BitInstant CEO Says World Operates "On an Inferior Monetary System" 185
hypnosec writes "BitInstant's CEO Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhees were invited to speak about virtual currency at the NACHA (the North American Payments Association) Annual Global Payments Forum held in Rio de Janeiro. At the conference the duo stated that the world operates 'on an inferior monetary system'. One of the more interesting parts of the whole forum was how Bitcoin as a currency and transaction system "works within current legal frameworks." A presentation by Senior Legal Counsel to the Federal Reserve titled: 'The Implications of Dodd-Frank Section 1073' sheds light on requirements that need to be fulfilled by "Remittance Payment Company" (RPC) guidelines. This law requires such companies to disclose a lot of information about money transactions. This is where Bitcoin as a currency and system collide head-on with the law."
Tracking money (Score:4, Interesting)
Bitcoin requires computer tracking of every single transaction, and requires distributing the information on each transaction to the public.
At the risk of getting flamed, I don't see how "Bitcoin as a currency and system collide head-on with the law" [requiring tracking of currency transactions]; the bitcoin system would require only trivial mods to do remove the privacy and track the "who" as well as the "what".
Re:Tracking money (Score:5, Informative)
the bitcoin system would require only trivial mods to do remove the privacy and track the "who" as well as the "what".
That's not how it works. First and foremost, the creation of public addresses can be done entirely offline, without connecting to the Internet and without any information leaving RAM. I can request money to be sent to one of these addresses and only the person sending it knows that it belongs to me as there is no other record of its existence. An infinite number of such addresses could be created and there is no way to tie them directly to me.
Secondly, any such non-trivial changes to the network would require nearly everyone on the network to agree, which is EXTREMELY unlikely given Bitcoin's user base and ideology.
Re:Tracking money (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tracking money (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just interesting. Wonderful.
You could characterize the use of cash exactly the same way. I like paying cash. It would be nice if I could pay cash over the intertubes. If Bitcoin does (the equivalent of) that, lots of people are going to like it for lots of reasons, some nice and some not so nice.
Just like cash.
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Ok, you're right. It's only a crime to express your desires in some way the legal system doesn't like instead of simply wanting a thing.
But all progress depends on people acting on their beliefs. Simply wanting a thing and keeping quiet about it never changed the world.
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Incorrect. Even if you have 100% of the network computing power, you still cannot force core rule changes upon users.
Each P2P node validates transactions and blocks on their own, and refuses to relay invalid ones. Deviating from these rules simply segments yourself away from the rest of the network.
With sufficient network power, you may DoS the network, but not force unwanted rule changes.
- jgarzik, bitcoin core dev
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Re:Tracking money (Score:5, Informative)
Alice doesn't put your Oxytocin in the mail until she sees your transaction confirmed by six or seven nodes on blockchain.info -- the people calculating the blocks are validating the transactions against the rules of the system. Once the money passing to Alice is "spent" on the blockchain, all of the peers processing transactions will see your wallet as empty and any attempt to debit BTCs from a wallet that's empty will be rejected.
This can be broken if you get a peer to accept your transaction, stick it in as block and lie that it's validated; but other peers are seeing your transaction too and computing their own blocks against the truth on the chain. Six or seven different nodes have to agree on the validity of your transaction, and you have no control over which nodes will be able to validate a block containing your transaction. If you got some vast percentage of the computing power on the block chain (not a vast amount of power per se, but a commanding proportion of the total cycles computing transactions), you might be able to get enough confirmations to make your false transaction look valid. And that's a problem, and it's a way that a large single guild could possibly create rule changes, but at his time it's probably not a major issue.
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Once a transaction is accepted into the block chain no other transactions that spend the same coins will be accepted. I may be wrong but I think every client on the network will see that transaction as wrong and not even forward it.
For the second part it's not hard to work out the IP behind any given BitCoin address as long as that address has sent, not just received, coins. Blockchain.info will give this info. Feel free to send your transaction though a proxy, TOR, a VPN, or a SSH tunnel. If you are buying
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Perhaps that's where I wasn't getting it. The descriptions always try to make it sound as much like money as possible. But you don't show your dollar to Alice, then she writes down the serial number, then you set your dollar on fire, and she prints her new dollar "copy" of yours.
