 Show Posts
|
|
Pages: « 1 [2]
|
Putting 2 + 2 together from the posts below, the logical decision for me is to invest in BTC... So please help me. How does one buy Bitcoin in size with the lowest spread, fees, hassle and risk if anonymity is not the objective? And how do I do this while residing in a third world country where I can't prove residence any more in the USA while being a US citizen thus most financial institutions are afraid to deal with me due to the FATCA regulations coming? And how do I make sure I comply with FATCA, i.e. is Bitcoin an offshore account? And how can I be sure to be able to have a way to exchange out of BTC given the FATCA regulations coming into full force in 2014? Sorry if I feel like bringing any anonymous cash into BTC is akin to re-entering The Matrix. FATCA has very dire ramifications to the US person if he/she does not comply. See second link above for details. See also this link for more articles on FATCA. Is the situation for Bitcoin clear? This worries me greatly and another reason I did not invest in BTC yet.
Mod feel free to move this topic to the appropriate forum for tax compliance issues. I am only aware of the Economics forum for such related discussion. |
|
|
|
It isn't certain that you'd be able to tell WHICH input that the attacker used, at least not with my scheme where you hide who's using what input. Revealing who's using what input might not be optimal if a user want to use inputs already tied to himself AND some inputs that aren't already, and doesn't want the unlinked ones to become linked to him.
Send all inputs to one key first. I don't see how that solves anything. You just openly linked your own inputs together yourself, then. Who said do it in the open? I was thinking of a group signature join, where the inputs aren't correlated to the outputs, but then you control all the outputs (they are paying to your anonymous public keys) even where you might not have controlled all the inputs (some of whom are paying to you). Perhaps I am misinterpreting the case you are describing? Perhaps my prior comment was "off topic" because I was thinking in terms of a solution where we can put the group signature in the blockchain. Thus my rebuttal to you here is I guess "off topic". At least that explains what I was thinking before. |
|
|
|
Uh oh, the altcoin wars... Although that article is correct that there can only be one dominant unit-of-account, it is not true that we don't find utility in other assets, e.g. gold, silver, stocks, options, etc.. The article is correct that no altcoin has yet created a feature set that was differentiated enough to make such a claim. The article is also loaded with strawmen and incompletely-explored-partial-truths. The nitty-gritty details matter. |
|
|
|
Please don't vote based on a misunderstanding of what is technically possible or not. I have listed features above which I am sure can be implemented. Note I have not included features which I think can be gamed or are niche-markets, e.g. MemoryCoin's grants. I think this would just encourage all those supporters to come spam the vote here and skew the ranking. I am interested to compare the mainstream coin features. I am not including UI features here, as that can be third-party work that doesn't have to be in the coin protocol. If I have missed an important feature, please list it here in this thread, and I will add it to the poll if this forum allows it. Otherwise, I will collect these and rerun the poll later. Note I thoroughly debunked the Bitcoin2 proposal. Feel free to discuss any new features in this thread. * Faster confirmation times don't add insurance (probability) against abandoned forks ** Inflation is necessary for an economy to grow. New coins fund the mining ecosystem to maximize protection against 50+% attack. *** I don't believe non-PoW schemes are secure. **** becoming irrepudiable after N blocks, necessary to support transactions that can fail to deliver ***** So upcoming of a sudden powerful miner doesn't take a HUGE advantage mining too many coins. Actually it is more than that: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0Difficulty retarget
We will keep the retarget block the same as Bitcoin's 2016, but because blocks are found 4 times faster, difficulty will retarget about every 3.5 days. The combination of fast retarget times and Scrypt proof of work (Litecoin will not compete with Bitcoin for miners) means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashing power that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog for everyone who stayed. |
|
|
|
Evaluation of the Bitcoin2 proposal: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=160612.msg2847180#msg2847180I am convinced these authors are technically myopic... You can quote from the linked post, then copy&paste your quote into a reply here. Consider the linked post to be the OP of this thread. I wanted to refer to my prior thread on threats to Bitcoin which the Bitcoin2 proposal seems to be trying to address, yet all their suggestions are WRONG. |
|
|
|
No Money Exists Without the MajorityAt the conclusion, I will offer a solution. Society requires money to be maximally fungible, as this maximizes the division-of-labor which increases efficiency, productivity and prosperity. Every possible form of fungible money is backed by the trust that it will maintain a healthy balance between the desirable qualities of wide acceptance (medium-of-exchange), liquid, and a store-of-value. During a financial crisis, neither fiat nor gold maintains all of these qualities. For example, gold is a better store-of-value as fiat is destroyed by sovereign debt collapse, but the majority can't widely accept gold's value because it entails fiat collapse and pestilence. During the collapse to the destitution (often including wars and megadeath) at the bottom, the majority will steal gold's value via the ( currently escalating) threat of confiscation of wealth which can force gold into hiding, thus killing liquidity and wide acceptance. Only agreement