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Cyril Sneer posted:So is anyone actually making real-life money off this? I made about $50 by buying when the coins were $1 and selling when they were $6. But I'm 100% certain that this is a bubble and the price will crash down within weeks, so I wouldn't recommend others trying to do the same.
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May 23, 2011 20:24
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JoeyVapes posted:If I use BitCoins to purchase Linden Dollars, will the universe collapse? You were probably joking, but that is actually possible
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May 23, 2011 21:10
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Also, don't believe you are untraceable with this. A transaction starts when you send info about that transaction into the p2p network, so if someone monitors large parts of the network they can in theory find out you were the origin of that info. Of course, you could just use Tor or some of the mixer services to hide yourself.
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May 23, 2011 21:28
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Videodrome posted:It's like the real debate here is which side of this scam is more flawed; the economics or the privacy/cryptography. The cryptography is actually pretty secure, from what I've seen. Of course, it doesn't matter how good your crypto is when a programming bug enables someone to generate 92 billion coins out of thin air.
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May 23, 2011 21:39
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DBlue135 posted:I'm curious: who are the miners are doing pre-image attacks for? Could you rephrase this in the form of an understandable question?
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May 24, 2011 07:59
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FrancisYorkPatty posted:Why the hell would anybody spend so much time "mining" when they could just create a program that infects other miners computers and loots their wallet.dat file? You gotta take into consideration that people using bitcoins are more towards the tech-savy end of the spectrum. So not only do you need to find someone that actually uses bitcoins, you also have to find someone dumb enough to get viruses. (Though, it would be a bit hilarious if one of those mining programs people are using turned out to be a trojan. Because that's a big fact infection vector right there)
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May 24, 2011 14:27
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peak debt posted:Is there a way to find out how many bitcoins the early miners have generated for themselves and are just keeping in their safes? Because in a way, having unquantifiable supplies lying around in the dark is the same as having a printing press. When the early adopters want, they can use their cheap bitcoins that they got years ago for cents, flood the market with them and cause huge inflation that would completely gently caress over any late investors. It's theoretically easy to see how many unused coins are out there. For example, look at this block - if you look at the "to" address you see that after generation, no part of those 50 coins have gone elsewhere in the system. You could also look at each transaction and see which coins haven't been in circulation the past X days, which might give a pointer about how much hoarding goes on. VVVVVVV The system is self-adjusting, so it will always take the approximately same time for someone to generate coins, about ten blocks per hour.
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May 24, 2011 15:42
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DBlue135 posted:Sorry, that should read "Who are the miners doing pre-image attacks for?" The "attacks" are for signing the transactions. But instead of a plain signature, the network requires that a certain portion of the signature be all zeroes - this is what makes the mining hard. Basically, every miner does sha256(random data + unprocessed transaction data), and the first person who finds a hash of 0000000000000000whatever "wins" and gets 50 bitcoins. This signed data is then added to the "chain" of transactions. blockexplorer shows all the data in this chain.
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May 24, 2011 16:52
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fishmech posted:Frankly for a kid who has their parents buy them computers and pay the electric bills it's a no lose situation. They can mine away on bitcoins and maybe get something out of it since they don't pay for anything in life. Not to mention that there's no age check on bitcoins. It's like a second allowance!
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May 26, 2011 15:45
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Wreckus posted:http://bitbills.com/ I am tempted to buy one of these just for the novelty value.
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May 28, 2011 17:10
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eSports Chaebol posted:The point is that the transaction has to be recorded, so the transaction has to go through somebody's block, creating a market for transaction costs. It will be interesting to see just how it pans out when the last bitcoin is minted though. For everything dumb about bitcoins, the technical aspects are pretty clever. Heh, you think they will even reach the point where the last coin is minted.
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May 29, 2011 11:56
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NotShadowStar posted:Since there's a hard upper limit of 21 or so million bitcoins total through the math involved, I'm guessing once the limit is getting approached the hashing would be so hard it would take years to decades to generate another one, if at all. No, the difficulty is self-adjusting. It will never be "too hard" to generate another block. So if every video card out there fried tomorrow, people would still be generating at the same rate (After a slight adjustment period, I think difficulty is based on the average of the 100 last blocks or something). The rarity of the coins comes from two hard-coded cutoff points in the official client. (I am actually quite intrigued by the whole bitcoin concept - the tech behind it is interesting and I love how the little microcosm around it behaves. Of course, I will also love it when that very same microcosm utterly breaks down.)