Businesses can be forced to obey the law (Score:2)
Exchanges, wallets, and businesses that accept BitCoin as payment can all be forced to migrate to some "BitCoin+", which ties transactions to a traceable personal identifier. The old network may still exist, but its utility for making significant financial transactions would be crippled.
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Not quite. There still is the "Cartel attack" that doesn't require 50% of the computing power of the network in order to become an actor. It is the one kind of attack that could succeed.
The attack goes something like this:
You have a "cartel" that represents a significant fraction of the network (but not 50%). Among themselves they calculate and publish among themselves successful hashes and develop chains of blocks that attempt to out compete the network as a whole. Only when a "competing" chain might o
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The cartel attack you describe just won't work. You need a longer block chain than the rest of the network in order to get your block chain published and you can't generate that with less than 50% of the network.
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Sure you can. It does take a large portion of the network, and in fact it gets easier to do this if you have multiple competing cartels (including some "cartel" members in multiple cartels).
I've performed empirical simulations to see if this works and it seems to work as promised, although it hasn't been rigorously investigated as I would hope to give some specific numbers.
Yes, you need a longer block chain than the rest of the network. The point is once you have a longer chain then you can keep the longe
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Oh, it is possible to have at least some of the time a longer block chain than the rest of the network. We are dealing with probabilities here and not just pure deterministic algorithms with Bitcoin. Perhaps only 10% of the time that the cartel would have a longer chain than the rest of the network.... but if the cartel was organized properly it could get more than their "share" of the newly minted coins and transaction fees.
This is sort of a rework of the prisoner's dilemma if you want to know the catego
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As various areas set up their own wans, bitcoin would continue to operate but in an entirely fragmented way..
It is possible, during this time, for people to trade the same coins multiple times by trading them in the different fragments..
When the civil war is over and the global connectivity is re-established, that global bitcoin swarm now receives conflictin
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Hash codes can still be sent around on "sneaker net" and other ways to ensure that Bitcoins can be transmitted to each other.
You don't need a 24/7 internet connection, all you really need is the ability to get your transactions processed eventually on the global network. Eventually means just that... it just has to be incorporated into the larger chain when it becomes convenient. As long as everybody acting locally agrees upon the values being exchanged there isn't even a loss of value among the bitcoins
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What you describe is far less of a problem than it seems at first glance.
If any large part of the network continues in isolation from the rest of the network both sides will still be viable, people in both parts will still be able to send and receive coins. When the networks join back the longest block chain, which will be the side with the most miners, will become the 'correct' block chain and be uploaded onto all clients orphaning the transactions that were on the shorter blockchain. The orphaned transact
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1) If the same coins are really spent on both sides of the network split the transactions on the losing side will become invalid and will be dropped. This should not be a problem in practice as clients will be on one or other side of the split, not both.
Clients? Sure. ID's not so much. It is quite trivial to phone my buddy on the other side of the network split and give him what he needs to start trading the coins I am also about to start trading. This idea that "it should not be a problem" assumes honest actors.. what kind of security is that? Its just plain old bullshit that you just tried to sell.
The entire network would be really hard to split and keep split in practice.
I think the AC's point is that it doesnt have to be kept split. I think the AC's point is that it just needs to be reconnected in the right sequence in order
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What exactly would be the point of that? That's doesn't seem like anything wrong with BitCoin specifically vs other electronic currency systems. That's just you and your buddy lying to people that you're going to pay them and letting chance determine who you end up not paying.
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Anonymity is not guaranteed with Bitcoin, and it is wrong to suggest that it is. There is some partial anonymity built into the system, but built into the protocol is a way to track where each coin has been spent, so far as what hash addresses it has gone to and where those "Bitcoins" eventually were spent. It is possible to trace each and every bitcoin to the block where the "coin" was generated.
Public hash codes such as something published on a website (including a Slashdot signature) or posted in a pub
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Trivial mod but practically impossible to implement - that's the whole beauty of it.
