Speculate as to how this will play out 

 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coinwallet-plans-bitcoin-dust-attack-september-create-30-day-transaction-backlog-1515981

UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

A CoinWallet representative told IBTimes in an email exchange: "I don't have a set date, but it will be early September. I'm too busy this month to fully devote a large amount of time to executing the 'test'.

"Despite the general belief that someone can do something like this by setting up a couple of servers to send payments to yourself over and over, it's a little more complicated than that."

CoinWallet's last test of the system involved taking a bunch of Bitcoin and then dividing it among thousands of Bitcoin addresses, all in tiny amounts of 0.00001.

"As part of this test, I will be reconsolidating more than 150 Bitcoin that currently sits in these wallets."

CoinWallet conducted a transaction to demonstrate what this will look like.

"As you can see from the transaction, there are 20 tiny inputs, with half going to miner fees, and half going to one of my CoinWallet addresses. This transaction is approximately 3kb, or 1/323rd of a block. In other words, for every ~323 of these I send, I fill up a block.

"Each of these transactions is for a total amount of 0.0002 BTC (including miner fees), meaning that with my 150 btc that is currently in this state, I will be crafting 750000 transactions, or 2321 blocks, or a 16 day backlog."

CoinWallet said the second phase of the test will be to use 20 cloud-hosted servers to send bitcoin payments in amounts of 0.00001 to thousands of its addresses at random, all in transactions that are also approximately 3kb each.

"These 20 servers push approximately 1 transaction per second. The plan is to fill them up to 50-100 Bitcoin in total. In theory, if all things go as planned, we will create a nearly 30-day backlog."

"Of course, this won't cripple Bitcoin entirely. Those who are smart enough to increase their fees will still manage to push transactions through. However, it will make it prohibitively expensive, and will likely render most standard wallet software, ranging from Multibit, to Mycellium, Blockchain.info and others completely worthless.

"I should however note that CoinWallet.eu is relatively immune to this form of 'attack' as our fees are dynamic and are set at 3x the standard limit. As always, CoinWallet clients will be unaffected by the test. More details will be posted publicly when the test is imminent."

The WSJ BitBeat reported in July that CoinWallet had communicated plans to flood the system with countless small transactions, enough to fill two blocks every minute, and after that send out slightly larger transactions. Its goal was to create a 200 megabyte blockchain backlog.

The previous CoinWallet test only achieved about 15% of its output because its servers crashed.

"We feel that our tests might prove to be the catalyst that propels the core devs and miners to implement the required hard fork that is desperately needed," Coinwallet told BitBeat.

A debate has been raging for months over whether or not to increase the maximum size of a transaction block of data beyond 1 megabyte.

Bitcoin core developers Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn are spearheading the drive to increase the block size, and have developed Bitcoin XT client to allow miners to opt out of the current 1MB limit. The majority of miners must adopt the protocol upgrade or else no change will come into effect.

"The fact that the XT fork hasn't occurred yet is ridiculous," CoinWallet said.

Lots of scaremongering going on with regards to the 'imminent Greek default'

So a simple question do you think a Greek default will happen, and if so will this be the 'Lehmen'/Northern Rock event to cause a massive global debt crisis that everyone has been 'zerohedge' fearing.          ....... i.e 2008 eat you heart out Mad Max here we come?     


30 day poll discus.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-phillip-nelson/the-smoke-has-cleared-aga_b_5179584.html

A small thought exercise into the future suggests that at one point Bitcoin will win over some struggling national economies. Argentina seems to be the goto example here, but it could equally be Venezuela, Belarus or any number of African nations. When the economy of 'poor corrupt country with hyperinflation' noticeably starts to fail all wealth will head to the only possible escape route; cryptocurrency.

So now we have the situation where the most corrupt, most ill managed, economically reckless country has an entirely Bitcoin based economy. However the rich and powerful from this country will still be the rich and powerful, except now their wealth is in Bitcoin and hence rapidly increasing in comparative value to the rest of the lagging world.

As we all know this first mover advantage will probably be huge, the most mismanaged mess of a country could become a new global superpower, with its exponentially increasing wealth. Unfortunately those is charge will still be at the top, their existing social policies, will still remain, they will still control most of the wealth.


It's going to the morbidly fascinating to watch but i'm struggling to see how Bitcoin will not reward the 'worst' first mover with large rewards and initially exacerbate political divides in the world ?

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130719-how-i-spent-a-week-without-cash

BBC does a Forbes Kashmir Hill..

Spoiler ... Fail

BitCoins is like stuffing cash under the mattress: it’s interest free. Birch’s message is clear. Not only is cashing in my savings as BitCoins a dangerous plan, it’s a dumb one.

He seems to miss the fact that due to inflation he is actually gaining interest. 

nice article on coindesk about UNOCS

Coindesk UNOCS

I'm not a coder or cryptographer so bear with me a little if this has an obvious answer... but it got me thinking, would it be theoretically possible to merge three or more blockchains together?

 say calculate a future block point for each of the chains create 'NewCOIN' now with the best features selected from all three chains. ?
 Obviously you'd have to get a massive % consensus from all miners on each chain. I was thinking 'newCOIN' would represent proportional value ratio of each 'oldCOIN' based various preordained coefficients.

I see the alt coin space as very fascinating but obviously getting new coins off the ground can be a challenge. The ability to merge chains and thus create a development and mining coalition to keep dying but promising alt chains/features alive, would be useful indeed.

This has nothing to do with bitcoin... i'm very sorry to leave it here .....its just so good !   

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/25/opinion/snowden-us-humilation/?hpt=us_mid

L'affaire Snowden has provided a glorious field day for all those "surrender monkey Commie pinko crypto-Marxist long-haired G8-loathing eco-friendly global-warming anti-free market anti-capitalist anti-McDonald's (anti-stereotype)" anti-Americans who just love to hate the "Land of the Free."

