I wonder if the last two bounces on Gox were helped a bit to paint the downwards trend  (Stamp at least took to the sell-off while china wasn't overly impressed) or if it was just coincidence.

If so I must say nicely done

I can't believe goxing still works....

The wording gox used was far from ideal and any non tech-savy person may interpret it incorrectly

A bold line stating that the underlying transaction security of bitcoin is not compromised would have helped to clarify things.

Yeah I totally agree with you.
What is a bit troubling however is how well this FUD worked.
If we come out bruised but ok I think this may actually reverse the downtrend

It is interesting how people are interpreting the withdrawal limit gox stated in its press release as one on the amount of bitcoins.
While this may be the case it most probably also refers to the number of withdrawals to make sure they can indeed keep track of all of them.

Not that I want to defend Gox but this entire thing has turned into one giant FUDStorm

Maybe the dumping is done by exploiters of the TM vulnerability to cover their tracks
If you had an account that could be linked to exploiting with significant amounts of BTC you might try this to salvage some using other accounts
I would imagine the more trading happens the harder it gets to sieve through whats going on

I've never used Gox but I'd speculate that they didn't just find out by accident.
Their accounting probably didn't add up which caused them to investigate.
The question is would Gox notice if this happened on a small scale?

So if you successfully executed the exploit with a small amount you'd sure as hell try to transfer those coins back in to further multiply them.
After this whole thing went down and Gox stopped anything from going out there could very well be exploiters with btc stuck on gox on an account that is or will get implicated.
Do you really think that they will get to keep these btc without any dispute?

It was just a thought that occurred to me. The reality can be totally different but at least I do think that it is a possibility.

[edit] at least it would explain why btc are being sold that low other than there being absolutely no confidence in gox. If you hadn't actually bought them you don't really care as much about their value

It is just one theory which did fit in well as a response to other more "extravagant" theories on the matter.
I think this is essentially the problem with Gox. Zip information about their status allows for wild speculation. Its the area 51 of bitcoin.

[edit] It would be interesting to know if Gox already has identified all successful exploits or if this is one giant cluster#$@# waiting to implode

I think that the term zero-sum game is being used unfairly in this context.
If Investing money into company a instead of b , b loses out on that investment so you'd be looking at a zero-sum game under these loose definitions (which of course is not the case).
You need to assume a totally closed system for a zero-sum game argument to make sense.

Bitcoin is not a closed system. It is a means of exchange

Technically bitcoin works however you value it but its utility increases as its value increases because that determines how much
value you can transfer through it. Think of it as the "bandwidth".

I'll go as far as agreeing with you that there will be people that won't benefit or only marginally benefit and those that will lose out for not adopting cryptocurrencies.
(note: I am not mentioning bitcoin specifically, lets talk about a new form of exchange that is emerging in a more general sense).
The later adoption happens the less you profit.

A far fetched example:
Every company is jumping onto this new "internet" thingy.
Those going in early are , on average, seeing increases in profit.
Now if Bob's Bakery also makes the jump after just about everyone and their pet has a website and has a page with online ordering it won't have the same impact as if he were the first to do it.

I don't understand why you have to explicitly link bitcoin to its perceived value. [edit] To me it looks like you treat bitcoins as some abstract paper bill with no use at all except for speculation [/edit]
Look at how the technology enables you to securely make transactions without having a central place that runs it all.
This in itself is a valuable new asset (you do know that you can add text to bitcoin transactions that is also stored on the blockchain so you could build all kinds of services around this)

You do know that the difficulty re-targets itself if the target blockrate is not met right?
Bitcoin would theoretically work with very very few miners but would then be hugely susceptible to 51% attacks.
The reality is as more miners stop mining it becomes easier hence more profitable and your problem dissolves into thin air

Bitcoin code is not set in stone. Basically whatever the majority of miners uses as a protocol is bitcoin.

Let me guess: you are all for proof of stake /nxt/ripple etc. [edit] just to clarify, ripple of course does not use PoS, I just mentioned it as some alternative

It is really good that cryptocurrencies are diversifying and exploring new options.
At the end of the day you want to be 100% sure that it works. A fundamental flaw in mining would instantly vaporize bitcoin.
These alternative approaches are young and when the time comes proven new alternatives to mining should be contemplated.

Just to get you thinking: Mining is based on the premise that you can't deterministically predict when the next block is mined. This is really important to weaken potential attacks
Peercoin actually does a really smart thing by interleaving "traditional" mining with stake mining. That way the next stake addresses are chosen in a more random way to avoid potential predictions
I have not looked at nxt code so I can't comment there.

Imagine for instance what would happen if you computed the next stake address through a hash of the curernt block including transactions.
An attacker could try and permute the transaction queue until he finds a hash that is one of his addresses. That way he essentially takes control of all stake mining

New alternatives will come but this does not happen over night. Proof of work is a really solid method despite its flaws with large pooled mining

Wow either way this goes there will be so many that get burned its not funny

At the rate the price is dropping at Gox it looks like they won't need to make an announcement.

I'm committed to hodling. That tiny bit that I have is mostly on paper wallets.
However its not just going to be traders. There will be lots of scared newcomers selling

This will  be really interesting. If Gox dies then a large portion of BTC will be moved out of the market until all legal issues have been resolved.
If it does not die a huge buying hysteria will begin.