Hard to implement? Why in the world do you think so? It's sweet that you think that it's impossible for there to be any invisible tracking, but even if there isn't-- Every transaction is public! Good grief, I can't think of anything more succeptible to decoding via data mining techniques than which transaction goes to whom. Unless you generate a new address for every single transaction, sooner or later there's enough information to decode who any given address tracks back to. And if you do generate a n
newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
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In this case, it's newsworthy for its entertainment value [pcworld.com].
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A couple of hours ago, that URL pointed to an article about yet another Bitcoin ripoff. It was a lot funnier then.
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A couple of hours ago, that URL pointed to an article about yet another Bitcoin ripoff. It was a lot funnier then.
The ripoff was an exchange service run by someone who was totally not up to the job. All the rules and regulations banks follow to setup web services don't apply to BitCoin ( yet ) so there have been many cases of people setting up stuff only to get robbed because they don't follow sensible security precautions.
The problem is lone idiots setting up web services that effectively handle money.
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And financial system were lone idiots flourish is supposed to be superior?
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Correct link. [pcworld.com]
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What's even more amusing that the #1 currency exchange for his product is still MtGox, which was formerly famous for trading Magic The Gathering playing cards.
Oh, and not only was that site hacked, but that hack was responsible for wiping out 2/3'rds of the currency's reported value overnight. Even now, it still hasn't fully recovered that value.
Wow, this sounds MUCH better than the existing monetary system! Sign me up!
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When people first started wanking-off to the whole BitCoin thing with hourly stories on every site, I was constantly shouted down as a troll for commenting on how the whole concept just felt scammy and dirty. That even if it was entirely legitimate, describing how it works to any rational human being would make them instantly feel like that isn't a real thing, but is some sort of a shady ass scheme (and remember those shady fucking things about a decade ago where you could install clients on your computer a
Just like... (Score:3)
...Tim Cook says that we are living in a post-PC era. Does it really surprise anyone that people with an interest in seeing things change are advocating for such changes?
Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:2, Informative)
Bitcoin is useless from a PRACTICAL standpoint. Why?
1) Transactions aren't instant, you have to wait potentially for hours for your transaction to go through and the value in your account to change. (Even transactions between two accounts you own, because Bitcoin isn't smart enough to handle that.)
2) Every device using Bitcoin needs a copy of the Bitcoin database. As of about a year ago, this was 700 MB of data. Every device needs a copy of this. Every device needs to go through this file and parse it. Incl
Re:Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:4, Insightful)
My credit card has pending transactions for days sometimes.
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Days before you get to sign the slip?
Those transactions are not actually "pending", the bank is holding your money for a few days to collect interest off of it before passing it on to the next gent.
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Re:Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:5, Informative)
1 - Ten minutes max, usually.
2 - Not true, there are several wallet tools now that don't hold the blockchain locally.
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1 - Ten minutes max, usually.
2 - Not true, there are several wallet tools now that don't hold the blockchain locally.
The ten minutes is the typical amount of time that Satoshi established for generating a block chain. It could be longer or much shorter before a transaction is incorporated. In theory the next block may take even days to be generated, but as a practical matter you are correct that about ten minutes is typical and longer than a half hour is almost unheard of. I have seen two blocks generated less than ten seconds apart, and some that take much longer to be processed.
If you don't bother including any trans
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Is it me, or does this seem like how some HFT will go in and monetize BitCoin? I mean, 10 minutes is usually "good enough", but you can bet someone will see a way to make it instant.
And once BitCoin becomes popular, you can bet the money traders will move in. Unregulated transactions? Check. With 10 minutes between confirmations, you can do millions of transactions in between that get resolved afterwards.
That's the future of BitCoin.
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Actually it's just you, because you haven't read the protocol spec and don't know what you're talking about.
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No, ten minutes is the average time it takes for the next block to come along. In practice it takes longer than that to get a transaction confirmed on average because it may not actually get included in the next block.
