Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[BeeTeeSea]

True, we will see a 650 price before next year

[cypherdoc]

the Bitcoin Virus won't stop replicating:

Someone over at blockchin reads this thread, that chart looks a lot more smooth.
Still this hashing increase is in my view is phenomenal.

no, that's just me clicking on the 7d avg button instead.

[cypherdoc]

top 10 nations for Bitcoin use via merchants/population:

http://cointelegraph.com/news/112561/top-10-nations-in-bitcoin-merchant-adoption

note:  i actually consider the US a laggard

[cypherdoc]

BTC-e is gonna get squeezed

[cypherdoc]

yes, oh yes!

[cypherdoc]

440 criticality incoming

[Hunyadi]

Pay attention to the bulls balls of steel!

[Pruden]

this is one disturbing piece of propaganda that has nothing to do with Bitcoin.  note the concept of trapping ppl into a digital cash system with negative interest rates.  this is Ken Rogoff's (Harvard economist) idea:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2gxr93/the_economist_the_benefits_of_getting_rid_of_cash/

And Larry Summers', who I get the impression (not only from this piece of propaganda) that he is a very appreciated idol in the US. He used to be the guy who was always right in the Clinton Administration, right?

http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-summers-imf-speech-on-the-zero-lower-bound-2013-11

[NewLiberty]

this is one disturbing piece of propaganda that has nothing to do with Bitcoin.  note the concept of trapping ppl into a digital cash system with negative interest rates.  this is Ken Rogoff's (Harvard economist) idea:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2gxr93/the_economist_the_benefits_of_getting_rid_of_cash/

Economists pretty much all work for government, or want to.  Some are at Universities on government grants or state univeristies.
Its rare to find one that is not corrupted by statist interests, always hopeful though.

[molecular]

the Bitcoin Virus won't stop replicating:

Someone over at blockchin reads this thread, that chart looks a lot more smooth.
Still this hashing increase is in my view is phenomenal.

It is absolutely phenomenal.

However note that the rate of growth has started to slow down instead of speed up at around November '13:

[Melbustus]

...
However note that the rate of growth has started to slow down instead of speed up at around November '13:

That's actually kinda good. The sooner we get to a mature mining market, the better for the security of bitcoin in general. I'll consider bitcoin a little less exposed when a few things happen:

1) There are no more hash/watt exponential gains to be had from a mining-tech jump; eg, going from 28nm ASICs to 22nm, etc. We may at that point now, actually. The gains from new process tech are certainly diminishing (as the taper in difficulty rise probably shows).

2) The power requirements of a 51% are an order of magnitude bigger than the world's largest datacenters.

[molecular]

...
However note that the rate of growth has started to slow down instead of speed up at around November '13:

That's actually kinda good. The sooner we get to a mature mining market, the better for the security of bitcoin in general. I'll consider bitcoin a little less exposed when a few things happen:

1) There are no more hash/watt exponential gains to be had from a mining-tech jump; eg, going from 28nm ASICs to 22nm, etc. We may at that point now, actually. The gains from new process tech are certainly diminishing (as the taper in difficulty rise probably shows).

2) The power requirements of a 51% are an order of magnitude bigger than the world's largest datacenters.

I also look forward to a 'saturated' mining market. Miners would operate at marginal cost and a very large part of expenses would be operational (power, maintenance), not capital investment. Everything else being equal (especially bitcoin price), hashrate should then grow according to moore's law and miners would sell close to all coins into markets.

Last year I've been thinking we might reach your point 1.) in the first half of 2014. This hasn't materialized, mining technology is still improving faster than moore (still catching up on other fronts).

I'm not sure your point 2.) means less danger for bitcoin. A 51% attack could be distributed across multiple datacenters or done using pools. It's hard for me to imagine someone (govt?) doing a 51% attack this way anyway. The most likely scenario I think would be governments forcing miners (51% of them) to censor transactions and consider blocks containing censored transactions as invalid. But for that to be a meaningful tool for them (say they want to cut off wikileaks for example) they first need to have better coin-tracking (hello coinbase, circle,...)

