Ok, lets give a run down of what we have going on:
Bitcoin - the oldtimer that has all of the hype. It is first to market, and is unlikely to disappear for decades (centuries) to come even if something else replaces it. It is the original, and people like originals, and that is the only reason it has value over the other coins. You could argue mining power, but that is because of value, and thus is derived from hype.
Litecoin - AKA, darn, I wish I could have mined bitcoin, and F that, I am not buying fancy hardware. Besides, all that fancy hardware just makes for less democratic mining, and wasn't that what satoshi really wanted.
Namecoin - Bitcoin is pretty neat, lets make it do something useful besides a system of accounting. This would continue to be awesome, but they did merge mining with bitcoin and rely on ASICs and whatever, who wants to f with that.
One million litecoin and bitcoin clones. Each thinking they are special because they use a cuddly panda bear as a logo and have a different mining rate, hashing system, etc. Some try to justify mining better with the fact they are solving primes or whatever, but really, mining is never the point. Mining is the hack that makes a distributed accounting system work.
My crystal ball says the true winner, maybe even to be a tough contender for bitcoin, doesn't exist yet, but I will describe it here for those who want to keep an eye out for it.
* It would use scrypt or some other hashing that is cpu bound and would have 1 minute blocks because really, that is ideal.
* Mining would start by default, and it would be super easy to add a pool in the client. The client would also have the best mining tool built in and just be a button press to start stop. Ideally pooled mining would be decentralized.
* It would not have some crazy deflationary thing built in, but provide a steady stream of currency forever. Yeah, it is boring, but we aren't trying to replace gold here, we are trying to replace dollars, and other fiats. They aren't get rich quick things, but things to build an economy of transactions on.
* It will allow you to do a lot more than just transfer money between addresses:
** You will be able to create a new colored coin at a 1-1 ratio for a small fee
** You will be able to set a key=>value store just like in namecoin
** Escrow (but most coins have that)
** Put colored coins up for sale at a certain price point for a certain number of blocks
** Put up actual ecommerce style listings and include a checkout and rating system
** Put up news / messages
** Send private messages
This is all the stuff I could think of at the moment. But bitcoin is a distributed account ledger and data store, and basic transactions are only the beginning.
Other tidbits: I feel that it should not use bitcoin-qt as the base environment. Python, or a web server running on a desktop with a html/css/js frontend would be superior so that front end development would grow rapidly.
Oh and yes, I could see another altcoin succeeding without any new features. It would be one created and backed by a government, and I see that happening someday soon. Perhaps part of it's transaction fees would be collected automatically as taxes. It would have the backing of men with guns and probably some old ideas attached to it, and thus its appeal.
The value of any altcoin is just what makes it different, and just changing some basic parameter in mining and generation isn't going to do it.
That is insightful. Thanks for chiming in on the newbie board to give us something to chew on. You are correct...if a government puts out a coin, it will be used. I don't think it would rise in vaule though because they don't like major flucuations. They would pre-mine it all and just use it for transactions of large amounts. I am not sure we would even know about it...in fact, maybe it's already out there. Thank you. A govt will of course pre-mine, but they will have to sell the idea of their currency. They can also impose rules into the chain about a certain amount goes to govt accounts, and set a nice steady inflation rate which will make everyone feel happy. They won't have to bother with taxes, and they have the option of saying fees partially go to them. They could set up scripts to automatically portion out the coins to the segments of government. If every citizen has a registered address, a portion of the taxes could be distributed in various ways. Basically this will eliminate a lot of the bureaucracy of government accounting, establish trust in the handling of currency, and eliminate the need to go out and collect taxes. In essence everyone is taxed via the fixed inflation based upon their currency holdings and transactions fees (which could use bytes + coin amount as the fee). This would be great as it would make a very transparent govt - all transactions would flow from tax income through the hierarchy and right down to govt workers. Also, taxes would be taken at a constant rate, so there wouldn't be a huge amount of money dumped during tax time. Politicans would be able to flow money in a constant way to various departments in a traceable way. As far as the value of alt-coins with very little differentiating factors - buying/selling them seems a little silly if you are just doing it for a name or some starting parameter. Seemingly paradoxically, I think alt-coins of all sorts are a fantastic thing. I could see schools, neighborhoods, or just groups of friends create a coin to establish a community based economy. Or perhaps one that could be used in an online game/forum. There are just so many random fun ideas that can be kicked around. This is why I get kinda depressed when I see just another coin being used as a get rich quick scheme. Put a little heart and creativity into things. Pretty Please  And if getting rich quick is your motivation, keep in mind being different is the best way to getting there. |
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Ok, lets give a run down of what we have going on:
Bitcoin - the oldtimer that has all of the hype. It is first to market, and is unlikely to disappear for decades (centuries) to come even if something else replaces it. It is the original, and people like originals, and that is the only reason it has value over the other coins. You could argue mining power, but that is because of value, and thus is derived from hype.
