Bitcoin will succeed by sticking to its strengths. Push transaction, irreversible, with as much or as little personal information disclosed.
Text messaging is a push transaction. Email is a push transaction. People will get the hang of bitcoin once they try it.
The whole idea of automatically pulling money from someones account on a recurring basis is a dying business model. Customers will pay and pay again for products they like.
I disagree that pulling money is a dying business model. Every bill I have, I've set to pull automatically so I don't have to A) remember to pay it and B) spend time logging into accounts and paying. The function of pulling money, specifically for recurring payments, is desperately needed in Bitcoinworld. This doesn't mean the protocol should be changed to enable it, rather it means ewallets and services should create opt-in pull capabilities. ie - in my Blockchain.info wallet, there should be a button (perhaps assigned to just one of my wallet addresses) where I tick "make pullable" and it then gives an authentication PW. I give this authentication PW to any merchant with whom I'd like to give pull access, such as my favorite porn site or the electric company. They can then pull money from that account. Note that at any point I can opt back out, by telling Blockchain.info not to allow pulls anymore. I retain all the power of Bitcoin sercurity, with a wonderful new feature that will be used in thousands of ways. Meh. That's mostly because push is hard, and errors are easy to fix in the fiat world. In bitcoin, push is easy, and errors are impossible to fix. There are already online bill payment clearing houses where vendors and banks can get together. I use a payment service with my bank, a push service. When I started filling out the information for my cable bill, it pulled the details from one of these services and started giving me reminders. Generally speaking, I pay everything on a credit card that I possibly can, so that I get 2% back automatically. If I can't, I prefer to use a push payment from my bank (they use the bill data clearing house when they can, or they mail a check). I only hand out ACH information and allow pulls when one of those two options isn't possible (or at least is annoying). |
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Hal posted some example code for it, a while ago. I don't remember if it was implemented.
Found it! here |
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I wonder what sort of BS customs gives you about receiving silver from overseas.
I know I don't have to pay export on it, do you have to pay import ? in eu no, other places I'm not sure  It is a small amount, sent from person to person so it might just slip by. last few hours btw  From what I've read, the US doesn't seem to have any particular import duty on gold or silver and small personal (non-commercial) shipments usually clear informally. |
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We've had an implicit assumption that if an attacker gets access to the RPC interface you're sunk, and while I think that's true (attacker could run a tight loop of "sendtoaddress" that will fail until the moment you unlock the wallet to send some bitcoins somewhere), I also think security in depth is a good idea.
Should do rate limiting then too. |
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Google "GLV method". I didn't see any source code, but several academic papers and slide decks about it.
To use it, you need to be able to precompute a multiple of a point (which is a property of the curve used), then you can factor a future multiplication on that curve into two multiplications each with half as many bits. For what bitcoin does, I don't think the complexity is worth a 30% to 50% gain in speed.
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A geologist, an engineer and an economist fall into a deep hole. The geologist starts inspecting the rocks and dirt and declares that they can get out by tunneling up through a soft area. The engineer looks too, and says that they can get out by dislodging some of the stones, and wedging them back into the walls to form stairs up. The economist thinks for a bit and says "First we assume a ladder..."
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Basically, it'll be used as a way to withdraw fiat, with lower fees and not for buying things.
Pretty good concept for people that want the fiat instantly without having to deal with multiple third parties. It will be cheaper to use this card for payments directly rather than withdrawing cash from an ATM. So for many of us this card will certainly be used for buying things. I personally think that cash is quite inconvenient and I have no interest in withdrawing cash with this card. Some people will certainly use it that way though. I'm seriously looking into setting up linkages to feed money into mtgox now. I earn a little cash back on the credit card that I use for most of my daily expenses, but I might be willing to flip that around and pay small fees by routing a portion of my monthly expenses through the card. It sounds like other people are thinking the same thing, and I hope that the extra volume would help stabilize the markets. "Bank -> credit card" vs "Bank -> bitcoin -> credit card" doesn't matter much to me, and one of those options has a good chance of making my investment in bitcoin more valuable. |
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There is nothing special about 0 that makes it less likely than any other hash result.
But the thing is that any random number you pick will just never happen. (assuming it was really random, and not something you just took from the already existing chain). That same way, there should never exist a collision in the chain, or anywhere else in the world. The sun will go supernova much before that happens. The laws of large numbers cuts both ways. The odds of an honest collision are astronomical, we can safely say that it will "just never happen". But there are an astronomical number of these unlikely events that will "just never happen". Some of them will happen just by sheer numbers and dumb luck. No reason it can't be the one we happen to be watching for and care about. |
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Depends if I'm thirsty today or tomorrow.
