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161  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: $5000 per coin will never happen if PoW mining is allowed to continue on: October 24, 2014, 07:07:32 PM
A PoS coin on the other hand costs nothing to attack, so anyone who wants to attack such a coin is able to do so without any cost/risk.

You're so clueless and a parrot of myths, it's embarrassing. Somebody please attack NXT and finish off its 11-month run, I am sure it will be no more difficult that taking a morning crap.

(Double face-palm snipped)


I would but:
  • Computer cracking is now considered more serious than actually killing someone
  • I have forgone about $60-$90 in revenue because I have been too busy/lazy to configure my Bitcoin miners over the past 3 months.

Essentially, the hardest part is finding a 0-day exploit (or series of exploits) that the majority of the "forgers" are vulnerable to. You then break into their machines and vote on whatever forks you want.

However, to prevent a simple roll-back, you may want to be even more ingenious. For example, you can randomly corrupt the block-chain such that no two nodes agree on the block-chain history. This is cheap since no proof-of-work is stored in the block-chain. This would be difficult for any PoS coin built "on top" of the Bitcoin bock-chain such as Mastercoin, however (such coins benefit from Bitcoin's PoW that you want to get rid of).

162  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: $5000 per coin will never happen if PoW mining is allowed to continue on: October 23, 2014, 09:24:09 PM

PoW mining is transferring value to outside of the eco-system, with ZERO benefit to the eco-system. PoS is fully capable of processing transactions for nearly no cost.


PoW does have a benefit to the eco-system. In the event of a total system compromise, the PoW built into the block chain allows us to pick up the pieces: with some confidence that the block-chain history was not tampered with in unpredictable ways.

Bitcoin is still an experiment: designed to prove whether a secure network application is even possible with the current state of technology.
163  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: $5000 per coin will never happen if PoW mining is allowed to continue on: October 23, 2014, 07:01:50 PM

Bitcoin works at any price. If Bitcoin was $5000/coin, I am not sure the network would handle the resulting transaction volume. (Which is why we are looking at a hard-fork to raise the maximum block size.)

PoW solves the initial coin distribution problem. In PoS, banks with unlimited money can easily take over the currency. With PoW, banks can not simply inflate the price in order to buy up all the currency. If they do that, miners would scramble to generate new coins with anything they can find.

Gold also works the same at any price, doesn't mean if as a gold holder, I like being charged 10% annual tax perpetually, I would definitely also try to remove that tax if it existed on gold.

In PoS, sure banks with money can buy up the currency (and enriching all the previous stakeholders in the process). I don't see how they can't do that with PoW system, they could do it much cheaper and easier, by buying up existing miners. I don't really see your argument here.

During the gold rush, the supply of gold was probably increasing 10% per year. (I don't have hard figures readily available.)

For the bank thing, I was making a reference to  the [prediction] Next spike $560,000 14 months from now thread in speculation -- that prediction assumes a final Bitcoin price of $300,000.


Governments have noticed it, powerful people have noticed it, *banks* have noticed it. Right now we are in a perfect storm of the aftermath of a huge overshoot on the purchase of mining equipment - this is *fact* as evidence by the hash rate/difficulty.

This will take time to unravel. It surely will though, as irrational as people are, they will eventually stop flushing money down the mining drain. That money will turn towards the supply. As it becomes obvious the bottom is in, that is when people will start the next run up. Only this time it isn't going to be just neckbeards, redditors, hipsters and anonymous, it will be institutions. That have pretty much unlimited buying power by virtue of them essentially being able to print their own money, because they are TBTF and will just keep bankrolling each other whilst nuzzling the teat of QE washing away their toxic assets.

So the move will be unprecedented.

Unprecedented to you and I and all the other peons around here. To those behind the move, they just spent a few hundred millions to acquire assets they can now assign book values of billions. Selling into this only makes you weaker in the end game, and selling is what they want you to do because those dollars you are acquiring get more worthless the more bitcoin they have. Who here though has the constitution to hold as they see the price double repeatedly. We are still at the end of the day all hardwired for fiat. As much as anyone pretends they are not.

So the number I have picked is probably not that accurate. The magnitude, and the colossal unbeleivableness of it, is what is important. That's the black swan that nobody sees coming. That 90% of the people in the world will miss 90% of the bitcoin.