In a way I feel sorry for Karpeles and the Gox team.
True they deserve the shitstorm that is/will be coming at them but this mark will stick to them for the rest of their lives.

That would be epic incompetence.
However the way I see it if Gox goes under the short term results will be the same.
All btc Gox actually has would be locked up until things are resolved.

I think this may be bullish in the mid term

I'm surprised that you as a computer scientist would really consider storing data on pendrives as secure.
Bit rot can and does happen (i.e. cosmic rays flipping bits etc.)

If I had to store lots of bitcoin I'd write my own algorithm to deterministically derive public/private keys from a single seed and have that code execute on a cheap machine that will be destroyed or totally wiped afterwards.
You can write the pseudo-code on paper and store that securely at multiple sites and also store the initial seed (not at the same locations).
If the worry is too great that the initial seed may be guessed together with the non-public algorithm one could use multiple seeds.

To test viability one would use a key pair derived after n iterations, transfer a small amount of btc to the public address and then send it to another and then never ever use that pairing again

You are flat out lying unless you can show us the transaction being "stuck" in the pending queue (you did add the miner's fee right?)

[edit] transactions can take longer but if it is in the queue and valid it will eventually go through. I've had low miner's fee transactions sit in there for 10+ hours just to test if they also go through

You do not need a screenshot. If it is on the blockchain or the pending queue the transaction is visible.
Post the transaction hash. The way I see it is that you took your time (>15 minutes) to actually make the transaction after issuing the order.
Once the transaction shows up in the global transaction queue the other party knows you posted it.

[edit] in fact I wouldn't be surprised if a pizza were to arrive at your door shortly. That is if you are not lying, which is highly unlikely given your track record

Of course it would be great to buy in at the best possible point in time from when you decide that hodling bitcoins makes sense.
However calling people who bought in at 1k bagholders depends on your personal prediction of what bitcoin may achieve and your personal goals.

If you are in it for the long term and don`t want to speculate and believe bitcoin can go beyond 10k then buying at 1k isn`t the end of the world. True, you could have gotten twice as many coins but then you are automatically moving towards the realm of speculation.
Thats why dollar cost averaging makes sense. You don't go all in right away.  
I've also bought fractions of a BTC above 850USD and don't feel like a bag holder. I believe that it will eventually surpass that point once again.
Yeah, i could try to sell and buy lower  but then I'm speculating and knowing my limitations in regards to predicting any movements at all I'll most likely lose even more through classical "buy high sell low" moves.

It is often not the best solution that wins but the most widely used one.
You are mixing up too many things. It makes a lot of sense to not add too many features to bitcoin because you can build layers on top that do that for you
What you are proposing is one protocol to do it all. Specification wise this would be a nightmare as anyone who wants to comply with the protocol has to implement everything

[edit] and if you think that the official bitcoin protocol is lacking in quality then go do something about it and start coding!

I think today we can only be certain that things are uncertain

Well it makes a huge difference if the cold storage has been stolen or if the keys are lost

Well the market is kind of treating the release as truth.
Gox can only win from this. If it is true well they've already pretty much lost everything so what is there to lose
If they lost a substantial amount of coins but much less than the 744k people will actually take it as good news

I usually frown upon profanity but man
"What the fuck is up with this shit?" Bitcoin, make up your mind where you want to go today

+1 Unlikely but this could be one of those black swan events

Well given that you were dead set on only buying coins at 200-300 usd and not above I can understand your sentiment
Gox was/is really bad news and the crash down to around 400 reflects that.

But I still believe that without the massive Goxxing we would have bottomed out at 500-550ish
Whatever, this is speculation. You may still get your coins. I however don't feel sorry for you.
If you are not willing to take even a little bit of risk (buying in at around 400) or being too greedy its solely your own fault

The point is: You are speculating on a specific price point you believe is a "good investment" based on your future predictions of where bitcoin will head

This is absolutely no different than anyone else investing at any price point.
You can elaborate all you want on how it is not important to you to invest and how bitcoin as a protocol will fail etc.
All I am seeing here is someone who wants to buy in cheap. There is nothing contrary to this perception in your statements

I think that a lot of new users were waiting for the bubble to pop and if this trend reversal holds long enough to restore some confidence we could see a nice upwards trend

looking at the seized btc stash from DPR I think it is a fair comparison

Look kkaspar is a bit like Jorge in the sense that he/she is trying incredibly hard to find good reasons why bitcoin can't and will not work.

I think it speaks for itself that both keep posting here.
If they truly didn't think bitcoin could succeed they'd have left and done something else.

They are either trolling or secretly want to get in.
It is the same as me posting in a my little pony forum how stupid the franchise is.

That is the dumbest answer I've seen from you yet.

As much as it annoys me that you keep introducing new reasons of why bitcoin is not for you whenever an argument shows that it is not a black and white answer and bitcoin could have merit I do value that this discussion is taking place with solid arguments.

The potential for getting rich is a reflection of the high risks you are actually pointing out.
Bitcoin could be replaced by some other crypto currency.
All the points you are making are the reasons why bitcoins current value is what it is and why it might be magnitudes more once they are resolved.
Just like you many many people are saying the risk is too high.

