2013-03-29: www.marketoracle.co.uk - Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch

[genuise]

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article39704.html

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[nevafuse]

Whereas, the middle-class are hurt by inflation since they must spend more their income, and they are hurt by deflation, because their wages decline.

How do declining wages hurt if prices of goods equally decline?

Once you have that cartel, you can eliminate those outside the cartel by delaying their transactions or charging transaction fees only to your competitors (billing the competitor, not deducting from the payer in the system).

Not only do I debate the author's theory on how cartels could form, but how can you discriminate against anonymous public addresses?  Even if you knew IPs, the transaction could just be relayed by someone else.

[willphase]

For merchants it is the elimination of the 2 - 5% fees charged by credit card companies

For the buyer or payer, there appear to be no remaining significant advantages

these statements don't match up - the retailer will pass the savings onto the customer, it's a competetive advantage.

...rant about 50% attack

ASICs will help here - they make the potential for a 50% attack by an external agent far less likely, as long as the hash power is evenly distributed - please move to smaller pools, or p2pool.

Will

[cypherdoc]

this article is a great example of one of my memes, "The geeks fail to understand that which they hath created".  

i know this enrages alot of you geeks types, but to those of you who do understand Bitcoin and the economic incentives built around it, i'm not talking about you.

the author reminds me of 2112 who seems to be constantly hanging around these forums but is a perpetual bear.  once the author stated this, "And here is where the hidden diabolical quality of Bitcoin (and Litecoin too) becomes too obvious when the technical details of the design are closely scruntinized by an expert programmer such as myself", i stopped reading.  reason being, all his subsequent arguments as to why Bitcoin will not work fall into the category of "economics", which is right up my alley.  

i laugh b/c the main thrust of his argument is that when block rewards go to zero then a malicious attacker could easily come up with a 51% attack and set 0 fees to destroy honest miners.  what an idiot.  first of all, if Bitcoin makes it to 2040, the price of 1 BTC could well be $100,000.  secondly, if it is worth that much, the size of the mining network will be orders of magnitude larger than it is now.  at that point, how likely will it be that 1 attacker could muster a 51% attack?  answer: zilch.

he also talks about this same attacker being able to maintain this for months at a time.  again, the costs to do this would be intractable.

what we're witnessing is the same round of naysaying we got the first time around during the spike to 32.   but once again, ponzi's don't bounce.

[herzmeister]

The author of course first kindly asked for peer review on these very forums.