Litecoin - AKA, darn, I wish I could have mined bitcoin, and F that, I am not buying fancy hardware. Besides, all that fancy hardware just makes for less democratic mining, and wasn't that what satoshi really wanted.
Namecoin - Bitcoin is pretty neat, lets make it do something useful besides a system of accounting. This would continue to be awesome, but they did merge mining with bitcoin and rely on ASICs and whatever, who wants to f with that.
One million litecoin and bitcoin clones. Each thinking they are special because they use a cuddly panda bear as a logo and have a different mining rate, hashing system, etc. Some try to justify mining better with the fact they are solving primes or whatever, but really, mining is never the point. Mining is the hack that makes a distributed accounting system work.
My crystal ball says the true winner, maybe even to be a tough contender for bitcoin, doesn't exist yet, but I will describe it here for those who want to keep an eye out for it.
* It would use scrypt or some other hashing that is cpu bound and would have 1 minute blocks because really, that is ideal.
* Mining would start by default, and it would be super easy to add a pool in the client. The client would also have the best mining tool built in and just be a button press to start stop. Ideally pooled mining would be decentralized.
* It would not have some crazy deflationary thing built in, but provide a steady stream of currency forever. Yeah, it is boring, but we aren't trying to replace gold here, we are trying to replace dollars, and other fiats. They aren't get rich quick things, but things to build an economy of transactions on.
* It will allow you to do a lot more than just transfer money between addresses:
** You will be able to create a new colored coin at a 1-1 ratio for a small fee
** You will be able to set a key=>value store just like in namecoin
** Escrow (but most coins have that)
** Put colored coins up for sale at a certain price point for a certain number of blocks
** Put up actual ecommerce style listings and include a checkout and rating system
** Put up news / messages
** Send private messages
This is all the stuff I could think of at the moment. But bitcoin is a distributed account ledger and data store, and basic transactions are only the beginning.
Other tidbits: I feel that it should not use bitcoin-qt as the base environment. Python, or a web server running on a desktop with a html/css/js frontend would be superior so that front end development would grow rapidly.
Oh and yes, I could see another altcoin succeeding without any new features. It would be one created and backed by a government, and I see that happening someday soon. Perhaps part of it's transaction fees would be collected automatically as taxes. It would have the backing of men with guns and probably some old ideas attached to it, and thus its appeal.
The value of any altcoin is just what makes it different, and just changing some basic parameter in mining and generation isn't going to do it.
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If 0.001 is millibits would 0.0001 be ten millibit-cents (0.1 mBTC) or "point 1 millibits". 0.0001 = 10000 Satoshis, so we could just skip right to the chase and say ten-thousand satoshi. I think there has been quite a few currencies in the world that worked with such large numbers for buying things like a cup of coffee. 100,000,000 Satoshis is one bitcoin, so even if bitcoin drops back to dollar parity, we will still be able to talk about them as 100 million satoshis. Really, this whole decimal point thing is a pain in the arse, and is totally unnecessary. Bitcoins are stored as ints anyway, and the decimal point 8 digits in was just a convenient display thing early on when bitcoins weren't worth much. What about
00.00000001 = 1 satoshi (1 s or 1 sat)
00.00001000 = 1 thousandkilo-satoshi (1 ks or 1 ksat)
00.01000000 = 1 millionmega-satoshi (1 Ms or Msat)
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I stepped out of the physical cryptocurrency business as it seemed a little too risky with current moves by the feds. You can however still print out the bills I used here: http://print.printcoins.com/and it include instructions as well as source code (so you don't have to trust my server with private key production). I was making these back when bitcoins were about $3 a piece, so the smallest denomination is $0.01. If someone wants to tweak the code to go smaller, feel free to submit it up to github and I will update the site. Perhaps they should be printed in mBTC now with some special coloration to signify the change. |
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Sold to early eh?
