In 2013 I sent 0.4 btc to a girl to purchase a his comic book. (She didn't spend it yet)
In 2013 I had a spare Gen 1 Avalon and set it up in some girl's basement to mine to her wallet. When Bitcoin hit $1000+ she had accumulated 8 BTC but she never sold them. Later I kept giving her my obsolete hardware so that she was always mining with about 700W of slightly dated hardware. Currently she has 2 Neptune cubes running at 1.3 TH/s and I think she has about 13 BTC now. So far she has not touched them. I keep a copy of her wallet.dat in case her computer crashes because she does not back it up (it is password protected). Sometimes I wonder if she even knows what she has, though she is aware that she is paying $120/month extra for her electric bill. |
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Not a millionaire, but in the summer of last year I found 10 coins on a wallet I had from when I first heard about BTC and I sold them for just over $10,000. Not a huge amount of money to some, but did enough for me so I could spoil myself and treat myself to a very nice new laptop and a short holiday.  Who was the sucker who paid $10K for 10 BTC last summer? I have some coins I'd like to sell him. |
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Can I ask then, from the point of view of, say, my local coffee shop taking bitcoin for takeaway coffees.....is it generally safe for them to take an unconfirmed transaction?
If it were my coffee shop I would accept standard unconfirmed transactions with no detected double-spends after a 30 second monitoring period. Why 30 seconds? How long after you scan the QR code or whatever would you see a problem? Would 10 seconds be enough? Or should it be 2 minutes? I am not selling coffee, I am just thinking from the point of view of a consumer standing in a coffee queue, or at a petrol pump or at a bookstore counter....30 seconds is a damn long time if they have a queue. I guess somebody would have to do some kind of Monte Carlo simulation with double spends from different points of the Bitcoin network. Then you might be able to say something like "with the current network propagation delay a double spend made 10 seconds after the initial legit transaction has a 0.5% (or whatever %) chance to succeed". They you can adjust your business model to accommodate your risk. mm....I think I need to know the maths of this a bit better. So the possibility of a double spend is reliant on time? Ultimately all that matters is the mining node that confirms either one of the transactions sees the legit transaction first before the double spend transaction. From a statistical standpoint, the more nodes that see the legit transaction first the less likely the double spend will succeed. |
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Can I ask then, from the point of view of, say, my local coffee shop taking bitcoin for takeaway coffees.....is it generally safe for them to take an unconfirmed transaction?
If it were my coffee shop I would accept standard unconfirmed transactions with no detected double-spends after a 30 second monitoring period. Why 30 seconds? How long after you scan the QR code or whatever would you see a problem? Would 10 seconds be enough? Or should it be 2 minutes? I am not selling coffee, I am just thinking from the point of view of a consumer standing in a coffee queue, or at a petrol pump or at a bookstore counter....30 seconds is a damn long time if they have a queue. I guess somebody would have to do some kind of Monte Carlo simulation with double spends from different points of the Bitcoin network. Then you might be able to say something like "with the current network propagation delay a double spend made 10 seconds after the initial legit transaction has a 0.5% (or whatever %) chance to succeed". They you can adjust your business model to accommodate your risk. |
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Can I ask then, from the point of view of, say, my local coffee shop taking bitcoin for takeaway coffees.....is it generally safe for them to take an unconfirmed transaction?
If it were my coffee shop I would accept standard unconfirmed transactions with no detected double-spends after a 30 second monitoring period. |
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For years I've been managing PGP keys that I use to encrypt valuable and sensitive files that I can't afford to lose. The exact same techniques can be used to manage Bitcoin private keys, so it is no big deal if you are already used to it.
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It not just "$30K around the house". He was widely known for doing cash deals nearly daily for a long time. Keeping cash at home in a safe or under the proverbial mattress, when nobody knows about it is safe and sane. It is a completely different story when everyone and his dog knows that he was a cash operator.
What kind of miraculous force protected him from robbery for all those years?
How would other people know if he kept his cash at home or how much there was? Sometimes it is just enough to be discrete about it. Should all big cash dealers advertise that they don't take any of that cash back home with everyone they dealt with? Obviously just being a large cash dealer does not automatically target someone for robbery in most areas. Edit: In any case, even if he kept no cash at home I think that the authorities would still have raided is house. |
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Or use a mixer.
How does this help if the mixed coins and the original coins can be associated back to the same IP address? At the very least you would need to use the mixed coins from a different node. |
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One thing I haven't seen explained is just what characteristics people think a government-issued altcoin, or clone/fork of bitcoin, would have. Why do people have a concern about a "government generated crypto"? All the cryptos besides Ripple, it doesn't matter whether they were created by satoshi or Mother Theresa or Adolf Hitler, it's decentralized after release. So I'm curious what people have in mind when they voice concern over the concept of a government-linked altcoin.
I mean, if they peg it to their fiat currency, then by definition their alt does not have a fixed supply and is subject to inflation and devaluation. So it seems to me the only way a government could compete with bitcoin would be by delinking their alt from their fiat, in which case it's just another new alt with an interesting backstory.
