epscylonb

I hate the term "securing the network".

Mining prevents double spends, that's all it does.

It doesn't prevent your bitcoins being stolen or make you whole afterwards, it's not analogous to a security guard standing outside a vault, or the government guaranteeing your deposits.

I'm mildly optimistic about about crypto currencies in the long term (10 years or more), but energy usage is the weak point of bitcoin, I wrote about this here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/195k4o/the_case_for...

No it doesn't if you take your profits in bitcoin you can move them freely between exchanges to a friendly local jurisdiction.

If the exchange allows international traders then the price will equalise with the rest of the world due to arbitrage.

It's estimated due to the way bitcoin works.

A transaction can be made up of a different number of inputs, if the inputs don't exactly match the output (the amount you want to send), there is "change".

The change is sent to a new address (belonging to the sender). So blockchain.info and this site are guessing as to which of the outputs was the intended sending amount and which was the change.

Yes, AML (anti money laundering) and KYC (know your customer).

The problem here is that brain wallets and paper wallets have become popular.

Brain wallets are always a terrible idea, either the pass phrase is too simple and easily cracked, or too complicated and easily forgotten.

Paper wallets are only useful for savings, if you want to spend the coins you should move the full amount.

As said elsewhere, if you use the stock client as designed, and don't use brain or paper wallets, then you should never lose coins.

And a whack-whack-oomps for the losses?

The key thing missing from the fiat section is that the main way that governments give a currency value is by demanding that taxes are paid in it.

I don't believe that any government of a significantly sized economy will ever accept taxes in bitcoin.

I wrote about why here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/195k4o/the_case_for....

The short version is that the mining aspect of bitcoin is just too big of liability for reasonable people to accept due to the energy requirements.

I'm bearish on bitcoin and bullish on crypto currencies, if a low energy crypto currency comes along, possibly based on proof of stake rather than proof of work, then it will be unstoppable.

You mean most western countries?.

MTGOX is the most trustworthy and secure bitcoin service out there. I still wouldn't put a large amount of bitcoin through it all in one go.

I could be wrong, but this looks like an ASIC fueled bubble to me.

Avalon, the first ASIC producer to market, require payment in bitcoin. I believe BFL require payment in bitcoin for orders outside of the US.

This created demand for bitcoin, which raised the price against the dollar. Others saw the rise and were encouraged to buy in or order ASICS, rinse and repeat.

As far as I know the only service that is turning over serious numbers is Silk Road. I guess you could also count Satoshi Dice, but I am sceptical about their long term future.

Due to the nature of bitcoin, it's entirely possible that the black market and wealth transfer functions of bitcoin have grown to support the current value, but the arrival of ASICS is too big of a coincidence for me.

So the price should be lower in the US because supply is greater right?.

Interesting, I wonder how much of that is Satoshi Dice though?. Not that SD doesn't count as demand, but it's unlikely to be sustainable due to the way it bloats the blockchain.

I'm a fan of bitcoin, and I think it may well have a bright future, but this recent rise over the last couple of months is probably a bubble.

New mining equipment called asics are being produced, at least one manufacturer, demands payment in bitcoin, and the price of bitcoin rises. Other people see the rising price and start thinking, hmmm should I buy an asic?.

My prediction is that by the end of the summer the price will be back to around $15, lots of people will have received their asic and will want to pay off the cost of the unit (~$1200+).

Of course there is always silk road, according the ars article last year they were doing 10,000 btc a week in revenue. Apart from SR I don't see where the demand is coming from except asics.

As I hold a few bitcoins, I would love to be proved wrong.

If you are using bitcoins to buy something local to youself, you do have protection, the local jurisdiction.

One of the proposed benefits of bitcoin is that by protecting the merchant from buyer fraud, it could enable a global free market. In this case, buyer beware is the watchword, don't hand over large amounts to someone far away unless you trust them or they have very good reputation.

In the image showing the internals, the boards they are using look a lot like raspberry pis.

I'm pretty much convinced that the big problem today in software is deciding where your APIs should go.

My instincts are similar to the articles author, a preference for small discrete pieces software rather than a giant monolithic application. More Web Services!, if you will.

But you are correct, getting this sweet spot is hard. Truth be told, I am not even sure experience guarantees a successful design first time around.

There is a tendency with developers to want to keep everything nice and clean. For example app A is responsible for a data set, anytime other apps want to access it they have to talk to A, if they are asking for that data a lot you might be better off caching or periodically copying the data over to the parts of the system. I always try to decide whether to segment something by thinking about how many calls it is likely to receive as a web service, more than a couple in short succession and I start having doubts.

Ultimately what makes the entire system work best for users is the correct thing to do and sometimes it is very difficult to come up with something which does that and is pleasing to the discerning coders eye.

> Taken to an extreme, there should never be more than one paying customer for every piece of digital (or convertible to digital) content ever created.

Sounds bizarre, but used to be quite common, wealthy individuals commissioning a piece of art (music, a play, etc).

And of course kickstarter is paving the way for a mass pay before production business model for all sorts of different cultural endeavors (music, video games, films, etc).