of the majority for a shared partial default of the value of all money and bonds as Julius Caesar did, will restore trust in money, entice gold out of hiding, and usher in a new period of growth and prosperity. For as long as there is a standoff between the insistence of monetary capital (regardless of the type of money or investment it is stored in, including gold) to not allow even partial losses and the insistence of the masses for socialism funded with debt to avoid temporary reduction in their standard-of-living, then the financial system will further self-destruct towards a Mad Max Dark Age. Side note, Martin Armstrong's 78 year (i.e. 3 x 26 year human maturity generations) real estate cycle predicts that bottom in 2033. I wrote that the 26 year downhill portion of this cycle appears to repeatably correspond with massive unemployment (and a major war) due to a new technological paradigm, e.g. the early 1900s destruction of cottage industry by mass production and now the destruction of menial labor by the personal computer automation and robotics. In the 1700s, it was agricultural technology disruption of employment. The masses delay their adjustment to the new skills with debt and socialism, which thus causes the resultant financial crisis to drag on longer and be more severe. We technologists have looked deeply for an alternative to Bitcoin, that would eliminate its 51% attack vulnerability, and have concluded with the 51% Rule of Decentralized Agreement, which implies that no decentralized digital currency will ever be able to (sustain an) escape from the desires of the majority of society. There will never exist a form of highly fungible money (not gold, fiat, nor digital currencies) that will escape from the desires of the majority of society. The desires of the majority of society will always migrate towards boom and bust socialism. We elect leaders because we can't agree on everything we individually want (including controlling what others individually do and want), because these leaders are able to employ the top-down power of the majority to give all of us something we want by funding with debt and then take it away from us again at the resultant financial collapse. The leader who promises the most wins, because we don't agree on the tradeoffs between wants and available resources. Thus leaders are forced to promise nearly everything. The only way to fund everything is widespread debt and unfunded future promises, i.e. funding by obfuscating mutual self-destruction in debt and misallocation (causing destruction) of human capital. This insoluble political power vacuum exists in all facets of individual freedom where technology does not exist to empower the individuals to route around top-down control. The insoluble socialism would destroy all production if it were not for technology to escape from top-down control. Thus all increased prosperity and standard-of-living throughout human history is due to personal empowerment technology, e.g. portable energy-dense compact carbon fuels, the automobile, telephone, personal computer, internet, the open source software model, and coming 3D printers. Even mass production (i.e. automation) empowered individual freedom away from top-down control by eliminating human menial labor, because a (e.g. prison ward) manager can measure in real-time if one is producing menial labor and thus force one to work productively because nearly every human can do the task, but it is not possible that every human can do every knowledge task thus the individual can feign inability or otherwise only produce when he/she chooses to do so. Humans are fungible w.r.t. to menial labor but not w.r.t. knowledge production Thus what gold standard proponents don't understand is that the insoluble political power vacuum that gives rise to booms and busts does not exist nor derive from the form of money used, but rather exists naturally in every society as explained above. The malfeasance of the leaders is not the source of the problem either, rather exist as a manifestation of the insoluble political power vacuum described above. So changing the form of money used or regulating or removing the corrupt leaders won't fix the fundamental driver of the phenomenon, and the insoluble outcome will occur again as exhibited over and over again throughout human history. The power elite are not even in control. It must be the case that savings in fungible money can not be a perfect perpetual claim on future human productivity, because otherwise past innovation eventually owns all future innovation. Because new knowledge is not fungibly created by any human, and thus can't be financed by savers (the material needs of a knowledge producer are growing ever smaller relative to value of knowledge produced). That fungible money is dependent on the majority is a feature which allows old money to be destroyed in favor of future growth and innovation. A strict gold standard is equivalent to Marxism as both require innovation to stop (Byzantine and the USA were never on strict gold standards, due to private banks fractional reserve debt and proxy debasement via international immigration of capital). Martin Armstrong explained this as a relative value issue as follows. Converting money into some savings account will not work. The medium of exchange has no mythical perpetual value while everything else floats including wages and investments. Yet if everything else floats, how is it possible that only money remains fixed? If everything else can rise in value, it is measured in MONEY and thus the purchasing power of money MUST decline. You cannot have it both ways. Money and socialism are intertwined and this will never change. To survive the near total wipeout of fungible money in a Mad Max Dark Age, store production in non-fungible knowledge or technologies that continue to generate revenue during or at least after the crisis. I am proposing a more modular paradigm for open source software to enable storing knowledge value in revenue producing long-lived modules.
