Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[Grafzep]

Not exact numbers, but useful numbers for reasoning, approximately correct: You can pack about 20,000 xns into a block. To outcompete other xns you need to pay > 0.0001 btc per xn.  Filling a block to deny service for 10 minutes requires 2BTC.  100,000 BTC would deny service for 500,000 minutes, about 11 months.  

In practice I would expect fees to rise quickly, as miners observed the attack and began to take steps.  I could see such an attack lasting for a week or two, depending on how quickly measures were taken and how well co-ordinated the major mining pools were.  More likely a day or three.  There are a zillion ways to break the attack vector.   Miners are ever and always the defenders of the network.

So a bad actor could own the Bitcoin infrastructure for $10k an hour? Seems cheap and easy...

[aminorex]

naturally there are many more elaborate ways to prevent this. You could favour transactions of coins that had their last transaction further in the past (is that done already?)

yes.  bitcoin*days-destroyed.  and that means you only get full DOS power on the first transaction.  If it took .1 BTC to out-mass half the transactions, you'd burn 1000 of your 100k on the first block.  I totally neglected this point.  You'd only get effective DOS'ing for a max of 100 blocks, 1000 minutes, about 17 days (huge error bars here), and it would only be effective against other small*new transactions.

[aminorex]

Overall, I think it's much cheaper and more permanently effective to just hunt down miners and kill them until you can easily do a 51% attack.

Why is it that the easy/direct solution to so many problems is to kill people?

[JorgeStolfi]

For concreteness, suppose they have 100,000 BTC previously spread out over that many addresses, and start sending out 10-satoshi transactions between those addresses with 1 satoshi of fee.  They can send 10^13 (10 trillion) such transactions before they run out of coins.  Would the network handle that?

Not exact numbers, but useful numbers for reasoning, approximately correct: You can pack about 20,000 xns into a block. To outcompete other xns you need to pay > 0.0001 btc per xn.  Filling a block to deny service for 10 minutes requires 2BTC.  100,000 BTC would deny service for 500,000 minutes, about 11 months.  

In practice I would expect fees to rise quickly, as miners observed the attack and began to take steps.  I could see such an attack lasting for a week or two, depending on how quickly measures were taken and how well co-ordinated the major mining pools were.  More likely a day or three.  There are a zillion ways to break the attack vector.   Miners are ever and always the defenders of the network.

Thanks! 

The Evil Lords also have huge computer farms.  Could they enhance the attack by using them for mining?

(Not that I think that the US government would use such a complicated method. If they ever decide to stifle cryptocoins, they will just declare them illegal tender, like China did.  Unless the FBI and/or the NSA see such an attack as a way to justify a budget increase.   )
 

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[aminorex]

Overall, I think it's much cheaper and more permanently effective to just hunt down miners and kill them until you can easily do a 51% attack.

Why is it that the easy/direct solution to so many problems is to kill people?

Or buy them.   100k btc means you could probably buy 51% of the hash power by purchasing mining pools.  There, no messy wet jobs.

[Asrael999]

And yes, I have a PhD in computer science, that I got by asking stupid questions.

Me too. I hope I never stop asking stupid questions!

 "There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question".    - Carl Sagan

[aminorex]

This is what happens in socialist / fascist countries with "good" welfare systems: People stop looking for jobs. They prefer to stay on welfare, they choose it because they can.

Look at the number of people in the U.S. on social security disability income, and compare it to the workforce participation rate.  Even a crappy welfare system gets gamed up to the limit when there's no other way to stay alive.

Frankly I would not want those people working for me.  I think everyone is better off if they are bribed into staying out of the workforce.  The reason is the same as the reason why the argument that market-based minimum wage is better than mandated is so bogus:  Lots of people have negative productivity.  No matter how hard they try, they will do more damage than good.  GHWBush, and BObama for example.  Would you want either of them making you a coffee?  Blech.

[aminorex]

And yes, I have a PhD in computer science, that I got by asking stupid questions.

Me too. I hope I never stop asking stupid questions!

 "There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question".    - Carl Sagan

Or as my Numerical Analysis II professor used to say, "there are no stupid questions, merely stupid questioners."

[Todorius]

Does this thread actually contain any bitcoin specific information at all any more?  
Apart from a half-hearted CCMF here and there, the off-topic discussions seem to have increased by about 10000%.

I dare even say that the only thing that has a larger gain percentage-wise over time thant bitcoin itself, is the amount of off-topic discussion in this thread.
But I even now predict that off-topic discussions are a bubble. They will have a peak, and then crash towards 0 !!!! So better stop it now, before it's too late!  

[mybitcoincharts]

What planet are you living on? GM almost went out of business because the United auto-workers drove up input costs to the point that they could make no profits. Not small profits. NO PROFITS.