It's also not unusual for there not to be any blocks for well over an hour, meaning that your transactions can actually take several hours to get their first confirmation. Plus, one confirmation isn't actually enough - there are various attacks that can be used against services which accept tr
Re:Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:5, Informative)
I think your comments are fair, but not entirely accurate any more;
I agree with them to a degree, and have raised those issues a number of times in the #bitcoin IRC channel on freenode;
The response to 1) is well, sure, transaction confirmations are not instant. So what? Neither are credit-card transactions. They can take days, even weeks to confirm. The banks agree to go with instant-confirmation based on probability. In a real-world implementation of bitcoin, I suspect that people would accept small transactions without 6 confirms. In fact, in a real-world implementation, I think most stores could do a lot worse than go down the "Starbucks" route; you have an automated payment app on your phone (or accessible via the web, or via a payment machine at the counter that uses your card number etc.). This "starbucks" account is filled by bitcoin, by you, at home. Or in store etc. but the point being that you fill it before you need it, 9 times out of 10. Ergo that reduces the need for instant confirms. Since it's only a small amount of cash in your Starbucks account, it mitigates the worries over hyperinflation & governmental interference that running all your finances in this way would raise.
2) Not every device needs a full copy of the database now. They have thin-use clients. I'm not sure on the exact specifics of how it does it, but I know it's supported, and will become "the norm" for most domestic users; I believe the main such desktop app is called "Electrum". The network as a whole isn't endangered as long as a fair number of clients continue to use the whole block chain apps. And a lot of people will. But on your iPhone or whatever, sure, thin-client, instant usage, no waiting on downloading the block chain.
Really, the way to get BTC into common, physical-world use, is to go down the accounts system aka "starbucks". A lot of retail chains are already set up for such a system, small retailers can easily roll their own thanks to the likes of OpenTransaction, and it makes it very easy to get btc into common usage without the worries over physical terminals, having to accept low confirm levels or make customers wait for ages etc.
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Here in Europe, the creditcard transactions with Visa Electron are realtime and the amount you pay is immediately taken from your account. If the realtime reservation cannot be made (due to network problems that sometimes happen), you cannot make the payment and the merchant wont sell you the goods. With non-realtime creditcards, the CC issuer and/or bank makes sure the merchant gets her money even if the customer didn't have the funds, thus the merchant can be sure to paid. With Bitcoin, if the transaction
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> Here in Europe, the creditcard transactions with Visa Electron are realtime and the amount you pay is immediately taken from your account.
Doesn't that make it a debit card? We have those in the US, too.
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Could be, I was assuming the AC used the fastest example available in his comparison...
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> Here in Europe, the creditcard transactions with Visa Electron are realtime and the amount you pay is immediately taken from your account.
Doesn't that make it a debit card? We have those in the US, too.
Yes, but Visa Electron and Mastercard Maestro are always verified, you can't simply spend something you don't have.
Visa / MC Debit have an option to be verified, but it is not mandatory and when used in a non-instant way they will show up on your account either immediately or maybe 3 days later, depending on the chain of payment processing.
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yeah it's a debit card. technically you shouldn't be able to overdraw it (it's possible when traveling, to some extent - it shouldn't be though).
but visa isn't really consistent with it's branding nor with it's actual rules globally. it's also supposed to be used only with the chip if possible, but the main point about "electro" part is checking it live if you have enough balance.
but visa electron, when travelling, works exactly like a credit card - whoever is charging it is just supposed to check that it h
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Doesn't that make it a debit card? We have those in the US, too.
No. They have credit cards that run as US debit cards, where the "account" they are taken from immediately is the credit account. Because it's taken from a credit account, it's a credit card, not a debit card. A debit card is a "credit card" tied to a non-credit account. The method of transaction is irrelevant to the account at the back end, and the card type is determined by the back-end account.
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Here in America the merchant is mostly on the hook for credit transaction problems.
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Here I would only accept Visa Electron type cards as a merchant as I would be fairly sure that I would always get to keep the funds.
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I know, in 1991 I arrived in Germany with my Visa card and could only use it to get cash from certain banks in the center of very large cities, and not for purchases anywhere. I understand it's gotten a little better, but still not accepted the way it is in the US. MasterCard was better in Germany, and the reverse in France.
