I miss an analysis of the impact of Asic's on the integrity of the chain, ie, only a few people can control the chain.

And the blockchain can be used (and is already used) to store illegal data like CP.

?

If you transfer BTC, you transfer monetary value, not information.

You are trying to compare grapes and oranges.

People are hoarding BTC at the moment because they treat it as a commodity, 'BTC is the new gold'. Two years ago it was because 'the financial system is collapsing'. There is absolutely no resemblance between the rise of information and complexity of society, and the USD value of BTC. There really isnt.

BTC is not information. We dont measure the rise in BTC in a rise of information. We measure in USD.

Every USD that is invested in BTC is backed by labor, not by information.

Yes, the speculation around BTC is one of the major threats for BTC, but not really a long term one. Prices will plummet, or even out.

Other threats are:

- The blockchain. You can insert data in it, and at the moment it contains wikileaks stuff but also CP. This will give BTC a negative connotation with the general public, and they will lose all interest.

- ASICs. Instead of the general public mining, it will be a few hundred(?) miners buying huge ASIC racks. They have the power to kill off competing cryptocurrencies (TRC anyone?) and control the blockchain.

Please explain.

I dont see BTC taking over as main stream currency. There are basically two scenario's:

1: BTC will try to take over as currency to do regular shopping. This will not happen as there are already excellent infrastructures in place to facilitate money transfer. BTC has nothing to add here. Transactions take a while to confirm, money can be very easily lost with hard disc crashes, malware etc and simple stuff like account numbers are impossible to remember. In that aspect BTC is a solution to a non-existing problem.

2 BTC will grow because ppl dont trust their own local currency anymore. The 'fear train'. But if established currencies fail on a large scale, why adopt BTC? New crypto-currencies here are set to fail here if they are pre-mined. People consider it unfair. Why would this by any different with BTC. 'So you dont trust your local currency anymore, here buy my bitcoins. I have been mining and collecting them for years.'

BTC has to find its niche and stick with it.

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This is an x-post from a post I made on Reddit a few days ago. It got little traction there and I am curious what this forum thinks of it.



First of all, I am not a hater. I see opportunities for Bitcoin and I think it can fill a very valuable niche on the internet. However, Bitcoin as a full-blown currency is something that I think will never happen. I'll start out with some criticism but explain my positive view later on. Please bear with me.

Bitcoin is being described as a decentralized currency waiting to take over the world, but at this very moment it is neither a currency nor is it decentralized.

It isn't a currency because at this moment people are treating it as an asset. People are hoarding and speculating with it and trade in goods is quite rare. Cool story that someone bought a Porsche with bitcoin but if one look at the Bitcoincharts tells us that the 30-day volume has been 164 million USD, this should be a daily occurrence. It is not.

Buying goods for Bitcoin actually has zero added value. I can buy goods for local currency just as well. The only reason to buy goods for BTC is the idea that it is 'free' because I mined for it, and the only reason to sell goods for BTC is because it is a cost effective way to acquire BTC. With the current boom it is actually really hard to build a business around BTC since you probably still have to pay suppliers in USD or something.

The only real benefit of BTC is that it is fast and anonymous and I really think BTC should capitalize on that niche. Later more on that.

Also it isn't decentralized. Bitcoin should have died off last month when the fork in the block chain occurred. Once again, it did not. Some people took quick action and were able to correct it within hours. Although this saved Bitcoin, it proves that only a few people have an immense amount of power on Bitcoin. The devs, Mt-gox, and the mining pool operators are the bare-bone of Bitcoin and can make or break your fortune overnight. You can complain about the power of bankers, but please realize that the Bitcoin elite is a much smaller group.

Then there are the scams. Ow god, the scams. If it looks like a scam, it is a bad scam, if it doesn't look like a scam, it is a good scam. If it isn't a scam, it is an excellent scam. Lots of Bitcoin ventures were started for shits and giggles years ago and the kids who started ewallets back then suddenly realize they are sitting on millions. Only now Bitcoin attracts some real business entrepreneurs. Being longer in business doesn't mean more trustworthy in the Bitcoin environment.

