What is funny is we don't "create" the virtual currency. We mine it ("find it"). You can create fiat, but not bitcoins. This means FinCen's statement on de-centralized currencies don't apply to bitcoin.
No, bitcoins are created, not "found". You have to be naive to think otherwise. Objects called bitcoins don't even exist in the protocol, so words like "created", "found", "issued", etc. are nothing but metaphors anyhow. Metaphorically, I would agree that bitcoins are created but not by the miner alone. They are created by the collective effort of the network. As a miner, how would I prove this in court? Easy. In order to "create" bitcoins, it isn't sufficient to find and publish a block. Even then, that block could still be orphaned. "Creation" is only complete once that block has been accepted into the consensus chain. That final step of "creation" is outside my control. |
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Bitcoins illegal?
Citcoins?
Ditcoins?
Litcoins?
I guess they can ban bitcoins, as long as everyone is cool with updating their client to change the name.
That's not how the legal system works. You can't get away with selling cocaine by calling it "sugar" or whatever. You can't even get away with selling cocaine by slightly modifying the molecule so it's not actually cocaine anymore, but still has some of the original effects. If they ban bitcoins (which I think is unlikely), you can be certain that they will phrase the law in such an overreaching way that ALL bitcoin-like systems are banned. However, such a law would need to be so overreaching that most tech-minded people would probably just ignore it. A similar thing happened with overreaching laws banning cryptography back in the early days of the internet. |
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Knackbar ist das Passwort sicher, da es vermutlich keine Überlänge hat und nicht allzu kompliziert ist. Also wird wohl ein Wörterbuchattack möglich sein. Allerdings muss dazu ein passendes Script her, das solange Passwörter ausprobiert bis es das richtige gefunden hat und zwar genau für deine Wallet-Datei. Je nach komplexität des Passwortes dauert es Tage, Wochen, Jahre oder Ewigkeiten.
Die andere Frage ist leichter zu beantworten: sie sind für immer und ewig aus dem Umlauf.
Ein Wörterbuchattack ist sehr schwierig, weil der Bitcoin-Qt Klient mehrfach-Hashing betreibt. Die Anzahl der Runden wird auf die CPU-Leistung angepasst, so dass in der Regel jeder Versuch eine Sekunde dauert. Der Benutzer muss also eine sehr spezifische Idee haben, was sein Passwort ungefähr sein könnte. Sonst hat er mit Brute Forcing keine Chance. |
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Dear Saver:
The Euro is an experimental currency. Use at your own risk. Don't invest more into the Euro than you can afford to lose.
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I deeply believe that a limit to the supply of a currency is bad in the long term.
We got roughly this scenarios for a money supply:
a) Deflation or zero inflation - Encourages hording and saving, discourages investing, risking and consuming.
b) low inflation - Encourages investing (risk taking), consuming. Saving (hording) is not encourages in this scenario as the inflation adjusted return usually are lower than investment (risk taking)
c) high inflation - its okey for an economy with real growth, such as the state of bitcoin right now with growing numbers of miners, consumers and shops.
d) hyper inflation: encourages flight from the currency of high inflation to anything that is not inflated, anything such as commodities, other currencies (with normal inflation), stocks, real estate and so on..
The optimal situation for bitcoin would be a normal inflation of 5% per year when we have reached 21 million coins so that the ecosystem of bitcoin can grow based on new coins reaching the market although. Normally 2-3% would be a good inflation target but since coins (wallets) can dissapear we need more inflation to compensate for lost coins.
So I hope the bitcoin community will reach the consensus that we need inflation!
