vanzard

He is not locked, he can certainly transfer his domain any time.

The FAA was established in the late 1950s, spurred by the then-largest largest air collision in 1956 over the Grand Canyon causing 100+ deaths. The original intent of the FAA was to increase safety in obvious ways: monitor the air space, define flight rules, etc.

But today they are spending time and resources deciding what to do with drone videos being monetized or not?? Clearly they have deviated from their original intent...

> Do you have any evidence of this?

http://bit.ly/10iW5wJ page 12: "Merchants report that they win, on average, 40% of the chargebacks they dispute". Obviously x% of these disputes (with 0 <= x <= 100) are disputes that the customer should have won, but the merchant did because the dispute process is not flawless.

> So what is it? No more work (and I just have to fill in a form) or more work?

Typically it is no more work. I have experience from almost filing a dispute on my Wells Fargo credit card against Sprint. I didn't end up filing it because Sprint sent me a refund at the last second. Wells Fargo's online dispute forms do ask for some evidence: such as a log of email exchanges, shipping tracking numbers, etc. That's how I know. Obviously the process varies between credit card issuers. And I am sure no evidence is required when it is clear the merchant is at fault (a phone call will do). But either way this is similar to the complexity of the process of submitting a complaint with the FTC, where it can be as simple as a phone call if verbal info is all you are willing to provide to them.

> Also you realize the BBB is a private company that has no teeth right?

The BBB is quite effective: "The overall settlement rate for all complaints filed by consumers in 2014 reached a record high of 91 percent" http://www.bbb.org/charlotte/news-events/bbb-in-the-news/201... Why do you imply they are ineffective?

> I see bitcoin people recommend small claims court all the time. It works great when the merchant it local. It doesn't work so well when the merchant isn't since you have to file in their county. So add on travel time, missed work, etc to travel to where ever they are(assuming they are in your country) and it becomes a lot less likely someone is going to go this route.

I agree, but don't lie by saying "it also requires that the company screw up repeatedly".

> This was a big company and if you read the correspondences they were more than happy to ignore the people until a 3rd party stepped in. This works great on rare occasions but bitpay isn't going to be able to afford to police transactions with their fees.

You imply TigerDirect was intentionally dishonest, but it is very obvious the incorrect refund amount ($14.99 instead of $167.21) was a glitch, a bug. No matter how you want to believe it, this story doesn't show that merchants are dishonest and evil when they take bitcoins and they know there are no chargebacks. Are you claiming some evil TigerDirect employee typed in $14.99 intentionally on his terminal to try to rip off the customer?

> I'll also note you skipped over the miner disputes in your response.

I didn't reply because this is not relevant: most customers who paid the manufacturers with credit cards could not dispute the charges either, because of the 60-day limit after which chargebacks are not allowed. So I am not sure what is your point... Whether you paid the manufacturer with a credit card or in bitcoins, all customers are out of their money regardless.

Also, you too skipped over many of my points:

- "But I am not claiming a legal action is as likely as a chargeback to make the customer whole. I am claiming a legal action works just as well as a chargeback to put pressure on merchants to keep them honest."

- "But I will repeat for the third time: this is not the only thing that incentivize merchants. FTC, BBB, legal actions, etc."

- "As I said, most merchants are trying to please customers, so most mistakes are resolved without a chargeback. I don't think you will disagree here"

- "So yeah for the 1% of cases where you think the merchant might be fraudulent use Bitcoin with escrow, or a credit card, or cash-on-delivery, or whatever. For the other 99% a standard non-escrowed Bitcoin transaction is acceptable."

Your non-reply means you agree with these points?

> likely won't result in the customer getting their money back

Likewise, a good fraction of credit card disputes end up being resolved in favor of the merchant, not the customer.

> involves a lot more work on their part

I already told you submitting an FTC or BBB complaint is no more work than submitting a credit card chargeback.

> It also requires that the company screw up repeatedly

True if you go to the FTC. Not true if you go to small-claims court: it will be investigated even if only 1 screw-up occur. Yes going to small-claims court is more work than filing a credit card dispute, but then if it is not worth your time given the transaction amount, it kind of proves that being refunded isn't THAT important to you. In this case you would complain to the FTC, and write off the small amount lost.

> You dismiss completely the possibility that this is because of the existence of chargebacks?

I acknowledge chargebacks incentivize merchants to act honestly. But I will repeat for the third time: this is not the only thing that incentivize merchants. FTC, BBB, legal actions, etc.

