Bitcoin's Biggest Downfall

[anderxander]

If you want to spend your bitcoins you need to convert them into some recognizable currency, which means you need a bank to do so, which can and will be shut down by the feds.

See the case of E-Gold for a similar comparison. E-Gold was doing something very similar: letting people transfer money anonymously and untraceably, but backing it with real gold in a vault so that it had some legitimate worth. The feds shut them down.

I know I know, Bitcoin is different.....There is no vault.

But you must convert to dollars to pay for electric and hardware.

The break down is where the crypto currency gets converted into real currency. These places are easy to shut down.

A solution to this could be a Sun Powered Data center. In addition the Open source hardware movement needs to build and offer their hardware in bitcoins.

Open Source Ecology is working on low cost electric production technologies using the sun and there is a good amount of backing.

Lets show them some support and donate some coins. The future of mining is sun powered.

Also a company offering technology like this exclusively in bitcoins would be huge!!!!!!

Access to cheap production materials only through bitcoin.

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Crash_course_on_OSE

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Donate

[Dayofswords]

i thought it was

• Lack of physical possession(thus, MUST NEED OTHERS)
• small transaction are "stress"
• quantum computing breaks public-private crypto

[fpgaminer]

But you must convert to dollars to pay for electric and hardware.

Not for hardware. There are people who already will purchase things from Amazon and NewEgg for you, in exchange for Bitcoins. Plato is travelling the U.S. using only Bitcoins.

It's a little bit of a pain at the moment, but as Bitcoins gain popularity more and more stores will accept them as a form of payment right along-side credit cards and PayPal.

The break down is where the crypto currency gets converted into real currency. These places are easy to shut down.

See Bitcoin-OTC, which is an Over The Counter market. Trades from one person to another, and only centralized in the sense that they all need a place to meet (IRC).

[cloud9]

Why would the Fed shut down an account?  Bitcoins are traceable through the blockchain.  Unless you are laundering that is, bitcoins or cash.  Laundering is illegal, be that bitcoins or cash.  You should be able to proof easy enough from the blockchain where you got your bitcoins from.

[Jaime Frontero]

wasn't that a song by Regina Spektor?

quite beautiful, actually...

[cloud9]

Brian Adams I think?

[SgtSpike]

What happens during the night/winter?

And why couldn't the Fed just block IP/DNS to the server?  They're trying to enact a law to make it legal to do so, and if they do, then all the major ISPs would be forced to block any sites the government asks them to.  They could probably do it right now anyway under some "threat to the US" act.

[luv2drnkbr]

But you must convert to dollars to pay for electric and hardware.

The break down is where the crypto currency gets converted into real currency. These places are easy to shut down.

That's just not true.  It's like saying you must convert Dollars to Euros in order to use them in Europe.  Once bitcoins are widely accepted and everybody takes them as payment, there will be no need to convert them since they ARE money.

[cloud9]

What happens during the night/winter?

And why couldn't the Fed just block IP/DNS to the server?  They're trying to enact a law to make it legal to do so, and if they do, then all the major ISPs would be forced to block any sites the government asks them to.  They could probably do it right now anyway under some "threat to the US" act.

Is Bitcoin worrying you or are you busy with some illegal stuff?

Are you buying rights of ownership to DIGITAL CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY CERTIFICATES on a very secure network employing a very capital intensive group of machines to keep it that secure?  A network effectively rendering a very efficient, fluid, secure book keeping system.  It is not as anonymous as some people think.  Their is a block chain recording each and every transaction.  Cash laundering and bitcoin laundering is illegal.  Laundering is not a standard feature of the bitcoin network.  You would easily be able to prove where you got your bitcoins from by utilising the blockchain.  And remember to pay your taxes this year if you profit from any barter transactions in bitcoin.

[SgtSpike]

What happens during the night/winter?

And why couldn't the Fed just block IP/DNS to the server?  They're trying to enact a law to make it legal to do so, and if they do, then all the major ISPs would be forced to block any sites the government asks them to.  They could probably do it right now anyway under some "threat to the US" act.

Is Bitcoin worrying you or are you busy with some illegal stuff?

Are you buying rights of ownership to DIGITAL CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY CERTIFICATES on a very secure network employing a very capital intensive group of machines to keep it that secure?  A network effectively rendering a very efficient, fluid, secure book keeping system.  It is not as anonymous as some people think.  Their is a block chain recording each and every transaction.  Cash laundering and bitcoin laundering is illegal.  Laundering is not a standard feature of the bitcoin network.  You would easily be able to prove where you got your bitcoins from by utilising the blockchain.  And remember to pay your taxes this year if you profit from any barter transactions in bitcoin.