[cypherdoc]

...
However note that the rate of growth has started to slow down instead of speed up at around November '13:

That's actually kinda good.

I actually agree.

There's been so many millions thrown into mining hardware you'd think the network is first and foremost trying to fortify itself from a future attack no matter the price of bitcoin. But now, since the cost to produce a bitcoin exceeds the reward, we should expect a lot of those speculative millions to head into exchanges instead for direct purchases.

[cypherdoc]

After Uber, San Francisco Has Seen a 65-Percent Decline in Cab Use

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/what-uber-is-doing-to-cabs-in-san-francisco-in-1-crazy-chart/380378/

[Peter R]

...
2) The power requirements of a 51% are an order of magnitude bigger than the world's largest datacenters.

Here's an interesting calculation:  

With the current block reward (25 BTC), each hour approximately 150 BTC (6 x 25) are produced.  At an exchange rate of $400/BTC, that's $60,000 of coins.  

In a competitive market, the price of a commodity tends to its cost of production.  As a "rough estimate," let's assume that this production cost is entirely electricity.  At $0.05 / kW-hr, one could purchase 1.2 GW of electricity to produce those 150 BTC:  

     ($60,000/hr)  /  ($0.05/kW-hr) = 1,200,000 kW = 1.2 GW.

Assuming an attacker was adding new hashing power to conduct the 51% attack, the attack miners would need to consume approximately the same amount of electrical power. That's the same order of magnitude as the installed capacity at the Hoover dam (2.08 GW) on the Colorado River:




The dam with the largest installed capacity is the Three-Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China (22.5 GW) shown below.  If the bitcoin price were $7500, it would require this dam running at fully capacity powering bitcoin miners to 51% attack the network.  




It's interesting to imagine all that water in the dam's reservoir pushing the wheels inside the dam's turbines, which then push electrons through the gates of a bunch of SHA256 ASICs.  That's the scale of power required to conduct an attack.

[Melbustus]

...
I'm not sure your point 2.) means less danger for bitcoin. A 51% attack could be distributed across multiple datacenters or done using pools. It's hard for me to imagine someone (govt?) doing a 51% attack this way anyway. The most likely scenario I think would be governments forcing miners (51% of them) to censor transactions and consider blocks containing censored transactions as invalid. But for that to be a meaningful tool for them (say they want to cut off wikileaks for example) they first need to have better coin-tracking (hello coinbase, circle,...)

With regards to distributing across many datacenters: hence my "several orders of magnitude more" requirement. ... But co-opting pools is another issue. That could get interesting; eg, how much censorship has to happen before individual miners jump to P2Pool? Then the game is to co-opt a sufficient number of huge individual miners.

[cypherdoc]

...
2) The power requirements of a 51% are an order of magnitude bigger than the world's largest datacenters.

Here's an interesting calculation:  

With the current block reward (25 BTC), each hour approximately 150 BTC (6 x 25) are produced.  At an exchange rate of $400/BTC, that's $60,000 of coins.  

In a competitive market, the price of a commodity tends to its cost of production.  As a "rough estimate," let's assume that this production cost is entirely electricity.  At $0.05 / kW-hr, one could purchase 1.2 GW of electricity each hour to produce those bitcoins 150 BTC:  

     ($60,000/hr)  /  ($0.05/kW-hr) = 1,200,000 kW = 1.2 GW.

Assuming an attacker was adding new hashing power to conduct the 51% attack, the attack miners would need to consume approximately the same amount of electrical power. That's the same order of magnitude as the installed capacity at the Hoover dam (2.08 GW) on the Colorado River:




The dam with the largest installed capacity is the Three-Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China (22.5 GW) shown below.  If the bitcoin price were $7500, it would require this dam running at fully capacity powering bitcoin miners to 51% attack the network.  




It's interesting to imagine all that water in the dam's reservoir pushing the wheels inside the dam's turbines, which then push electrons through the gates of a bunch of SHA256 ASICs.  That's the scale of power required to conduct an attack.