> Google tiger direct bitcoin refund

I did and I found 2 stories, both resolved in favor of the customer:

- "Edit: The situation is resolved" from http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wesnv/beware_of_ti...

- "He personally verified my address again for the shipment as well as a "care package"" from http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wi95l/another_tige...

This proves my point that most merchants act honestly and that most disputes get resolved without chargebacks :)

> having the funds available again in a few minutes

No. When credit card issuers refund you instantly, it is always a TEMPORARY refund (check the fine print of your credit card agreement) - you still need to submit a full package usually within 60 days with evidence of the dispute (tracking numbers, product descriptions, pictures of what was received, etc) for the credit card issuer to investigate and either make the refund permanent, or resolve in favor of the merchant. That's why I keep explaining t you that submitting this evidence of the dispute is similar in complexity to submitting a complaint to the FTC as they ask the same things a credit card issuer would ask.

Out of curiosity: how many credit card disputes have you ever filed? What proportion were resolved in your favor, and in the merchant's favor?

I repeat again: I agree the customer is less likely to get his money back with an FTC complaint than a chargeback. But FTC complaints still work as an incentive to keep merchants honest because what the FTC does eventually is one or more of the following: initiate lawsuit, shut down the business, seize the merchant's assets (offices, products, money, everything), etc.

> What evidence do I have of fraud if its just a shipping dispute and their word against mine?

The same evidence you would supply to your credit card issuer for a dispute: shipment info, package tracking numbers, pictures of items delivered, customer/merchant email exchanges, etc.

> Mistakes, and disruptions in the continuance of the company

As I said, most merchants are trying to please customers, so most mistakes are resolved without a chargeback. I don't think you will disagree here. I have never had to issue a chargeback, yet I had a few mistakes happen on me and the merchant always resolved them in my favor.

As to "disruptions in the continuance of the company" this is an extremely rare event, even rarer than outright fraud. So I will agree this is a nice case to have chargebacks available, but again as I said for 99.9...% of other purchases Bitcoin's lack of chargebacks is totally acceptable. I don't think you will disagree here either.

Filing a complaint to the FTC or BBB is no more difficult than filing a credit card dispute. In both cases you merely supply evidence of the fraud.

But I am not claiming a legal action is as likely as a chargeback to make the customer whole. I am claiming a legal action works just as well as a chargeback to put pressure on merchants to keep them honest.

> honesty isn't the only reason for charge backs

What other reasons? Illegal charges after theft of credit card billing information? I would say this is an argument for Bitcoin since using Bitcoin makes impossible for the merchant to steal or lose your billing information :) So what other reasons for a chargeback are you thinking about?

> it won't actually matter in getting me my money back

You aren't answering my point. Your argument was that we need the threat of chargebacks to make merchants more likely to ensure customer satisfaction. I told you that other threats like legal action are sufficient to keep the pressure on merchants to remain honest. For example a merchant repeatedly taken to court will eventually be shut down, or maybe fined sufficiently that it will eat his profits so he will be enticed to be more honest.

> Without I am encouraged to trust my system

If customers threaten to go to court or report you to the FTC/BBB I can ensure you you will be encouraged to go investigate too.

> So then you say "Well only use trusted merchants like Amazon!"

I am not asking for change. People already do it. They already use trusted merchants (mostly). This was the central point stated at the beginnig of this thread: "most merchants are honest, most disputes are resolved without chargebacks. Therefore chargebacks aren't really that needed or that important for most transactions." So yeah for the 1% of cases where you think the merchant might be fraudulent use Bitcoin with escrow, or a credit card, or cash-on-delivery, or whatever. For the other 99% a standard non-escrowed Bitcoin transaction is acceptable.

> None of those are really comparable in effort, cost, or effectiveness

Does it matter? Some defrauded users WILL be persistent and WILL go through the effort of using these recourses, so they do keep merchants in check.

The fraud world is not as simplistic as you think it is ("oh crap customers can issue chargebacks against us, I guess we have to be honest now").

Fraudulent merchants will act fraudulently, regardless if chargebacks exist or not. Honest merchants will act honestly, regardless if chargebacks exist or not.

What comex meant is Chrome pioneered the use of seccomp-bpf. And indeed, Chrome is by far the application using seccomp-bpf in the most advanced way.

> If the price stays down the transactions must go 250x.