If bitcoins are so publicly traceable, I dare you to try to find my current wallet balance.  Or at least, take your best educated guess at it.

I do have a couple of publicly-available bitcoin addresses, so what else can you tell about my bitcoining activity from information you can find?

[MoonShadow]

But you must convert to dollars to pay for electric and hardware.

I've never cashed out, not even a little.  I've bought many things besides other currencies.

[cloud9]

What happens during the night/winter?

And why couldn't the Fed just block IP/DNS to the server?  They're trying to enact a law to make it legal to do so, and if they do, then all the major ISPs would be forced to block any sites the government asks them to.  They could probably do it right now anyway under some "threat to the US" act.

Is Bitcoin worrying you or are you busy with some illegal stuff?

Are you buying rights of ownership to DIGITAL CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY CERTIFICATES on a very secure network employing a very capital intensive group of machines to keep it that secure?  A network effectively rendering a very efficient, fluid, secure book keeping system.  It is not as anonymous as some people think.  Their is a block chain recording each and every transaction.  Cash laundering and bitcoin laundering is illegal.  Laundering is not a standard feature of the bitcoin network.  You would easily be able to prove where you got your bitcoins from by utilising the blockchain.  And remember to pay your taxes this year if you profit from any barter transactions in bitcoin.

If bitcoins are so publicly traceable, I dare you to try to find my current wallet balance.  Or at least, take your best educated guess at it.

I do have a couple of publicly-available bitcoin addresses, so what else can you tell about my bitcoining activity from information you can find?

With enough time (which I do not want to spend on your dare) and effort (which I would put in something more positive) and resources (which law enforcement agencies do not have a shortage of), your challenge will be met - given enough of your key transfers and some (even the slightest) transparency into the real/traceable online world from you or any of your wallet's key transfer's counter parties.  Sometimes your keys combine to make up for a larger amount and the difference from the intended value to transfer gets issued to a new key that you just maybe spent to someone transparent, and voilla! questions asked to this transparent person of how some known illegal money spent on btc transfered to you and then to the transparent person renders your identity from the interrogation maybe.  Good luck, it seems like you would have a lot of tracks to cover - is it worth the effort for the average joe who will just prove his innocence by utilising the blockchain.  Even if its not a requirement in your jurisdiction to prove your own innocence, your reluctance to do so might be a dead give away warranting investigation.

[SgtSpike]

What happens during the night/winter?

And why couldn't the Fed just block IP/DNS to the server?  They're trying to enact a law to make it legal to do so, and if they do, then all the major ISPs would be forced to block any sites the government asks them to.  They could probably do it right now anyway under some "threat to the US" act.

Is Bitcoin worrying you or are you busy with some illegal stuff?

Are you buying rights of ownership to DIGITAL CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY CERTIFICATES on a very secure network employing a very capital intensive group of machines to keep it that secure?  A network effectively rendering a very efficient, fluid, secure book keeping system.  It is not as anonymous as some people think.  Their is a block chain recording each and every transaction.  Cash laundering and bitcoin laundering is illegal.  Laundering is not a standard feature of the bitcoin network.  You would easily be able to prove where you got your bitcoins from by utilising the blockchain.  And remember to pay your taxes this year if you profit from any barter transactions in bitcoin.

If bitcoins are so publicly traceable, I dare you to try to find my current wallet balance.  Or at least, take your best educated guess at it.

I do have a couple of publicly-available bitcoin addresses, so what else can you tell about my bitcoining activity from information you can find?

With enough time (which I do not want to spend on your dare) and effort (which I would put in something more positive) and resources (which law enforcement agencies do not have a shortage of), your challenge will be met - given enough of your key transfers and some (even the slightest) transparency into the real/traceable online world from you or any of your wallet's key transfer's counter parties.  Sometimes your keys combine to make up for a larger amount and the difference from the intended value to transfer gets issued to a new key that you just maybe spent to someone transparent, and voilla! questions asked to this transparent person of how some known illegal money spent on btc transfered to you and then to the transparent person renders your identity from the interrogation maybe.  Good luck, it seems like you would have a lot of tracks to cover - is it worth the effort for the average joe who will just prove his innocence by utilising the blockchain.  Even if its not a requirement in your jurisdiction to prove your own innocence, your reluctance to do so might be a dead give away warranting investigation.