|
|
|
|
|
Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a donkey from a farmer for $100.
The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.
The next day the farmer drove up and said, 'Sorry Chuck, but I have some bad
news, the donkey died.'
Chuck replied, 'Well, then just give me my money back.'
The farmer said, 'Can't do that. I went and spent it already.'
Chuck said, 'OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.'
The farmer asked, 'What ya gonna do with a dead donkey?
Chuck said, 'I'm going to raffle him off.'
The farmer said 'You can't raffle off a dead donkey!'
Chuck said, 'Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead.'
A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, 'What happened with
that dead donkey?'
Chuck said, 'I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and
made a profit of $898.00.'
The farmer said, 'Didn't anyone complain?'
Chuck said, 'Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.'
Chuck now works for Morgan Stanley.
|
|
|
|
|
Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch
by Shelby H. Moore III
March 29, 2013
Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency and payment system to gain significant interest. This month its marketcap surpassed $1 billion.
P2P currencies promise some differences from credit cards, such as increased privacy, no control by authorities, instant signup, lower fees for the merchant, and no chargebacks (buyer at the mercy of the merchant to issue refund if dispute).
Unlike a credit card which allows the merchant to see your details, making unauthorized charges to your P2P account is impossible, unless you allow someone to get your private key. Note credit cards are adding for example Verified By Visa to provide a similar degree of security.
The government control increased on March 13, when FinCEN ruled that transactions for goods and services paying with P2P currency are not regulated, yet exchange to other currencies is regulated and can't be anonymous. Since most users need to exchange from legal tender to and from P2P currencies, some of the purported privacy has already been lost. Also instant signup has been effectively eliminated for many, as now many new users must "practically give a DNA sample" to become verified by exchange providers— however this tsuris may not exist in all jurisdictions.
The anonymity of payments for goods and services is given by the fact that each sender and receiver of a payment is just a number without any other identifying information attached. New numbers can be generated by users at-will. However, the authorities regularly collect information from the internet about usage activity using various means of tracking such as man-in-the-middle routers, spyware, and requests for information from sites that collect information via cookies such as Google's ads and Facebook's Like that appear on many pages of the internet.
So what are the compelling advantages of P2P currencies, since most of the differences from credit cards are being diluted?
For merchants it is the elimination of the 2 - 5% fees charged by credit card companies, the elimination of the ability of the buyer to issue a chargeback, and accessing a new market of highly motivated buyers. In some cases however, the buyer will not like this "no chargeback" provision and prefer to use a credit card.
For the buyer or payer, there appear to be no remaining significant advantages. Even most merchants don't accept P2P currencies yet. The non-merchant has one significant reason to buy digital coins— the expectation of appreciation.
Valuation
The supporters of Bitcoin are projecting very high valuations ranging from $1000 to $1 billion per coin in the future, based on a limit of 21 million coins to ever be created, and a projection of percentage share of global transaction processing.