Still more profitable to buy using fiat now and keep your bitcoin for the next bubbles. Probably true. But I find that using bitcoin is WAY more convenient for some things. I hold on to the bulk of my mining income under the assumption that bitcoin will be huge some day, but I spend some here and there, and I don't worry about how much I could have sold those coins for if I'd held them until the right time. |
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(If this smallest number found would be 0, it would be an indicator that somebody actually broke the algorithm as one might be lucky but chances this happens by pure luck are just not high enough that the algorithm could be considered save if this ever happens. The one who was lucky might know it was luck but all the cryptographers would assume it wasn't luck. It would be fun though  ) As mentioned above, even if we had touched the 0 once, this would raise concerns ans serious doubts in it being just luck I would assume it was luck until it happened a second time. There is nothing special about 0 that makes it less likely than any other hash result. No one got into a panic when 0000000000000118b413786fcb4f6db133ba1146ab0c33c521d2320f59b18f23 popped up. |
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Do you like to buy 1 coca cola if tomorrow you can buy 2 coca cola with the same bitcoin ? Depends if I'm thirsty today or tomorrow. |
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Heh, this is one of the things that I really wish Satoshi had done better. NTP has been around since forever, and there is no reason why bitcoin couldn't have insisted on accurate clocking. A +/- window of 10 minutes would have been plenty to account for just about any possible network conditions.
But, like D&T said, it doesn't really matter in practice. The natural variation in the random process of solving blocks is dominant over the 3 hour window allowed.
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I'm in my 30s, and I consider myself an optimist about technology. And I still don't think that I have to worry about anyone creating a quantum circuit for SHA or ECDSA in my lifetime. There are generic algorithms ( Grover's, for example) that operate on quantum computers that can "solve" arbitrary circuits. In principle, that means that anything that we can figure out how to build can be solved in roughly the square root of the amount of time it would take in a classical computer. The catch is, of course, that SHA and ECDSA don't really lend themselves well to circuit design. We can't really even build a classical circuit that implements SHA-256 without iteration and memory, and we don't even blink about putting billions and billions of transistors on a chip these days. Meanwhile, state of the art in reversible quantum circuits is currently something like 4 qubits and 5 loops, and to be quite honest, we aren't even 100% sure that these devices are even quantum computation devices (but the early signs are encouraging). Classical computing has a 50 year head start, but development in quantum computing will likely be faster (we already know how to miniaturize, and we have computer aided design and manufacturing tools). But not so fast that we won't see problems coming decades in advance and have plenty of chances to switch algorithms. |
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I have thought about this and can see it legitimately working. The key is having enough large BTC holders taking part or a few people with a large holding in BTC.
What would basically happen is that a price would be chosen. Say, $10/BTC. Then this group sets up a bid and sell wall at $9.50 and $10.50.
As one wall gets hit, the money is transferred to the other wall. As that gets hit it builds up the other. Being spread apart by $1, profit is able to keep it going. At any time, the group can decide to bump up the price a small bit at a time. They decide on $10.50. They bring up the wall from $9.50 to $10 and raise the wall from $10.50 to $11.
The key is that the walls are large enough that they do not get stuck with all of their money on one side or another as a huge rally or crash occurs.
It would be like a Federal Reserve Board determining the price. But they would still have to react to market sentiment because their walls would be affected.
This is the hard part. In the fiat world, they can do this by sourcing and sinking infinite currency. In the bitcoin world, or whatever, they don't have that ability any more, so they don't know that they can stay on the right side of the market. |
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Hmm. Those graphs do not appear to be averaged at all, or at best daily rather than 7-day.
The graphs are definitely averaged. Elux's graph above provides an unaveraged version that shows the raw volatility. Ahh, my bad. I didn't see the controls under the banner ad. Carry on. |
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Hmm. Those graphs do not appear to be averaged at all, or at best daily rather than 7-day.
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"6 weeks of no bad L" ... except for that period when we had an extra 200g/h. Seems pretty convincing to me.
You weren't paying attention. The run of bad luck started before the rate jumped. While it is still possible that we had a little initial bad luck, then luck returned to normal at the exact moment that we had a scaling problem, it is quite a stretch to call that convincing. |
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I think we peaked around $15.50 ($15.40? whatever). The 7 day average will be quite a bit south of that, meaning that this peak won't be scraping the 150M line like the last peak. We also seem to have bumped off a 50% retrace in the vicinity of $7.58. Again, the 7 day average will be quite a bit north of that, so we might not even fall under the 100M line.
This is based on the data so far, of course. I lost $5 today trying to predict the future, a quick reminder that I'm no good at it. The target for the $100,000,000 market cap is about $10.25, and the target for $75,000,000 is $7.70. And the math will get even easier over the next 36 days or so as we get closer to the 10 million BTC milestone.
This week will be interesting indeed. Personally, I expect a bit of an uptick, probably over $10 and hold for a while. There is a lot of speculation that money wasn't able to get into mtgox over the weekend, but will be coming online to buy cheap coins as the Japanese banks open for business (happening now). I don't really buy into such nonsense myself (the facts are probably true, but they don't in any way support the conclusion), but I've read it on here enough to expect quite a few people to believe it, making it trueish retroactively.
I'd most likely call this a bubble too. I'd want to see a rebound to at least $13 to call it a correction, and I don't think that'll happen this week. But it wouldn't surprise me too much either.
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