I understand you now. That's right. But my point was the price is unlikely to stay down... Anyway this debate of whether the price will go down or up is a little silly: even assuming the price stays down it will literally take DECADES for the network to "need" to increase the tx/block by 250x to maintain the same level of security. The bitcoin reward is halved every ~4 years, so we only need the tx/block to double every ~4 years to maintain the same level of security. So far Bitcoin as MORE than met this need: the tx/block has more than doubled every year since its creation.

> I didn't say this is necessarily the end of bitcoin

You were saying you did not believe the price drop would stop. Now you are saying it will quite likely stagnate. That's quite a different statement.

> It's just that the raw numbers which we do have show that it's not really doing that well. > [...] > The fact that only hard numbers which we do have show poor adoption indicates that it's the same elsewhere.

Yes we know that for merchants accepting Bitcoin, it represents an incredibly tiny fraction of their total sales. But why do you think this means Bitcoin is not doing well? A brand new payment technology unlike anything else going from zero to representing 0.1% of the sales of 100,000 merchants worldwide is a significant accomplishment in my opinion. I say 0.1% because 0.x% seems to be approximately what the average merchant reports. For example Overstock reported 0.2% of their sale revenues were in bitcoins for 2014.

Also why do you extrapolate your single anecdote (WordPress shutting down Bitcoin sales) to an industry-wide trend? Why do you ignore 3 other anecdotes that contradict your opinion (Overstock consistently doing 0.2% of their sales in bitcoins = $3 million/year so they are far from stopping to accept bitcoin, Newegg reporting their best bitcoin black friday sales in 2014, Gyft reporting the same)? Why do these 4 anecdotes, whether positive or negative, matter at all, when I showed you more indirect metrics (avc.com) that obviously show strong overall adoption? The avc.com metrics may not show actual bitcoin sales figures, but clearly they indicate something.

To answer your question: I think BitPay and Coinbase don't release current numbers of Bitcoin payments processed because this is sensitive financial data for competitors. But surely VCs wouldn't be pouring tens of millions of dollars in them if they showed no growth, don't you think?

> But the transaction volume in USD

This is again irrelevant to the point the OP and blog post author were making. If the number of tx/block continues to increase, then the current level of network security will increase, all else being equal (eg. USD price of Bitcoin staying flat).

> on a 6-12 month timescale bitcoin has been absolutely terrible investment

Absolutely, but long price downtrends have happened multiple times in the past. That's why I asked "what makes you think this bubble, as opposed to the last N bubbles, is clearly different and clearly marks the end of Bitcoin?".

> which you did use as an example

Well I didn't, the OP did :)

> There is no mention whatsoever on how many purchases they have that is being made with bitcoin.

I was pointing to these slides because they show a multitude of metrics increasing. It seems unlikely bitcoin purchases would be declining given everything else is increasing: number of bitcoin startups, number of wallets, number of merchants, number of daily tx, etc. Individually these metrics mean little, but all combined... Heck we went from 0 to 100,000 merchants since 2009, so it is certain bitcoin purchases have increased in that time frame. Why would you doubt that?

> Do you happen to have any data about the purchases made specifically with bitcoin?

Very few merchants publish their bitcoin metrics. But 2 come to mind: Gyft and Newegg said that their 2014 Bitcoin black friday sales were the best ever: http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/12/09/bitcoin-black-friday-2014-...

> Because they have already stopped

No, tx/block certainly NEVER stopped increasing: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints...

And price is cyclical. After the bubble of June 2011, it took 21 months to surpass its previous high of $30. What makes you think this bubble and price correction is different? In fact, Bitcoin is on the rise since its $150 bottom on January 14th so it would indicate the drop in fact did stop.

> Dell does not accept bitcoin

This is irrelevant to the point the OP was making: transactions that remain within Bitcoin incur no fiat exchange fees. I sell something on craigslist for bitcoins, I use these bitcoins to pay back lunch money to my coworker, he gifts the bitcoins to his brother, his brother sends the bitcoin to his son overseas for remittance, etc. All this with zero fiat exchanges.

> But customers unfortunately are not

Growth is not through-the-roof, but it certainly is there: http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ You cannot quote 2 anecdotes and infer an industry-wide trend. The plural of anecdotes is not data. Anyway it's again irrelevant to the point the OP was making: the blog post's argument is flawed, not everybody who uses Bitcoin is doing it for illegal purposes.

> financial transfers can be reversed.

Not this time: hackers withdrew some of the money from ATMs.