(Bold mine)
164  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: $5000 per coin will never happen if PoW mining is allowed to continue on: October 23, 2014, 06:35:54 PM

But for you is it a real problem these 500 million usd /year ?

Of course it's a problem, I'm being charged 10% tax on my Bitcoin holding, for something that is easily replaceable and useless.

We are still all early adopters. The selling pressure ensures that new users can still buy Bitcoins at reasonable prices.

Bitcoin works at any price. If Bitcoin was $5000/coin, I am not sure the network would handle the resulting transaction volume. (Which is why we are looking at a hard-fork to raise the maximum block size.)

PoW solves the initial coin distribution problem. In PoS, banks with unlimited money can easily take over the currency. With PoW, banks can not simply inflate the price in order to buy up all the currency. If they do that, miners would scramble to generate new coins with anything they can find.
165  Other / Meta / Re: FUN FACT: bitcointalk.org and bitcoin.org hosted on same web server on: October 23, 2014, 06:38:02 AM
IIRC, this forum used to be either a subdirectory or subdomain off of bitcoin.org. I vaguely remember when everything moved to "bitcointalk.org".

Yes, I believe it was forum.bitcoin.org.

IIRC, the split happened because the libertarian troll-fest that is the forum was perceived to scare new users away. I believe there was a deliberate effort to suggest that this was not the "official" Bitcoin forum. Though, I don't think any of the attempts to start a better forum succeeded. (I avoided one simply because I do not like JavaScript)
166  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin Fractional Units on: October 23, 2014, 06:13:02 AM
so you purpose only 1 Fractional Unit  1XBT = 1 / 1,000,000th of a bitcoin.

why X. B. T. tho?

why not  B. I. T. ?

Quote from: Wikipedia
In addition to codes for most active national currencies ISO 4217 provides codes for "supranational" currencies, procedural purposes, and several things which are "similar to" currencies:
  • Codes for precious metals Gold (XAU), Silver (XAG), Palladium (XPD), and Platinum (XPT) are formed by prefixing the element's chemical symbol with the letter "X". These "currency units" are denominated as one troy ounce of the specified metal as opposed to "USD 1" or "EUR 1".
  • The code XTS is reserved for use in testing.
  • The code XXX is used to denote a "transaction" involving no currency.
  • There are also codes specifying certain monetary instruments used in international finance, e.g. XDR is the symbol for special drawing right issued by the International Monetary Fund.
  • The codes for most supranational currencies, such as the East Caribbean dollar, the CFP franc, the CFA franc BEAC and the CFA franc BCEAO. The predecessor to the euro, the European Currency Unit (ECU), had the code XEU.
The use of an initial letter "X" for these purposes is facilitated by the ISO 3166 rule that no official country code beginning with X will ever be assigned. Because of this rule ISO 4217 can use X codes without risk of clashing with a future country code.
- ISO 4217
167  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: When quoting small amounts of bitcoin, how do you call 100 satoshis? on: October 23, 2014, 05:50:49 AM
No, too lazy Cheesy

I think http://zibcoin.org/ just converted me to "zib".
168  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: When quoting small amounts of bitcoin, how do you call 100 satoshis? on: October 23, 2014, 05:04:03 AM
1 bit = 100 satoshi.

Is "bit" the official term?

No, but it does appear to have some of the big players behind it.

Since Coinbase adoption, I have mostly stopped following it. Apparently many wallets support it as well.

It is also apparent that Americans find the Metric system confusing for some reason. Though in grade 2, it was taught with props: 10 cubes make a stick of 10, 10 sticks make a sheet of 100. 10 sheets of 100 make a cube of 1000. Actually that is not explaining the Metric system per se: that was explaining how Arabic numerals work. I think all the metric names for orders of magnitude were covered in grade 3.

Edit: removed duplicate 2011 discussion link.
169  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin Fractional Units on: October 23, 2014, 04:02:41 AM
I am not sure why we need yet another poll on this.

I still hate 'bits' because I (and others) will find it confusing. Others will come in with other seemingly confusing examples to try to prove I can handle it with my big-boy pants.

The poll is also strangely worded; in terms of the current exchange rate: which I doubt is finished moving around.

