the wallet that is generated within Armory is deterministic based on a seed and a chain code. this is distinctly different from the Satoshi client. this is kept as an offline wallet on a computer only accessible by the owner of a large store in the back room. "watching wallets" of this same offline wallet are placed on computers at the cashier checkout stands. these watching wallets have the capability of generating a brand new address for each customer that comes thru the store when paying for an item. these watching wallets do not have private keys associated with them so the cashiers can't steal the btc. the cool thing about the owner's offline wallet and the cashiers watching wallet is that they generate the same addresses ad nauseum sequentially from the seed and chain code. the only difference again is that the cashiers watching wallets don't have the private keys.
edit: i didn't say this quite correctly. each cashier would have a watching wallet connected to its paired distinct offline deterministic wallet.
Hmm. I'm going to have to read his source. That doesn't seem possible to me, unless it is really generating the list of private keys and deleting them. |
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What's the difference between the FPGAs and the new ASICs that makes them so much cheaper?
FPGAs are generic logic devices. You essentially program the interconnections between logic gates to build whatever device you need, and when you need it to become something else, you flush it out and dump in new code. ASICs are fixed. The cheapest ones are pretty similar in structure to an FPGA, but with permanent connections instead of make/break links. Because the links are permanent, the chips are faster and less expensive per unit (assuming a medium-ish production run, there are still plenty of setup costs. I think someone posted quotes that went up from around $200,000 not long ago.) More expensive is to go all the way down to directly building the exact gates that you need in an optimized layout. This is pretty much identical to how mass production chips are made, where the designer (or the compiler more likely) has full control over the physical structure. That enables much higher performance, but with insane setup costs. For a complex chip, you need a very large production run to amortize the costs. |
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Probably by something more suitable to those niches coming around and displacing bitcoin. But other ways are possible too.
The only thing that could replace Bitcoin for those niches is another cryptocurrency. I think it is unlikely for another cryptocurrency to displace Bitcoin anytime soon because it would have to be far superior, and have a greater amount of developers and talent behind it. It would have to be so superior that Bitcoin couldn't have something else built on top of it to catch up, or simply have features added to the protocol or clients. That's quite a tall order. In any event, it could happen with a well funded corporate backed cryptocurrency where the corporation was willing to spend more money right now on a developer team. They open source the cryptocurrency itself (just like Bitcoin), but they use their expertise of the currency to bundle it into other 'killer apps' that they monetize. Even in this scenario though, it is not clear what advantage the corporation would have in developing the new cryptocurrency over just using Bitcoin.The lack of developer resources for Bitcoin itself is probably the biggest weakness it has right now. But who with deep pockets would be willing to pump a lot of cash into such a venture described above? None that I can see right now. Hey, I never said it was likely. But some parts of bitcoin's design were made with the assumption that it would not be small for long. If bitcoin ends up in a couple of niches, the mining reward won't be enough to pay for security and/or the fees will be too high to be useful. In the long run, of course. |
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I think that in one of his speeches, Gavin put it something like this: Years from now, 1 bitcoin will be worth either a lot, or nothing at all. It is very unlikely to be around the same price it is now.
I fully support that view. It doesn't mean that bitcoin must be "all". It doesn't mean that it has to be everywhere and do everything. But it'll either take off and be pretty big, or it'll vanish into the mists of history.
Care to explain how it will vanish into the mists of history when there are clearly niche markets that can never be served by regulated fiat currencies or payment systems? Probably by something more suitable to those niches coming around and displacing bitcoin. But other ways are possible too. |
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Didn't consider that part - if we have no real way of knowing, then the effect should be negligible.
What really happens is that the market sets the exchange rate based on supply and demand. But the supply isn't the total supply, it is the active supply. Coins that are lost, or forgotten, or being saved, are not active and do not influence the market. Of course, if the price rises, that will give people an incentive to use (sell) their coins, pushing the price back down. But there is no way to know which coins are being saved vs. which coins have been lost. |
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Meh. Some of us don't feel that carbon dioxide is pollution at all.
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Yes, coins can be lost permanently. At some point, probably many years from now, the losses will exceed the decreasing subsidy. That means that in the long run, the value of the remaining BTC will increase, but it will be gradual.
Keep in mind that the subsidy makes the currency very inflationary right now.
