Block 105000 just generated, 25% of all bitcoins now mined

[ribuck]

Block 105000 has just been generated. That's one-quarter of the way to the eventual total of 21,000,000 bitcoins.

According to bitcoin watch, the 5.25 million BTC generated so far are valued at $2.27 million, or 1204 ounces of gold.

Way to go!

[grondilu]

It's indeed an important symbolic time.

[FreeMoney]

I'd say it's going pretty well.

[The Script]

I've heard rumors about an internet2 where all packets require authentication.  Is this something to worry about, especially for bitcoins?

[grondilu]

I've heard rumors about an internet2 where all packets require authentication.  Is this something to worry about, especially for bitcoins?

Haven't heard of such a crazy idea.   Anyway, imo unless we're talking about a name-address style authentication, there is nothing to worry about.

[joe]

I've heard rumors about an internet2 where all packets require authentication.  Is this something to worry about, especially for bitcoins?

Yes. If the government requires ISPs to only transmit authenticated / approved packets (i.e. "deep packet inspection") to only government approved destinations, then we have something to worry about. At that point, there would be no way around it and the government could shut down bitcoin easily.

I'm personally worried because in recent news we have both parties supporting a measure requiring ISPs to retain records for a specified number of years.

[The Script]

I've heard rumors about an internet2 where all packets require authentication.  Is this something to worry about, especially for bitcoins?

Haven't heard of such a crazy idea.   Anyway, imo unless we're talking about a name-address style authentication, there is nothing to worry about.

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I've been hearing consistent rumors about this:

http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/internet_fed_researchers_want_to_scrap_net.htm

[stakhanov]

2 million dollars seems a lot of money compared to the still relatively small number of goods and services you can buy with bitcoins... Is a major crash ahead?

[ribuck]

2 million dollars seems a lot of money compared to the still relatively small number of goods and services you can buy with bitcoins...

For sure you don't need 5.25 million coins if people are just downloading Kiba's art or having the occasional game of poker. So there's no doubt that the price of a bitcoin already "factors in" some allowance for the future utility of the coin.

If that utility doesn't eventuate, bitcoin might fail. However, maybe "being a long-term store of value" is already sufficient utility to ensure the success of Bitcoin, even if people aren't buying loaves of bread with it.

Anyway, if it gets to the point where phone-to-phone transactions are safe and straightforward, then I think there's no stopping Bitcoin from that point onwards.

[The Madhatter]

2 million dollar market cap is really nothing. However, it's a great start.

If the US were to implement such a network there would be a lot of people writing software to circumvent it. I also would suspect that the hosting/IT industries in the US would take quite a financial hit as people hosted their sites elsewhere. Does the US economy need another large blow? I know! We should bundle and sell Internet 2 futures! (sarcasm)

Lots of fiber has been setup to purposely bypass the USA in recent years. (Probably due to the NSA/AT&T spying fiasco.) The infrastructure for a large hosting shift is already in place.

What about the end users being locked into this Internet 2 control grid? - You may ask. The uber geeks would install satellite internet services purchased from other countries to bypass it and run 802.11s (mesh) to propagate "clean" Internet. They just can't win this one. lol!

Does the US government expect every private corporation to replace all of their routers to handle these authenticated packets? At whose expense? This won't happen. (See: IPv6)

Some examples of failures that "they" are still trying to implement:

- Look at the migration to IPv6. It's a disaster! Unless IPv6 is designed as a backwards-compatible extension to IPv4, migration will never happen.

- Look at DNSSEC. It's only a 18 year old project that doesn't work. Collectively all of the DNSSEC-enabled hosts are a giant DDoS amplifier. The host hashes can be inverted easily with GPUs, NXDOMAIN requests are unsigned (so they can still be spoofed). I could go on and on here.

Cheers!
The Madhatter

[LZ]

Oh, no room for Bitcoin, eh?
We'll go build our own Internet... with blackjack and hookers!
In fact, forget the Internet and the blackjack!

[ribuck]

2 million dollar market cap is really nothing. However, it's a great start.

Remember when the Bitcoin market cap passed one million dollars? Some guy posted that this meant nothing, because his uncle's house was worth more than a million dollars.

Some time soon, the Bitcoin market cap is going to exceed the value of that guy's uncle's house.

[jib]

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I've been hearing consistent rumors about this:

http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/internet_fed_researchers_want_to_scrap_net.htm

It's a conspiracy theory.

Federally Funded Researchers Want To Scrap The Internet

Yes, the government is researching new networking technologies which could eventually be applied on the internet and replace some current protocols. But saying they want to "scrap the internet" is like seeing research into LEDs and saying the government wants to scrap electric lighting.

The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

"Internet 2" here (according to the site they link to) describes the hypothetical no-net-neutrality dystopia in which the Internet moves to a cable-TV-like model where the only sites that exist are those that have deals with ISPs to get connectivity. They seem to be confusing this with the real (and unrelated) Internet2, a partially government-funded consortium that runs an advanced research and education network and develops new technologies.

Google is just one of the major companies preparing for internet 2 by setting up hundreds of " server farms " through which eventually all our personal data - emails, documents, photographs, music, movies - will pass and reside.

And now they're confusing Internet 2 and Web 2.0, showing they probably don't understand the distinction between the Internet and the Web and have very little idea what they're talking about.

Basically the article's taking every new technology that might possibly change the internet in unknown ways, and every unimplemented proposal or suggestion for decreasing internet freedom, and conflating them all into a huge government conspiracy.

[em3rgentOrdr]

I've heard rumors about an internet2 where all packets require authentication.  Is this something to worry about, especially for bitcoins?

Yes. If the government requires ISPs to only transmit authenticated / approved packets (i.e. "deep packet inspection") to only government approved destinations, then we have something to worry about. At that point, there would be no way around it and the government could shut down bitcoin easily.

I'm personally worried because in recent news we have both parties supporting a measure requiring ISPs to retain records for a specified number of years.

This is where Steganography comes into play.

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning "covered or protected", and graphein (γράφειν) meaning "to write". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages—no matter how unbreakable—will arouse suspicion, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal.[1] Therefore, whereas cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties.

Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. As a simple example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet, a change so subtle that someone not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice it.

Do you see the cat embedded below in the picture of the tree?
=>

[em3rgentOrdr]

Does the US government expect every private corporation to replace all of their routers to handle these authenticated packets? At whose expense? This won't happen. (See: IPv6)

Some examples of failures that "they" are still trying to implement:

- Look at the migration to IPv6. It's a disaster! Unless IPv6 is designed as a backwards-compatible extension to IPv4, migration will never happen.

Cheers!
The Madhatter

I'm not letting the GUBBAMINT take away my IPv4 router!!!

[FreeMoney]

We don't really want to send data in obscure ways though since we want to distribute widely and quickly and to strangers.