Do you mean sex for bitcoins or p0rn for bitcoins ? There is a difference.

Bitcoin solves multiple problems. It is quite a reVolutionary invention.

1. Problem of government breaking down money using printing them or manipulating them in other way.
2. Problem of centralization - too much power corrupts people too much. In bitcoin, that is not a problem, as there is no central authority.
3. Problem of single point of failure - bitcoin will work as long as internet will work. Destruction of multiple banks or data centres will not bring bitcoin down.
4. Problem of anonymous transactions (when used properly).
5. Problem of divisibility: You can divide bitcoins up to .8 decimal point, like 0.00000001 bitcoins. Actually the protocol allows dividing even to smaller pieces.
6. Problem of creating gold standard currency which can be easily sent over the internet.
7. Problem of creating an electronic virtual currency, that would not be virtual and would be a "hard" currency. Each Bitcoin has an inherent intelectual value, because it holds a solution to complex mathematical problem. And REAL work needs to be input to produce a bitcoin, just like you need real work to mine gold out of ground.



I don't think you are understanding the conception of bitcoin properly. If you would, you would also know that bitcoin can be quite anonymous when used properly.


Why would there be any paper trail ?
1. Somebody buys bitcoins somewhere - probably on some exchange or market using credit card. Trail starts.
2. It sends them to your one-time generated anonymous bitcoin address (yes, Bitcoin supports it) , trail breaks.

So how does the trail pinpoint you if nobody knows that the final address belongs to you ?

Well she probably has SOME skills...

Yeah but i wonder why does it say that transaction size is 1K if currently one transaction takes averagely ~275 bytes of storage ?
Does it take more bandwidth than storage or what ?

OMG, this is just.... not right.
I mean... what would Satoshi say ?

Of course, and that is a kind of Steganography, which i already pointed out.
Steganography = hiding additional information in seemingly "standard" data, such as music, video, images, and now - bitcoin.

But such a transaction is a standard transaction, which is no problem at all because it does not bloat the blockchain with extra data.
The problem which i was talking about is people trying to push extra non-currency data into the block chain and mainstream client, making every transaction bigger, which would increase storage and bandwidth requirements.

We're not understanding each other.

I already pointed it out in when i was talking about Steganography. You cannot stop people from using bitcoin for other means than currency - because there is steganography, but you can limit it using currency fees and isStandard().

Anyway as i said, the less unnecessary data is in the chain, the better. More junk = greater bandwidth/storage requirements. And in case of bitcoin goes into micro-payments buisness, this will become a problem quickly.

Yes, there is a way. Only put necessary information in the chain. Keep currency-unrelated stuff out, and it will be fine.


1. There is a mechanism already implemented to do that. Transaction fees. If there are too many transactions, per transaction fees my kick in automatically. However i don't know how does that  exactly work.
2. This cannot be completely stopped, but that is not a problem until bloat is kept out of official chain. As long as the tansactions are "standard", but hold some steganographic information in them, it's OK.


You overslept. That is exactly what version 0.3.18 is doing using isStandard() function. It filters out all non-currency transactions unless I am not misunderstanding something.

Agreed, this is a small paradox/loop, but it works.

My concern is putting unnecessary bloat in bitcoin transactions. Check this out:


OK, so 22 billion transactions per year. That gives us ~60 milion transactions per day, ~2.5 million transactions per hour, ~41000 transactions per minute and ~695 transactions per second.

Right now, bitcoin requires about 275 bytes of transfer/storage per single transaction, which gives us 190 972 bytes of transfer/storage per second, 687 500 000 per hour, and 16 500 000 000 per day. Yeah, that is 687 MEGABYTES PER HOUR and 17 GIGABYTES PER DAY.

If bitcoin is supposed to ever become LARGE like VISA or MasterCard, it has to be prepared to handle large amounts of transactions. And putting some additional crap in transactions will make the bandwidth/storage space requirements become VERY difficult for people who want to run their own clients (and i intend to).

If you add for example only 100 bytes to each transaction (not much, right ?), then total amount of space&bandwidth will increase by almost 40%. And 17 Gigabytes per day is already enough.

It matters, because he is the original bitcoin inventor and he has IMHO the best vision for this project.
Is there somebody else i could trust more ?

Not necessarily.

You can place blockchain bootstraps in compressed *.zip or *.tar.gz files, and hardcode just multiple (RMD160, SHA1, SHA256 + Filezize) hashes of backups into mainstream client.

OR, updated hashes of blockchain bootstraps can be avaiable for download from main bitcoin server over https, in which case it will be impossible to fake them (but this is a centralized solution, so probably not very good).
Possibilities are endless.

A link to porn addiction curing centre ?

Just because somebody watches porn, does not mean he is addicted to it.
The same goes with everything. You can be addicted even to chocolate (some women are), but that does not mean that everyone who eats chocolate is addicted to it.

Oh my, dat is soo awsum. +10 to dis idea.
Can we has dis idea implemented in mainstream client, plz ?

I mean how could anybody refuse this soft fluffy little lolcat ?

Thoughtcrime detected !
Please don't go anywhere, a SWAT unit will be there in few minutes to pick you up.

Same here.
Merging bitcoin with some other completely unnecessary crap would be the worst idea of the century.
I would welcome a fork with open arms in such a situation.

If anybody wants to play, he should find himself a sandbox. We're doing serious buisness here, this is no place for toys.

No. Only the total computational power of all your computers/servers/cores count. It doesn't matter if you split the power into 2 computers/cores, 1000 computers or do everything on a single ultra-powerful machine.

Dollar ? Safe haven ? What cave did you just came out from ?
When the **real** financial crisis comes, dollar will be the first to fall.

Actually, destruction of dollar will be one of the first signs of collapse.

EDIT:
Dollar may be collapsing right now, as Chineese have started selling their reserves.

In my country we have "Z deszczu pod rynnę", which means roughly the same.



To topic author: What hugolp is saying is right. Stay away from both these options.... it is far from safe investment.

Save money by buying silver, platinum and land. Currencies, bonds, treasury bills are bad investments, thinking long-term.

This is definition of awesomness.

Especially that this could educate the people who don't like to study and read books, or at least motivate them to get to know more about economics.
The current tragic economy state is caused by "normal" people not understanding what is actually going on in the economy.