There is no reason to get defensive here.
So you do not believe that the protocol can last much longer than maybe a few years?
That's great but I feel that half of your arguments have nothing to do with that sentiment.

And to clarify things on the protocol level.
Bitcoin does something elegant that Lamport already proposed in 84 when talking about the consensus problem.
Cryptographically signed messages make solving the Byzantine generals problem easier because attackers can't forge the general's message
This is the basic building block for bitcoin.
Other consensus variants are better for other tasks (Like using a Total order multicast for a replicated state machine).
Sticking everything into one protocol makes absolutely no sense.
You bloat the system, the code gets messy and ultimately this can lead to major problems in the long run.

A slim protocol is a good thing in this respect. It is easier to maintain and better to understand

+1

To a) : Would you agree with me that in our current system as you get wealthier it becomes easier to increase that wealth even more?
You are also comparing apples to oranges. The current value increase is price discovery and not deflation. Deflation will happen once this has stabilized

b) I'm not sure what you mean here. If bitcoin finds mass adoption prices won't fluctuate as much.
Because bitcoin is deflationary the incentive to spend it is lower. It will be interesting to see how that plays out on a larger scale if
bitcoin is ever to become mainstream

c) I've told you before that Proof of Work is a robust way of building consensus in such an anonymous probabilistic consensus
Bitcoin is a protocol. If a better method comes along that is guaranteed to work it can be implemented trivially.

People need to wrap their head around the fact that bitcoin is what the majority of miners use as a protocol.
Anything can be changed, yes this includes the 21 million cap. If everyone adopts a protocol that changes this then
thats that. If some don't agree with this you'd fork bitcoin, effectively creating a new altcoin.

just think about something like  
{ while true; }
in the scripting language. I send you such a transaction. Will your machine lock up in an endless loop?

[edit] just to point out the irony in this. If the scripting language is turing complete there will always be the possibility of
implementing non-terminating code. And because of the halting problem you can't deterministically decide if a piece of code
is going to terminate or not.

Yes, thats probably the way you'd want to implement it.
But then calculating fees is going to be hard/impossible.
Any time you have conditionals you'll have to take into consideration the longest possible execution and use that as a fee

I disagree. Proof of Stake has not been formally proven to be robust to all attacks. When that happens the discussion becomes relevant.
The proof of work method bitcoin uses relies on sha256 hashing which has been investigated quite thoroughly.



Roughly speaking a protocol is merely an agreed upon way of communication. It is neutral in the sense that the protocol is well defined
and you are free to implement code that is compliant with the protocol.

The unit price has absolutely nothing to do with this. In a system where you want to exchange ownership of something you need
to actually create that something. Either you put it all in at the start or you add it. To stick with the protocol concept.
Altcoins that are forks of bitcoin are merely modifications of the protocol where these aspects were changed.

I'll go as far as saying it is impossible to create a system of wealth exchange without having an "unfair" distribution.
Every single altcoin has this exact problem. Look at the discussions on wealth distribution in nxt for instance.


Hey look, its refreshing to have a serious discussion with all the trolling going on these days. Even if we disagree  

I think you completely misunderstand what bitcoin as a protocol is.
You have units of account (bitcoins and fractions of bitcoins) that can be owned using public/private key encryption and a distributed ledger where probabilistic agreement is reached on transactions and new coin creation.

There is nothing that says what that bitcoin represents. The market is giving it a certain value but in itself it is merely a ledger of numeric values attributed to addresses that can be exchanged.
If everyone agreed that bitcoins represented beanie babies then that is what it would be.

What you are kind of arguing is that there should exist a meta protocol of which bitcoin is a particular implementation.
That is essentially a blueprint for arbitrary cryptocurrencies but you still would have to create specific implementations from it.
[edit] incorrect wording
Just because people give bitcoins a currency value does not mean that in essence it is NOT a protocol

Not just that. You'd try to open pandora's box. I highly doubt the devs would ever put that into a protocol update.
And even if they did at least a majority of miners would then have to move to that change.
Even attempting this would destroy bitcoin

In essence it would break trust.
You trust that only 21 million coins will come into existence.
Forking bitcoin to change funds in any way would immediately break the trust that that what you own is actually yours.

Who is to guarantee that this change is a one time thing?
Who is to guarantee that no government gets access to unlimited coins?

Btw forking bitcoin is essentially like making an altcoin out of it.
Only one of the forks can be the "real" bitcoin. This is not to say that both can't survive.
But if such a major change were to be put through you can be certain that we'd end up with two bitcoins and
this would break just about all trust

Look by that logic any entity with enough funds can change bitcoin through buying out the miners.
The point is that you would immediately and irreparably lose trust and the value of bitcoin would crash.

It is a fact that you can fork bitcoin at any point in time changing anything and everything. You don't even need a majority for that.
Altcoins are usually created with their own genesis block. You could also make an altcoin that uses the current bitcoin blockchain as a basis.
Here comes the important bit: you as a user determine what the "right" protocol is. This isn't even a mining question btw.
Such a profound change would likely split the community in half.
You'd literally end up with some users supporting the "old" protocol and some with the "new"
Of course I don't need to point out that this would crash bitcoins value and completely break the trust.

