This site has 544,647 members. it can't possibly ensure that every one of them is not a scammer.

I guess this advice is too late for you:

It's silly because every probability is far away from being impossible, and because a collision is so unlikely that it is not worth even considering.

I don't know anything about bitcoin in China, but I bet there are plenty of people reading the 中文 (Chinese) forum that do.

Try posting in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=30.0

That's a silly thing to write. The odds of an address collision are less than the odds of two people selecting the same molecule of water.

You are exaggerating. 2¹⁶⁰ is approximately equal to 6⁶², so the real probability is the same as rolling a 6 62 times in a row. But that is the probability of generating a particular address. The chances of generating any address that someone has a private for is more like 6⁵⁰, give or take a few orders of magnitude.

If you look in Bitcoin Core's menu, you will see the Backup feature. It is that easy.

That coin was dead on arrival and has been dying ever since.

I didn't want to bother logging in to comment, so I will do it here.

The author makes the same mistake that so many others make: the belief that the halving decreases the supply of bitcoins. Then he makes the mistake of comparing bitcoins to consumable commodities like oil and wheat.

First, the supply (as in money supply) of bitcoins is increasing. After the halving, the supply of bitcoins will continue to increase. The supply of bitcoins does not decrease.

Second, unlike oil and wheat, the supply of "new" bitcoins is not important because, unlike oil and wheat, bitcoins are not consumed. All bitcoins are available as supply, not just the new ones.

Here is what actually happens:

The increasing money supply of bitcoins creates a constantly increasing market supply of bitcoins. More precisely, the supply curve shifts to the right as the money supply increases. After the halving, the supply curve will continue to shift to the right, albeit at a slower rate. Shifting the supply curve to the right causes the equilibrium price to fall (assuming that the demand curve is constant).

In order to maintain a constant price in the face of increasing supply, the demand must rise (or more precisely, the demand curve must shift to the right) at the same rate as the supply curve. Otherwise, the price will rise if demand increases more quickly than supply, or the price will fall if demand increases more slowly than supply.

Next, we see the price go up and down despite the constant increase in supply. That means that the demand is constantly changing. We know that the demand does not rise at a constant rate, so it is naive to assume that a slower increase in supply will cause a rise (dramatic or not) in price because it assumes that the demand continues to rise at a constant rate.

Finally, it is really much more complicated than that. Not only do the supply and demand curves shift, but their slopes change due to things like propensity to save, the velocity of money, and other significant factors, including the price itself. The whole system is very complicated, chaotic, and difficult to predict. It is ridiculous to assume that the halving will cause a dramatic rise in price. It is much more reasonable to assume that the halving will put less downward pressure on the price.

Ok, we get it.

21 Inc. has big plans.

Big deal. Their big plans don't seem very well thought out to me. Consider the plan disclosed in the article: how does an embedded bitcoin node/miner in every toaster facilitate planet-wide cloud computing?

I impressed by the number of people you have trolled here.

Ok, I recommend that you read the article to see how it is actually done. Nobody is processing a trillion frames per second. The camera is not even recording a trillion frames per second.

LOL. Think about it for a second. If cameras could not photograph light waves a decade ago, then what did they photograph?

Also, the camera being discussed here does not work the way people think it works. Do you know why wagon wheels look like they are turning backwards in old movies? That is how this camera works.


And they would have to fire a billion bullets.

The reason I think the idea is abhorrent is that somebody has to control the blacklist.

It is doable if you can get 51% of the miners on board. The miners simply refuse to accept transactions and blocks involving blacklisted addresses. Even mixers can't get around that.

Anyway, it is an old idea that will never happen, but if you are still interested, look up "bitcoin red list".

I guess I was just arguing semantics, but I think you are missing the point. The point is that the rules should not (and eventually will not) be dictated by one person or group. Competition allows a super-majority to change the rules, whereas with the "one" implementation, only the group controlling Bitcoin Core can change the rules.

Bitcoin XT is a major step in that direction. It has been a treacherous step, but babies fall down when they learn to walk.

It is safe to use a Trezor on a compromised computer. The private keys are never revealed, and a transaction cannot be modified because it is signed by the Trezor and verified by you. A phone wallet is not as secure.

I am not arguing for competing rules. I am arguing for competing implementations of the rules.

Multiple implementations is better than one because one implementation means centralized control. Nobody can unilaterally change the rules or break the network. Also, keep in mind that when there is a change to the "one" implementation, the result is two implementations (which was the source of the fork in 2013).

I agree that a scenario with only two implementations is risky. Ideally, no implementation would have a majority so that if a change to one implementation is incompatible, only that implementation suffers. I think that four or more is sufficient.

Andresen's point is that as long as Bitcoin Core defines the consensus rules, the few people that control Bitcoin Core control Bitcoin, but their status won't last forever.

The good news is that the oligarchy is already starting to crumble. There now are a few independent implementations of the consensus rules and their influence is growing.

Bitcoin XT wasn't the first alternative, so I don't feel that Andresen and Hearn can claim that they started the movement away from Bitcoin Core's control of the consensus rules, but they certainly have publicized the issue.

I'm glad you questioned my numbers. It looks like I am out of date and new information shows that the distribution is not as skewed as previously thought.

According to these estimates, as of April 2014, the distribution looked like this:

So, you must have 10 BTC to be in the top 10% of bitcoin owners. That's still not as unreachable as people might imagine. Anyway, if you have any bitcoins, you have more bitcoins than 99.99% of the people in the world.

The word "wallet" means two things:

• 1. A file that holds your private keys and/or related information. In the case of a hardware wallet, it also  includes software that creates addresses and signs transactions using the stored private keys.
• 2. Software that connects to the Bitcoin network and creates and publishes transactions, and monitors the addresses in your wallet.

Most wallets are a combination of #1 and #2. They access the Bitcoin network and manage your private keys and the bitcoins that they hold.

Hardware wallets, such as Trezor, Ledger, and KeepKey, are limited to #1, so they need software that does #2 in order for you to use them. Tezor and Ledger both have sites that you can use to spend the bitcoins in your hardware wallet.

Hardware wallets generate their own addresses using the list of words that you write down. If you enter the same list of words into two different wallets, they will generate the same addresses. That way if you lose your wallet, you can enter the same list of words into a new one so that it will use the same addresses as the old one.

Altcoins also make -100% returns.