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

[empowering]

That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection.   always worked so far....  and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me...  simples

Come on, I used "car" to suggest a sizable amount.  Replace it with "plane tickets" or "home theater" or whatever if you wish.

But isn't bitcoin supposed to be used to pay for everyting through the internet, from chewing gum to a mansion in Bali?  

(And if you buy a gold-plated Rolls Royce from a reputable dealer 1000 miles away, why would he not deliver it to your home -- after he got your check and cashed it?)

A couple of weeks ago, some famous bitcoin guru (Matonis?) explained in an article how in the future one would walk into a car dealership, choose a model,  point the smartphone to the QR code on the windscreen, and drive out, without interacting with a single person.  He did not mention satoshi-testing, air gap, brainwallet -- or what the client would to if the sticker on the windscreen turned out to be fake.

Right.. however the reality of it is........using as you did , cars as an example.. then the answer "sales contract"  is the simple way... and most cars are infact sold in person most of the time....

But if we are talking other high ticket value items, that are sold online, then there are other solutions..and looking into the future a trusted and reputable third party escrow style service/some sort of multi sig/ protocol based decentralised(?) set up..  that is trusted by both parties (ie general public, and business) in the event that there could be any "confusion/gaming" as you suggest , that could easily solve the problem.

Also Jorge... you must surely realise that , yes you can come up with theoretical problems, and good for you (it would be better if you propose solutions too but you know that all depends on how useful you want to be) but how many of them are practical? and how many of them will be solved or are being solved as we speak?  

Also does money , paper money, and electronic money have problems too?  paper money/electronic money gets stolen each and everyday in a million different ways, there are many weaknesses in the traditional forms of money, always have been... and will continue to be...


 It seems that the lady doth protest too much, and also that you have a very static or linear point of view... try coming up with solutions to problems you think are real,  and looking forward rather than backwards all of the time.

Just a thought.


 

[grappa_barricata]

Also, maybe it is time to restate the obvious.

Bitcoin 'ownership' is the knowledge of the private key. Bitcoins can't be 'stolen', but the private key can. This is a technically unsolvable problem. Not only for bitcoin, but for everything.

To make it clear for kids and professors alike, let's consider a Retinal Scan authentication system.
You can't practically brute force access to it, but of course you can take the eye of another.


A victim of the evils of retinal scan authentication

[JorgeStolfi]

You must be quite the goofball too waste so much time:

1) Getting the balls
2) Putting the balls in the container
3) Shake the balls while filming for 47 seconds
4) Putting this shit on YouTube
5) Realizing nobody cares that he has some little balls to play with

Most of those balls were bought by a student of mine while he was spending a year at the UWE in Bristol, working on his thesis on photometric stereo.  We needed some targets with specific known shapes, and the balls were meant to be embedded on another ball object to make many tiny "warts".  He bought them by mail (500 balls was the minimum amount, came in a small envelope through ordinary mail) and were paid with my credit card, IIRC. I visited him at Bristol shortly after that and helped him with some xperiments. In the end we did not use the warty ball (we made other targets with table tennis balls, rubber balloons, muffin cups, nails, house paint, and other such stuff).  When I left I took the rest of the balls with me.  I also added to the "collection" a few dozen larger balls that I got from dismantling old floppy and CD drives (they are inside a stabilizer gizmo that sits atop the spindle to prevent it from vibrating as it speeds up).

At some point I noticed that some of the balls climbed up the walls of the plastic container when it was shaken, apparently because they picked up static charge and repelled each other.  Static electricity from friction and and repulsion of electrically charged objects is usually demonstrated with bits of light insulating stuff; I was a bit surprised to see it happen with relatively heavy and conducting objects.  It seemed as a good a subject as any for my first YouTube video.

[empowering]

Also, maybe it is time to restate the obvious.

Bitcoin 'ownership' is the knowledge of the private key. Bitcoins can't be 'stolen', but the private key can. This is a technically unsolvable problem. Not only for bitcoin, but for everything.

