Bitcoin in 2012: By the Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin in 2012: By the Numbers

thebitcointrader.com

93 pointsmrb33 comments

Bitcoin transaction volume is up tremendously but that is in large part due to 'satoshidice.com'. The reason why they're so large is because you can't really do all that much with bitcoins (yet, this is improving though), so people will gamble their bitcoins away.

As an experiment I put a bitcoin donation link on reocities.com customer pages to see if anybody would donate but the counter is solidly stuck at '0'. I figured if the general public starts to see bitcoin as viable then I'll see some donations there, there have been offers enough of people that want to donate money, bandwidth or server capacity to the project in the past.

The bitcoin ecosystem is tremendously interesting, both from a game-theory perspective as well as an economical one (and technical too). Within a short time we've seen CPU, GPU and FPGA miners to go to insane hashrates with a generation of ASIC based hashers about to turn the previous generation of FPGA/GPU units into expensive doorstops.

The guys behind bitcoin (who I think are related to Michael Peirce and Donal O'Mahony somehow [1]) have done their homework very well and the fact that bitcoin has survived relatively unscathed over the first couple of years has definitely made me shift from 'fad' to 'possible'.

This likely won't be our last crypto currency but it definitely has life and merits serious scrutiny. The bitcoin economy is now already very substantial and it will likely grow enormously in the coming year.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/

Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gold"(!): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html He also seems to have tried to postdate his blog post (URL says 2005, but date in the post says 2008) to perhaps hide the fact he was the first one to come up with these concepts :D

He was even a contractor for Digicash back in 1994-95.

Nothing he describes there is terribly remarkable - all those ideas were widespread. His description lacks the key innovation that made Bitcoin better than its prececessors, which is that it doesn't rely on trusted centralized timestamping servers.

Szabo's bit gold ideas, or Bitcoin's ideas, when taken individually, are not remarkable.

It is the combination of all of them, that truly gives the whole distributed currency its elegance. And I would argue that Szabo is the first one to put almost all of Bitcoin's ideas together, in writing. Yes bit gold's proof-of-work takes a trusted timestamp as input, but simply changing it to take a head of the "chain of title" as input is really the only (minor) difference between bit gold and Bitcoin.

Here are his own comments on bitcoin: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y...

I vaguely remember he also denied being Satoshi Nakamoto somewhere - but I cannot find it now.

Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.

I think it is quite probable that Bitcoin was written by a single person. It is not that complicated: block chain of merkle trees + signing transactions with public/private crypto + proof-of-work with hashing function + peer-to-peer networking. The first public release (0.1.0) was only 20k lines of code. Someone like Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney, who have each spent more than a decade thinking about and attempting to design decentralized currencies certainly have the expertise to design Bitcoin all by themselves.

My admittedly vague feeling is there are so many balances in the system that it was likely reviewed by a larger group, having lengthy expert-level discussions in a non-public forum, before release.

I've heard the theory that it's a government think-tank project that in asome sense 'escaped', in that it was thrown out to see what happened and has thrived beyond expectations.

ASICs aren't on the market yet, but I'll be excited when I get one on my doorstop.

They've been delayed for months, and it seems this month will be the month they ship.

> and it seems this month will be the month they ship.

And the cows fly...

I heard that at Nokia it takes 3 years to design an ASIC chip. So these bitcoin companies should be able to it in a year.

There has been a lot of back-and-forth over this, I've done my own research and I think that it is possible to make some degree of ASIC in about a year.

Specifically this would be something called a 'structured' ASIC. If you get it right the first time (always a big question) then under a year is doable. A structured ASIC isn't nearly as efficient as a real special purpose design, it will consume more power and will fall speedwise somewhere between an FPGA and a true custom ASIC, probably closer to the FPGA end.

There are currently three companies that claim to be working on ASICs, only one of those three I think has the chops to pull it off.

But anybody that paid their money up-front to these companies without a shipping product is really slightly out of their mind.

All of the companies have insisted that they're not selling structured ASICs, though.

Designing an ASIC that only does SHA256 really fast should be a lot faster than an ASIC that does more than one thing, right?

Isn't the idea of ASIC's in general that they are only supposed to do one thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIC "As feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over 100 million. Modern ASICs often include entire microprocessors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, Flash and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (system-on-chip)."

Reason I became so passionate about Bitcoin is because it backs the ideology, which is anarcho-capitalism. Not all bitcoin users realize this (and they don't have to in order for Bitcoin to work), but many do. And the beauty of this situation is that anarcho-capitalism seems to be the only political ideology that is actually backed by a technology voluntarily produced by people contributing to it. A huge step forward from any kind of political movement trying to achieve its goals by force.

