Another scare tactic to keep the general public from using bitcoin.. truth is, more crime has been done with the American dollar then all other currency's combined
It's awesome. I love these kinds of articles. The kinds of people who read The Atlantic will buy fewer Bitcoins. This is great news for me because, in general, I prefer that those people have as little economic power in the future as possible. On the other hands, a bunch of kids who didn't already know just learned that Bitcoins are immediately useful to them. Bitcoin is winning the hearts and minds of the next generation, while undermining the older generations who've spent their whole lives running up debts and starting wars all over the world. |
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You need to have the government working with you. The less Bitcoin is associated with that nasty, violent religion, the better. |
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Bitcoin has no image problem. These “image problem” people are like if the Clampetts discovered that they were sitting on a swamp made out of crude oil and worrying that people won’t accept it because it’s too ugly and gross, so they try to convince people that it’s a pretty shiny pink and tastes like cherries.
The only way to think Bitcoin has a bad image is by marketing it to the wrong people. Yes, just about everyone could benefit from Bitcoin right now, but for most people, the immediate benefit would be relatively small, and it is too much to ask them to understand both the economics and the cryptography that would be required to convince them that Bitcoin has a vastly greater potential than it has yet achieved. Instead of marketing Bitcoin to the people creative enough to see its potential, or to those who so desperately need it now that its benefits are obvious, entrepreneurs like Jeremy Allaire are attempting to market Bitcoin to the average American as a payment-processing system. This is premature because Bitcoin’s benefit as a payment system is only significant after lots of people already have it—therefore the benefit is marginal to most people. As Bitcoin improves, and particularly when it begins to weaken the fiat money system, more and more people will find it prudent to adopt it.
Bitcoin inspires suspicion among bankers and regulators. Bitcoin has a bad image with them, but that’s their problem, not Bitcoin’s problem. Those who are worried about banks boycotting Bitcoin or the government regulating it out of existence should not plan to start a Bitcoin business under such regime uncertainty. Eventually, Bitcoin will have become so widespread that it will have drastically reduced the scope of both banks and government. Then that will be a good time for payment-processing companies.
This is all a bunch of narcissism. It’s an emphasis on appearance without substance and respectability among people who don’t matter. Bankers aren’t Bitcoin owners yet, and until they are, their opinions are not important. If Jeremy Allaire thinks that Bitcoin has an image problem, he should try smuggling it into Argentina instead of marketing to Americans and bothering with American banks.
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How to talk to your grandparents about Bitcoin kinda depends on your grandparents.
My grandparents are the kind of people that, if I still talked to them, I'd tell them that Bitcoin is a fad and they should put all their money in tbills and MBS derivatives.
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Whereas the oak tree is still there regardless of whether we look at it, talk about it, call it different names. With the oak tree, the specific configuration of atoms matters. With Bitcoin, the agreement of people matters.
Hence, we have the power to mutate Bitcoin with the power of thought and agreement, in a way we cannot with the oak tree.
Notably, this has happened before (P2SH and some bug fixes come to mind). People agreed that Bitcoin should be changed, and viola, Bitcoin was changed, without anyone supposing we're now using an alt. If I trim a branch off of an oak tree I've changed its specific configuration of atoms, but it's still an oak tree. Moreover, it's still the same oak tree as it was before. If I set the tree on fire, the ashes which result are not an oak tree any more. Clearly not all changes are equal, so it's not correct to say sat that since we've made minor alterations to the Bitcoin software over time that means Bitcoin has no unalterable definition. There are characteristic of Bitcoin that, if they were not retained, would represent the "setting on fire" type of change as opposed to "pruning the tree" type of change. |
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Russia and other petronations (Saudis) fund unrest all over the world with oil money. Using bitcoin will not change this, it's wishfull thinking by Americans who have no idea how the rest of the world works (I know Stefan is Canadian but he focuses on US news 99% of time)
"Funding unrest" is not the same as "waging war". There isn't anywhere close to enough oil money in the world to pay for invasions and multi-year occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. |
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The financial result is the same as if the original BTC were reallocated, even if the technical details are different.