Those are interesting numbers.

I've made this argument in the past; that an attack by an NSA would more likely have to come from one location for maximum security and secrecy purposes.  These figures make me more comfortable.

[cypherdoc]

...
I'm not sure your point 2.) means less danger for bitcoin. A 51% attack could be distributed across multiple datacenters or done using pools. It's hard for me to imagine someone (govt?) doing a 51% attack this way anyway. The most likely scenario I think would be governments forcing miners (51% of them) to censor transactions and consider blocks containing censored transactions as invalid. But for that to be a meaningful tool for them (say they want to cut off wikileaks for example) they first need to have better coin-tracking (hello coinbase, circle,...)

With regards to distributing across many datacenters: hence my "several orders of magnitude more" requirement. ... But co-opting pools is another issue. That could get interesting; eg, how much censorship has to happen before individual miners jump to P2Pool? Then the game is to co-opt a sufficient number of huge individual miners.

Co opting pool owners is going to be very hard to do. Many of these guys are libertarians at heart and more likely to fight back by going to the press or hiring lawyers. Lavabit is a great example.

Plus, there are secret ways of notifying others that you're under duress.  

[Melbustus]

...

     ($60,000/hr)  /  ($0.05/kW-hr) = 1,200,000 kW = 1.2 GW.

Assuming an attacker was adding new hashing power to conduct the 51% attack, the attack miners would need to consume approximately the same amount of electrical power. That's the same order of magnitude as the installed capacity at the Hoover dam (2.08 GW) on the Colorado River:

...

The dam with the largest installed capacity is the Three-Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China (22.5 GW) shown below.  If the bitcoin price were $7500, it would require this dam running at fully capacity powering bitcoin miners to 51% attack the network.  

...

It's interesting to imagine all that water in the dam's reservoir pushing the wheels inside the dam's turbines, which then push electrons through the gates of a bunch of SHA256 ASICs.  That's the scale of power required to conduct an attack.

Indeed, I think those calcs are pretty interesting....and I hadn't realized just how much power the Three-Gorges Dam generates....wow.

The ridiculous 51% attack scenario is probably secret nuclear-powered datacenters. With new nuclear power-plants in the 1.5GW range, the hashrate only needs to grow another 2-4 orders of magnitude to be relatively safe from that. Of course, I agree with molecular that a brute-51%-force attack is really unlikely. Bitcoin is far more likely to be attacked in the censorship-via-regulation vein; but then, you have to get pretty tight regulatory-agreement amongst essentially all developed jurisdictions in the world in order for it to be ultimately effective.

[cypherdoc]

...

     ($60,000/hr)  /  ($0.05/kW-hr) = 1,200,000 kW = 1.2 GW.

Assuming an attacker was adding new hashing power to conduct the 51% attack, the attack miners would need to consume approximately the same amount of electrical power. That's the same order of magnitude as the installed capacity at the Hoover dam (2.08 GW) on the Colorado River:

...

The dam with the largest installed capacity is the Three-Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China (22.5 GW) shown below.  If the bitcoin price were $7500, it would require this dam running at fully capacity powering bitcoin miners to 51% attack the network.  

...

It's interesting to imagine all that water in the dam's reservoir pushing the wheels inside the dam's turbines, which then push electrons through the gates of a bunch of SHA256 ASICs.  That's the scale of power required to conduct an attack.

Indeed, I think those calcs are pretty interesting....and I hadn't realized just how much power the Three-Gorges Dam generates....wow.

The ridiculous 51% attack scenario is probably secret nuclear-powered datacenters. With new nuclear power-plants in the 1.5GW range, the hashrate only needs to grow another 2-4 orders of magnitude to be relatively safe from that. Of course, I agree with molecular that a brute-51%-force attack is really unlikely. Bitcoin is far more likely to be attacked in the censorship-via-regulation vein; but then, you have to get pretty tight regulatory-agreement amongst essentially all developed jurisdictions in the world in order for it to be ultimately effective.

I'm sure China and Russia stand ready to help the US in any way that it can