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let me add that to really appreciate how easy it is to use Bitcoin in commerce one should try Armory.
it allows me to control multiple wallets, use watching only wallets to monitor offline balances, import keys, and most importantly generate addresses for new subscribers on an ongoing basis w/o exposing private keys. this is made possible by the deterministic wallet.
Would you please clarify the "w/o exposing private keys" part? Just like your private keys are subject to theft on a compromised machine, so is the seed for deterministic wallet. Besides, a key pair is a key pair - deterministic or not. Private key -> public key is a trapdoor. Knowing the public key had better not tell you anything about the private key, or we've got HUGE problems, far beyond the mere $100,000,000 market cap of bitcoin. With that in mind, Armory lets you add addresses (or public keys) for monitoring, while the mainline client only accepts private key imports. But don't get mad, the reference client has a lot of stuff that it must handle, even though Armory can skip it. They do different jobs, in different ways. |
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He's saying that mtgox requires $64,000 per month to exist. Their average fee is 0.5%. Divide one by the other and you get...
If their monthly volume traded drops below about $13 million dollars, they'll be in the red and eventually would have to shut down, making it hard to trade coins.
(It is more complicated than that, of course, because some part of their commissions are in BTC, but they don't (can't really) sell those coins, so their fiat earnings have to pay for everything at the moment.)
Why can't they sell their btc? Because they are in the BTC trading business, and they could front-run every buy, sell, and hold order that everyone ever made. |
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Meh. I'm a pretty strong libertarian, but I don't think that everything should be privatized. Certainly we are WAY too far in the other direction right now, so I love listening to hard-libertarians come up with ways to change things around, even when I think that some of those ideas are pretty well unworkable.
Some things are natural monopolies. I think that most roads fit into this category, as do several other utilities, mostly the things that are physically attached to the land. Some type of public governance seems to be required for those.
I'm not against rules, but I am vehemently against rule Rs, unlike you I prefer my autonomy and freedom and do not agree with being governed by anyone without my contractually arranged explicit consent. But to each his own, if you want to be a slave to a small gang of people, be my guest.  LOL. How did you get from anything that I said to slavery? By the way, this is why libertarians are still a joke. Are you really sure it was a good idea to pick a fight with your best friend? Are you too young to remember the 70s and 80s?  |
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Ok, running two instances at once will be tricky.
Either make two bitcoin.conf files, and point the second instance at the second file using -conf=W, or specify -port=X and -rpcport=Y on the command line of the second.
Also, reconsider your thinking behind running two copies.
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He's saying that mtgox requires $64,000 per month to exist. Their average fee is 0.5%. Divide one by the other and you get...
If their monthly volume traded drops below about $13 million dollars, they'll be in the red and eventually would have to shut down, making it hard to trade coins.
(It is more complicated than that, of course, because some part of their commissions are in BTC, but they don't (can't really) sell those coins, so their fiat earnings have to pay for everything at the moment.)
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I think that most roads fit into this category, as do several other utilities, mostly the things that are physically attached to the land.
Where I live, no utility I use is publicly run. All private. Water, sewer, TV/Internet, electric. My garbage service is also private. I used to live somewhere that had a private fire department that was better than any other fire department in the state. My local fire company used to be private until the county passed a law to take all of the private companies over. The reason it is so hard for people to imagine roads as private entities is because they have not experienced them themselves. And if you don't like those services, you can pick different ones? I can choose another garbage company, and another TV/Internet company. When I lived in Texas I could choose between electric companies. Unfortunately here there is only one. My water and sewage companies are local co-ops. Run by committee chairmen voted by members(anyone who uses their service). I do not see why another water company could not come in and compete. This one has just been around for so long that there is not much demand for another one. I ran for water chair last year but lost by 4 votes. It is a very small company. It would be interesting to see how the two sets of water mains and sewer systems would intertwine, and in which land. At least with electric and communication, you have the option of one above ground, and one buried. But what you are describing really sounds like a local government, in fact even if not in name. I can't think of any obvious difference. What do you think about radio? |
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I think that most roads fit into this category, as do several other utilities, mostly the things that are physically attached to the land.