Those mere technical details are in fact the relevant difference. Doing a sufficient amount of work to orphan part of the chain has a high cost associated with it. Holders of Bitcoin can calculate the risk losing their funds due to a reorg because that cost can be calculated. When you allow miners to confiscate generation outputs with a mere vote instead of via the proof of work process it becomes easier to do, therefore it will be used more often. It also most certainly will not stop with confiscating the rewards of "bad" miners. Of course that's just the small end of the wedge. Once voting by miners, as opposed to producing the valid ECDSA signatures, is established as a legitimate way of editing the ledger, then the path will be cleared to enable all sorts of other editing. This is exactly how to destroy Bitcoin - by taking away its most important advantage it holds over legacy currencies. |
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Secondly - if I read it correctly, this doesn't affect the fungible nature of Bitcoin, does it? It does not allow for arbitrary blocking of transactions or theft of coins, nor does it "taint" an ouput. Is this understanding correct? Does it not just allow for reallocation of the coinbase? The proposal is theft of coins. The Bitcoin protocol right now has no built in mechanism via which a third party can reassign a balance. If such a mechanism is ever added to Bitcoin, then Bitcoin is worthless. It doesn't matter how little they promise to use it (at first). When it comes to the question of, "under what circumstances can miners vote to confiscate funds on the blockchain," the difference between "never" and "rarelty" is infinitely greater than the difference between "rarely" and "frequently". Biitcoin only has value if the answer to the question is "never". |
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If you run into him again ask about updating this thread (or returning to the forum at all). Thanks.
According to my logs, I was imagining it. Confused with another nick. |
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I think that this project is dead. Sadly  jackjack hasn't been around for two months. He might be back. I might be imagining it, but I'm pretty sure I've seen him on IRC within the last few days. |
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his youtube got temp banned for this video We actually don't know which video cause the temp ban, but I'd bet it wasn't a Bitcoin-related video. My first guess is that a lot of people complained to YouTube because of his "Estrogen-Based Parasites" video. |
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While I can't see how anyone could be calling Bitcoin a "scam", the fact is that Satoshi's premine does exist and now we have the feds with their own massive hoard taken from the SR bust. It cannot be ignored that either one of these groups could cause some serious disruptions to the exchange rate depending on if/when/how they cash out.
In 2011, the exchange rate dropped 90% and Bitcoin is still here. In 2013, the exchange rate dropped 60% and Bitcoin is still here. Recently, the exchange rate has dropped about 60% and Bitcoin is still going strong. I don't think Bitcoin really gives a crap about the exchange rate. Exactly. The same news cycle about Bitcoin repeats each time as well, and there's an entirely new generation of people who get get caught up in it because they don't bother to study (recent!) history. N00bs gonna n00b, I guess. |
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Until then, the best thing you can do is exchange watching-only wallets with parties you interact with frequently, and make sure that any payment addresses they send you appear in the WO wallet you have for them. Armory already gives you a way to watch multiple wallets and mark who they belong to. Out-of-band verification of payment addresses (such as phone call) would be recommended for exceptionally large transactions. This is something Bitcoin companies should have been doing for years. How many exchange balance thefts would have been avoided if exchanges let users upload a WO wallet and only processed withdrawals to addresses in it? |
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What was the role of blacksmiths after the invention of the automobile?
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The name is intentional, DarkWallet is created to be radical.
Something which draws less attention probably would have been wise....too late now. Actually quite the opposite. Radical is the winning strategy. Remember that "government" is just a word - there is no monolithic entity with that name. Instead, there are a large number of individuals who all have their own individual goals and motivations. The extent to which they cooperate to enforce certain policies on the rest of the population is a function of how well their individual goals and motivations align with the goals of the organization itself. Regulators can't stop Bitcoin any more than the RIAA could stop P2P file sharing, so there's no need for Bitcoin users to self-censor out of a misplaced hope that doing so will protect them. Every time regulators attempt to stifle Bitcoin and are unsuccessful, Bitcoin will gain more credibility and more users - and very importantly many of those users will be "defectors" from the government side. As governments are finding themselves unable to stop Bitcoin, their organizations will slowly start to fill up with Bitcoin users. Identifying the positive feedback loop in this scenario is left as an exercise for the reader. Provoking conflict with the regulators is, in fact, the best thing that can happen for Bitcoin in the long term. |
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The central banks of the world are caught in a game theory trap from which they can not escape.
Bitcoin is a threat to them, so their natural response is to act to counter this threat by restricting financial freedom.
Every action they take to restrict financial freedom makes Bitcoin correspondingly more valuable.
All Bitcoin has to do in order to win is to not sell out.
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Exchanges need to be able to process orders faster than the blockchain can process transactions. Nobody wants an exchange where they can only trade once every 10 minutes. So multisignature by itself is not enough to make exchanges secure.
What you need is some way to track user accounts on a server that implements cryptographically secure triple-entry accounting. You could use that system to track customer balances and then all you'd need is some way to manipulate Bitcoins held in multisignature outputs that was somehow tied to those signed receipts.
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