So you could potentially link two addresses together because they were included in the same transaction, but without knowing which of the addresses is the "change" address, how would you know how much I actually sent out and how much I kept for myself?

And I'm not worried about being investigated - I've got nothing to hide.  I'm not in to drugs or anything that isn't legal, and if my profits turn out to be greater than my expenses from my ventures in Bitcoins, then I will pay my due taxes on it.  I believe my effective tax rate this last year was 0.66%, so I'm not terribly worried about how much that will amount to. 

But really, I just want to see someone TRY to track another person's activity to see how feasible it is.  Not because I am worried about hiding myself (why would I publicly post about my website(s), and my bitcoin addresses if I was?), but because I am a curious person, and enjoy challenges, and like to see what is possible and what is not possible with technology.

[MoonShadow]

But really, I just want to see someone TRY to track another person's activity to see how feasible it is. 

It's not an issue of feasibility, tracking an address's trades are certainly feasible.  The question is resources.  An entity with unlimited human resources could track down the payments of a person, but there isn't a way to do this without human intervention.  The data just doesn't exist to automaticly tie an address to a human being, although that might be made easier using data mining techniques.  For example, in a normal transaction a human being would be able to look at the transaction and guess that the smaller of the two outputs is the change, but a computer program doing the same thing is going to be unreliable.  The idea that all of the addresses in bitcoin can be traced back to an individual real identity is rediculous because that would literally require limitless human resources, primarily in the form of trained detectives doing classical detective work.  That's simply impossible, and that is why bitcoin is as anonymous as the user is willing|able to be.  Anonimity is inconvient, and most people don't need that much of it.  Bitcoin doesn't really promise anominity, it just makes it possible.

[cloud9]

So you could potentially link two addresses together because they were included in the same transaction, but without knowing which of the addresses is the "change" address, how would you know how much I actually sent out and how much I kept for myself?

Checkout http://blockexplorer.com/ type in some of your recent destination addresses and click on the keys in the table to explore.

[SgtSpike]

But really, I just want to see someone TRY to track another person's activity to see how feasible it is. 

It's not an issue of feasibility, tracking an address's trades are certainly feasible.  The question is resources.  An entity with unlimited human resources could track down the payments of a person, but there isn't a way to do this without human intervention.  The data just doesn't exist to automaticly tie an address to a human being, although that might be made easier using data mining techniques.  For example, in a normal transaction a human being would be able to look at the transaction and guess that the smaller of the two outputs is the change, but a computer program doing the same thing is going to be unreliable.  The idea that all of the addresses in bitcoin can be traced back to an individual real identity is rediculous because that would literally require limitless human resources, primarily in the form of trained detectives doing classical detective work.  That's simply impossible, and that is why bitcoin is as anonymous as the user is willing|able to be.  Anonimity is inconvient, and most people don't need that much of it.  Bitcoin doesn't really promise anominity, it just makes it possible.

I think it would be absurd to make the assumption that the smaller of the two is change.

For instance:
- I used to mine with deepbit, and when I did, I took payouts of 10BTC or more.
- I have payed other people 10 payments of 0.25 BTC, and 12-15 payments of 0.10 BTC or less.
- In each of those instances, my change would have been far greater than the sum sent out.

How else would it be feasible to figure out which address is change and which address is not?  Your entire argument that all transactions for a person are traceable seems to hinge on the fact that you can figure out what is change and what is not, but as it stands, I just don't see how that is possible.  You could use a bunch of guesswork, and perhaps get lucky if the person sent to another publicized address (i.e., I donated to a given cause, then they would know which address was change), but other than that, I just don't see how tracing a person's transactions is really possible.

[cloud9]

But really, I just want to see someone TRY to track another person's activity to see how feasible it is. 

It's not an issue of feasibility, tracking an address's trades are certainly feasible.  The question is resources.  An entity with unlimited human resources could track down the payments of a person, but there isn't a way to do this without human intervention.  The data just doesn't exist to automaticly tie an address to a human being, although that might be made easier using data mining techniques.  For example, in a normal transaction a human being would be able to look at the transaction and guess that the smaller of the two outputs is the change, but a computer program doing the same thing is going to be unreliable.  The idea that all of the addresses in bitcoin can be traced back to an individual real identity is rediculous because that would literally require limitless human resources, primarily in the form of trained detectives doing classical detective work.  That's simply impossible, and that is why bitcoin is as anonymous as the user is willing|able to be.  Anonimity is inconvient, and most people don't need that much of it.  Bitcoin doesn't really promise anominity, it just makes it possible.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11138.msg158505#msg158505

[cloud9]

But really, I just want to see someone TRY to track another person's activity to see how feasible it is. 