I think copyright has been a net benefit to society over the last 100 years, but it has now become too unwieldy. Copyright was never "natural".

> While I have zero doubt these companies and others will be taking 101% advantage of the situation, don't forget that the situation has been created by our own governments and an unwillingness to modernise in the face of a globalised world.

Ultimately it is the fault of the voters, and as another poster pointed out, this is about a level playing field, not "punishing" big multi nationals.

What we have seen since the 80's is a corporate oligarchy being created, if you can get into it you are set for life.

These people are Nixonian in their attitude, "it's not morally wrong when I avoid taxes". This also stems from the amorality of Ayn Rand's writings, in Randian thinking it is acceptable to expect others to follow a moral code which you yourself break and it's acceptable to admonish others for breaking it.

Big companies don't actually create a lot of jobs, most companies over their lifespan shed workers as they become more efficient. For a healthy free market to operate, it is vitally important that the percentage tax burden is the same for small companies and large companies, governments should not be giving tax advantages to anyone. This economic cherry picking causes "too big to fail" syndrome.

As a UK voter, if a political party said they would simplify the tax code and make all companies who operate in the UK pay taxes on their business here I would probably vote for them.

The problem with oil, is that it is an inelastic commodity. During the oil shocks of the 70's prices had to rise by 400% before demand started to fall.

Also the notion of a country being energy independent when relying upon oil is a silly one. In the global economy, we want everyone to have relatively cheap energy, if not the global standard of living will fall.

The pruning stuff looks great, at the moment the time it takes to download the blockchain (and the disk space requirements to a lesser degree) is creating a disincentive to run a full verifying node.

I suspect bitcoin blockchain transactions will never be very useful for micro payments, because of the confirmation delay.

If you use bitcoin as a clearing house though, which means you aren't broadcasting a blockchain transaction for every payment then micro transactions could work very well.

It's actually not really optimised for micro transactions.

The popular gambling site satoshidice is responsible for the rapidly increasing size of the blockchain, now around 3GB.

Bitcoin has two main utilities, firstly it is very hard to prevent a bitcoin transaction from taking place, it can potentially be tracked after the fact if you aren't careful though.

Secondly the fixed limit means that it should become a safe store of value, assuming that bitcoin is successful in the longterm.

Bitcoin isn't really designed to scale up to VISA levels of transaction processing, instead it is more suited to be used as a clearing house, to track deposits and withdrawals.

This to me is one of the most interesting aspects of bitcoin.

Some have speculated that if bitcoin is widely adopted in the global economy, then a certain percentage of all energy produced on the planet will have to be spent doing proof of work to secure the blockchain.

It's pretty easy for me to see a swing back to centralised currencies in that situation, it's only worth all the energy needed if you really don't trust the central authority.

There are a number of suggested solutions to this problem, one of which is proof-of-stake and there is already a client based on bitcoin called ppcoin which uses it. Currently ppcoin is a hybrid of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake but potentially could be a low energy version of bitcoin.

I have often thought that if bitcoin is really successful it will be worthless, because it will have forced the central authorities to be more fiscally responsible, removing the reason for bitcoins existence.

But I can't also help thinking that maybe we just need several competing global centrallly printed currencies, and you can pay or be paid in whichever you choose. As long as a cartel doesn't form competition should keep the central authorities honest.

The developer plan is still $100?.

I never really understood this, it seems more logical to me to give all members the developer perks. Most of the users won't use them, and those that do are helping to promote the app.net service and get new subscribers.

This comes up a lot in the bitcoin world where people think it is neat that they could use a pass phrase as their private key to their wallet.

It's actually incredibly dumb, if the attacker knows you are using a pass phrase then a dictionary attack is about as effective as a brute force attack. And in the case of bitcoin wallets, even a pass phrase with 12 dictionary words has substantially less entropy than a random key.

You could of course use 3 instead of e and do other unusual things, but all that stuff reduces the memorability of the phrase while gaining you less than you think in terms of entropy.

If you want entropy in your passwords or phrases, and you do even if you don't realise it, then you need them to be random.

User friendly key management is the real problem in online security, something that is secure and simple enough for the average senior to understand and use could make a ton of money.

I chuckled, the point I was trying to make is that I think this may make a conventional war more likely.

The iranian regime seems pretty adept at holding on to power, and the ramifications of online warfare seem to helping them.

> The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing.

To begin with.

This could be seen as retaliation for stuxnet, widely believed to be a joint US and Israeli creation.

I wonder if the creators of stuxnet are surprised by this. We tend to think of cyber warfare as being less harmful than the conventional kind. But could Iran doubling down on online security be more dangerous in the long run?.

What happens if you lose the ID card?.

I had a similar idea, for an "auth box" that would could be hosted by a third party or ran at home on the end of a consumer connection.

Whenver you log in or sign up to a site, a request is made to this device which can authenticate the user and return the result to the site.

A big drawback to this scheme is that stealing the box could become profitable. It would also require a more mature network than we have now.

Passwords are crap and key management is hard, who really wants to do 2 factor auth every time they want to log into gmail?.