The irony is if that forking question were to ever come up at all (which i am 100% sure will not happen) then the second chain might survive as GoxCoin (tm)  

I'm enjoying this hypothetical forking question  

This is certainly not the point in time where a fork were to be actually considered but there might come a day where this becomes the case.
In a sense this is the ultimate strength of the system and the reason why cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
No regulation or external influence can stop a new spawn from emerging

I advise anyone and everyone to actually PRINT paper wallets.
If you are really paranoid that the paper won't last chisel the private key in stone.

Another such situation on a different exchange would cause carnage at this point and time

I believe the most important news now is what happened to the 750k btc (+120k gox)

Did they confirm they were in fact stolen and when it happened?

Look I agree it is unbelievable but with screw ups on this magnitude no one WANTS it to be true.

The most important thing is to figure out if they are in fact missing due to theft and if that happened recently and by few entities
If they basically screwed up in a way where many many people got a few extra transactions it is much less harmful than if a few entities
now control 750k+ bitcoin

This will be interesting. Consider what would happen if people started to draw most of their coins off exchanges just to be on the safe side.
I also expect a dip but bitcoin does not cease to surprise

I think Mark Karpeles deserves a dictionary entry for "incompetence"

Occam's razor would suggest incompetence. Think about it. Karpeles will be under the public's scrutiny for the rest of his life because there will always be some that think he ran off with the cash. Effectively his career is over and probably most of his freedom gone.
If he indeed were such an evil mastermind he'd have found a fall guy to blame.

I really feel with those that lost bitcoin through gox.
Naturally you'd want to believe you got robbed by an evil genius rather than have lost your money through negligence
that could have been avoided easily

This could be said of you as well.

Whats up with intelligent people arguing desperately against bitcoin in a bitcoin forum like Jorge Trollfi and you, kkaspar?
Is there a point in shouting bitcoin will fail to a group that mostly believe in bitcoin? What if you actually turn out to be right?
You gain absolutely nothing from this. And don't come with the "I'm only here to help" argument. Thats utter bullshit

This may sound stupid but if I were satoshi and had the private keys I'd evenly split the coins onto every address there is now.
[edit] actually split it based on the current distribution of coins. The point is to provably get rid of them

Look I hope it is true not because I want Satoshi to be known but because that person's life has just been screwed.
If Satoshi has indeed destroyed the keys and that person is Satoshi there is no way to prove that he has in fact destroyed them.
The only way out of it is if he actually has the keys. No matter what is going to be done people will probably not believe he destroyed those keys.
Maybe through a trustworthy escrow he could send them to an address for which the key was destroyed. Even then you'd have doubters.

If this man is indeed Satoshi he can only flee from potential robbers by provably removing his wealth.

Coinage is a way of separating cold wallets and coins that are not in circulation from those that are regularly spent.
Basically any coin that is not involved in a transaction starts to accumulate coin age. It is a way of measuring if "old" money is being re-activated The amount of coin age "destroyed" tells you basically how many coins that have been sitting in addresses for a long time have been re-activated and used in transactions

Are you being serious here Jorge or is that trolling? You have a Ph.D. in the field of computer science yet fail to come up with your own answer.

Using a priority queue you can sort transactions and the nodes will simply drop the oldest transactions with the least fees if the queue overruns.
There already exist rules for how transactions are ordered and small value transactions require more of a fee to be higher in the queue.
Ultimately you will either quickly burn up your bitcoins in such an attack or your transactions will be dropped and ignored without affecting the others

[edit] the only effect you can cause is that zero/low fee transactions for tiny btc amounts coming from other parties will also be pushed off the queue

[edit2] here is a link to the unconfirmed tx queue from blockchain.info https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
basically miners can include transactions (they are not forced to) and they will take the ones from the head of the queue that can fit into the block mined

I've been wondering about that myself a bit. The only reasonable conclusion apart from Jorge trolling is that he is conducting some form of sociological research on the bitcoin community but I somehow doubt it.

Interesting calculations. You forgot to take into consideration that larger sums get more priority so you most probably would only disrupt a portion of transactions

I suppose with 100,000btc it becomes somewhat feasible. But you still need to have 20k larger value transactions per block (I haven't looked at this but is it possible to have the outputs of one tx be the inputs of another tx in the same block?)

[edit] naturally there are many more elaborate ways to prevent this. You could favour transactions of coins that had their last transaction further in the past (is that done already?)

You are practically screaming "I am invested in Ripple please make it go up".

Ripple has an interesting idea but fundamentally solving decentralized IOUs with a level of trust like bitcoin has yet to be invented.
A Gateway can go under and it is incentivized to cover up as long as possible. This trust issue can't be trivially removed

Shorts being forced ?
Looks funky

Ultimately it makes no difference at all if the supply is fixed or not as long as miners get the transaction fees from mined blocks as a reward once the cap is reached. All you are really doing is changing the denomination. Proof of Work in the form that is being used will raise/lower difficulty in accordance to the computational power being thrown at the network. What difference does it make if you mine 50, 500 or 5million coins in one block or merely receive the fees?
The price will converge to what the market thinks it should be.

[edit] to clarify this. miners will mine if it is profitable to mine, even if it is just for the transaction fees

wow!