Lol, neither. I am anti-speculation. |
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Guess I shouldn't post after reading too many postings about bitcoins in the news. Kinda made me grumpy and maybe a little trolly.
All of what I read is bitcoin is worth $X, or it is this volatile, or so on and so forth.
The thing I was implying rather obtusely is that it is not worth a damn thing in dollars just as a euro isn't worth a damn thing in dollars, except on the rare occasions that you need to convert the two.
I would be happy if the news was no longer about the gyrations in the $/BTC conversions and how BTC compares to gold, and instead talked about how great an enabler it is of creating economic prosperity through nearly frictionless transactions. Bitcoin doesn't even store balances, it stores transactions. They are the root of what this is all about.
I sometimes think it would have been better for bitcoin if Satoshi would have set the block reward to 100 BTC for infinity so the fixation wouldn't have been on this pokemon like feeling that you got to catch them all. It might have lead to a slower adoption as you wouldn't have the hoarders descend upon the new form of gold, but you would have had a decreasing inflation rate relative to the quantity of coins out there anyway (which would have still led to long range deflation).
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[Deleted post]
Post written in a sarcastic and negative state of mind and was encouraging unproductive dialog. Please move along to another thread that is likely to be more productive.
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At $1000 a bitcoin (yeah just rounding of simplicity) that is $0.10 per kb of data, which does seem pretty high. For example, the average transaction fee in the most recent block as of this: http://blockchain.info/block-index/447052/000000000000000297670c7da6af4c6b66d3f0bc34796480e253f6c95c571243was 0.000188 BTC in fees or $0.19 per transaction. If you do a $1 transaction, you will be spending nearly 20% on fees. Goodbye micro-transactions. That is not very competitive against paypal and other payment systems. I know this isn't exactly the goal of the project, but it would make sense for it to be only a few dollar cents per transaction so that digital sales services can sell things like songs, digital assets, and other low cost things without racking up huge fees. As it is, only things valued at over $10 per transaction would be sensible (this would be a about a 2% transaction fee at that price point). |
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Just do something like when displaying, and just keep the big text to anything greater than a dollar.
0.01123
or
0.01123
Or
11.23 E-3
or
11.23 x10^-3
I think the problem is just visualizing the count of digits into the decimal values.
Yeah, I know basing it around the dollar has issues, but people just are used to values roughly around a dollar, and it is nice to see when you are bigger or less than a dollar.
Introducing funny symbols that people aren't used to isn't going to help novices. This is a visualization problem.
112,300,000 Satoshis isn't really very difficult to visualize though. At least there is a breakdown with commas that make it easy to measure scales.
This could be another fun way of seeing numbers:
0.011'236'392
I can understand this much better than
0.011236392
and a fee on a transaction would be something like
0.000'1
I guess part of the problem is that in common situations, there has never been a reason to give easy to read long decimal numbers in the way that you have for large integers (we deal with values of one million much more often than one millionth). This is a reality to deal with in our case, and we just need a way to delineate orders of magnitude in a way that is very easy for users to see.
This is an identical problem to why this 19942347823 is much harder to process than this 19,942,347,823 (oh yeah almost 20 trillion, cool, I can get that).
The thing we don't want is a changing standard that people will need to keep getting used to whenever price swings happen (likely to be for the next 5 years). mBTC, uBTC,... aren't going to cut it. I think people would be much more capable of dealing with the idea that they have to spend 100 million satoshis for lunch - though I so despise using a person's name as a unit of currency, especially a currency with the ideological underpinnings that bitcoin does. How we call them ints or bits or something. Anything but satoshis. I think he would be put off by such idolatry.