To make it clear for kids and professors alike, let's consider a Retinal Scan authentication system.
You can't practically brute force access to it, but of course you can take the eye of another.


A victim of the evils of retinal scan authentication

sexy

[empowering]

ITT:
We bitch about JorgeStolfi's manipulative appeal to authority

...
The reason that I referred to Jorge's "professor" status in a snarky way is because it does (and should) NOT matter whether one is a professor or a snotty nosed 5 year old in order to post decent ideas in this forum....

...because he stuck his PhuD in our faces

...
In the beginning, he displayed his credentials rather prominently in his posts...

...we learn that he didn't

...
If so, I was wrong.

...so now we want him to

...
are you tenured prof?  /s

tbh mine was a somewhat sarcy question....

[PickNic]

I've understood that best months for btc are october and november.

[adamstgBit]

whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...

anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!

[PickNic]

btc will raise over 1000$ within the end of november.

[JorgeStolfi]

OOPs, correction: the 500 balls that my student bought are not in that container.  Those are mostly the spindle stabilizer balls, plus a few small ones removed from ballpont pens.

[NotLambchop]

...
The Bitcoin applications and their security can (and will eventually) exhibit the same amount of security (or lack thereof) as those tied in with the banking system. That part is obvious, because the Bitcoin protocol doesn't address the security of this layer in any way.
...

I'm wondering if that's the only way of seeing the problem.  I agree with the above, but...

...the security of conventional banking applications is not the only security layer for the end users of those applications.
Case in point:
If my bank's ATM or webportal gets hax0rd, I don't lose a cent.  If that happens with my Bitcoin wallet/app, I do.

[PickNic]

whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...

anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!

lol! maybe you don't know that to make electricity you anyway need oil a lot more than a full tank of petrol

[adamstgBit]

whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...

anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!

lol! maybe you don't know that to make electricity you anyway need oil a lot more than a full tank of petrol

you've been brainwashed!

[grappa_barricata]

I'm wondering if that's the only way of seeing the problem.  I agree with the above, but...

...the security of conventional banking applications is not the only security layer for the end users of those applications.
Case in point:
If my bank's ATM or webportal gets hax0rd, I don't lose a cent.  If that happens with my Bitcoin wallet/app, I do.

All of these advantages will seems less significant when the government or bank determine that you can't withdraw from your account for a while, or that a part of them 'is just gone, because russian hackers, muhahaha', or that 40 years worth of world-wide GDP are to being introduced into the economy at once.

[NotLambchop]

...
you've been brainwashed!

That's because he hadn't changed the tinfoil in his hat regularly, like he should have.

[NotLambchop]

I'm wondering if that's the only way of seeing the problem.  I agree with the above, but...

...the security of conventional banking applications is not the only security layer for the end users of those applications.
Case in point:
If my bank's ATM or webportal gets hax0rd, I don't lose a cent.  If that happens with my Bitcoin wallet/app, I do.

All of these advantages will seems less significant when the government or bank determine that you can't withdraw from your account for a while, or that a part of them 'is just gone, because russian hackers, muhahaha', or that 40 year worth of world-wide GDP are to being introduced into the economy at once.

"Black Helicopters Flown By Lizard People" is an entirely different argument.  We're not talking 'bout that stuff now--just mundane shit like security.
*I, for one, welcome our Reptilian Overlords.

[adamstgBit]

...
you've been brainwashed!

That's because he hadn't changed the tinfoil in his hat regularly, like he should have.

you've ALL been brainwashed! to think i'm saying nonsense.

this is not good. not one little bit....

[grappa_barricata]

[NotLambchop]

^No one cares...



BWAHAHA<twists mustache>

[adamstgBit]

did btc-e get hacked

was that why there site was down?

[grappa_barricata]

"Black Helicopters Flown By Lizard People" is an entirely different argument.  We're not talking 'bout that stuff now--just mundane shit like security.
*I, for one, welcome our Reptilian Overlords.

Pffff... it is well known that lizard people don't like flying, and the black helicopters were not black at all, but rgb(6,6,6).