It's not an issue of feasibility, tracking an address's trades are certainly feasible.  The question is resources.  An entity with unlimited human resources could track down the payments of a person, but there isn't a way to do this without human intervention.  The data just doesn't exist to automaticly tie an address to a human being, although that might be made easier using data mining techniques.  For example, in a normal transaction a human being would be able to look at the transaction and guess that the smaller of the two outputs is the change, but a computer program doing the same thing is going to be unreliable.  The idea that all of the addresses in bitcoin can be traced back to an individual real identity is rediculous because that would literally require limitless human resources, primarily in the form of trained detectives doing classical detective work.  That's simply impossible, and that is why bitcoin is as anonymous as the user is willing|able to be.  Anonimity is inconvient, and most people don't need that much of it.  Bitcoin doesn't really promise anominity, it just makes it possible.

I think it would be absurd to make the assumption that the smaller of the two is change.

For instance:
- I used to mine with deepbit, and when I did, I took payouts of 10BTC or more.
- I have payed other people 10 payments of 0.25 BTC, and 12-15 payments of 0.10 BTC or less.
- In each of those instances, my change would have been far greater than the sum sent out.

How else would it be feasible to figure out which address is change and which address is not?  Your entire argument that all transactions for a person are traceable seems to hinge on the fact that you can figure out what is change and what is not, but as it stands, I just don't see how that is possible.  You could use a bunch of guesswork, and perhaps get lucky if the person sent to another publicized address (i.e., I donated to a given cause, then they would know which address was change), but other than that, I just don't see how tracing a person's transactions is really possible.

Maybe I did not clearly express myself.  I'm trying to say that the keys in your wallet are made up of lots of transactions which sometimes combines keys that you would like to hide with keys that you would like to keep secret - effectively linking the two keys and if,

as stated before:

"given enough of your key transfers and some (even the slightest) transparency into the real/traceable online world from you or any of your wallet's key transfer's counter parties"

the above quoted phrase might reveal your identity.

[SgtSpike]

Ah - we were talking about two end results.  I was talking about being able to trace all of a single individual's transactions, whereas you were talking about being able to reveal the identity of a person given an address or a few addresses.

It would be extremely easy to identify me.    Oh well.

[anderxander]

That's just not true.  It's like saying you must convert Dollars to Euros in order to use them in Europe.  

Last time I went to Europe I had to convert my dollars to Euros to spend them in the store. There might be some stores that accept Dollars but even credit card dollars are converted to the local currency. Not sure what you're talking about....

Once bitcoins are widely accepted and everybody takes them as payment, there will be no need to convert them since they ARE money.

Except to pay for electric.

But you must convert to dollars to pay for electric and hardware.

Not for hardware. There are people who already will purchase things from Amazon and NewEgg for you, in exchange for Bitcoins. Plato is travelling the U.S. using only Bitcoins.

It's a little bit of a pain at the moment, but as Bitcoins gain popularity more and more stores will accept them as a form of payment right along-side credit cards and PayPal.

The break down is where the crypto currency gets converted into real currency. These places are easy to shut down.

See Bitcoin-OTC, which is an Over The Counter market. Trades from one person to another, and only centralized in the sense that they all need a place to meet (IRC).

And except you are trading them for a centralized currency. The ease of convertibility from bitcoins to dollars is not my issue.

What's the airlines bitcoin payment address?

What's neweggs bitcoin payment address?

ATI's?

What about the mining companies bitcoin address's to pay for raw materials used to make hardware?

BTC must pay for BTC in BTC. BTC cannot pay to run BTC with another currency if it wants to stand on its own and as good as another currency.

Which brings me back to the off the grid data center and Open Source Ecology. If you could get a manufacturer/raw material producer to accept only BTC for power generation equipment, it would force people to convert to from USD to BTC in order to have access to it.

This gives both technologies a competitive advantage.

Plastics? Get a hemp producer to accept only BTC for his hemp crops.
Clothes? Same thing.
Food? Get farmers to only accept BTC.