GDP per capita doesn't matter. PPP per capita is what truly matters when comparing countries.

> US to lose its superpower status

It already lost it. Not only to China, but also to the European Union. Both now equal or surpass the US in terms of PPP per capita.

> Quite frankly China's rise is overrated!

Perhaps you don't realize that an ~8% yearly economic growth means China's GDP/PPP per capita is DOUBLING(!) every 9 years. And it has been doubling every ~9 years for the last... 35 years.

The large binary size of a Go program has nothing to do with "garbage collection". It's because the binaries are statically linked against the Go runtime. Try compiling a static C "hello world" program and it will be comparable in size to the Go binary.

It is very strange his motherboard splits the BIOS on 2 SPI chips of 2 different sizes. I have never seen a vendor do this. Why?

1) When the BOINC servers come under DoS attack while gridcoin nodes are downloading the rankings, some nodes will have the rankings data, some will fail to get it. This would fork the gridcoin chain because some nodes will take into account the PoR bonuses (and all transactions using these coins), while others will reject them because they were unable to confirm the BOINC rankings. This fork would in effect break the gridcoin network until the BOINC servers come back online.

2) You can be as honest as possible, but many people still won't trust you. This is precisely why, eg., Stellar is not trusted and not embraced more widely, despite being set up as a non-profit foundation, with a charter, a voting system, being completely transparent, etc. People and companies around the world (especially those with a tendency to have anti-USA views) may not trust BOINC (hence gridcoin) because BOINC is operated in and funded by the USA. Do you think most, say, Chinese companies would be willing to fully embrace gridcoin, knowing it relies heavily on a US-based project like BOINC? No!

I can see your viewpoint though. People who care about science and who may already be BOINC users would probably like gridcoin. But most people in the world (unfortunately) don't care that much about BOINC, and when given the choice of Bitcoin or Gridcoin, they would probably go with the former (if only because of their anti-USA views, or because Bitcoin is already more widely accepted).

This "little bit" of centralization makes Gridcoin sufficiently brittle that it completely annihilates its chance of being widely successful AND stable.

Here is a thought experiment for you to understand: imagine if Gridcoin was as big and as valuable as Bitcoin, which has about $1 million dollars worth of bitcoins mined every day. A good chunk of this million dollars would be distributed based on BOINC rankings. So many people would be interested in gaining control of the BOINC servers. They could either hack them. Or they could offer to outright purchase the domain names and entity managing them, maybe they would even hire the staff running the servers. They would give appearances of operating legitimately at first. But eventually they would interfere with the rankings for their own financial benefits, either plainly maliciously, or with excuses to appear semi-legitimate (they could say "since we run the BOINC servers, we deserve a share of the profits"). The Gridcoin community would be upset and disagree with this. Maybe they would try to abandon trusting these BOINC servers, but how? They would not all agree on a solution. This would create forks in the chain. Maybe they would try to set up a new entity to run a new set of BOINC servers. At this point the situation is a mess and is no different than Ripple/Stellar to whom this exact scenario happened: part of the Ripple community abandoned Ripple and followed Jed McCaleb's Stellar fork.

Morale of the story: absolute power corrupts absolutely. You cannot give power to a central entity (BOINC servers) to control distribution of money. This is too much trust and is bound to break at some point.

And in addition to these social problems caused by centralization, what about the technical ones? What happens when the BOINC servers are down, ie. under DoS attack? How do you resolve gridcoin transaction conflicts which could be resolved by looking up the BOINC ratings? The whole gridcoin network would be unable to operate due to a few servers being down. On the other hand, a true distributed currency like Bitcoin does not depend at all on a single server. This is why being 100% fully distributed is incredibly superior to being 90% distributed like Gridcoin. Even if it was made 99% distributed, the 1% of centralization is what will eventually hamper it.

Gridcoin's proof-of-research is not decentralized: it relies on the BOINC project servers. So it shares all the same centralization flaws as FoldingCoin which relies on the Folding@Home servers.

Gridcoin is a little different because if you remove the BOINC project servers, it is not centralized anymore, and only relies on proof-of-stake. But this would make it no different that the many proof-of-stake altcoins that already exist.

> They're trying to pretend like your coins are completely safe. They're not.