See, most of the people on this forum are running on this assumption that people CARE about decentralization, etc. That is simply an unfounded assumption. If people happily use fiat now, why would they suddenly become suspicious of it? My scenario is this: Bitcoin slowly gains ground in terms of becoming a legitimate (in the eyes of people) currency, and grows stronger everyday. The governments of the world begins to view it as a threat rather than a cute toy. They create their own crypto, that is completely centralized, and advertise that it has all the benefits of crypocurrency technology, and none of the negatives. It's possible they'll even say that being decentralized is a fatal flaw of bitcoin, and that being centralized and monitored by the government makes it more secure and better. I bet most people would believe the government if they did say that. This, coupled with penalizing bitcoin use by making it extremely hard to obtain bitcoin (or obtain a license to obtain bitcoin) etc. The central point here, is, I think most people on this forum has become somewhat "delusional", in that they think that decentralization is so obviously this holy grail, and everyone can see the benefits. It's just not true. But what does it mean to speak of a "centralized cryptocurrency"? What characteristics would it have different from bitcoin? If it is POW mined, for example, then the miners control the coin. I suppose a government could develop its own algorithm and mining hardware and try to keep control of the mining. That would create interesting scenarios of foreign agents and rebels trying to steal or back-engineer the algorithm and hardware for it, to attack a nation's currency. A centralized cryptocurrency does not make sense. Why even bother? Just issue the coins with their serial numbers on government run servers, which would then track the changes in ownership as the coins are spent. You don't need a blockchain for that. |
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It can also be overcome using VPNs
I run a non-Bitcoin web site and use browser fingerprinting to detect the same user using different accounts. They can use VPNs, TOR, proxies, etc. but if they use the same computer/browser they will have the same fingerprint. No need to check IPs, which is useless in many cases anyway, e.g. for some companies if you log in from work 10,000 people share the same IP address. |
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I connect to BTC Guild using a private IP given to me back in 2013. Does this still provide protection from DDoS attacks? I've seen the particular private IP address that I am using leaked for over a year.
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The proof-of-work completed needs to be validated very quickly by all nodes broadcasting the transaction. This requirement rules out a lot of interesting stuff that can only be validated by repeating the computation process.
On top of that, the type of work done needs to have a concept of difficulty that can be controlled in a granular and repeatable fashion.
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I am somewhat concerned that as a result of mass adoption Bitcoin will become over regulated and you won't be able to use it as freely as you can today. Some bad things that could happen as a result of regulation:
- government sponsored blacklisting/tainting of coins and addresses
- license required to trade and exchange
- license required to mine
- license required to run full nodes
- registration of addresses used
- ban criminals from using Bitcoin (it's already illegal to be one - so don't drag Bitcoin into the picture)
- changes in protocol to support some or all of the above
If Bitcoin did end up evolving into a regulated cryptocurrency that everyone uses I would not consider that a success.
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he has to share his ref link in his post. But not the signature section coz we use that section for signature campaign.
Ref link AND signature campaign? You can't have your cake and eat it too - that's a universal rule. |
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The idea of trying to control "copies" made sense when you had to have expensive equipment to make the copies and the idea of allowing people to hold control over the new inventions made sense when you didn't have a way for everyone to communicate.
How would you apply this idea to something closer to home ... something like a Bitcoin mining ASIC? Say you are the owner of a fabless ASIC design firm and you've just spent the last 2 years designing the most efficient 16nm SHA256 mining chip. You send the digital design to a fab for manufacture. Should the fab be able to sell copies of your design to a third party? Or worse, manufacture extra chips using your masks and dump them on the market? |
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Good! They are competing to be the leading press media and try to attract as many readers as possible to generate revenue. We, as a cryptocoiner, pick the best site to read the information about it.
Most of the news is rehashed crap with no additional editorial analysis. I don't need to see the same three sentences of information rewritten in ten different ways. |
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If Nikola Tesla had his way we'd all have free wireless electricity.
You wouldn't want to fly in plane in between 2 Tesla coils though, or the coils would perform just like they did in C&C Red Alert. |
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Really poor analogy. You can not compare Bitcoin to checks.
Not in this case, but the check analogy and postage is good when it comes to transaction fees. Postage should be related to the number of checks you place in the envelope, not the value of the checks. Similarly the transaction fees should be related to the number of bytes you transaction takes up and not the value of the transaction. Speaking of Buffett, he may be a good investor but he himself admits there are a lot of things in the financial world that he doesn't understand. He's not even a good trader. I've owned Berkshire Hathaway A for almost 20 years (bought 1 share in the 90's when is was only $80K) and it has done well, but it certainly has not been my best performing investment, |
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If you rate the level of network stress by how close the recent block size is to the 1M cap, I would agree we are stressed. I think the large block size could be a result of high difficulty. Miners are finding it difficult to solve blocks as quickly as before. While they take longer to solve the block, they add more transactions and hence the increase in blocksize.
Current blocks solved per hour according to bitcoincharts.com is 5.89. This is only slightly lower than the target rate of 6.0/hour, so you can't really blame difficulty. |
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you actually need to have vip status not donator.
It seems like I can still change my displayed name (which is currently different from my username). |
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