Yeh I've read your explanation. WHO CARES ABOUT A LITTLE INFLATION

Have it your way, I'll look around for some botnets for rent...

It's not really a problem either way.

You can inflate the currency slightly for a while and either sell or destroy the coins.

The first option increases the market capitalization and will temporarily drive the price down (more supply), the latter does nothing but waste your time and money.

Have fun! Be sure to let us know how it goes! :)

Just like people haven't tried it before...

So if you destroy coins at will then there is no real distributed impervious system afterall!

No different to using paypal. The transaction can be halted by other people

Oh jeez software verification goes beyond trying it! Well it's supposed to!

You misunderstood me.

I was referring to your little botnet. If you used a botnet to mine coins and then just threw them away. It would do nothing. It wouldn't inflate the supply or cause anyone any grief at all. In the long run you'd cause a tiny bit of deflation. Probably less than 0.01%. It isn't even noticeable.

If you sold these coins (most likely, why would you work for free?), you'd cause a temporary decline in the asking price of the coins because you'd flood the market with supply. This would only work until the difficulty increased automatically. Again, this really does nothing. You just *helped* us mine more coins! Thanks! lol

You don't get it. Cracking the crypto is how Bitcoin works. By attacking it you are actually helping it. :) So crack away! :)

What are you talking about here? You mean that you can DDOS someones IP and take them down and because of that it's no different than Paypal? :Oh crap
Or what do you mean? It does only take a couple of seconds to complete the transfer. It's not like downloading gay movies in 1080p.

Approximately how long should a transfer take to complete?

I sent the 0.05 BTC balance I had at MyBitcoin.com to my wallet - about 35 minutes ago, and they still have not shown up in my wallet?

Edit: Oh, I totally misunderstood.

The first time you install the Bitcoin software you need to sync up with the P2P network. Your client should say "Block 116,642" or more.

The blocks increment every so often. If your client is out of sync it will download the missing blocks automatically. You can see the current block count @ bitcoinwatch.com.

You only have to sync your client when you first install it. It's not a bug.

The "blocks" are containers that have transactions inside of them. If you did a spend from MyBitcoin to your PC you won't see it unless your client is in sync with the rest of the network.

FYI: You can view the contents of these blocks by going to blockexplorer.com

ok thanx .... I'm at 95'000 blocks so far

I'll wait for it to sync.

How can a system where the honest users earns 1 credit per X hours and a botnet owner earns 10,000,000 credits per X hours be fair?

How many computers are using brute force at once?

According to your 0.01% figure you already have 100,000,000,000 members? 100 accounts for every Chinaman!

And no a botnet doesn't HELP your currency.

You decide the difficulty level of the encryption, so if MORE CREDITS helps you some way botnets can't do it

Cool. The block chain is a sort of distributed database that contains every transaction since Bitcoin started. The oldest blocks eventually get compressed and "fall off" the end.

It's super technical stuff. It's covered in the whitepaper if you are interested in knowing more about how the system keeps track of the transactions. ;) It's brilliant in my opinion. :)

What would be a better solution? It seems like it has worked fine since 2009.

Without sounding like a broken record, I'll say this once more: read the whitepaper. Pretty please? :)

not sure, a botnet is always going to have an advantage on CPU time, a mining permit for each verified account? anyway I'm off topic, interesting concept!

I wouldn't worry too much, cam_girls is the one that is a little broken... :helpme

:1orglaugh

This just in:

http://memeburn.com/2011/04/could-bi...omment-page-1/

Nice link!

Maybe not bitcoin (due to a few issues, for example that you mine and find gold coint with cpu power which is a geek niche, I think coin should be purchased from dollar, euro, metals etc.) but something like this - done different - may have relevance in future, given the real economy is a joke like a video game lately, so let it be a video game officially.

Anyway the real issue of any pay or exchange thing is the law and lobbies who pay the governments who does the law. Whoever does not remember e-gold, read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

I remember every kind of illegal transaction was done using e-gold in 1990's, including non 2257 compliand adult sites, then the system became illegal and the guy who operate it stopped. And he's a good faith guy, but does not matter.

Ok next step it is: you mix egold with bittorrent you get a decentralized bitcon stuff, the money can't come from money launder at start because you create it with cpu power (this looks to me even less fair then who create coin by play in MMORPG's, at least online game money require human time = work to generate it?), but wekk, you can't stop this going on as well as you can't stop bittorrents. But govts can still put in jail whoever you catch using it, especially merchants - from the moment such system become popular.