Bitcoin has no ideology. It's a protocol. Satoshi and many of the early adopters appear to share your philosophy, and Bitcoin is especially applicable to the needs of anarcho-capitalists. But it is not married to that ideology.

That's why I said it "backed" the ideology. And that's why I also said Bitcoin users don't have to share or even know it in order for it to work. I agree with you completely that it's just a protocol, but if you look at it in the context of politics, it is obvious governments wouldn't be exactly happy if more people started using it.

Sorry, I somehow read "backs the ideology" as "backed by the ideology", which obviously has opposite meaning.

One of my main beefs with Bitcoin right now is that the most vocal people advocating it are extremist, non-mainstream ideologues. Although I'm not of the Austrian-school, I do consider myself a libertarian-anarchist which is probably just another word for your anarcho-capitalism. However it's not doing my/our cause any good to have Bitcoin move more and more out of the mainstream and the Bitcoin user community become more insular.

> One of my main beefs with Bitcoin right now is that the most vocal people advocating it are extremist, non-mainstream ideologues.

I used to be pretty normal person before I got interested about bitcoins. Now I think that the end of the nation state is near and my friends think that I'm a weirdo.

That's my bad, I'm sorry. I should have said it is "backed" by the ideology. My initial comment was not exactly clear.

> it backs the ideology

I don't think what you're saying is even well-defined. In other words, what does it mean for something to "back" an ideology?

I think "anarcho-capitalism" is abhorrent, but I think bitcoin is ideal for the political system I advocate, which is capitalism.

Capitalism is a purely economic concept. Anarcho-capitalism (literally: “no authority (state), just capitalism”) is the result of applying capitalism to everything, including politics. What then is your capitalist political system?

Capitalism is the economic and political system in which no one may initiate force against anyone else.

The only way to institute such a system is to have an institution that holds a self-enforced monopoly on retaliatory force, which is the government.

Under any form of anarchism, the gang that is most successful at weilding force gains control. "Market anarchism" is an oxymoron, because markets (freedom) and force are opposites. Likewise, "anarcho-capitalism" is an oxymoron.

The popular association of mob violence == anarchy is just that, an ungrounded popular interpretation. "anarcho-capitalism" (or the term I prefer: libertarian-anarchist) is the political philosophy of bringing freedom of choice to government, breaking the monopoly on retaliatory force and allowing free-market mechanisms to select the best system of government which does the job while staying out the way. I suggest doing some reading on the history of Anarchism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy

> The popular association of mob violence == anarchy is just that, an ungrounded popular interpretation.

You're talking to someone who has studied the issue in depth. I'm not just going from an uneducated assumption.

I honestly think that a "market for force" would quickly result in something akin to feudalism at best.

Can you explain the mechanism whereby different groups weilding force would just agree to disagree and co-exist?

What would happen in practice would be that some groups are defeated, and the others pledge fealty in a kind of feudalistic system which just ends in a dictatorship.

Of course, it would be likely that some particular group (which might even win) would represent some specific ideology, and just turn back into a regular government (such as a constitutional republic).

I'd definitely be supporting the "competing government" in favor of establishing a constitutional republic.

They'd replace the "jackbooted thugs of the state" with the jackbooted non-union or pensioned thugs of the lowest bidder.

I heard of bitcoin forever ago, but I had no inclination to use it as a currency. I'm now using it somewhat frequently. Turns out it's becoming the standard currency in "affiliate marketing" worlds that are... we'll say not quite "white hat."

I'm pretty sure that a large part of the bitcoin early adopters market is centered around things that can't quite stand the light of day. But there are plenty of good uses too, have some alpaca socks:

http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffe...

Most of the businesses accepting bitcoin do so because of the free publicity associated with it, and yet they also re-inforce the trend for bitcoin to become more mainstream.

Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things to happen to the net in years, and even if it fails the amount of interesting data gained is staggering. The ECB had a meeting recently on about this new kid on the block, the outcome was quite interesting:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-...

I posted this on /r/bitcoin, but this might be relevant here.

It seems Bitcoin is moving from the innovator phase of the technology adoption lifecycle to the early adopter one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

The community and services around it is maturing.

As long as it keeps it's "slow and steady" adoption, it may be able to find some mainstream adoption. But that will still take many years and will entirely going to depend on some vendors and markets accepting it.

With acquiring bitcoins and some stability in the market due to volume, the only remaining question will be what can I buy with bitcoins?

While a nice idea, there's still nothing I want that can be purchased with BitCoin.

Are you certain? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

google trends geographics of search queries for bitcoin. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_nHZ-VCYAAzZN-.png:large

Reply on news.ycombinator.com