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May 30, 2011 00:43
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NotShadowStar posted:Even if it doesn't have a calculation limit, it has a hard limit of 21 or so million chits generated. It says that a bitcoin can be divided up to 0.00000001, but that doesn't help at all against organizations who amassed thousands or millions. That's an even worse 'gently caress you got mine' if it does become any standard currency, since the central amassed controllers now centrally control all supply and demand and can divide it out in chunks that are in non-significant figures while hoarding the rest. Then the currency collapses. Yeah, that was kinda what I meant. There is a 21 mill limit, but apart from the jump where it goes from 50 coins per block to 25 coins, the coins are created at a steady rate. Then, when the number of coins reaches 21 millions, the whole dynamic completely changes overnight. But my bet is that the whole bitcoin economy will go through some radical changes long before arriving at that point.
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May 30, 2011 02:24
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fishmech posted:All you need to do is disrupt connections to slow the collective computing power down - a distributed computing network is severely impaired if nodes have trouble communicating. A DSOS (slowing instead of denial) would be a great way to artificially "lower the power" of the Bitcoin network. It's not like a dynamic port is hard to implement, though. But you still have the same problem with getting a lot of IP:port pairs of the network simply by asking it. Though I doubt a direct DOS would do that much harm. You'd be "better" off sending thousands of transactions that the network will process. I haven't examined the client much, but I think right now it honors any transaction and don't care about requiring a certain transaction fee.
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May 31, 2011 23:41
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butts lol posted:oh yeah, I've heard you can now buy sweet sweet drurgs with your bitcoins: "Mainstream" media discovers bitcoin and connects it to illegal uses, economy collapse in 3...2...1...
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Jun 1, 2011 20:40
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It's passed the $10 for one buttcoin mark.
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Jun 2, 2011 14:02
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homeless snail posted:So where's the over/under on when Satoshi cashes out? How do you know he hasn't already?
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Jun 2, 2011 15:13
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ayekappy posted:Still... had any of you known that BitCoins could buy drugs and you didn't invest in it, then you're the idiot. I had heard about BitCoins, but didn't know about the drugs; so no big deal. It's the same reason eGold lasted as long as it did. I'm definitely going to keep my ear on the streets for the next drug fiat currency so I can get in on the ground floor. How could you have heard about bitcoins but NOT the drugs? Buying drugs is about the only way to actually spend your coins.
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Jun 4, 2011 03:23
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Same Great Paste posted:Been lightly reading around for a few days so I'm surely wrong on many technical details, but I don't understand why something like the following wouldn't work : There is no "claiming" of blocks. Whoever controls the private key corresponding to the public key embedded in the new block owns the money. Since that private key doesn't get sent anywhere, you can't steal other people's blocks.
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Jun 5, 2011 00:38
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Patashu posted:Once upon a time, someone underflowed a bitcoin transaction and gave themselves 92,233,720,368.54277039 bitcoins. http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=822.0 Oooooor...they could find another bug. It's not like the program is 100% certified bug-free.
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Jun 5, 2011 03:00
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Patashu posted:What would this bug look like? Everything is locked down hard by cryptography. Although I'm sure inevitably one of the mobile or alternate clients for bitcoin will implement said cryptography wrong and leak private keys. The first time someone found a bug and generated billions of coins it was because of an arithmetic bug. Since the code that handles transactions is fairly complex, I bet there are at least a few more bugs lying around. Cryptography alone doesn't guarantee security.
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Jun 5, 2011 12:12
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I think Paypal's "no fees" sending is US only. I've never been able to send money for free.
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Jun 7, 2011 19:41
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1337_ScriptKiddie posted:All I'm saying is that you currently can give me $50, give me $50, it is possible for anyone to give me $50 right now! And enjoy getting into a world of hurt if those $50 came from a stolen credit card! Bitcoin sucks, but so does Paypal.
