I think every message is signed with the private key. You can not modify it.
A Bitcoin transaction is signed with the private key, but public addresses can certainly be rewritten on the fly. |
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Has anyone considered a rather cheap but effective attack on someone using Bitcoin? It seems to me that all someone would need to do to potentially steal a bunch of coins from someone is to simply set up some kind of network sniffer that detects any Bitcoin addresses being sent, and rewrites them with an address from the attacker's wallet. For instance, if I am using Bitcoin at work, a malicious sysadmin could set up a proxy server that automatically rewrites all unencrypted Bitcoin addresses I am receiving with addresses from his own Bitcoin wallet. This wouldn't work for web sites that were loading with HTTPS, but it would work for any other unencrypted traffic it seems. This could be really bad if someone messaged me a Bitcoin address to send a bunch of BTC to and it got rewritten. I bet the opposite could be done as well, where the attacker rewrites all Bitcoin addresses going out. I try to submit a withdrawal address to someone or some site, and it gets rewritten with the attacker's address, so they receive any BTC that gets cashed out. Any way to stop this attack?
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@dissapate
I had not seen operation fabulous, the site still needs some work and the wording isn't exactly conducive to SEO (i.e. Advertise With Bitcoins in a h1 tag). But I'll have to check it out. Have you tried it?
I have not, but I did see them advertised on a number of Bitcoin sites. |
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In a way, buying bitcoins is an investment in all bitcoin related companies. You'll stand to benefit if any one or several of them are successful.
So why are you involved with bit-pay? You could have just bought up a bunch of BTC instead. Are you doing charity work for the rest of us?  |
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My opinion is: who cares about legal definitions? Bitcoin is whatever you want it to be.
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Hey, I never said it was likely.
But some parts of bitcoin's design were made with the assumption that it would not be small for long. If bitcoin ends up in a couple of niches, the mining reward won't be enough to pay for security and/or the fees will be too high to be useful. In the long run, of course.
Yes, that is a potential problem. A weakness of Bitcoin is that there is no direct demand for security of the blockchain. In other words, those using Bitcoin don't really care if the next block is generated at a difficulty of 1 or a difficulty of 1 quadrillion. They just want their transactions to go through. If the price of Bitcoin stays too low, this could be a problem. The miners would continue to mine at a rate that is profitable, but that could mean a lot less security, and diminishing security for the blockchain. If Bitcoin simply had a fixed reward for miners forever this wouldn't be as much of a problem. I believe there were other spinoff cryptocurrencies that went this route. I don't think this would fly with the current group of Bitcoin enthusiasts though, because they love the fact that there will only ever be 21 million BTC in existence. We will see how this plays out... |
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Probably by something more suitable to those niches coming around and displacing bitcoin. But other ways are possible too.
The only thing that could replace Bitcoin for those niches is another cryptocurrency. I think it is unlikely for another cryptocurrency to displace Bitcoin anytime soon because it would have to be far superior, and have a greater amount of developers and talent behind it. It would have to be so superior that Bitcoin couldn't have something else built on top of it to catch up, or simply have features added to the protocol or clients. That's quite a tall order. In any event, it could happen with a well funded corporate backed cryptocurrency where the corporation was willing to spend more money right now on a developer team. They open source the cryptocurrency itself (just like Bitcoin), but they use their expertise of the currency to bundle it into other 'killer apps' that they monetize. Even in this scenario though, it is not clear what advantage the corporation would have in developing the new cryptocurrency over just using Bitcoin.The lack of developer resources for Bitcoin itself is probably the biggest weakness it has right now. But who with deep pockets would be willing to pump a lot of cash into such a venture described above? None that I can see right now. |
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Sadly, the killer app for Bitcoin seems to be none other than regional-level mail order illegal drug trade.
