I glad to see startups that are betting everything on bitcoin, I am currently betting everything on bitcoin and winning. I could be writing applications for banks to be more greedy, or HFT that does quote stuffing, but I am not. I am working for myself and that is the best feeling. So I understand how these companies feel. Good Luck to all of them.
... and good luck to you too gweedo. Working for yourself is the best feeling  |
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I have absolutely no issue about the persons. I'm sorry.
My point is that it is far too easy for someone to "own the btc market".
Am I wrong?
They don't "own" the market. Sure, right now there are lots of people who own a lot of bitcoins, but there is nothing we can should do about it if we want to respect economic freedom, and normally it should get more and more difficult to acquire lots of bitcoins as the market expands. Exactly. Some People here sound as if they have a problem with Guys getting rich. Strangely that are often also the ones falling for the get rich quick schemes.  Sound like? huh? didn't you read my argument? you very well know what it means to own percents of an unregulated currency. the holders can be as good as it gets, but it is still a problem. Just as it is in fiat system. they are humans who can get greedy and form cartel with other investors ,and sell whole junk to central bank for example. You seem to have quickly and conveniently forgotten that bitcoins were basically worthless a few short years ago ... therefore a corollary to that is that anybody who is doing well out of them now or has done so in the past has done it completely off their own bat (except for the thieves and fraudsters of course) ... you, and anyone else is perfectly free, and welcome, to create your own worthless crypto-currency that you can then attempt to enrich yourself with. Wealth envy towards fraudsters, thieves and corrupt banksters, politicians and connected elites who parlay influence into ill-gotten gains maybe justified but toward people who have created wealth out of nothing it is a disgusting thing to behold. It is the moral and ethical equivalent of watching someone build a beautiful piece of furniture or even a whole house with their own hands and then another saying, "they don't deserve that, he shouldn't be allowed to own a house/car/chair/bittoken like that" ... how fucked up is that? |
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Who would have thought just two short years ago that BBC would be quoting F. Hayek's "Denationalisation of Money" ... bitcoin is already a success because it has created a platform for monetary freedom and opened people's eyes to the obvious root of so many of today's problems in society, bad govt. money.
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Important work. Also if bitcoin does not adopt a robust privacy strategy it risks another alt-coin will gain a competitive first mover advantage for what I consider to be an extremely desirable (marketable) property for monetary instruments.
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Wow, there are a lot of threads popping up today on new ideas for Decentralized Exchanges. (I can't imagine why...) I started one myself 5 hours ago.  Allow me to throw some ideas on the fire, as this thread seems to have gotten further than the others. 1. Your concerns about how to port in real-world cash are unfounded. There already exists an industry of businesses that will take cash in many forms and give virtual credits, including bitcoins, for them... BitInstant, Dwolla, OKPay, coinbase, ArumXchange, and many others can upload cash into this exchange in one or more forms. Let them deal with this headache; there are many of them so there is no central point of failure there. 2. To really replace MtGox and have real-time graphs and trades like we all want to see, the core of this beast must always determine the other clients running within a short enough pingtime's distance. (So trades can happen in milliseconds, not multiple seconds.) If a client logs on, looks around for other clients, & notes all of their pingtimes, the client can be a real-time, graph-displaying trading platform for everyone within a decent pingtime of you! True, this means that someone in Kansas isn't likely to see the trades of someone in Perth... But that's the nature of decentralization. The going price of a bitcoin would therefore not be global, but regional... Although the regions are likely to be continents, not cities. You'd trade quickly with those closer to you (pingtime-wise) and if you can't find your trade there, I guess it would be a good idea to include an OTC board in the package too, or port in #bitcoin-otc somehow. (Note: VPNs could be used for people that live far away from population centers to reduce pingtimes, too!) 3. No marketing will be needed. (!) If each client for this exchange gives the fees to the person running the client where the trade happened, then it is self-incentivized to spread much like how bitcoin miners get paid to mine. I've got some very specific ideas about how to make this part work, but for now all you need to know is that everyone with an internet connection would want to run this client because it would literally pay them to just run on their PCs. (And they wouldn't need expensive GPUs.) More details on this step later. 