One example, adult sites you pay with cointorrent or whatever you name it, or bigger operators who exchange goldbits with paypals or dollars - will be same if you support wikileaks with a biller - can't stop wikileaks but you can close all their processors, paypals and banks, so let the wikileaks be a bit coin thing itself, whoever (phisical people - not net traffic) is caught making big bit-transactions would get "Assanged" i.e. very bad life due to law, wh ocan be even updated just to fix the gap of P2P currency with some "P2P Money Launder Act" of 2012 or so.

So I think these systems can work for small number of geeks who find it fascinating, but if for some reason one of these systems become big in transactions and number of merchants (as it was egold) will be made illegal (just the fact you can't say for sure who is the sender, who is the receiver, and for what the transaction is made, make it illegal today) and if can't stop it as not centralized, the bigger merchants using it can be spanked hard enough to give up.

History Repeats
 

In the Depression, many small towns created Wooden Nickles, as the townsfolk needed to buy & sell, but there was no cash.
In the 70's & 80's somebody (we'll call X), in a major city would start a barter currency. You agreed with someone to trade a service or goods. The advertising business was the model for this trading ads for restaurant meals. As with most transactions, you might have a trade imbalance, i.e. a car for x number of haircuts. If you didn't want haircuts, you took trade dollars. Transactions went through X for a 2% fee. You could also buy trade dollars. X always seem to print money for himself and counterfeiting was also a problem. These barter services usually folded in a year or two.
Then somebody had Real Dollars, that usually were in tourist or college towns. The idea was to show the money was helping to show money circulating in the town rather than hoarding or being spent out of town. But like Disney Money, people saved them for the pretty pictures on them. Real Dollars are gone, just like so many topless bars that printed their own currency.
As for BitCoins, I looked yesterday at a site that severely limited how many you could buy a month (probably they had a small supply). This makes it difficult if you need some to make a major purchase now. Other problem, since you really don't know who you're dealing with, opposed to PayPal or a postal address, they burn you, there's no recourse.
Lastly, the claim of there will be only 21,000,000 created. If BitCoin takes off, they will go up in value as more people need them. At some point they will become so valuable, most people can't afford them and the market will collapse or suddenly more will be created causing deflation.

cool shit.

The CPU power thing is only a clever way to fairly distribute the Bitcoins. There's really no other way to make a decentralized "mint". Plus, it's optional.

The real economy is a joke? I hear ya... :)

Also, you can buy/sell Bitcoins from a growing number of exchangers around the globe.

Here is a partial list of them:

bitcoinusa.com (USA / ACH and wire payments)
britcoin.co.uk (UK / Linked to online banking?)
bitcoin4cash.com (Canada / Cash in the mail)
bitcoin2cc.com (Global.. convert Bitcoins into a virtual VISA card)
nanaimogold.com (Money order, Liberty Reserve, HD Money, and a ton more)
coincard.ndrix.com (convert Bitcoin into PayPal / Pizza.. yes! Pizza! lol)
coinpal.ndrix.com (PayPal -> Bitcoin. They only do very small amounts at a time, apparently)

I completely agree, and I remember e-gold. On a side note: did you see what happened to Liberty Dollar?

I can't see how just running the application would imply you are a criminal. A court wouldn't be able to prove that you even moved a cent with the application. It's like that by design.

Also, it seems like governments can bend/twist almost any law to throw any of us in jail for any reason now.

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus

Funny you would mention that. Check this out: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...u rrency.html (Could the wikileaks scandal lead to a new virtual currency).

As long as there are countries that don't make it illegal, it will survive. You could just host your sites in a freer country and keep accepting Bitcoins as payment.

Plus, you have to keep this in mind: they have bigger fish to fry. "They" seem to be more concerned with copyright infringement anyway.

I'm assuming that you were trying to use CoinPal. That service is very new. Also, they are still trying to keep fraud down to a minimum so they limit how many Bitcoins you can buy per week.

The problem with accepting reversible transactions (PayPal / Credit Cards) a non-reversible currency such as Bitcoin is a big one.

Example: Fraudsters can rush in with stolen PayPal/CC numbers and run away with Bitcoins. Bitcoins can't be charged back, but PayPal/CCs can! The fraudsters convert the Bitcoins into a bank wire and run off with the money.

We call this a "soft" to "hard" money problem. It's no different than selling something on ebay, shipping it, only to find that the buyer decided to chargeback later and rip you off. It's an ongoing problem that doesn't just affect Bitcoin.