One thing I do support is:
  • 108 Satoshies = 1 BTC
  • 100 Satoshies = 1 XBT (ISO 4217 compliant)

That solves the problems with financial software assuming 2 decimal places. It also avoids confusion because the XBT term is not widely used yet.

Of course, calling XBT=100 Satoshies "one Bitcoin" would cause confusion.

170  Bitcoin / Legal / FINTRAC, ANDROID, Google Services, VOIP on: October 22, 2014, 06:06:28 PM
On Monday I got a call from FINTRAC. They wanted a description of my business activities in writing. The person I talked to claimed to have not received the brief description I had sent on October 2nd (did not receive an e-mail confirmation for that one). Apparently, FINTRAC is examining Bitcoin businesses on a case-by-case basis until the regulations implementing the new legislation passed in the spring are drafted.

I think to avoid delays later, I will draft a document explaining everything Bitcoin related I plan to do over the next year or so -- even if unlikely.

New Bitcoin rules won't apply to sale and purchase with bitcoins - Canada

In slightly unrelated news, I was disappointed in the EULA accompanying Chrome on the new smartphone I bought for this venture:
Quote from: Google Chrome Additional Terms of Service
11. Technology Pass-through Terms.

(a) Except pursuant to applicable permissions or agreements therefor, from or with the applicable parties, Sublicensees shall not use and shall not allow the use of, the Adobe Software for the encoding or decoding of mp3 audio only (.mp3) data on any non-pc device (e.g., mobile phone or set-top box), nor may the mp3 encoders or decoders contained in the Adobe Software be used or accessed by any product other than the Adobe Software. The Adobe Software may be used for the encoding or decoding of MP3 data contained within a swf or flv file, which contains video, picture or other data. Sublicensee shall acknowledge that use of the Adobe Software for non-PC devices, as described in the prohibitions in this section, may require the payment of licensing royalties or other amounts to third parties who may hold intellectual property rights related to the MP3 technology and that Adobe nor Sublicensee has not paid any royalties or other amounts on account of third party intellectual property rights for such use. If Sublicensee requires an MP3 encoder or decoder for such use, Sublicensee is responsible for obtaining the necessary intellectual property license, including any applicable patent rights.
(Bold mine)
So apparently I am not allowed to use the Adobe software as an MP3 player... because of my computer's form-factor. Incidentally, when I tried to create a Google Account for my company to complain about this on their help forums, I was greeted with the following error:
Quote from: Google accounts
Google could not create your account

In order to have a Google Account, you must meet certain age requirements. To learn more about online child safety, visit the Federal Trade Commission's website.
The difficulty is that my company is considered a child because it is less than a week old! The FAQ on the topic was not helpful.

I think I will save trouble by Installing free software and hardening the phone. I was not planning on using the cellular modem immediately anyway. I want to try using  Shaw Go Wifi access points as my transit carrier and Diamondcard as my phone carrier (the US location does concern me). "Airplane mode" does not appear to disable WiFi. I don't know where the tor project got their lists of Bitcoin accepting VOIP services, but Diamond card is not listed in either one.
171  Economy / Speculation / Re: borrow money from teh bank.. then inject it straight to BTC. on: October 17, 2014, 06:46:19 AM
If we all, I mean literally all did this and just ignored payments to the bank and let the bank take our houses and cars... we would be filthy rich and they would be left on a pile of used cars and other shit.  Grin
Ya, but where you store your private keys with no house/car?
172  Economy / Speculation / Re: borrow money from teh bank.. then inject it straight to BTC. on: October 17, 2014, 06:40:17 AM
Then I will be at loss and maybe with debits, so maybe worse than at the beginning Sad

Debts.

It is a real risk. Last October/November, I resisted the urge to take out a loan to buy Bitcoin. This was despite my confidence that the price would not drop below $300 if it ever surpassed $300. I still doubt Bitcoin will drop much below $300. If true, that would mean you would lose at most half of your investment. There is also a non-0 chance that Bitcoin will become worthless as well. The chance of that happening actually drops every year as Bitcoin matures.
173  Bitcoin / Legal / Alberta MSB registration log. on: October 17, 2014, 06:22:46 AM
I have tried to start the paper work with FINTRAC so that I can register as a MSB here in Canada (the Canadian regulations do not appear to have the $1000/day exemption the US regulations do). If successful, I may buy low on the exchange, then sell slightly higher at locabitcoins. I have to be cautions, because, if I try it without informing my bank, they will probably close my account (when setting it up, I estimated 1-2 Bitcoin transactions per month, not 20-30).