I'm loving it. Rabid bears with foam around their mouths roaring about lower lows than even they could have imagined.

Personally I think this can go two ways. Either we breach a few mental resistance points such as 400 and 350 in which case we might really sink like the titanic as massive panic ensues after which an even longer bear market ensues.

Or we are inching towards the bottom with volume wanning as neither bulls nor bears feel comfortable trading only to explode upwards as things again pick up on momentum and everyone scrambles for "cheap coins"

The problem with an entity having more than 50% of the hashing power is that it basically can decide the winning chain.
Below 50% it can't go off and do its own thing as it needs others to contribute. With more than 50% it will always eventually make a chain that is longer than a competing one

Proof of Work is ideal for what satoshi wanted because together with the blockchain it provides probabilistic agreement with anonymous participants and the reward for participating is bitcoins.

Most forms of consensus would work for a public ledger where ECDSA is used to prove ownership of whatever is written in there.
The functionality of the blockchain can easily be covered by a bunch of distributed servers reaching agreement (i.e more or less what ripple does) however you need trust in such a setup. Trust requirements are extremely lessened in a PoW system. (no miner owns a majority, large numbers of miners stop mining at once etc.)

PoS is less anonymous than PoW because you have to reveal your stake so the coins minted are tied to you. Of course you can augment this situation with some form of coin mixing or zero knowledge proof but thats beyond what I want to say. For PoS it is harder to find a way of distributing coins. PoW provides rewards for participating and those are then spread. PoS requires initial coins to generate rewards.
You could implement some form of lottery in a PoS system to initially try and spread coins to make it more fair.

I'm not a fan of PoS but I disagree. It is like taking off the restrictions for fractions of bitcoins making them infinitely divisible and then saying that will make them worthless. You can have intricate rules for any coin on how much a block will reward providing infinite possibilities for altcoins.

The value of coins is the trust in the system technology wise, its current utility and how it will develop in the future.

Of course there is an unbounded number of potential altcoins for both models, PoW and PoS and since PoW is, by design, very work intensive you will soon reach actual limits because resources are bounded.
Nevertheless PoW [Edit] of course i mean PoS [/Edit] also has resource bounds (network transmission, disk space, etc) so the models are actually equivalent, one merely allowing more concurrent coins than the other.

But this has absolutely nothing to do with coin valuation. By the logic of your argument an almost infinite number of small coin networks renders any large coin network of 0 value (say a 1 million user network in relation to 10^30 networks of coins with 10 users each also effectively leads to a value of practically 0 for the 1 million user network)

Why would it? that law actually further strengthens my argument ( a large network is more valuable and not proportionate at all to many small networks)
OP Is pulling statements out of his behind without any sensible logic behind them

[edit] just a small joke:

raid_n's law:
"Within any sufficiently large forum there will be someone postulating their own law"

since sufficiently large is unbounded you won't disprove me

Bitcoin is not backed by energy, rather the way the blockchain reaches consensus through PoW is. This may seem like nitpicking but it is an important difference.
Bitcoins mined at difficulty 1 are worth exactly as much as those mined now. You can subscribe to the idea that the cost of mining dictates the value of bitcoin but I won't.

The value of a bitcoin is what the economy gives it. Bitcoin works and will work once no more block rewards are given out as long as enough miners mine for tx fees.
By your logic those miners will also dictate the price of bitcoin allthough the energy expenditure will most likely be less than it is today.

Exactly. The point is that if bitcoin crashed say to 1 cent then obviously the energy expenditure for mining new bitcoins will adapt to reflect that.
You can't say bitcoin is backed by energy because throwing more energy at the system will not necessarily increase its value.

I think it is a dead end to try to argue PoW superiority through energy expenditure.
It is used because the method is extremely solid for reaching probabilistic consensus with anonymous participants.
PoW is a means to an end just like the blockchain is. It should not be seen as something magical and be worshipped. It is a solid piece of engineering for a specific problem.

You are right, however they will put large amounts of money into bitcoin when it magically recovers and soars to new highs.

Lets face it. Volatility is needed for bitcoin adoption at this point.
Anyone with even half a brain will try to buy when bitcoin is crashing and not when it is moving up.
In my opinion it is much more likely that a large dump will kick off the next strong upwards movement.

This whole timed IPO where you receive successively less just feels wrong.
Reminds me of crappy home-shopping channels where they flash how many items are left.

If we have a strong rebound I feel there is a great probability that it will be the start of the next bubble

This feels like a coil that is very wound up.

Yeah, also if you want to put on a tinfoil hat it would make sense to try and delay the bubble as much as possible so it is in the making when the ETF launches rather than beyond its peak

on btc-e it kind of looks like someone is manipulating a bot into selling?

I'm not sure if the exchange is malfunctioning. If you figured out the algorithm a trade-bot uses and it has a weakness you can basically farm it dry

[edit] just to clarify this
You basically induce buying/selling of the bot while trying not to move the price too much or else the trade rules that particular bot uses might change. At least that is how I would go about it if I found a repeatable pattern that a bot follows which is profitable.

I really don't know what to think about Mike Hearn.
Clearly his whitelist/blacklist agenda is so contrary to what bitcoin was intended for I don't feel confident in having any trust in what he is saying.