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cc is for practical purposes instant.
the vendor who you're buying from is instantly promised money by the system(in most cases even checked&verified promise) and you get your purchase instantly.
though if bc was used commonly for everyday things, then for things like coffee you would load up credits on your coffeeshop card with it, same with bus etc.
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Um, no. Confirmation of credit card transactions is virtually instantaneous. It make take a while for the transfer to take place or the charges to be applied - but that's not the same thing.
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1) For low-value transactions (say, $50), 0 confirmations is usually fine. For higher value transactions, 1 confirmation (average of 10 minutes, sometimes more) is pretty good. If you're buying a car or a house, waiting an hour or two for more transactions is reasonable. You'd spend at least that time on paperwork.
2) There are several thin clients now that do NOT require the full blockchain. For example, MultiBit, Electrum, Blockchain.info, various cell phone clients... the implementation depends on the cl
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If you're buying a car or a house, waiting an hour or two for more transactions is reasonable. You'd spend at least that time on paperwork.
Who in their right mind is going to be signing paperwork before the money, or a legally enforceable promise of money, is confirmed and in their hands when talking about very large sums?
...perhaps the same idiot that didnt get a lawyer when you was buying or selling a house.
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Who in their right mind is going to be signing paperwork before the money, or a legally enforceable promise of money, is confirmed and in their hands when talking about very large sums?
Afaik, house sales usually involve an escrow process. Buyer & seller make a contract; buyer puts money into escrow account; seller completes deed transfer paperwork; then escrow company releases money to seller.
No reason this couldn't be done with Bitcoin, or any other type of payment mechanism.
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A year ago, processing 0.00001% of the world's commerce was 700MB - how big would it be if they handled Visa's global transaction volume?
Re:Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong on every detail.
1a) Using the "move" RPC command, bitcoin makes an instant transfer between two accounts that you control.
1b) All transactions are published instantly, and available instantly, via the bitcoin P2P network. There are also several websites like http://mtgox.com/ which facilitate instant transfers. After that, you wait on average 10 minutes per confirmation, each of which makes your transaction exponentially more secure. While not recommended, yes you can spend zero-confirmation transactions.
2) Did you bother to look at Android Market before posting? Only full nodes require the full block chain database (2+ GB now). Lightweight software exists for phones, or you can use a web wallet from places like http://blockchain.info/ or http://instawallet.org/
- jgarzik, bitcoin core dev
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1a) Using the "move" RPC command, bitcoin makes an instant transfer between two accounts that you control.
Except that isn't actually a transfer at all, and as one of the core Bitcoin developers you must know that. All the "move" RPC command does is update a note in your wallet which says that a particular number of bitcoins belong to a particular account name. It doesn't actually move any bitcoins - in fact, the bitcoins you're transferring don't even have to actually exist. If you want to actually transfer bitcoins from (for instance) your wallet to your Mt.Gox account, or your desktop to your mobile phone, or
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While it's believed the number of prime numbers themselves are infinite (it's not easy proving anything in mathematics with the word 'infinite' in it)
Yes, if only we could prove there is an infinite number of oprimes rather than just believing, presumably from some famous named conjecture. I'm sure any such proof would require extremely deep and difficult mathematics and not be something that is used in textbooks as a first example of mathematical proof as copied straight out of Euclid.
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Yes, if only we could prove there is an infinite number of oprimes rather than just believing, presumably from some famous named conjecture. I'm sure any such proof would require extremely deep and difficult mathematics and not be something that is used in textbooks as a first example of mathematical proof as copied straight out of Euclid.
I'm sensing a high level of sarcasm here. I can prove that the angles of the three sides of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. I cannot prove that parallel lines never cross. That's the difference between something proven, and something posited. A conjecture is one step below even that: It's something that all the data points to being true, but it can't be derived directly from mathematical laws. In other words, it's a really good guess.
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I thought you might have taken the time to look things up, but apparently not. Let's recap then; Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes in approx. 300 BC. The proof is very straightforward and has been repeated many times. See here [utm.edu] for a canonical example. But wait, there's more. Bored mathematicians have found other proofs, usually perverse ones for amusement value. See, for example Goldbach's proof [utm.edu], or Furstenberg's topological proof [utm.edu].