Notably 50% of Bitcoin's future money supply was issued to the founders and early adopters in first 4 years ended 2012, and by 2016, 75% of the 21 million coins will have been created. By 2020, 87.5%. By 2024, 93.75%. By 2028, 97%.
This accelerated phaseout in the creation of new coins is creating a mad "gold rush" to get in before it is too late. Even though at least 59% (but most likely 75 - 95% since that is only a lower bound that can be measured reliably) are holding long-term and not spending, the skyhigh valuations are based on the hope for adoption by merchants and then increased spending on goods and services in the future.
The 21 million Bitcoins are replacement goods with low barriers to entry and thus can be debased by market share. If competing P2P currencies issue many more coins, then the total finite demand for P2P coins has to be spread between the coins in all P2P currency competitors. However, this spread of market share is not uniform. Today, Bitcoins traded at $75 - $95 with 10.8 million coins issued and Litecoins traded at $0.58 - $0.68 with 2.5 million coins issued. Given real-time exchange between P2P currencies, there is nearly no barrier-to-entry, since merchants will want to accept as many no chargeback currencies as they can if value is rising or stable. Also Gresham's Law dictates that coins will higher issuance will drive coins with less issuance out-of-circulation towards a higher store-of-value. Valuations are also crucially based on market share of transaction processing to be captured in the future, which requires circulation of the currency. So it is quite naive to think that the 21 million coins of Bitcoins are immune to debasement by competitors, unless all competitors suck and have no desirable differences.
Much of the fervor is further amplified with a false sense of altruism under the delusion of being part of a momentus and historic creation of what supporters expect to be the first meritocratic money system— one which can't be debased by the power elite who control the strings on banks in the fiat fractional reserve systems society uses now.
Scaling
For Bitcoin to meet the expectation of investors in its digital coins, the transactions for goods and services has to scale up.
And here is where the hidden diabolical quality of Bitcoin (and Litecoin too) becomes too obvious when the technical details of the design are closely scruntinized by an expert programmer such as myself.
The processing of transactions in P2P currencies is provided by "mining" peers, who provide some Proof-of-Work to insure that double-spends can not exist in the single correct copy of the distributed database. These peers are computers connected to the internet and interacting in a protocol with the other "mining" peers.
To incentivize the "mining" peers to offer their hardware and electricity to this task, they are given the new digital coins created with each new block of transactions. Also they may be offered an optional transaction fee by some payers.
However, the rate of creation of new coins is halving every 4 years, and will eventually stop. Given the fervor the supporters have over non-debasement for meritocratic money system, the end of the creation of new coins is "non-negotiable".
If an attacker can muster 51% of the Proof-of-Work capacity of a P2P system, the attacker can take over the system. There are differences of opinion as to the degree of malicious behavior an attacker could do. However, one unarguable mathematical conclusion is that an attacker that had for example 60 to 90% of the Proof-of-Work capacity could process 60 to 90% of the transactions. If this attacker did not do any thing noticably malicious and did not charge a transaction fee, then virtually all customers would not find it necessary to offer a transaction fee, because over just 3 blocks of waiting time the 60 to 90% becomes 94 to 99.9% of all transactions.* If this was sustained for sufficient months or years when the production of new coins had ended (or declined significantly), then all the other miners would go bankrupt because their costs are not subsidized. Such attacker would then control virtually 100% of all transactions processed. Note this 60 - 90% could be built up over time, because offering free transactions to a percent of the market (when no new coins are being minted), drives some percent of the other miners bankrupt thus increasing the percent the attacker has— it is a snowball effect.
This was explained to some of the developers of Bitcoin who hang out at bitcoin.stackexchange.com, but they claimed it is only an opinion and not a fact. How can math be an opinion?
*First block, 60 to 90% + second block 60 x (100 - 60) to 90 x (100 - 90)% + third block 60 x (100 - 84) to 90 x (100 - 99).
Digital Kill Switch
There is an expectation that large retailers such as WalMart, Amazon, etc., will want to provide the "mining" peers at no transaction fee cost to the buyers, so as to gain a competitive advantage over other retailers.