Where I live, no utility I use is publicly run. All private. Water, sewer, TV/Internet, electric. My garbage service is also private. I used to live somewhere that had a private fire department that was better than any other fire department in the state. My local fire company used to be private until the county passed a law to take all of the private companies over. The reason it is so hard for people to imagine roads as private entities is because they have not experienced them themselves. And if you don't like those services, you can pick different ones? |
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Meh. I'm a pretty strong libertarian, but I don't think that everything should be privatized. Certainly we are WAY too far in the other direction right now, so I love listening to hard-libertarians come up with ways to change things around, even when I think that some of those ideas are pretty well unworkable.
Some things are natural monopolies. I think that most roads fit into this category, as do several other utilities, mostly the things that are physically attached to the land. Some type of public governance seems to be required for those.
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If the soldering is high melting point you use a non powered soldering iron heated in a tortch flame to red hot, a mere touch is all it takes and the whole board doesn't become a heat sink and get damaged.
Uh, I'm not exactly a pro, but I've done a lot of soldering work, and this seems very, very wrong to me. Have you ever tried this technique? On electronics? If I were trying to remove an ATX power connector, I'd soak the area with a temperature controlled SMD rework gun at a very low setting, flux the shit out of one pin at a time, then use a decent quality suction iron on it. Pause and resoak between pins to allow the heat to balance out. If you are very good with wick, you could try that, but make sure you pre-heat and re-flux the wick too. Removing a structure like that from a modern 4 or 6 layer board is not trivial, particularly when it was made in an industrial process using ROHS-compliant solder. Yes I have tried it, many times, the fact that it seems wrong to you personally is OK with me. At home with basic tools this is how it's done. People over heat these boards and damage the copper traces and sometimes the fibre itself. The plastic wire clips gets melted and mangled and the whole thing is a mess. Pre heating it for one or two pins is pointless, you don't want all the solder off normally, just a single busted pin out, which means heating it in a localized area as rapidly as possible and getting it free without removing all the solder in most cases. I've even "pre froze" delicate areas around a repair point using fibreglass wool and an upside down air can to keep the heat localized. A single touch from a red hot tip while hauling the damaged pin out means a clean removal and it's relatively easy to solder a new pin in with standard flux core solder and a basic iron after that. If you are more confident, have advanced equipment, then by all means, use a more measured approach. My approach works however. The fact that it is "ghetto" doesn't mean it doesn't work correctly. Ahh, I was thinking of swapping the whole assembly, not just a couple of damaged pins. The few times I've popped ATX sockets off boards, it was because I wanted the sockets. I suppose after overheating like that, the pins probably don't have a press-fit to the frame any more and will come out one by one. Make sure you have a firm grip on those pins and hope they come out quick on the first try! And if you have a dead (or even just old) board that you can mangle for new pins, go for it. For reassembly, I'd reconnect the plug before soldering. That will keep the new pins aligned and sink more heat (but that shouldn't be much of a problem with new solder). |
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I see we have some non-Libertarians in the thread who think there should be publicly maintained roads, etc.  Perhaps there shouldn't be, but there clearly are. In what fantasy land did freedom create roads? All the roads that I know of were created by the DOT. Now you know of some created by private industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_StatesI take it excluding the handful of roads listed there the rest were built with public funds? Strange that your clearly better idea of private roads only accounts for <1% of all roads, eh? Public funds are an illusion. They were private funds before they became public funds, and the conversion was not an act of charity. |
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I was thinking the same thing. If BTC could be bought like a mutual fund it could be pitched as a unique, risky but futuristic option for automatic monthly IRA contributions. We'd just need some fund manager to set up the automatic purchase at market price and storage of BTC is some sort of insured bitcoin bank. They take a percentage and report fund value daily just like a mutual fund. With the flood of new money the price would skyrocket, then word of mouth takes over and everybody else wants in.
We early adopters get rich, the fund manager gets mega-rich, and suddenly Joe the Plumber knows about bitcoin.
Ah, the wet dreams of every pump-and-dump strategizer. Quoted for posterity.  |
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I was thinking the same thing. If BTC could be bought like a mutual fund it could be pitched as a unique, risky but futuristic option for automatic monthly IRA contributions. We'd just need some fund manager to set up the automatic purchase at market price and storage of BTC is some sort of insured bitcoin bank. They take a percentage and report fund value daily just like a mutual fund. With the flood of new money the price would skyrocket, then word of mouth takes over and everybody else wants in.
We early adopters get rich, the fund manager gets mega-rich, and suddenly Joe the Plumber knows about bitcoin.
Sadly, I don't think that fund managers could touch bitcoin with a 10 foot pole. |
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