I was told by FINTRAC representatives that they handle registration, not licensing of Money Service Businesses. They gave me a general Service Alberta number to inquire about licensing. I eventually left a message with the Licensing Department at 780-422-1335. The automated machine warns that license applications are processed on a FIFO basis with a 4 week delay.

I left a message asking about licensing requirements for selling less than $1000/day worth of Bitcoin. The lady I talked to (should have noted her name) was initially concerned that I would need to apply for a Direct Seller's License. That is mainly intended for door-to-door salesmen. The requirements include posting a $10,000 bond, and contract wording advising the buyer that they have a 10 day cooling off period under the Fair Trading Act. After the lady I talked to did some more research (and called back again), I was advised that I did not need a license if I was arranging the sale over the Internet prior to meetings. Todo: look up the "Internet Sales Contract" regulations (81/2001 ... with amendments)

The cooling off period, while reasonable in principle, has two major problems that I can foresee. 1. I may end up becoming a hedge against rapid price volatility. It is not clear I am allowed to give my customers negative ratings over such incidents. 2. There is a slight money laundering risk: since both Bitcoin and cash is fungible. That can be mitigated by not repeatedly selling to people exercising the option. Even with those restrictions, I may want to consider licensing if I want to be able to sell without using the Internet to hash out details. On the phone I was told the threshold was $1, but ALBERTA REGULATION 191/99 says "The amount for the purpose of section 24(a) of the Act is $25." (so they may have raised it)

I called FINTRAC back and was advised that I can not register without a legal business name. I will have to see how much work setting up a private company is. (I know a corporation requires bylaws and directors, etc). If I am successful, we may want to encourage others to do the same. The paper work will prompt them to exempt businesses doing less than $1000/day as they do in the US (I hope). My experience is limited to Alberta. While searching for licensing requirements, Quebec came up in searches (as requiring MSB licensing). Other provinces may also require licensing.

Update: Registering a "Trade name" took only a simple form and $55. Though the form did ask for an ID number (such as Drivers' ID). Apparently they do not have to be renewed. Because Trade names do not even technically have to be unique, you don't even need the business name search. New update: A trade name is not a business.

Update:
Quote from: Direct Seller Definition
Direct Selling is the business of soliciting, negotiating or concluding sales contracts in person at any place other than the seller's place of business. These contracts are for goods or services that will be purchased by an individual for primarily personal, family or household use.
It appears the $10,000 bond, with a 2 year hold after operations cease, may be designed to make you seriously consider a 3 year lease. With an actual location, you can avoid some of the statutory contract wording as well. It also appears that I am free to sell (for example) Bitcoin vending machines to businesses without a license.
174  Bitcoin / Legal / Re: How to get my BTC money refunded? on: October 17, 2014, 05:25:08 AM
It probably does not help after the fact, but you should try to find out how to contact the site operators before you send any funds. I don't even know what a PTC site is.

A "whois" look-up is  a start, but scammers will often use private registration.
175  Economy / Speculation / Re: borrow money from teh bank.. then inject it straight to BTC. on: October 17, 2014, 04:33:32 AM
What if something bad happens and I need the money before we reach moon?

sell Bitcoin.

It is not the end of the world if you do that.

Being able to do that requires the ability to secure said Bitcoin. Cold-storage helps: even against scammers pressuring you to "sell" your whole stash (ask me how I know).
176  Economy / Speculation / Re: borrow money from teh bank.. then inject it straight to BTC. on: October 17, 2014, 04:25:51 AM
If you're confident bitcoin will go up in price then yes, borrow money and buy bitcoin.  Even cash advances from your credit card should be maxed out.  What's the interest rate?  Maybe 20%?  That's nothing compared to bitcoin's ability to double in price over a matter of days or weeks (see 2013).

Just be aware of what happens if bitcoin falls in price while you're forced to make regular repayments to the bank.  Gamble responsibly.

I would not advise maxing out your credit card for this. While in the past, the price of Bitcoin has grown like 10,000%/year (100x), that is less likely to continue every time that happens.