On the other hand he has a strong point that from a software perspective the protocol needs a lot more attention given what is at stake.

With the amount of narcissism and arrogance Shelby H. Moore III presents himself I am surprised that he has yet to produce an awesome solution to all our problems.
Oh wait, he has but we just don't get it....

lol

You are making incredibly wild conjectures here. Gox says they "lost" coins. It is very interesting that they have not revealed which addresses they believe contained stolen coins.
We have a public ledger, mixing is not 100% perfect.

With that amount of coinage you would probably have to run something like a gambling site or very large mixing service for a long time to launder them with very little trace.

I love it that just because price does not develop in the direction you hope for that suddenly there is this huge agenda behind it.
Sooner or later Gox will have to come clean on what happened to the coins. I have a hunch that a technical glitch is more likely than someone having stolen all the coins.
We have a public ledger. They could simply reveal addresses that stole coins to engage the community in finding out who stole them. The fact that this is not happening speaks for itself

Sadly, I tend to agree about mr Trollfi.

Quote: " I am a prof of computer science and I am supposed to understand computer things. "

The insult here is that if you have spent just a tiny amount of time with the actual protocol code you'd know that he has in fact NOT looked at bitcoin thoroughly from a technical standpoint.
At least some of his questions/claims indicate this to me.

[edit] of course he'll say that the abstract concept is sufficient and no knowledge of details are needed.....

Shouldn't setting up a bitcoin.conf file with rpcallowip etc. and pointing cgminer at the ip:port of the machine running bitcoind / bitcoin-qt suffice?

Well it would mean releasing a fork of bitcoin-qt and bitcoind that is modified and any code that follows the official protocol.
Miners would need the backing of at least half the community.

Oh, and lets not forget the honest miners that do not agree to the fork. Effectively you'd more than halve the difficulty if you decide to fork.
This then becomes a game of byzantine generals

It is interviews like these that strengthen my assumption that he truly lost the coins due to erroneous coding.
If you think you are infallible it is when you are bound to make mistakes

We are right where we need to be.
The cards have been dealt.

I think bitcoin needs these cycles. This is how you distribute coins.
Either we will face complete failure or sooner or later there will be a rebound. Somewhat like  a phoenix rising from the ashes

Back when the original hodl thread appeared I had to smile.
So far I've sold very little of the few btc I own.  A pizza, some donations. you get the idea.
The regular user is not going to short bitcoin or go leveraged long regularly.
Unless exchanges use fractional reserving these methods will not work indefinitely the way they do now.

I wish. It is interesting the person sold pretty much all of his coins. You'd think most people would stick to some concept of "I'll keep half just in case".
Either way, without these purchases bitcoin would be nowhere. I am grateful for that.

I'm late to the party if you want to call it that. But it does not matter. What is happening now will have such a profound impact on society it will create many new and interesting opportunities.
It is exciting to be part of it.

The argument makes no sense because by that logic you can also push the market up.
It is unlikely the real whales will let their speculative toy be destroyed. They are more likely just out to collect some bacon

At the rate things are going at least we will have answers sooner rather than later.
Better than all this waiting for something interesting to happen

That "link" is the image encoded in base64.

I applaud to everyone running a full node. For bitcoin to be decentralized you also want users and not just miners to store and verify blocks and transactions.
If you have an old asic miner that engages in the "bitcoin lottery" on your full node even better!

Ripple is basically inviting the next Lehman Brothers to happen
It is kind of amusing actually. Most large banks or financial institutions with multiple locations worldwide will probably need to run something similar internally anyways.

mmi is often patronizing and a straight out asshole sometimes.

You get out what you put into it...

Occam's razor != wildly guessing

Hal stated he did not have a very large stash (I believe it was a few k coins) He did mine in the early days but stopped. (At least that's what I recall from an interview I once read)
There was some analysis on the blockchain showing very very early coins being sold around the peak of the last bubble and it is believed that those were some of his

At least with open source you can find out about bugs and backdoors.
You have to be pretty foolish not to expect secret services or other large players to have the source code to windows or even their own backdoors specifically put in.
Security through obscurity will eventually come to bite you

After Snowden even the wildest tinfoil hat theories can seem plausible

apart from the obvious answer to extend functionality would any of you care to elaborate why.
And please give concrete technical reasons

This is exactly what annoys me about your attitude. You pretend to know it all yet when someone posts an embedded image in a quote you have no idea what is going on.
A lot of the presented attacks in that wiki are known weaknesses or potential attack vectors, yet many require focussed effort and a lot of financial power to be executed properly.

While your statement is totally true (any code that survives 20 years without any modification is either very basic and hence easy to prove fully correct or its effects are so neglectible that there is no real point in focussing attention on it) it was made to throw a bad light on the current status quo of the core protocol code.

Show me any complex software or service that will work for 20 years if external factors change.

"if the technical part of Google search stay as it is today, then simply Google search wont survive for 20 years... and this is for sure.

Statements like your original one just make you look like a fool

But this is where you are mistaken. Bitcoin is a protocol, that is true. Yet you fail to understand what it does.