But we see from the prior section that the incentive is very great to create a cartel that has control over all transactions. Once you have that cartel, you can eliminate those outside the cartel by delaying their transactions or charging transaction fees only to your competitors (billing the competitor, not deducting from the payer in the system). So this is just the credit card fees we have now all over again, except then they will also have a public global record of all transactions in the world (total end of privacy).
Then the government could easily collude with these cartels to turn off the transactions of political dissidents, free speech advocates, gun rights advocates, Ron Paul supporters, and any other classification of terrorist. With control over the processing and the merchants who depend on it, they can easily force an upgrade to the protocol which requires a SSN or other government tax ID to be attached to each transaction.
This is not a stretch at all. The design of Bitcoin and Litecoin encourages it— I go so far as to say they were designed for it given there are alternative designs (I proposed one) that don't have this diabolical possibility.
Having numerous competing P2P currencies does not escape from this diabolical threat, if all of them have the same diabolical design. A non-diabolical design would either have debasement that never ends and/or a minimum transaction fee.
I doubt one can create a non-diabolical P2P currency at any time in future, because the first-mover advantage will apply inspite of low barriers to entry. Because if the users already have Bitcoin and Litecoin, they may not see any compelling reason to add another, in spite of the diabolical quality which does not affect them directly (as a member of the majorty and not a dissidant or other threatened class).
Not Gold
The P2P currency fervor was further stoked by the illusion that they are somewhat like gold. Gold is a private hedge against government malfeasance, it can be traded privately with no public record. P2P currency ownership and transactions are stored in one public database that is never erased forever!
Gold's money supply is always increasing forever (we can mine it in outer space if we run out on earth) and the rate of nominal increase every year is also increasing. Bitcoin and Litecoin are geometrically decreasing the rate of increase of the money supply and will terminate production of new coins at 21 and 84 million respectively. Some people think this makes them even better than gold and silver.
Many people have the illusion these days that inflation is bad and deflation is good. Sorry to bust their bubble, but both transfer wealth to the power elite. The power elite have more savings relative to their expenses, thus they can switch their savings between investments which increase during both inflation and deflation. Whereas, the middle-class are hurt by inflation since they must spend more their income, and they are hurt by deflation, because their wages decline.
If distributed to the middle-class, some minimal debasement is beneficial to offset the guaranteed (government backed stopped) usury interest income the wealthy earn during deflation. I am not a socialist and I love free markets, but the fact is that money is a social collective institution and this is the reality of the math. Either you redistribute algorithmically with debasement and mining of new coins, or you redistribute with taxes and politics. I would much prefer the former.
It is possible to make a P2P currency that more closely emulates gold's money supply. And has the advantage that no one controls its rate of debasement and thus can't manipulate it to create false business cycles.
|
|
|
|
|
Who is he? And who was the creator of Bitcon?
I am very confused, can someone clearly explain where the creator of Bitcon was born, his education, background, etc.?
I don't want inane stories about gifting a ponzi scam to mankind.
Give me facts please?
|
|
|
|
Bitcon's transaction fees can't scale. The only option going forward is if corporations will subsidize the mining for free, which means monopolization and 666 system. I have written much about this, you can go digging if you are really interested: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/users/3441/shelby-moore-iiiOtherwise just listen to all the fanboys who reply and tell you that I am wrong. You are investing in either a design that can't scale, or that will scale to enslave mankind. Remember I told you. Now let the moronic, inane fanboy replies begin! |
|
|
|
|
Please select the range you expect for the peak $us dollar price of Bitcoin any time between now and 2017.
It should be relative to that year's dollar when the peak is reached.
This is designed to give us a rough distribution of expectations in the marketplace. Thanks.
Note you can change your vote at any time, so this will be an up-to-date value hopefully.
Please try to be honest and not just inflate expectations, so we can get some science from this.
|
|
|
|
|
Please select the range you expect for the peak $us dollar price of Bitcoin any time between now and 2034.
It should be relative to that year's dollar when the peak is reached.
This is designed to give us a rough distribution of expectations in the marketplace. Thanks.
Note you can change your vote at any time, so this will be an up-to-date value hopefully.
Please try to be honest and not just inflate expectations, so we can get some science from this.
|
|
|
|
|
