
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Let's create a healthy, constructive discussion here about the question whether Mastercoin "bloats" the blockchain, and what are some good technical solutions to that. Please stop!
You are creating enormous amounts of nonredeemable UTXO. This kind of usage undermines the scalability of Bitcoin because you are pushing data storage into the UTXO set and not merely into the transaction history. The UTXO set must be rapidly available for validation and can not be pruned unlike the rest of the blockchain. Currently pruning yields 50:1 compression (and improving) of the space required to run a full node. The addition of never-redeemable outputs undermines that.
Do you believe that "Bitcoin" cares about how people use it? Bitcoin scalability is a definite challenge. We should tackle that challenge as early as possible, instead of nicely asking people to only use it in specific ways. Willet is open to discuss better, more efficient ways to encode Mastercoin transactions into the blockchain. gmaxwell, do you belong to the school of thinking that categorizes SatoshiDice as spam? |
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http://bitcoinaverage.com/All the tickers I found use Mt. Gox rate, which as we know does't really represent anything these days. (Looking for a widget to put on my home screen)
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 Motivation: Let's confuse regulators by sending an unknown amount of money. If they're having trouble understanding how to regulate Bitcoin, how will they regulate a coin where you don't know in advance how many coins are sent in each transaction? The Idea is simple: Mining is proof of work just like Bitcoin. The one difference - you don't know how many coins you mined for another K blocks into the future. When you solve a block, you receive a random number of coins (even distribution between 0 and 50). The exact number of coins depends on the hash of the next K blocks. You get (hash(next K blocks) % 50) randomcoins. In this coin, you can: 1. Send a fixed number of "matured" randomcoins (mined more than K blocks in the past). 2. Send an "undetermined block" - you can send these undetermined 0-50 randomcoins to someone else, even before the exact number of mined coins is determined. Note - K can be chosen to be arbitrarily high. Originally I thought K should be chosen by the protocol, but here's a twist that lets miners choose K: When you start working on a block, you choose a K between 0 and 2^16-1. The amount of coins you get if you solve a block will be an even distribution between 0 and 50*(1-2^(-K)). The higher the K value you choose, the longer it takes for the coins to solidify, but the more coins you get (asymptotically you get very close to a mean distribution of 0-50 coins ~ 25 coins on average). Bonus - allow a new type of "indeterminate transaction" that sends some yet unknown portion of the coins contained in an address to another address - basically expand the idea from just mining unknown amount of randomcoins to expanding the unknowns into each transaction. Confusion galore. |
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There is the exchanges category, but not a great lot of information of some of these, and not in a way that's easy to compare. Can someone create a summary article like this one? Can anyone compare the various exchanges? What are their respective volumes? Which are transparent regarding operation, incorporation, operating team? Do any of them have unique features that other exchanges don't?
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This Legal forum is great, really - keep up all the good work. Still, I am wondering whether there is demand for ... something a bit different. I'm thinking of creating an invite-only private forum (Google Group) that has a high content to noise ratio. - Do you think it's a good idea?
- Who should moderate such a forum (I'm not very active on the legal forum myself, I would mostly lurk in that forum)
- Who should we invite?
- What should it be called?
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I believe that is where LitecoinGlobal are incorporated. We're considering our options in incorporating YourBitBit/ bitBlu, and Belieze just came up. If anyone knows a good lawyer there, please do make an intro/referral. Cheers, Ron |
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The Bitcoin Amsterdam conference is happening in little under 2 months. Among other things, there will be a panel discussing alt coins. Charles Lee / coblee, creator of Litecoin, will be on this panel. As an alt lover, I jumped on the opportunity and asked to be included in the panel ... and my request was granted. If anyone here is serious about alts, thinks he can contribute to an interesting discussion, he is invited to do the same and contact the conference organizers. Disclaimer - I am not personally involved in organizing the conference, I just want to attract more quality people to this panel.
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For those who are not aware, MasterCoin is not just an alt that was recently released, it is actually the name for a much deeper project created more than a year ago by dacoinminster. The name chosen by the recent alt is unfortunate. The original MasterCoin is not really an alt, but rather another coin embedded within Bitcoin. I advise you all to read up on it, it's fascinating. Investment in creating/bootstrapping MasterCoin is open from today until the end of August, after which the number of MasterCoins will be set. No, there is no code or binaries yet, the bootstrapping BTC will be used to fund the project. |
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Over the last few years, a lot of experience has built up in the Bitcoin community regarding security practices. One particular aspect is the security of Bitcoin Services (e.g. exchanges, wallets, stock exchanges, and any site that has bitcoins flowing through it / stores users' Bitcoins for a long time). In order to benefit anyone that builds a similar security-critical website, I think it's essential we create some best practices focused in one centralized place, specifically targeted as service developers and operators ( Securing your wallet is good for users, but doesn't say help too much to Bitcoin service operators). I suggest we as a community pull our knowledge and create a similar resource that discusses building secure Bitcoin services. Can any of the members who were involved in securing Bitcoin services step forward and create such a wiki entry with their knowledge? (Or post your experience here if you're more comfortable with the forum than the wiki, we'll organize it into a coherent wiki entry) P.S. if you're in good contact with operators of Bitcoin services, feel free to forward this to them. |
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Various VPS providers have been hacked before, e.g. by hacking into the management console and resetting the VPS password. Out of the Bitcoin-accepting VPS providers ( 1, 2), which of them are most secure? Which are used by serious companies (Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin companies)? Any information beyond the linked articles / tables? Recommendations to use (or stay away from) a particular service? |
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Discourse.org is a promising new open source forum engine software. They're working hard with three industry partners to tailor the forum software to their needs. So far they launched with two partners, and the 3rd partner slot is still open. We are currently evaluating our options for third partner – who we hope will be equally amazing and definitely our largest yet, by volume. If you feel your organization is a good match, mail us, explain why you're a good match, and let's try to make a love connection.
IMO going Discourse is a much better approach than developing something custom made. We need to speak now and approach them. Theymos, I brought this topic up before and haven't heard a good argument against. |
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We are forming bitBlu, a new company in the crypto-currency space. The founders are all Israeli, so by default we thought to register the company as an Isareli one. However ... there might be legal/operational benefits to registering elsewhere. I think that if this zone was a reality today, it would be ideal for us. Give that the zone above is still not operational - what is the best country for Bitcoin startups to register at? Can you list the specific: 1. Benefits to registering in that country over the alternatives? 2. Downsides? (e.g. one of them would be it's more complicated for us than the natural Israeli registration, due to geographical reasons) 3. Concrete steps I need to follow in order to register there 4. Any contacts that can help us promote this registration process? |
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I originally posted under Economy > Marketplace > Services, but I think it fits better here. Can this thread please be moved here? |
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