You mean by brute-forcing private key of the wallet owner or what ?

It is difficult for just "somebody" to gain enough trust on the interwebs to just start a fork of bitcoin.
A value of currency is directly proportional of trust that people put in that currency.

Currently, people trust Satoshi. To start an alternative currency, you have to gain trust and build your reputation, which is very difficult. And before that, you need to convince people why they should use your currency, not some other currency.

Well, you can have multiple addresses and receive money to the other one, so probably no.
And the address is not exactly the same as public key, is it ?

Why so serious ?


+1

Still, you have to know how many coins he has, otherwise the transaction will be invalid. Am i rigth ?
So this makes things insanely difficult.

Either you try to brute force private keys with simultaneous sending small amounts, which won't be very profittable, or you can try big amounts and risk producing invalid transactions.

Will the private key be enough to steal somebody's wallet ?

I concede with Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente, which are among the very few economists who have successfully forseen current financial crisis (google it). Well, Celente actually has like a 20-year long history of valid forecasts.

From their opinions, one might conclude that some terrible financial disaster is coming, one which has not been seen in the history of mankind probably.
Perhaps the perpetual circle of self - fueling debt will create something very unexpected.... Unexpected even for the banksters who probably caused the current crisis.

I hope that this future event will create a chance for Bitcoin to adopt widely.

Also, i wouldn't invest in Gold, since it is usually overpriced and suspectible to price spikes as everybody wants it and it is advertised as a remedy for the crisis. I would rather go silver, platinum which are more stable and predictable. Of course the last currency i would ever choose is dollar.

I think they can, but knowing a Bitcoin address won't give you the money it posesses.
Knowing the asset's address in Loom will.

I have just read the FAQ ( https://loom.cc/faq ), and there is one thing i don't understand...

Assets are a random hashes, just like bitcoin addresses are. How does loom protect people from guessing assets at random, if somebody for example trues to guess one trillion assets per second ?
There will be a small possibility of guessing correct. Is there a limitation of how many assets can an entity request per unit of time ?

This is sooooo obligatory...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

Women, know your limits.

Actually after giving it some thought, i think the free market's "They are private companies. They get to accept or deny whoever they like" approach is no longer valid.
The reason for this is that when government is involved, we are no longer talking about free market.

And the Mastercard's decision is purely political, so it has actually nothing to do with free market.
This is what happens when government's start to mess in the economy.

You are right. But there is not a lot of choice around... In most banks there is only Visa or Mastercard, so it is a nasty oligopoly.
If VISA starts to doing the same, then we may have a problem.

First they came for the torrents...
Then they came for bitcoin.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/22/2113241/RIAA-MPAA-Recruit-MasterCard-As-Internet-Police

So mastercard will block payments to sites MAFIAA tell him to, WITHOUT a court order.
What's next ? They randomly block accounts of people with a hair color they don't like ?

Did we land on Mars already, or this is a purely theoretical discussion ?

Sirius, would you care to create a no-sensitive-data version of backups so everyone can backup it like wikileaks ?

Ah sure, forgot about that.
Well, there is always a possibility of cutting out all sensitive data from the database to make a public read-only forum backup (nobody will be able to login to it since it would contain no hashes, so just read-only).

But i guess that would be probably too much work.

Electricity is also limited to the speed of light.

Well hmmm...

Subspace antennas ? ;P

I myself would not ever dare to do anything serious on cyber cafe's computers. I mean the problem is not only the operating system. They can also install hardware keyloggers or sniffers.... the possibilities are endless.

The only way i imagine it is using my own laptop. Plus a VPN and SSH tunnel of course.

Actually, not only that. The codec they are using only works on low frequency range (11 Khz or something), and the codec is specifically tuned to compress human voice best. It will not carry very high or very low tones properly.
So if you won't use correct frequencies, you will fail.