Most exchangers only accept non-reversible forms of money for this very reason. Most exchangers accept wires, money orders, liberty reserve, cash in the mail (I'm serious), cash in person, various pre-loaded cards that you can buy from 7-eleven/wal-mart, and many others. Of course you can always mine them into existence, but that process is very very competitive now.

Is there recourse with PayPal? Also, anyone who has been through a lawsuit will tell you that it solves nothing.

Anyway, due diligence is always required. Don't buy from people that have a horrible track record, and limit your exposure to risk. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. You know "the drill". :)

I'm glad that you made this statement. It's a very common question.

Bitcoins are divisible to 8 decimal places. If demand for Bitcoins is excessively larger than the 21,000,000, it is not a problem at all. :)

Currency
 

The trading chart at Mt. Gox shows Bitcoins have dropped in value from about $.80 to $.60 in just the past 48 hours. A 25% loss of value! So much for stability.

That doesn't prove anything.

The market capitalization is only ~$4 million dollars right now. This is the operating economy of a small town. You can't compare it to the currency of the country of Sweden, for example.

It is true that the exchange rate can be volatile at times. You have to keep in mind that this is still a fairly new currency. Usually the rate seems to hover around $0.75 per Bitcoin most of the time. What happened yesterday was an anomaly (someone probably sold a LOT of them all at once) and the price quickly recovered.

recovered = everyone lost money right?

R E C O V E R E D. Can't you read, you schizophrenic fuck?

:1orglaugh

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who is frustrated with that guy.

Price Swings
 

The Mt Gox dark pool allows you to buy or sell large quantities of BTC without moving the market.

You can mark any buy or sell order with a value over $1000 as being in the dark pool.

Orders in the dark pool don't show up on the order book.

There are 2 types of dark pool orders.
Dark pool and Normal - Can be filled either partially from the normal orders or the dark pool.
Dark pool Only - Can be filled only by other dark pool orders or a single normal order that is larger than the dark pool order. This means that if there is a single normal order that would fill the dark pool order both will be filled.

You pasted that from their website.

What is your point exactly?

OK I see that it could actually work now.

You forgot to mention a bitcoin is divisible down to $0.00000001BC

So even though you have to pay the select group of miners to join the economy, AND there is only $21,000,000BC maximum, these 2 variables work in tangent!

i.e. say 10,000,000 people use bitcoins, then the average persons wallet would have only $2BC!

So $1BC might be worth $1,000US in the future!

Or $1US = $0.001BC

So there's a DISTRIBUTION PHASE and a CONSISTENT CURRENCY PHASE say in 3 to 10 years time.

A bit like the population mining gold and minting our own coins.

I think I would have gone with $21 BILLION Coins, or we might end up using MicroBitCoins instead!

:warning:warning:warning

I'm pretty sure I did mention that. MyBitcoin.com's system is divisible to 0.00000000001 BTC internally (11 instead of 8 decimal places), BTW. Just "food for thought".

The entire world won't use Bitcoin all at once. :)

If we totally max out 21 million coins I'm sure competing cryptocurrencies will appear to fill that void. The mining process will begin anew, and we'll see auto-exchangers pop up all over to trade between Bitcoin and 'NewCoin'.

I'm richer for 0.05 BitCoins WoHooo :D

How can we be sure that bitcoin is not a botnet itself?

There is a lot of regulation already.
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/...y/index_en.htm
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/...09L0110:EN:NOT

And US has its fair share too.. :2 cents:

Cryptography
If I understand this right, the strength of this currency relies on the strength of the SHA-256 algorithm?

Why use SHA-256 and not for example SHA-512?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2

Could these algorithms be considered weak?

As an example OpenSSL produces a 1024 key as default. Many commercial SSL certificates require 2048 bit keys.

It looks like this entire economy relies on the cryptographical strength of the chosen algorithms. Am I right?

Modified client software
How does the Peer-2-Peer system work like? Is it like a democracy where the majority rules?
Lets assume that X amount of evil peers have modified the source code in their client software to ignore others winners claims for the 50 Bitcoins.

If there are enough of these rogue players (client nodes), then they would be able to rule that they are the rightful winners, and corrupt the concensus of the entire network.

It is based on voting power right? And nothing limits the number of clients? Each instance of the client software is a vote?

If I created 100 million virtual clients (with rogue software), I would be able to influence the entire economy? Or would I need to have 1 billion nodes?

Is there any mechanism which prevents fake nodes running fake software?

How does the mechanism work which prevents the same coin from being used twice?
Could that system be tampered with if 100 million fake nodes produce manipulated traffic?