So where is BTC useful? That is actually quite easy, just capitalize on the anonymity of BTC. People tend to ignore that because it is linked to porn, gambling and drugs, but in fact it can provide a real service to the internet economy in the form of micro-transactions. Lots of online games, mobile apps and websites revolve around micro transactions, and lots of people are being put off by it because it forces them to provide credit card or paypal details to random third parties. In fact, this community is already a good example of that with the use of Bitcoinbot, rewarding content.

Forget the Porches, it is all about the micro transactions for virtual goods.

If Bitcoin was adopted on a large scale by mobile applications, that would be huge!

And it should, because in that it lies its biggest strength. If anyone right now is thinking of starting a Bitcoin business, dont start reselling consumer goods, but start developing apps, games, content that can be sold for BTC.

TL:DR Forget consumer goods and replacing currencies, the future of Bitcoin is in microtransactions on the internet.

Did anyone contact the immigration and customs enforcement? Stealing bitcoins etc is a pretty arbitrary crime because the value is arbitrary and I doubt any agency would commit resources to tracking down BTC thiefs but people scamming other people by impersonating a federal officer is known territory to them.

It is quite simply actually. Is Bitcoin a currency or an asset?

In theory it is a currency but in reality it is an asset. How much % of all Bitcoins are on Mtgox? 30%? I read a post on this forum a while back about mtgox moving 2 million BTC's. Take in account all the other exchanges, hoarders and lost BTC's and you will realize that that Bitcoin is an asset, seized by speculators. Maybe it will end up being a currency, I dont know, but at this moment it is not.

Also consider that there are a lot of people profiting from 'new' money being pumped into BTC's (and it are not merchants because they want a currency witout 10% daily swings) so Ted being sceptical towards BTC's is imo completely justified.

Start a talk about cryptocurrency's and whatever is perfect but BTC is at this moment more of a product, an asset, so dont be surprised if they consider it a sales pitch.

Vaults have time delay locks and it is very common for people banks to not have access to any cash. I cant even get cash anymore at my local branche, I have to use an ATM.

I would be quite worries about that happening if I was running mt.gox. Basically you have an office with $15M in cash lying around (considering mt.gox controls 500k BTC). Anyone can walk in and force mt.gox to transfer all those BTC's to his wallet and there is absolutely nothing he can do to either get those funds back or try to find out the identity of that thief.
A normal bank doesnt have $15M in cash in their vaults and they are much better secured then 2 nerds in a communal office building.

It is obvious that Mark from mtgox is satoshi. Running the biggest exchange allows him to sell all his old bitcoins unnoticed in the black pool and he makes a killing from all the other transactions as well. Thats why satoshi is unknown and disappeared. If it was to come out that satoshi, the founder of bitcoin, made millions from it it would really hurt the integrity of the concept. 

Not sure if you are trolling or not.

Your share per block goes up.

Total blocks found will go down.

Your daily payout will approx stay the same.

Lets hope the 1 second one is invalid then. Would suck to crunch for 3 hours and then have it divided between 52 shares in the end (of which I had none of course ).

Ow wow, a 1 second round?

A  three hour block with 1.5 THash? Guess the ddos broke this block or something

So wait, every block contains 50 BTC's + the transaction fees of all transactions described in that block?

And the difficulty of mining depends on the amount of mining taking place? I always thought it was dependent on the amount of BTC's in circulation.

Quick question about the pool. There is a 'found block' stat in the my account page. Do you get a bonus for finding a block?

And it would be nice to have a 'blocks solved in the last 24h' stat somewhere.

Does anyone know how much data is being uploaded from the miner to the pool when running at 350 Mhash? Is it like 10 megabyte/day or more like 10 megabyte/hour? Or maybe even more.

I was also wondering how much bandwidth the miner such as GUIMiner uses. How big is a typical share?