4. No miners needed. A lot of the data that runs across these clients need not be encrypted... You want the world to know what the current price for each currency is, for instance... It's just the ownership of things on it you must secure, so no processing of SHAs here, just good, secure ledger keeping. Every client should be both a place for you to log in and make trades, and a place for other people to trade on. If run this way, it will use a bit of bandwidth (think: bittorrent) but not any advanced hashing that requires special equipment like GPUs. Enjoy the ideas; I'll add some more later. Geez. 6 pages before there's finally a reasonable post Thank you! Much of this does seem like it can be done by OpenTransactions or Ripple. I'm still concerned about being able to execute trades without someone being able to take BTC (or a trade confirmation) and not send the USD/EUR. Has anyone come up with a way to verify that both parties have actually sent their part of the trade without relying on a central service? In all these discussions, these have been the #1 problems to be solved. Virtual currency and ledgers are easy, or at least doable, but depositing money into the system, and verifying fiat side transactions, are still a big  There are some really good ideas and points in here, particularly this one Your concerns about how to port in real-world cash are unfounded. There already exists an industry of businesses that will take cash in many forms and give virtual credits, including bitcoins, for them... BitInstant, Dwolla, OKPay, coinbase, ArumXchange, and many others can upload cash into this exchange in one or more forms. Let them deal with this headache; there are many of them so there is no central point of failure there. It seems like the P2P client exchange could have a "standard" voucher/virtual credit/token (whatever you call it) to represent that someone has deposited fiat cash into the P2P exchange system. Those tokens can then be cryptographically locked up when a user commits to trade, using a smart contract escrow or similar, and then released when bot sides are happy the trade has been completed, i.e. P2P token credits are released to seller and bitcoins released to buyer. The crucial thing here is the standardising of the virtual P2P tokens that represent that fiat cash has gone into the system through one of the known issuers (BitInstant, Dwolla, OKPay, coinbase, AuramXchange, etc) ... so maybe it is simply a matter of someone releasing a good enough Open Source standardised format for P2P fiat token representations that all these fiat exchangers will adopt because it then gives them access to users of the P2P exchange client? |
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Ah.. she's so cute.....  Love at first sight ! Can just see these growing out of USB ports the world over ... like little replicators, seemingly sprouting from nowhere to infest computer gear |
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Proudhorn says: He's right, you know, because the only resource consumed by government currency is paper. This is sadly misinformed. The resources consumed by poorly managed govt. paper currency (which they all inevitably are since humans are fallible) also encompasses all the waste associated with the gross mis-allocation of capital and resources that come about from centrally-planned financing ... it is not just mere few bits of coloured paper expended but the complete screw up of the economic system that needs to be accounted for ... count that up and get back to us. Edit: Patiently waiting for krugman's follow up post titled "Adam Smith Hates Federal Reserve Banking" |
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I'm having trouble enjoying this - he obviously doesn't understand how difficulty governs the hashpower thrown at the network. I'm actually stunned he can't figure that out.
Nah man, there is so much more to securing the network. The hash produces a proof of work, not much moar. There's the need to secure the sig scripts so that tx's can't be altered. There's the need to prevent DDoSing the network overall with packet floods, all kinds of quirks to the protocol. So many possible attack vectors that satoshi practically covers them all in the 0.1 release. Some day he will get a nobel prize in economics for this invention. .... a Nobelesque prize to recognise society-changing coding/engineering feats ... like TCP/IP, WWW (http) , linux, etc ... particularly open source, i.e. non-commercial contributions? |
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While I'm glad Dan has written this, what amounts to a retraction of his previous what I would call denigration of Bitcoin, I'm also a little saddened.
It is like when watching a great champion get beaten in his twilight years ....
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Amazing.
Wonder if krugman ever had the courage to analyze what Adam Smith would have made of a scheme to eternally expand govt. debt-based money as a means of financing a wholly dysfunctional centrally planned economic system?
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But I trust a P2P open order book more than I can trust the orderbook of a server that easily can be hacked or ddosed.
So, effectively, the brokers publish promises as their order book? Does this get linked to a particular customer? If you place a sell order, you then see it on the public list? How are cancels handled? In theory, you could have the exchanges actually act as banks. For example, they could issue chaum digital cash. Mt. Gox could give you 10 Mt. Gox dollar for $10 and buy 10 of them back for $9.90 (or whatever spread made them profitable). These "dollars" could then be traded using a alt-chain. In fact, you could exploit the main chain if you wanted to. You could use the coloured coin idea with 1 satoshi coins = $1. Basically, coins generated from a particular source would be alt-coins. For example, if the coin came from a particular address. However, an alt chain might be better. However, it is done, mints convert fiat to/from digital tokens and then they can be handled digitally. A Federation of OpenTransactions signing servers could have this system up and running in 2-6 months (maybe less if more resources) ... the "exchange servers" are not so much exchanges as Notaries that sign off on any trades/transfers that pass through them ... i.e. it is questionable whether they need to worry about MSB BS because they do not actually transfer anything, just sign off on it. |
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Well historically if we look at the full history of BTC it has deflated at a rate of around 1000% a year, or roughly one order of magnitude per year. In its MOST stable period which was 2012 it managed to only increase 300% but this was a lull between two massive bubbles and crashes. So I think it's quite reasonable to say that BTC lives up to it's intended deflationary nature and is by any reasonable definition is hyper-deflationary.