Ok, now I have the itch to make my bitcoin client display numbers like this: 0.011'236'392
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It allows to select between multiple wallets within the datadir. e.g. bitcoin -wallet=foo.dat will load $DATADIR/foo.dat (or create it if it doesn't exist). Don't use it to access wallets outside the datadir.
Er. This doesn't split the database environment, so if its used as this thread is requesting it will almost certainly result in wallet corruption. (and leak wallet information as well). Any update to whether this feature was incorporated into the main client? Last update to the thread was nearly a year ago, and it looks like tcatm did a patch for it. I am considering using the symlink option, but it seems a little dangerous. |
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I really don't understand the purpose. If someone wants to buy and sell bitcoins, they can do it directly and digitally. If the ETF is for bags of corn or tons of copper, those can't easily be bought and sold because of their physical attributes, but bitcoins don't have this limitation.
With all ETFs you need to verify that they have the goods and can secure them and won't be shut down and don't have sinister motivations (such as walking away with the cash). These two guys made their fortune from suing FB. It just seems like you are adding a layer of risk on top of an already risky "asset".
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(note: this is not likely on the main litecoin app, but I think it is on the Scrypt Miner) So I haven't opened up my bitcoin client in about 2 weeks, and I am on a Mac. On may 8th I decide to try my hand at litecoin mining. I installed the normal litecoin app: https://github.com/downloads/litecoin-project/litecoin/litecoin-0.6.3c-macosx.dmgbut that didn't start mining for me (turns out I just needed to tweak some settings). I also installed this: https://github.com/downloads/litecoin-project/litecoin/Scrypt%20Miner%20GUI%20-%20OSX.zipWhich is Scrypt miner. Both of these are in the download links on the litecoin website. On may 10th, all of my bitcoins were transfered out of my wallet in this transaction 761ca847529a3087c5d71b24bd93ab242d2a7b64dd96522204cc10d233aeb0fa Which appears to have ended up at this address http://blockexplorer.com/address/14j73fVVomPRpfzxb9DmYQQy7sFZj626a8Which has about $50000 worth of bitcoins on it. Now it it totally possible that that this wasn't a trojan horse. I do backup my unencrypted wallet in dropbox, and maybe someone in dropbox has compromised it (happened in linode before). I don't see any other practical ways I was attacked, but the timing with the litecoin thing seems way too close for me, and it could have been the scrypt miner that had the backdoor in it. The miner app crashed immediately after I ran it. If anyone has the capabilities to test this, it would be really great for the community. I think the best test would be for someone to run the the app on a test machine and see if it makes any network requests that transfer private keys from a wallet. I am out about 20 bitcoins (or about $2000), which totally sucks for me, but it looks like this hacker is raking in a lot more than my little score. If anyone wants to toss some replacement bitcoins my way, this address is secure: 1F7qFmjtYKCC9joH5FmeALHPNJKLscPLGZ Thanks, Rob |
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There has been a few alternate currencies created so far using the bitcoin protocol. Are there any guides geared toward programmers as to how to create one?
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I mean if you look down enough, we'll be reliving Star Wars very soon, and people will call satoshis "Credits" because it will be convenient. You know what we need? SciFi that incorporates Bitcoins - Bit-Fiction Science Fiction here we come! Bitcoin is just another instance of scifi becoming reality. I would even say that without scifi bitcoin couldn't exist. Scifi is where the inital sketches of future realities are created. If it is mentioned now in a novel, I would argue that just like cloning sheep, it is not scifi. |
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I don't have any Litecoins, but I am starting to see how they are an improvement to bitcoin. Bitcoin seems to be advancing rapidly into an arms race of specialized chipsets that make previous models obsolete in less then a year (as in not competitive on the hash/energy rate) This means that miners will have to be more and more capable of taking on large risk and larger capital expenses, which is forcing the small guys out, and forcing all miners into pools. The result of this is that the political power over the blockchain is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. This is bad. Bad to the point of eventually all power will be in the hands of a few very rich people, and they will be able to lead the rest of the community by the nose. With litecoins, it is still within everyone's reach to independently mine, and when you mine, even if you have less fancy equipment, the energy you put into hashing will be about the same as the bigger guy along a fairly linear measure. This is great news, because trying to change the direction of the currency would go up against a much larger population of miners that will need to be convinced. Take a look at http://blockchain.info/ and see how few pools there are that write all of the blocks. This is a lot of power in a few hands, and that is dangerous. |
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I think Hal makes more sense to honor as a unit.