We don't want to encourage "investing,risking, and consuming" for their own sake. We don't want to discourage "hording and saving" for their own sake. We want to encourage productivity. For optimum productivity you need a balance of BOTH saving and investing/consuming. Artificial inflation distorts that balance towards malinvestment, taking stupid risks, and wasteful consumption. |
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O RetroShare é mais resistente à censura que um fórum na www. É descentralizado como Bitcoin. Só que é um pouco difícil manter a massa crítica. http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ |
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http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/scpops/ecbocp137.pdfThey estimate that we lose around 1% of GDP to costs incurred by existing payment mechanisms (banks, debit/credit cards, cash, cheques). That's a lot higher than I'd have expected. Most of the cost falls (no surprise) on retailers. This 1% GDP figure includes both the cost of friction and the cost of insurance. Effectively, most credit card payments come with a mandatory insurance and escrow service. I suspect that those kinds of features make up the bulk of the 1% figure. Bitcoin can make a huge difference to the cost of friction. Insurance costs are harder to reduce, but even here Bitcoin can help. By giving people choice on how much insurance they want for each individual transaction, people can eliminate insurance costs from transactions where insurance is not needed. eg. small face-to-face purchases. More choice will also reduce the "moral hazard" behavior that credit cards encourage at the moment with their flat-rate monopoly insurance fees. People will be more careful about using their credit card on questionable websites, etc. This will reduce insurance costs across the board. |
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I think that bitcoin has reached a metastable state. It's a bit like an aerogel. Permanently frozen bubbles.
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Related question:
Are "full nodes" really needed if they're not mining? I don't really understand their purpose.
Because if full nodes are really needed for something, maybe there should be a separate fee paying them to stay on-line?
"Full nodes" are not needed in the sense that Bitcoin could still function without them. However, they are beneficial to all users of Bitcoin because they make the network more resilient against certain types of attack. |
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You are mistaken. It's not a public good -- a 'block' is the private property of the miner/whatever entity who discovered it. Selling pieces of that block to interested parties (who want to make transactions) is the whole point.
That's like saying that a public park is private property of the construction company who was commissioned to build it. A block does NOT behave like a private good. It behaves like a common good. It needs to be stored, at a cost, by ALL miners and ALL full nodes for all eternity. Not just by the original miner. Otherwise it is completely useless to the buyer. |
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Public goods, the 'pedia says, are non-rivalrous. That does not sound akin to block space at all at all.
Might have to give ya "commons" though...
-MarkM-
Ok, let me be more precise: Hashrate is a public goodBlock space is common goodBoth goods are vital to bitcoin's survival and both are currently financed by the same fee. Finding the "correct price" of those types of goods is not a trivial task. [edit:] Even less trivial for bitcoin, because in the current implementation, both prices are coupled. What is the "correct price" for hashrate might not be the "correct price" for block space and vice versa. |
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price discovery.
You are aware that price discovery does not work with public goods? |
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Sippenhaftung? [edit:] Nein, war anscheinend nur ein Fehler der Bank. Mit Bitcoin wäre aber sein Vermögen menschlichen Fehlern nicht hilflos ausgeliefert. Mit der Ausnahme von seinen eigenen Fehlern natürlich.  |
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Although the long-term impact of price fluctuations on the Bitcoin market is unknown, the ability of the market to stabilize itself after the technical glitch may make the currency increasingly appealing to cyber criminals, money launderers and terrorists.
One of the most hilarious non-sequiturs I've read in an article about bitcoin. They are not even bothering to finish the sentence before changing the topic by 180 degrees. |
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The problem with tying your wealth to private keys is that non-geeks (and even some geeks) are inevitably going to lose them, or expose them by accident.
Tying your wealth to your real identity would be more secure and more user friendly, but it would sacrifice privacy.
I'm not sure how this could be done in bitcoin, but here is an idea:
You could create a special multisig transaction that needs to have 20-of-100 signatures before you can spend it. Then you choose 100 family and friends and give each of them a private key.
So before you can spend your coins, 20 of your friends need to "tell" the bitcoin system that address X really belongs to you and hasn't been compromised.
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Don't panic. Unconfirmed only means the transaction hasn't made it into a block yet. In practice, this means that the recipient has received the money but has to wait for confirmation in order to spend it safely. Sometimes it might take an hour or two for confirmation.
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Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
You are too stupid to be here. Please leave. Yeah, that's really persuasive. |
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MPOE-PR:
Irrespective of them being idiots or not, the bitcoin devs owe nothing to you.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If you feel strongly that something needs to be done urgently, then start a Kickstarter campaign to hire a team of "real" developers to clean up the code and write a specification.
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Bitcoin has fewer bugs than most professional software I've used.
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Centralized exchanges are only a temporary fix. Once Ripple and other p2p exchange mechanisms gain popularity, it will be impossible to enforce trading hours.
If I want to trade with a friend of a friend at 3am on Christmas eve, and there is no central authority executing our trades, who is going to stop us?
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