It's surprising how many of them there are these days.

This has nothing to do with bitcoin... i'm very sorry to leave it here .....its just so good !   

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/25/opinion/snowden-us-humilation/?hpt=us_mid

L'affaire Snowden has provided a glorious field day for all those "surrender monkey Commie pinko crypto-Marxist long-haired G8-loathing eco-friendly global-warming anti-free market anti-capitalist anti-McDonald's (anti-stereotype)" anti-Americans who just love to hate the "Land of the Free."

It's surprising how many of them there are these days.

 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/910858fa-d3bf-11e2-95d4-00144feab7de.html

Might be behind a pay wall for some, but its free for several articles a month and well worth registering.

Anyway unlike there usual dismissive nonsense this is a huge article, well researched and read by many a billionaire.

Still has that tinge of derogatory tone, like some old man looking down his nose at you; but at least he's had the respect to put his glasses on and see what all the fuss is about.

A growing band of young evangelists believe the virtual currency Bitcoin is the economic future. But how long before regulation catches up with them?

 


edit: actually this might be a free article, logged out and it still lets me view it. ?

A cross post from Reddit, but very much worth a read, as it has a certain eloquence that many writers seem to lack.

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/05/29/crypto-anarchy-and-libertarian-entrepreneurship-chapter-iii/

Bitcoin is an enormous improvement over PayPal, credit cards, banks, and it is even superior to gold in many ways. It can be teleported instantly anywhere in the world without relying on any institution other than a distributed network of computers. A Bitcoin wallet, properly secured, cannot be stolen. Banks are obsolete. It is more difficult to create new bitcoin than to create gold. It would be possible to create a machine that makes gold with nuclear reactions. It would be much more difficult to convince the Bitcoin community to accept a change to their software that would allow their currency to be inflated. Bitcoin is potentially, and I believe very probably, one of the greatest inventions in history. It fights squarely on the side of libertarians.

Surprised this hasn't been talked about much before? We're ahead of the curve and it may stay that way?

Though the difficulty is adjusted in an attempt to maintain the targeted 10 minute block discovery time, this only occurs every 2016 blocks by using the time required to mine the previous 2016 blocks as a reference. While nobly designed, the reality is that computational power is being added at such a significant rate that the network regularly underestimates its adjustments, leading to an average time between blocks so far in 2013 of approximately 8 minutes and 55 seconds – 11% faster than expected.

If the network adjusts difficulty to average 10 minutes based on the speed of discovery of the past 2016 blocks, we’re almost guaranteed to continue seeing average discovery time below 10 minutes as long as computing power continues to grow. In addition to fundamental forward projections for technology like Moore’s Law, there are already known surges in network computing power in the pipeline. With Avalon ASICs now shipping, 10,000 USB miners from ASICMiner currently in production, and Butterfly Labs supposedly, maybe, eventually delivering thousands of backordered units, there’s strong reason to believe this trend will continue.

Mod -noticed this is a dupe... delete me !

In the Fight for Freedom, Technology Gives Individuals an Edge Over Governments
A cold civil war brews between empowered individuals and controlling officials.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/07/in-the-fight-for-freedom-technology-give

this growing divergence between what we can do and what our rulers want us to do may be a portent of an accelerating technology-fueled cold civil war.

First time i've heard that term used, 'cold civil war' or 'World cold civil war' might be more appropriate. It really conjures up the imagination; the computer literate individual, in an arms race with the worlds Orwellian superpowers.



“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Related to the Radio 4 documentary, but well worth a read


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22292708

Not bad. A little negative, but considering recent events thats hardly surprising.

At least were being taken seriously by mass media these days.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130412-bitcoin-and-the-illusion-of-money/1

"Some economists, certainly, would welcome further disruption. Writing in 1976, Fredrich Hayek argued in The Denationalization of Money for the removal of the legal obstacles preventing people from using any kind of money they wanted, thus creating a kind of global battle between different rival systems.

“We have always had bad money,” Hayek argued “because private enterprise was not permitted to give us a better one.” No government has yet has acted on Hayek’s faith in the power of the open market. The world, though, may already have embarked on just such an experiment.  Betting against Bitcoins is one thing. But the change they represent packs quite a punch – and, with conventional finance on the ropes, it’s still anybody’s fight."

The National and mainstream liberal newpaper from the uk   

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/04/bitcoin-currency-of-vice


"The future of money may or may not include a Federal Reserve Bank of Amazon, but it probably does involve the gradual decentralisation and democratisation of currency. Virtual currencies aren't just a new-fangled sort of Monopoly money. Rather, they may just be the thing that ends the monopoly on money."

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/308617409311432706

KIM IS ...... !

Now thats what I call PRESS 

Thanks to piramida and xcsler dowstairs on the speculation floor.

They piqued my interest in a topic that i'm sure has been discussed before, but recently seems to be perhaps more important?

Pan forward many years to a time when the Blockchain is Terabytes large, most solo miners and in fact nearly all regular users have all but given up on downloading the full version so now only an handful of exchanges and mining pools  keep a full working copy.

Whats to prevent this consortium of elite, the last holders of a full working copy of the Blockcahin from conspiring together and "editing" the transactions to their advantage.... A little zero here a little 1000 there? probably from old and inactive addresses now suddenly emptied?

I'm thinking Libor scandal of the 22 century 

I'm no cryptographer, nor do I claim more than a rough working knowledge of the Bitcoin ecosystem, but I've been following the story for over 2 years now and have yet to get bored of this forum so go easy on any stupidity.

Front of the Technology page today !  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21496977

Nothing new for those of us here, but it's nice to see the Beeb flying the bitcoin flag once again.