Counterpoint: Volkswagen in Germany has an organized labor rate of about 98%, workers have 32hour work weeks and 6 weeks (IIRC) of  holiday per year. And half of the seats in the board of advisories are represantatives of the workers*. Yet, they are quite profitable.

* = Thats German law for public companies.

edit: typo.

[hdbuck]

And yes, I have a PhD in computer science, that I got by asking stupid questions.

Me too. I hope I never stop asking stupid questions!

 "There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question".    - Carl Sagan

Or as my Numerical Analysis II professor used to say, "there are no stupid questions, merely stupid questioners."

Quot Homines Tot Sententiae      

[San1ty]

Does this thread actually contain any bitcoin specific information at all any more?  
Apart from a half-hearted CCMF here and there, the off-topic discussions seem to have increased by about 10000%.

I dare even say that the only thing that has a larger gain percentage-wise over time thant bitcoin itself, is the amount of off-topic discussion in this thread.
But I even now predict that off-topic discussions are a bubble. They will have a peak, and then crash towards 0 !!!! So better stop it now, before it's too late!  

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[octaft]

Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud.

I'll bite on this one. I had a friend who is Norwegian. Norway has one of the "best" welfare systems in Europe. If you can't get a job then you are entitled to get more on welfare than most people in Europe make by working.

He managed to get a doctor in Sweden to write a statement saying that working causes mental pain for him. This Swedish doctor did not care what he wrote when he was told flat out that he was going to use this doctors statement to abuse the Norwegian welfare system. The Norwegian welfare office NAV accepted this piece of paper.

He told me flat out that he prefers doing nothing over working. "Why would I get a job when I can live like a king doing nothing?" he asked me.

This guy later moved to Czechoslovakia and lived like a king. The Norwegian welfare check he receives is way more than well-educated people in that country earn.

This is what happens in socialist / fascist countries with "good" welfare systems: People stop looking for jobs. They prefer to stay on welfare, they choose it because they can.

Sounds kind of like that welfare queen story Ronald Reagan used to feed Americans, which turned out to be complete bullshit. I'm sorry, but I need a little more than "my one friend one time," especially when I find it hard to believe that your friend would have a plan to game the system, but simultaneously would admit it to the very doctor he was relying on for the ability to do so. If that was his plan, he could have simply said he needed assistance for mental retardation and he wouldn't have been lying. I imagine doctor's aren't supposed to be giving out statements that they know are false, anyway, so the doctor and your friend are to blame, assuming the story is even true. And if you live in America, this is certainly never happening. I'm not saying nobody games the system, I'm just saying that nobody is living like a king by gaming the welfare system. Nobody.

The story just doesn't really add up in my mind, and reads like homespun propaganda. Even if it is true, why should the legitimately needy suffer because of some bad seeds? Would you amputate your leg to fix a broken toe?

[686f646c]

http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/screen-shot-2014-03-13-at-08-20-39.png

[Todorius]

Does this thread actually contain any bitcoin specific information at all any more?  
Apart from a half-hearted CCMF here and there, the off-topic discussions seem to have increased by about 10000%.

I dare even say that the only thing that has a larger gain percentage-wise over time thant bitcoin itself, is the amount of off-topic discussion in this thread.
But I even now predict that off-topic discussions are a bubble. They will have a peak, and then crash towards 0 !!!! So better stop it now, before it's too late!  

C
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  M
   F

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Agreed, CCMF !

[TakeTheSkyRoad]

We are still within the secret descending triangle of DOOM. The doom-train seems to be running out of coal and an upside breakout during or over the weekend seems likely. Tomorrow is Friday so it does depend a bit on how low the end-of-the-week sell-off takes us but I'm optimistic that $600 will hold.

No KPOP forecast ? Disappointed 

[gog1]

Huge selling pressure at around 640-650, and consider bitfinex BTC loan book didn't increase, it does not look like the work of short seller.  Someone really has lots of coins to unload at 640-650.  

[Richy_T]

High unemployment rates are solely the result of minimum wage laws and other government intervention. Every job hunter could get a job if he was willing to accept a wage that would allow his employer to profitably employ him, given his productivity level. Walmart wage suppression allows Walmart to pass the cost saving onto customers. There is no net harm to society. Some win. Some lose. Thems the breaks.

Let's not forget that stuff like food stamps also reduces the wages that Walmart would have to offer to attract employees. It's like the perfect storm of political stupidity.

[JorgeStolfi]

Here is the latest 3D chart from my subscription based newsletter "BTC and KPOP daily update":
[ snip chart ]

I must admit that Bitcoin already made a substantial and permanent contribution to the world economy, by demonstrating how technical analysis charts can be dramatically improved by iconic images of various life forms.