Bitcoin forms probabilistic consensus on a ledger of units where ownership is proven through digital signatures.
The value lies in the ledger and that consensus is formed on it. Not on the concrete protocol specification

[edit] To place an analogy. See bitcoin as the concept of sorting a list and the protocol as a concrete sorting implementation. It does not matter if you use quicksort or some weird randomized approach, the result is what matters.

This is you just backing out of the argument. I would love to get into specifics. Btw I am not heavily invested in bitcoin. I have a few but even if the bullish prediction of the vinklevii comes true it won't really change my life.

I am however massively excited about the possibilities provided by cryptocurrencies.
You know I don't have to subscribe to bitcoin as the winning ledger (yes, ledger not protocol) to believe in cryptos.

You know very well that many of these issues are generalized problems for digital services and not exclusive to bitcoin.
If the answers were trivial they'd be solved already but nevertheless I will give you my opinion on what I personally think about them.


Amusing that you say bitcoin will fail yet assume the transaction volume goes up 100 times.... anyways
The block size limit is more or less arbitrarily fixed and very very trivial to increase in the protocol.
Now you will say "oh, but I argued it will have to change in 20 years..." to which I can reply:
If internet bandwidth and hard disk capacity do not magically stop to grow at all even 100 times more transactions should be manageable.
The block size limit is directly linked to blockchain size and that’s why it is there (it provides more or less an upper bound on the size increase of the blockchain for a given time)



upon massive growth of bitcoin this can start to become an issue. You have to discern between full nodes and those that only have parts or none of the chain.
The interesting question is how to go about distributing the blockchain. We can implement an altcoin that uses a proof of work function on the data of the blockchain to encourage its decentralized storage.
It is not necessary for each and every node to actually store the entire chain as long as we can guarantee that it, as a whole, is well enough distributed to be secure.
There is a lot of potential data culling you could do and still verify transactions. Ultimately it will be up to the individual to decide if it wants the entire chain or not.
Either way at current hard disk price points it is still quite some time before it becomes unaffordable for the individual to store the entire blockchain.



The "normal" user won't want to run a full node. As long as enough individuals do so this is okay. There is still some room upwards before it becomes infeasible for regular people to no longer be able to run a full node without having to spend excessive amounts of money on it. Again it would be nice to see some incentives for actually running a full node without being a miner. Maybe a PoS/PoW hybrid solution as a side chain? (Personally I trust more in the hybrid approach as PoW introduces randomization into the system). I could see how an alt aimed at securing the network might somehow create a mutually profitable situation where bitcoin users more readily embrace the altcoin.




I don't like the argumentations you sometimes read on PoW requiring energy while PoS doesn't (which is not really true imho).
Nevertheless there is one point you can't deny. To launch a >50% attack you need at least 62.5 hourly Megawatts over quite some time.
This energy is not wasted, it is securing the network. Look at some other forms of energy being wasted. Every bomb launched not only harms or potentially harms lives, it also wastes incredible amounts of resources.
It may sound cheesy but go fight against war before you fight against the energy consumption of bitcoin.


DDOS is an issue you face in the internet in general. You can try to optimize with filters and also trusted relaying, though generally that opens other cans of worms as you are now moving towards centralization.
Maybe something like a distributed decentralized whitelist for transaction requests? (btw this is something that worries me about Mike Hearn. He has done a lot for bitcoin but his proposition of flagging coins
basically introduces the same problem. If you apply a filter to bitcoin that filter also needs to conform to the consensus properties of bitcoin, namely being decentralized and to some degree anonymous)


No, it is not an issue unless you are mark karpeles or code like him




In the type of consensus bitcoin uses it is impossible to guarantee no double spending. It becomes less probable with every new block that a tx is double spent.
The solution: wait for more blocks.
Ok, here is a more productive answer: Multi-signature addresses where the second signature instils some more trust on transactions by not signing double spends.
How it would work: You request a new multisig address from FastTrustPay® network with your public part of the address. They respond with a multisig address as well as an n-lock transaction for the amount of coins you want them to provide fastpay services for to an address you specified. The n-lock tx guarantees to you that you will get the coins back if something goes wrong. It is well advanced in the future but not too far so you will have to wait years for your coins to come back to you again (this is to prevent you from double spending using the n-lock security). You then transfer the exact amount to the multisig address. Every time you want to send a transaction you send a request for n amounts to x.
Fastpay responds with a new n-lock transaction for the remaining coins, and the half-signed transaction with n to x. you add your sig and post it to the network.

Basically the service checks your available funds and only allows you to spend what you have once. If the receiver also trusts the service it will accept your transaction with fewer confirmations as it knows FastTrustPay will not issue double spends



"What if the government takes over BoA or Citigroup?" That argument can be applied to anything. The bottom line is that you can't avoid it in any system.
Consensus can only be reached if you actually have a majority (or eventually have a majority)
If that majority happens to be the other party well bad luck. formally in such a system it is impossible to circumvent.



The same problem applies to all netbanking at the moment. this is an issue of network security and not bitcoin per se.


These are just quick responses. You very well know that there are potential approaches to deal with these issues.
If you stick to your rigid thinking and argumentation it will get you nowhere.