Perhaps your going to say that those are just a touch hand-
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For anyone interested reading this discussion, I may as well say what the proof actually is, because it's shorter than typical explanations of how easy it is.
Suppose there are only a finite number of prime numbers. That means you can produce a complete List Of All Primes. Multiply them all together, add 1. This number has no prime factors (by definition; none of the primes on our List Of All Primes divide into it), which means it must be prime itself, but it's way bigger than anything on the list so it can'
Re:Ignoring the theoretical for a moment (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot something: Bitcoin supply decreases exponentially over time.
They're based on prime numbers, which become increasingly rare as the numbers increase.
Can I have some of what you're smoking? The exponential decay curve of Bitcoin supply has nothing whatsoever to do with prime numbers. It is simply a planned feature that after every 210000 blocks produced, the block reward will halve.
Also, as others have already corrected you, Bitcoins are fine for microtransactions. There are currently 8 decimals, with a possibility to increase in the future.
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I can reuse cash immediately. There's no need to put it on an account first.
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Your bullshit is so thick it's not even funny. You got a mining rig but didn't know about the transaction fees? A 10 bitcoin limit? FFS.
Slow speed of analogue money is the savior (Score:2)
The slow speed of analogue money is the buffer we all need, as electronic money move around too fast.
With ultrafast transactions only we would have the stock markets crash every few minutes, albeit after a few hundred millions, or billions of transactions.
The differently paced transactions may be a pain in the rear for stock brokers, but they have saved us all from even more disasters. Slow human brains cannot react within seconds to a system running amok.
Now, go away Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how much you
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A stock market that crashes every few minutes sounds like an opportunity to me!
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With ultrafast transactions only we would have the stock markets crash every few minutes
And the bad thing is? The stock markets are perfectly capable of crashing without Bitcoins and have done so many time in the past. High Frequency Trading is an evil anyway that should have been stopped before it started.
Erik Vorhees? (Score:4, Funny)
Does he know anything about camp crystal lake?
To in your face (Score:2)
This article show a great deal of pro Bit Coin bias. Sever farms for generating coins may not be common yet, but bot nets are already an issue. However the real stickler point that the Legal Council is trying to get acknowledged in my opinion is the point of Exchange. In this case the point of Exchange from Bit Coin's to USD. (e.g https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox [bitcoin.it] )
For now you can stay anon as long as your jacked in the system and buying goods that people will exchange for Bit Coins (I've personally never
The black market is... (Score:2)
The black market is the side that hasn't won and re-written history. Yet.
Digital currency is only as good (Score:3)
as the network. Network goes and and you're fucked. People need to learn how to barter again and save on taxes and remove the usless currency. To me there's more value in buy/sell type websites than digital currency.
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People need to learn how to barter again and save on taxes
In general, countries that have sales taxes or value added taxes officially tax barter as well. In British Columbia, and in Ontario the last time I lived there, there is no sales tax on the resale of used personal items: i.e. you don’t have to pay sales tax at a garage sale/boot sale/flea market.
But if you trade computer repair for plumbing repair, the law says that you are required to collect the service/sales/value add tax for the computer repair and send it to the tax man, and the plumber likewise
Is south america a USA dependency? (Score:2)
In linked article, the reporter first starts by a rant about the difficulty of obtaining a visa to Brazil, suggesting he has some natural right to go wherever he wants, then:
To my surprise, however, nobody in Rio (perhaps all of Brazil?) speaks any English. Of all the places I’ve travelled in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, Rio was the most difficult to communicate with locals, by far (they’re in South America, right? Shouldn’t they speak American??).
This guy is joking, right?
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You'll notice that countries that have widespread acceptance of foreign currencies tend to either be heavily oriented towards tourism and/or have unstable currencies (high inflation typically). Those benefits make up for the additional risk and overhead. What are the benefits for developed economies with stable currencies?