Fully agree with that, no disrespect to Gavin. Me as well. Hmmmm... What do you all think about milliBTC also being referred to as "Finneys"? Hal Finney was on the receiving end of the first BTC transaction from Satoshi. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0Perhaps 100 Satoshi's should be a Fin? But that would collide with a natural SI prefix (micro)...may be 1k Satoshi's = 1 Fin? I think in canada a fin is slang for a five dollar coin. In any case, what is wrong with Bitcents. I think everyone gets it right off the bat. That cup of coffee, well that will be 5 bitcents please. Candybar, well that is a half a bitcent. Right now a bitcent is about equal to a dollar, so it all works out pretty nicely. (I wonder if I will laugh at this statement a month from now, and for what reason) I say, just go with the word that seems the most natural and that people get immediately without needing to know much about small measures in the metric system. People know what 1 cent is, and way back in the day $0.01 actually could buy you something. Will this work in the future, when _maybe_ the price is over $1000 each? Lets argue that over when/if we get there. Right now people are defaulting to calling them Bitcents (including the use in the title of this thread), so this whole milliBTC nonsense just creates more of these pointless threads where the answer is obvious. Just go with what users gravitate to naturally. |
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I am not sure why you would put the words "Legal Tender" on the bills. You are dancing a fine line with that. Initially I put on my bills "Not Considered Legal Tender". Please look at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tenderIf the government does not recognize it as legal tender, than it may be fraud to put that on the bills. The denominations on the bills is also a little too high. I think that anything valued more than $50 would be too much to put on a denominated bill designed for circulation. It is too easy to create duplicate bills, steal private keys, etc. Unless the security can be super high and difficult to counterfeit, anything denominated and looking like currency is best left at small values ($1-$20 value in bitcoin). That doesn't mean that a lot of bitcoins shouldn't be stored on a paper bill. But it shouldn't be something circulating. It would be something like a bitcoin cheque which can be used to give bitcoins to someone who doesn't have the means to handle them digitally at the time, or just store in a safe as a cold wallet. No one should trust a bill to a high degree that has moved around and comes from an uncertain source. |
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Go to meetup.com and find a local meetup group for bitcoins. They exist in most major cities. At the end of most meetups, it turns into a light form of an exchange floor, where you can buy or sell bitcoins.
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Only medical mary j. Not sure why it is popular in Oregon. I live there and don't know anyone that uses bitcoin.
Was thinking the same... I'm in Eugene. There is a pretty strong libertarian movement going on in Oregon, and bitcoin has infected it. I just created a meetup.com group for it: http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Bitcoin-Group/Only three people are on the meetup group so far, but the meeting this sunday should have many more as it has been passed around a lot in email. Also, Intel is located in Oregon, and bitcoins are starting to get pretty popular on the intel campus. Finally "it is full of alternative minded people" is totally right on. Interesting - I was rather unaware of the happenings in Portland regarding libertarians. And Intel - is that anecdotal? Have you heard this from people who work at Intel, or do you work there, or..? We were one of the states where the GOP convention had to be shut down because Ron Paul libertarians were winning every seat down the line. Yep, I personally have overheard enough conversations at intel about bitcoin and mining from people who I am not connected to that I think that the idea of it is running rampent through the campus. I yep, OR has some statist policies but hopefully some of that will change. Someone used the word liberal, and I hate that the word that basically has been distorted to go from freedom loving to statist. And yes, not pumping your own gas is pretty nice, especially in a rainy state like ours. I wish when I visited non-pumping states that the gas stations would take a little extra money to come pump my gas for me. |
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that would be great, except, people come here to learn about Bitcoins. I suspect that most, especially in the newbie section have no bitcoins yet. I know i don't.
Well, you don't have to write to learn. |
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