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Jun 7, 2011 19:59
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trashcanman posted:This probably isn't exactly technically correct but the gist is right: Close, but no cigar. The 21 million limit is arbitrarily chosen and enforced by the official bitcoin client. The problem solved doesn't get harder as time goes by, it is made harder - the difficulty is dynamically adjusted depending on how much computing power is used on mining, so no matter how many join, the system will spit out coins a few times every hour. If the market crashes completely, a lot of people will pull out and the total processing power in the P2P network will fall drastically. But it will still produce coins at roughly the same rate, so the arbitrarily set 21 million limit will be reached on schedule. But in practice, the effect right now is the same as you describe: Lots of people join, driving the difficulty up and making it harder for people to produce coins individually at the same rate. edit: holy gently caress 23 dollars, this is insane
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Jun 8, 2011 01:17
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Look at this: http://blockexplorer.com/tx/960616e5dc8b29d3cde382a7047828a7964271b9177bcfd541d8a3bb15aac9df That...is $3 million changing hands.
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Jun 8, 2011 01:24
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Dave Inc. posted:Every day I check to see if the BTC Market has crashed yet. I seriously cannot wait to see it happen.* You think that's something - I knew about this a year ago when a single CPU would yield 50 coins each couple of days. And I never made any.
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Jun 8, 2011 13:03
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UrbanFarmer posted:All transactions are still available to the public in the block chain. Which...are...anonymous. So you don't know whether someone exchanged coins for dollars, or if it was just some Russian guy laundering his cash.
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Jun 8, 2011 19:03
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I just thought of something (that probably happens in the real stock market too): Let's say you have a lot of bitcoins from the early days when it was easy to mine them, say 10000 coins. You then go on mtgox and buy some hundred coins for above the market rate, for example $35 per coin. Bam, you've nudged the market upwards and suddenly increased your worth by $50000 at a cost of $3500. Is there anything stopping this behavior? Another question: Is it possible that this was how the coins started their initial climb above $1?
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Jun 8, 2011 19:16
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evensevenone posted:Ok, so your $3500 nudged the market up. When you go and sell your 10,000 coins what is that going to do to the market? That's where the dark pools come in.
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Jun 8, 2011 19:32
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It's back down at $27 now. Is this the bubble exploding?
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Jun 8, 2011 20:14
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Fuuuck, this leaves my 0.23 bitcoins useless soon!
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Jun 8, 2011 21:56
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Drewsky posted:I'm not afraid to admit that I don't understand this at all. It all gets easier once you understand that it's basically monopoly money that people for some reason think will earn them thousands.
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Jun 8, 2011 22:03
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It's swinging like a roller coaster right now. It'll be interesting to see if the panic sellers or the True Believers win this time. edit: Jun 8, 2011, 21:22:41 28.80000 28.34 Jun 8, 2011, 21:22:42 23.00000 100.00 TOTALLY STABLE GUYS
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Jun 8, 2011 22:26
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..there were beanie baby meetups?
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Jun 9, 2011 00:26
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You don't use the program at all for mining Read the intro here Though I would recommend against mining unless your electricity is cheap and/or you already have a powerful video card.
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Jun 9, 2011 00:46
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I hope the http://bitbills.com/ guy will still sell his cards after the crash. I still want one framed on my wall. (But I'm not paying $10-20 for one)
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Jun 12, 2011 13:03
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It's interesting how this decentralized, distributed money system actually drifts towards being controlled by a few entities. Mtgox dominates the market side, and deepbit controls about 50% of the computing capacity in the network.
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Jun 12, 2011 13:46
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It's more that we hate it and want it to fail because libertarians are idiots. edit: Stefan Prodan posted:If you're asking is there a stock you can buy (not go short on) that will go up when other things go down, the answer is yes. Do stocks like this work in extreme cases, though? Did it go up during the crash of 2008?
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Jun 12, 2011 15:05
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Why actually go through with the hit if you can just steal the money and run? Or is there a reputation system like silkroad? "He killed him real good. A++++ would hire again!!"
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Jun 12, 2011 18:33
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Barudak posted:Presumably yes. The world of illegal goods transfer typically operates almost solely on reputation so while you might be able to scam people once out of goods because they have no way of prosecuting you it shouldn't be able to happen twice. But there's a slight difference between hard, organized crime, and someone who claims to sell assassination services on an anonymous ebay. If I weren't so lazy I should just add myself as a killer-for-hire, and if someone ever hires me, I'd not just take their money and run: I'd also tip off the intended victim that someone wants them dead.
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Jun 12, 2011 18:44
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