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It is hard for the government of any country to know how many Bitcions you may have, as they can be stored in a "private" hash key that can only be known to you and recorded somewhere that a government can't discover. If there are laws of this nature that you must live under, it is up to you as if you want to comply with those laws voluntarily or not.
As for how to verify how many Bitcoins you may have or not have without the government discovering that quantity, that may be a bit harder. Not impossible as
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But your words, as stated, are simply false. You are allowed to store all the wealth in gold you wish. There are no rule
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If you believe that the gold defines value rather than the paper currency...
Why would you believe something that stupid? Gold is just another commodity. Gold prices in 1999-2001 were about $275 an ounce. The current spot price fluctuates, but when I just checked it was about $1770. Does that mean that the price of everything else has gone up in the past decade by a factor of 6.4x? Of course not, don't be silly. Even things that grow faster than inflation (tuition, medical care) haven't gone up in price tha
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many asian central banks are hoarding gold, building reserves. maybe it is you who believes something stupid.
the value of fiat money always goes to zero. gold from five thousand years ago holds value today. gold is real money, dollars are game chits.
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In the loose sense of "related" (Score:3)
Also related: can somebody spot me $50 until Friday? You know I'm good for it.
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Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money [wikipedia.org] for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money [wikipedia.org] for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?
I use Paytrust [paytrust.com]. I have all of my bills sent to them, and they scan them in and pay them automatically based on payment rules I set. I can categorize each bill and generate reports from that, which is good enough to let me separate my investment property rental expenses from the rest of my personal expenses at tax time. At the end of the year I can buy a CD with my annual activity archived.
For investment tracking, I rely on E*Trade.
This system works for me and I'm not sure what I'd gain from something like M
Inferior Monetary System (Score:3)
At the conference the duo stated that the world operates 'on an inferior monetary system'.
We live in an imperfect world, and the human civilization, too, is imperfect.
Same as the monetary system that the world is using, it is imperfect
But to say that the world is using an "INFERIOR monetary system" is to infer that there exists something much more "SUPERIOR" than the one we are using.
If that's the case, I would like to know what is it.
While I applaud those who have created the Bitcoins (and I do have a few of them myself) and their ideology to offer the world an a
Re: (Score:3)
Or that there HAS BEEN a better system. And our money system has deteriorated tremendously since the second world war. Especially the finance firms were given far too much freedom to just commit fraud, which caused bubbles and the inevitable following crises. In the "first" 18th century, at least a steam engine made things that represented some value. In this "second 18th century", data centres don't produce anything of value, yet almost all money is sucked into them.
If you are from the USA, Roosevelt has p
Re: (Score:2)
And criminals also makes extensive of cash, existing banks, existing money transfer systems etc... Criminals always want to stay one step ahead of the law, is it any wonder they would embrace a new payment system before anyone else?
Re:better than bitcoin though (Score:4, Insightful)
So all the folks running the exchanges and other hacked services, if indeed they were hacked and not just subject to fraud by the owners, were all fools who hadn't taken 10 minutes to learn basic security?
Face it, whatever the security of the protocol, the record of the bitcoin community and the services run by said community is deservedly in the gutter.
Re:better than bitcoin though (Score:4, Informative)
A different level of security vigilance is necessary for a Bitcoin exchange operator, than for an individual holder of Bitcoins - because it's a much more tempting target for thieves. Much like a traditional bank requires rather more security than one's wallet.
Re: (Score:2)
So all the folks running the exchanges and other hacked services, if indeed they were hacked and not just subject to fraud by the owners, were all fools who hadn't taken 10 minutes to learn basic security?
BitCoin has now attracted a lot of greedy fools and a lot of conmen just like cash always has. One guy stole rather a lot of BitCoins by offering 7% interest a week. That was obviously a ponzi but very many people fell for it.
Re: (Score:2)
But here's the thing: in the Bitcoin community, those that have poor practices can actually fail!
Re: (Score:2)
And take a lot of people's money with them!
I'll stick to the normal economy for now, at least there I have some form of legal redress.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Fine, you're saying that the current bitcoin community is, in general, a bad place to put any financial faith (and therefore money).
I agree.