My bank did recently offer to extend my credit limit. I plan to purchase about $850 worth every month for 3 months: leaving my original credit available. I also have a "low fee" credit card ("only" 11.99% annually). I do expect the price of Bitcoin to exceed that growth, but have no idea if it (a doubling) will actually happen before 2016.
177  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Keeping your butts safe on: October 17, 2014, 03:29:32 AM
Where do you guys store your paper wallets?  If I had a safe that weighed like 500 lbs I'd use that, but not many people have that.

I guess most people just find a hiding spot in their house and hope it doesn't burn down?

This came up once before in this thread, but nobody responded directly.

If you are worried about your house burning down, you obviously do not have off-site, verified backups.

I currently have my Bitcoin stored in two locations at least 10km apart. I must confess, it was scary to open the sealed envelope only to learn that some of my private keys were only stored in one location (ie: not verified).

I hope to upgrade to 3 locations at least 10km from each other, each with m-of-n keys, such that 2 keys are needed to recover funds. If you opt for a safe-deposit box 10km from your home, you may get extra scrutiny for using a branch that is not near your home or place of work.

I chose 10km because I rarely leave the city. I concluded that if I am likely to survive any city-destroying event: so should my Bitcoin. If the city is totally wiped off the map, I probably won't be looking for my private keys.

With the precautions outlined above, I think there is no problem with paper wallets. Some people suggest encrypting your backups, but then you will need to back up the decryption key somewhere. As the number of locations go up, the higher the chance of compromise. That is why m-of-n keys with some kind of tamper detection would be ideal.

178  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Why 1BTC should equal 10^8 satoshi ? on: October 13, 2014, 05:41:17 PM
Here's the answer to "why 21 million" and "why 8 decimal places":

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/

Quote
The 21 Million BTC limit

One somewhat controversial property of Bitcoin is its fixed currency supply. There are currently 25 BTC being generated every 10 minutes, and this amount cuts in half every four years. All in all, there will never be more than 21 million BTC in existence. On the other hand, each bitcoin can be split into 100 million pieces (called “satoshis”), so it will not become difficult to use Bitcoin if its value goes up the same way it would become problematic to trade with dollars if each penny was enough to buy a car. Thus, all in all, the total number of currency units that will ever exist stands at 2,100,000,000,000,000: 2.1 quadrillion, or about 250.899. In choosing this figure, Satoshi was much luckier, or wiser, than most people realize. First of all, the number is considerably less than 264 – 1, the largest integer that can be stored in a standard integer on a computer – go above that, and the integers wrap around to zero like an odometer.
...
Notice how scientific notation allows you to express all of these values with reasonable accuracy despite their wildly varying scales. Floating point notation is essentially scientific notation in binary; when you store the number 9.625, your computer stores “1.001101 * 1011” (or rather, it stores 01000000 00100011 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000, which is the same thing in high-precision serialized form). In this high-precision form, the “significand” (the part that’s not the exponent) has 52 bits. What this means is that high-precision (more precisely, “double precision”) floating point numbers are good enough to exactly store integers up to 253, but not higher – if you go higher, you start lopping off digits at the end. Bitcoin’s 250.9 satoshis are, in exponential terms, just below this maximum.

fixed.
179  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: bitcoin changing my ideology from socialism to libertarianism! What about you? on: October 13, 2014, 05:26:24 PM

  developed nations, which use the most resources, tend to have low birth-rates.


Poorer, less educated (dumber?) people seem to have more kids as well.  

Ever see that movie Idiocracy?  


That was not a documentary.

They were using exaggeration for comic effect.

Edit: the implication is: educate the poor, birth-rate solved!
180  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: bitcoin changing my ideology from socialism to libertarianism! What about you? on: October 13, 2014, 05:11:20 PM
That book explains that in hunter-gatherer societies, there is no scarcity. The commons provide all that is need. If supplies need to time to replenish, they can simply move to the next area. With no property to defend, wars are avoided simply by walking away.


No scarcity, huh? You need to have a pretty peculiar definition of scarcity to support that proposition.


I hate to echo genjix's grim prediction, but our brains do not handle large numbers well. A large enough number is considered infinite. For that to work in practice, we need a relatively small population. There is some hope: developed nations, which use the most resources, tend to have low birth-rates.
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