Yes but this during adoption phase when the needed network effect to establish as a currency is being established. Bitcoin does no have the luxury of a big bad govt. overnight declaring it the coin of the Internets (and wouldn't want to anyway). That order of magnitude per year is a figure Vladimir and I discussed way back in late 2010 I think and is a ballpark figure to keep in mind as the network adoption is growing. Networks often grow exponentially over fixed time periods ... until they mature. So this most recent run up could be seen as the combination of reverting to exponential growth after being beaten down by previous Gox fiasco ... so should have been $10 at end of 2011, $100 at end of 2012 ... and euphoria looking towards end of 2013 ($1000). |
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warning!!!warning!!!warning!!!
... "something has to be done" brigade have shown up,
lights flashing, emergency sirens blaring, something must be done, I tell you.
Asshat discussion is that way -> Ah I disagree, the asshat discussion is right here ... you started it. You haven't got a clue what you are talking about .... ... but something must be done, I tell you! |
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warning!!!warning!!!warning!!!
... "something has to be done" brigade have shown up,
lights flashing, emergency sirens blaring, something must be done, I tell you.
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Could you not redirect the "surplus" hashpower to another pool of your choice (P2Pool springs to mind) until the "threat" has passed?
Details around fees might be problematic but I'd imagine there might be a smaller pool or two out there that might be happy to get the boost from time to time and forgo fees for a super miner like BTCGuild overflow.
Problem is having control of such hashing power in the first place. Distributing it around really doesn't help on that. There is still potential to grab it and use it. They go and distribute the hashing power. Now, if they were to stop this at one point and try something like double spent attack? There is nothing to prevent this, apart from not gaining the power in the first place. Well it all comes down to who got what blocks right? If BTCGuild is not stamping out more than 51% of the blocks there is no threat ... it doesn't matter how that hashpower got directed towards the blocks. Who directs that hashpower? And can you trust them not to abuse the power at any point? Getting the blocks isn't really the issue. It's the fact that they have potential for it. And this should be avoided. You must be overlooking the point of why the pools were set up in the beginning ... to reduce variability. People already implicitly trust the pool when they direct their own mining power to it. As a miner, if you are really worried about the pool operator "abusing your hash power" why would you point your miner at it? All Eleutheria is trying to achieve is to show to the bitcoin network he is beyond reproach, clearly his miners already think this or else how does he achieve > 51% in the first place? As long as BTCGuild is not stamping more than 51% of the blocks it is immaterial where the hashpower comes from or goes to, or even who is directing it. In fact, if that pledge is given by BTCGuild (or whoever) and they are seen to be going above that then they would lose the power quite quickly I'd assume ... unless the miners really are as idiotically hellbent on over subscribing to one pool as they seem to be. |
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might be time to change the OP title ... "Bitcoin needs bitfloor's help!"
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I like it, awesome concept. Seems like a good fit for tons human recognisable applications. Old made new again. Take it off it de-activates, maybe even a future mechanism for the ring to authenticate the wearer ... dna on a chip, etc. |
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"cooldown" ... "rollback" ... goxxed again!
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Could you not redirect the "surplus" hashpower to another pool of your choice (P2Pool springs to mind) until the "threat" has passed?
Details around fees might be problematic but I'd imagine there might be a smaller pool or two out there that might be happy to get the boost from time to time and forgo fees for a super miner like BTCGuild overflow.
Problem is having control of such hashing power in the first place. Distributing it around really doesn't help on that. There is still potential to grab it and use it. They go and distribute the hashing power. Now, if they were to stop this at one point and try something like double spent attack? There is nothing to prevent this, apart from not gaining the power in the first place. Well it all comes down to who got what blocks right? If BTCGuild is not stamping out more than 51% of the blocks there is no threat ... it doesn't matter how that hashpower got directed towards the blocks. |
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Economists who like inflation and are terrified of deflation are not being rational. Both hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation are terrible. Both high inflation and high deflation cause economic problems. Both low inflation and low deflation are tolerable, but are not ideal. The ideal is no inflation and no deflation.
Or abolish any central monopolistic "official" currency.  Let people decide what to use as a currency. Then basically everything is an asset. Like Hayek's free market of currencies, but today it would be more than that, it would be more like a rich eco-system. There'd be different exchange and value systems which are native to different main use cases. There'd be regional currencies, metal currencies, internet (crypto-) currencies, business-to-business clearing, company-issued vouchers, and so on. As there'd also be some overlap, they'd all balance each other out. This is the vision ... I'm glad other people are seeing it too. |
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