Nothing is completely safe, not even traditional banks. FDIC insurance has many limits and restrictions (eg. it does not cover safe deposit boxes). In 2014 the national bank in Bulgaria had a catastrophic bank run who left depositors like you and me unable to access their money (to this day they still don't have their money - http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2014/08/18/the-bu...). In 2013 customers of the bank of Cyprus lost between 50% and 100% of their deposits over 100 000 euros (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/cyprus-sets-levy-on...). And so on. It is a good reminder that a crisis causing you to lose money can happen at ANY financial institution. Every year there are millions of people losing money who thought was "safe".

That's why it is always a good advice to diversify, to not keep all your eggs in one basket, etc. Bitcoin is no exception.

With that said, it is fair to remark that Coinbase is still probably one of the safest places to keep your coins "online" for day to day usage.

I wanted to add that naturally it is very costly to run this sort of attack. Because as you are artificially manipulating the prices, you have to keep paying out the customers' arbitrage profits. This is why willy caused MtGox to lose tens of millions of dollars in the end. Mark Karpeles was simply clueless or naive in thinking willy would help him. So don't do it, or you will lose money :)

In summary, I do believe regulation can and already does help BTC. They bring finance professionals in the market who have a clue (unlike Karpeles). They bring trust. They bring more trading volume. These are all things that make BTC less manipulable, hence less manipulated.

What you say is true and applies to ANY commodity market (or in fact any non-centrally regulated market): FX, precious metals, oil, textiles, fruits, etc.

I can set up my own independent exchange to trade, say, gold in the same way there are thousands of online gold exchanges. Then I can artificially inflate the gold prices on my exchange, using fictitious money (like the willy bot did), leading customers to come to me to trade their gold for high prices, and therefore impacting the worldwide market price of gold... at least a tiny little bit for a tiny little while... until customers find out that they can't withdraw their fictitious money from my exchange, so my sham and its impact ends right there. This is what happened to MtGox in February 2014.

The bigger the market you are attacking is, the less time it takes for the sham to be discovered, because the tiny percentage of people who try to benefit from the fictitious high prices quickly overwhelm your ability to fake solvency. A huge market like gold would pretty much suffer no effect due to its size. And as the Bitcoin market continues to grow, the hypothetical impact of such a sham should diminish over time.

Officially they spec 1.4 GHash/J but in practice it measures 1.8 GHash/J: see the "0.57 watts per GH/J" quote in the link I gave. Only a few low-performing units bottom out at 1.4.

> But if you have to replace your hardware every year this makes the whole thing even worse

You used to have to replace your hardware every year, but not anymore. There was a big race to get the ASICs to the next fab node as Bitcoin startups progressively got better and better funded and could develop for more and more expensive processes. In 24 months we went: ASICMINER 130nm -> Avalon 110nm -> BFL Single SC 65nm -> Bitfury 55nm -> Jupiter 28nm -> Neptune 20nm. But now that we have reached the top-of-the-line 28-20nm, Bitcoin ASIC developers are just waiting for foundries to make the next node available (16nm), so the lifetime of a Bitcoin miner should grow from less than a year to at east ~2 years.

If a Bitcoin miner lasts ~2 years, its hardware cost is relatively small compared to electricity costs, so replacing them is not much an issue: a $1500 2kW Neptune consumes $3500 of electricity over 2 years at $0.10/kWh. TCO = $5000. The hardware represents only 30% of that. So not only it is affordable but it makes sense to throw that hardware away and replace it for a more efficient one after 2 years.

KnC Neptune does 1.8 GHash/J: https://www.kncminer.com/pages/neptune-setup-info

> I find it unconvincing that everybody is already using the newest hardware.

Only a third or at most half of the network is mining with the Neptune at 1.8 Ghash/J. The rest is mostly the 1½ year old Bitfury at 1.2 GHash/J. Then there is a bunch of Monarch at 1.4 GHash/J, some Antminer at 1.3 GHash/J, and so on. So yeah a 1.5 Ghash/J average is very likely. You have to remember mining is extremely competitive. If you are not on the latest generation hardware, you are making less money than the competition.

> I estimated that gaining 50 % of the processing power would cost you 100 million in hardware

These days the estimate is closer to half a billion dollars. (There was a nice article about that - can't remember the link, sorry)

The network never "choked" at 1.3tps. There are peaks of activity near the theoretical max of 7 tps (check for blocks close to 1MB in size). There are thousands of unconfirmed transactions because their senders chose to include fees that are too low (or no fee at all), so miners decide to not process them.

> When new coins are no longer being awarded to miners then people will have to start to pay the transaction fees themselves

That's not how it works. People (senders) already pay the transaction fees themselves.