Central to the notion of a "killer app" is something which may be as-yet unseen and unknown, but which will revolutionize usage when it comes about. Thus, to say Bitcoin's "killer app" is drug trade, merely because that's a common usage now, is to misunderstand the concept of killer apps. In all likelihood, none of us know what the killer app will be, and indeed there may be many since Bitcoin is such a versatile and enabling technology. I agree 100% with this. Nobody could possibly have predicted what the 'killer apps' of the Internet would be back in the '70s. What Bitcoin is being used for now and who is using Bitcoin now could be radically different from how it is used and who is using it in the future. Bitcoin is a protocol that can have all kinds of layers built on top of it, many of which could completely hide Bitcoin entirely. In that case, Bitcoin would just be a back end system of wealth transfer. |
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Looks like this is being done through thefundersclub.com. From their 'How It Works' page https://thefundersclub.com/site/howitworks/: Who can invest in FundersClub funds?
Accredited US investors can invest in FundersClub funds. Accredited investors are defined as individuals with greater than $200,000 of annual income (or $300,000 combined income with a spouse) or investors with $1 million or greater personal net worth, not including their primary residence. Entities in which all of the equity owners fall within the “individual” qualifications, as well as trusts with total assets greater than $5 million whose purchase is directed by a person with knowledge and experience in financial and business matters that such person is capable of evaluating the merits and risks of the prospective investment may also invest. All potential investors will need to complete an investor qualification questionnaire, which will be part of the legal documents you will need to sign, before any investment request is accepted. So you have to be fairly wealthy to invest. Lame lame lame.  |
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I think that in one of his speeches, Gavin put it something like this: Years from now, 1 bitcoin will be worth either a lot, or nothing at all. It is very unlikely to be around the same price it is now.
I fully support that view. It doesn't mean that bitcoin must be "all". It doesn't mean that it has to be everywhere and do everything. But it'll either take off and be pretty big, or it'll vanish into the mists of history.
Care to explain how it will vanish into the mists of history when there are clearly niche markets that can never be served by regulated fiat currencies or payment systems? |
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Sorry to say but that segment was terrible for the layperson. If that segment was my introduction to Bitcoin, I would have been confused out of my mind. Why didn't they give some kind of introduction to Bitcoin before the interviews?  Also, the hostess was pretty bad. Saying you don't know about the subject you are interviewing about makes you sound weak and makes it sound like you shouldn't be doing the interviews at all. |
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What math background is needed for the course?
The course is mostly self contained, however some knowledge of discrete probability will be helpful. The wikibooks article on discrete probability should give sufficient background.
That's a relief. However, as far as I know, to really understand cryptography, you have to know some crazy high level math. |
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Pensioners are often forced to retire against their will, have most of their pensions stolen from them, and rarely if ever get pension hikes. Inflation hurts pensioners more than working people (who get pay rises). At least in the US, many public sector workers get pensions that are indexed to inflation so they are insulated from all that. Not to mention that their health benefits are usually far more expensive than the monthly stipend they receive. If those pensions are indexed to the CPI, they aren't insulated. It is well known that the CPI is very flawed and underrepresents the true inflation rate. For instance, food and gas are excluded from it. Who doesn't buy food or gas? |
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Interesting. Awhile back he had put a message at that URL saying he was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations. He also went into the Bitcoin channels on freenode IRC and said that he didn't want to promote Bitcoin to his fans, and that was his reason for pulling the address. |
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Did anyone notice that bitdaytrade is still listed as a sponsor even though their site got hacked to hell and was shut down?  |
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I'm careful to explain that in several years, one bitcoin will likely be worth a lot of money or nothing at all, and almost certainly not what they are worth today.
Oh no! You didn't fall for the 'all or nothing' fallacy, did you? Discussion on that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99689.0 is not all. True, I guess we could call it "going big or going bust" fallacy. |
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I'm careful to explain that in several years, one bitcoin will likely be worth a lot of money or nothing at all, and almost certainly not what they are worth today.
Oh no! You didn't fall for the 'all or nothing' fallacy, did you? Discussion on that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99689.0 |
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Has anyone noticed that half the threads in the "Bitcoin Discussion" sub forum have to be moved? I'm not naming names but some of them are from long time posters who are posting threads that obviously don't belong there (e.g. service announcements). What is going on? Maybe we need a 'list of shame' for these individuals. |
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