Like p2p filesharing this is a genie you can't send back into the bottle

well done snipping my reply out of context as I immediately followed with a statement of you using the "if it doesn't change in 20 years" excuse.
So your argument boils down to "There are potential scalability and security issues if bitcoin is not maintained for 20 years"

IPv4 will/is running out of address space. So should I say it is a failed protocol? Should I call it useless? That issue was known for a long time.
Or even more to the point. Do the address space limitations of IPv4 directly prevent you from writing witty comments in this forum? (assuming you or your provider still run on it)
The same goes for the bitcoin protocol. Absolutely essential changes will come when needed, more is bonus.

I asked you why you believe that technically bitcoin is so flawed that it simply can't last 20 years.
The issues you posted are possible problems that may or may not be relevant.
To make such a definitive claim I would have liked to hear something along the lines of "at difficulty x the nonce is too small to guarantee that a solution can be found" (btw this is a real possibility)
That would be a real issue.

[edit] just to clarify : the nonce is 4 bytes, the block hash 32. You can vary other things like the timestamp but unless you can ensure that you have at least 32 bytes to modify you may not find a solution

Btw I agree with you that bitcoin is not the greatest thing after the internet but I think it is quite significant. Some people get carried away with their enthusiasm.

More than anything I expect these high volume swings to attract even more speculators ultimately increasing adoption

We are not at the "most people" phase. These violent swings and the uncertainty drive coin distribution.
You can subscribe to the theory that the manipulators and speculators always win, I don't.
For every winner there needs to be a loser. I doubt this is just small time speculators losing out. It will be both whales and smaller fish that win and lose

Tell me, nasterxy, why are you not running a giant mining farm and making huge profits?



 

I'm sorry if I have to break it for you guys but there is no "math" that limits the number of bitcoins.
You need to stop thinking about bitcoin as some mathematical absolute that has been discovered by satoshi.
It is more or less just a statement made in code that everyone agrees with.

I have no idea what you are trying to tell me here.

People often suggest there is a greater "Math" behind why bitcoin is limited in supply.
Basically it is a few lines of code in the protocol an the fact that the majority of miners and users follow that protocol.
It is horribly trivial to change the supply of bitcoin to an arbitrary amount if there was enough backing by the community for it.

Saying it is impossible to change is having a fundamental misunderstanding of how or why bitcoin works

I have to side with Jorge here. It is unlikely that coin emission will change in recent times but it is not impossible.
Ultimately you cannot enforce what rules people subscribe to. The mere existence of altcoins proves that multiple rule sets can concurrently exist.
And no one should fool themselves that only one coin will ever be accepted by retailers. If it is trivial to integrate bitcoin, it is trivial to integrate other coins.

The proposition that only bitcoin can and will survive comes from selfish motives. You only need to believe in that if you want its value to be extremely high.
There is enough room for multiple cryptocurrencies and they can and will come and go as technology changes.

Does it really matter if I pay something in btc, ltc, doge, nxt or ether? If the design and security of the protocol is sound (which I am not advocating here for many of the so called bitcoin 2.0 alts, the verdict is still open) and enough people use and accept it it is "good enough".

Arguments on the network effect only work to a certain degree. An analogy would be to claim that something like Facebook or Google will be the sole existing service simply because it has the biggest network.

The irony is that they don't. Or would you honestly claim that for Litecoin there is any real improvement.
All it takes is regional acceptance on a larger level to make a coin relevant for people in that area.

We can argue all we want about if, in the long term, these alts have merit but the reality is that they exist and some have quite respectable market caps for offering very little innovation.

If you already have your mind set on what you want to believe that is your thing.

I see a future where cryptocurrencies are used for all kinds of things, can be traded on p2p exchanges (a working algorithm for exchanging different cryptocurrencies that are based on blochchains exists)
and there are different coins for different usage scenarios.
An MMO could base its ingame currency on a cryptocurrency and in that community it makes sense to use it. Why would you want or need bitcoin for this, especially if you can easily exchange one for the other on exchanges.

But you go on believing that bitcoin will reach world dominance.
I simply find it a very narrow vision of the future

I'm only trying to point out that people should avoid adopting a black or white stance on bitcoin.
It is not an all-or-nothing thing where either bitcoin succeeds or some other alt does but they do not want to accept the possibility of co-existence.

Ask two different people a question and you might get three different answers .

I can both believe in the success of bitcoin and the existence of several successful altcoins.

Either way I'm sure there are exciting job opportunities in the field for years to come so my outlook is bright even if I am not heavily invested

By your logic shouldn't we already have a single global currency because that is where we would logically converge to?

"Every Bitcoin one holds is held at the exclusion of every other possible use for that money, especially other currencies."

Such is the nature of speculation. You believe currency x will be worth more in the future than currency y hence you hold x instead of y.
The thing is there is no guarantee for this and over time outlooks can change.

I personally think it is likely bitcoin will be worth more in the future, hence I have a few.
But do I know this for certain? No. which is why I am not "all in". Do you know for a fact that bitcoin will always be number 1? Can you guarantee that ripple or ether or nxt, for some obscure and unfathomable reason does not outgrow bitcoin and appears to be more valuable for a majority of people?

[edit]

What I think is that you are implying the convergence to a monopoly, a single globally accepted digital currency.
I don't think it is in the nature of humanity to agree. There will always be people wanting something else