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Don't use the word "anonymous". The person who hears that word will assume it means something quite different from how Bitcoin works.
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... how would the honest nodes know to reject my blocks? If my proof of work is longer and the blocks I fake are recent?
An honest node can check the transaction signatures. No matter how long your proof of work is, you can't fake other people's signatures. So all you can put into your fake blocks is honest transactions plus your own double-spends. Of course, if you can trick other people into using your modified client, then that client can show those people that they have a balance of three pink unicorns. But it won't convince the rest of the network of that. |
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If you cant get your hands on Bitcoins because Central banks are throwing them away...
If a central bank did start destroying bitcoins, you wouldn't need to get your hands on so many bitcoins (to get the same spending power). If a central bank or other organization wants to harm bitcoin, they will need to do it in ways other than by market forces. For example, by spreading a virus that steals people's wallets. |
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If this is a valid attack what happens in the source code to stabilize the currency in this situation?
The source code does nothing about this! If someone sells their bitcoins to the central bank because they prefer fiat currency to bitcoins, it's not my problem. And if the bank destroys those bitcoins, it's also not a problem for me. Bitcoin is not for those who have drunk the "deflation is evil" Kool-Aid. |
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It looks like it was just one big sale taking the price down. Check back in a day or two to see if there's any momentum behind the drop.
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If you charge a large but fixed fee per wire, maybe €50, a resale market will naturally arise.
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The letter probably needs to include links to Satoshi's paper and to the source code repository.
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The high returns last year are a bit misleading, because most people were mining with CPUs and it was not possible to achieve anything near 100 MHash/s.
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So as a 5870 user starting in a pool as of FEb 17. Would it be wise for me to go solo or just stay in the pool?
You could join the pool at first, just so you know that your rig is working. Otherwise, it may go for days without generating, and you will find yourself wondering if it is working properly. When you are happy that your rig is working, you can switch to solo mining to get 2% more coins, on average. With a 5870 you will average just over one block a week, but some weeks you will get 2 or 3 blocks, and sometimes you will go 2 or 3 weeks before you get a block. It's very variable. |
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It’d be like 26,6 according to 146.4m/5.5m at least.
One percent of the 146.4 billion turnover is 1.464 billion, not 146.4 million. |
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If each bitcoin had to be spent 300 times if equal to 1% of the internet economy (at time of article)... is that like saying 1 bitcoin would be worth 300 dollars?  No. You have to take the velocity of money into account. Suppose I buy something from Amazon with bitcoins. Amazon then pays their employees with those coins. Those employees buy other stuff with their wages. The same money goes round and round in the economy. This is called the velocity of money. Based on the 2006 figures that I quoted above, 1% of the US internet economy is around 1.5 billion dollars. If bitcoins were being used for that, it would equal $300 of transactions per bitcoin (1.5 billion divided by 5 million). If each bitcoin was spent 300 times during the year to support that amount of trade, then each bitcoin would be worth $1. If each bitcoin was spent only 30 times per year, then each bitcoin would be worth $10. If we look at bitcoinwatch.com we see that over the past 24 hours, 108641 out of 5450000 coins were transacted. That's 2% of all coins changing hands per day, meaning that on average each coin changes hands just over 7 times per year. But that's not quite the figure we want. It doesn't reflect purchases of tangible goods (it could be just people moving coins from one wallet to another, or back and forth between their wallet and MtGox). Also, it doesn't include people who make purchases using the shopping cart interfaces of MtGox, MyBitcoin, etc. In fact the velocity of money is almost impossible to measure, and most economists don't even try. On the other hand, the value of a bitcoin (or a dollar) is easy to observe, so that's what people measure. |
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Just to clarify, my pledge is 100 BTC for the second person to do it on a different day, before the end of this month.
However, if the two people both do it on the same day (which they might find easier), I'll send them each 25 BTC.
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It won't take long before ... some "authorities" will start bugging our asses about it.
I think it's likely that the authorities will bug people's asses much harder about the monetary aspects of bitcoin than the illicit substances aspect. |
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If two people do it (before the end of Feb 2010), I'll donate 100 BTC to the second person.
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By the way, if the bitcoin economy grew to be 1 percent of internet trade, how much money in dollar terms would you say that would represent?
Here are some US figures from Wikipedia, a few years old, but 1% of that would be one and a half billion dollars: E-commerce B2C product sales totaled $146.4 billion in the United States in 2006, representing about 6% of retail product sales in the country For 1% of US internet trade, and with 5 million bitcoins issued, and at their current value of around a dollar, each coin would need to be spent 300 times per year. |
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Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you are methodical about backing up your bitcoin wallet file, it might not hurt to have a few coins elsewhere (e.g. MyBitcoin). Spread the risk.
Also, consider using more than one bitcoin wallet on your computer. Otherwise, if you make a typo and accidentally send 1234 bitcoins instead of 0.1234 bitcoins, you've lost everything.
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So you do agree then that Satoshi drinks your milkshake?
The best analogy I can come up with is this. Satoshi filled his milkshake, but didn't drink yet because it tastes terrible. We fill our milkshakes and start to drink. At first they taste terrible, but we keep drinking. Gradually our milkshakes taste better and better. And by the time Satoshi eventually drinks his milkshake [...] it tastes mighty sweet, thanks to everyone else. This metaphor was intended to show the symbiotic nature of bitcoin. We needed Satoshi to invent Bitcoin so that we could benefit from it. But equally, Satoshi needed us to use Bitcoin so that he could benefit from it. Satoshi could have generated endless bitcoins, but they would be of no value to him unless we were generating and using our own bitcoins. Our actions gave value/sweetness to Satoshi's bitcoins/milkshake. |
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... there are laudable aspects to wanting to better your own position, but when that comes at the expense of altruism you cross the line ...
If you hang around this forum a while, you will see countless examples of altruistic behavior from self-professed libertarians. Libertarianism rejects the idea of being forced to be altruistic, but it doesn't reject voluntary altruism. It shows a lack of understanding of the human spirit to imagine that people are "good enough" to coerce others into being "altruistic" through the mechanisms of the state, yet are not "good enough" to be altruistic in the absence of a coercive state. Anyway, history shows that those who wield control in a coercive state are more likely to enrich themselves than be altruistic. |
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One problem is it isn't always obvious what is and is not "dust" or "spam".
Quite apart from the technical difficulties of distinguishing spam, one person's spam is always another person's ham. Bitcoin should be free of value judgements. Any transaction fee should be independent of transaction value. |
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