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trubble76 wrote:Are you essentially touting the use of WoW gold as real currency? Any half decent programmer would be a trillionaire overnight, no?
Rob Lister wrote:trubble76 wrote:Are you essentially touting the use of WoW gold as real currency? Any half decent programmer would be a trillionaire overnight, no?
Well, no. Wow gold is backed by WoW, like dollars are backed by the U.S. If WoW decided to flood the market with WoWgold, the resulting inflation would destroy the market. Only 21 million Bitcoins will ever (can ever) be created. Not one bitcoin more.
byofrcs wrote:So far the bitcoin concept has survived. Thieves have so far stolen coin from exchanges and wallets and obviously have manufactured (legitimate) coins but as far as I know the coins have never been counterfeited or transactions falsely confirmed. This is rather awesome really.
There is the adage though that bad money chases out good so the problem with bitcoin will be hoarding.
If I was a central bank system making money from seigniorage and using money supply and my fractional banking system to manage society then I would be worried that hoarding did not happen. If hoarding does happen then I am less worried.
byofrcs wrote:I would attack bitcoin in a few ways if it becomes liquid and fungible on an international scale.
1) Smear campaign. Associate bitcoins and crime.
2) Attack exchanges. Fuck up anonymity by making convertibility by unknown persons very difficult.
3) Make use illegal. Just simply make the use of bitcoins and possession of bitcoin wallets illegal.
4) Bring in your own bitcoin-like system.
SeriousCat wrote:Well, BitCoin has stayed rather stable at around 1 BitCoin to $5 (USD). It's really more of a currency for maintaining anonymity. For that purpose, it's been quite successful.
SeriousCat wrote:byofrcs wrote:So far the bitcoin concept has survived. Thieves have so far stolen coin from exchanges and wallets and obviously have manufactured (legitimate) coins but as far as I know the coins have never been counterfeited or transactions falsely confirmed. This is rather awesome really.
There is the adage though that bad money chases out good so the problem with bitcoin will be hoarding.
If I was a central bank system making money from seigniorage and using money supply and my fractional banking system to manage society then I would be worried that hoarding did not happen. If hoarding does happen then I am less worried.
To be honest, I don't understand how the BitCoin system has survived and become so resilient to value fluctuations. Somebody's doing a very good job of protecting the system.
Rob Lister wrote:get bitcoins however (mine, buy, trade, steal)
byofrcs wrote:
The network. Anyone (you , me, the governments) can setup a mining node. Just buy some fast GPU and join a mining operation.
The promise is because the coin is a chain of cryptographic hashes that is authenticated by the network. To abuse this you need to break 256 bit crypto and mess with a network of unknown peers.
As processor speeds grow then the system automatically makes it harder to generate a valid hash.
GrahamH wrote:byofrcs wrote:
The network. Anyone (you , me, the governments) can setup a mining node. Just buy some fast GPU and join a mining operation.
The promise is because the coin is a chain of cryptographic hashes that is authenticated by the network. To abuse this you need to break 256 bit crypto and mess with a network of unknown peers.
As processor speeds grow then the system automatically makes it harder to generate a valid hash.
So the value of a BitCoin is a number of CPU cycles?
byofrcs wrote:Yup - that is why you use GPUs or custom FPGA to get the most flops per joule plus the system automatically makes it harder as time goes on for a new coin to be made. The coins are limited by design to 21 million but these can be chopped up into fractions of 8 decimal places. It is a deflationary currency in the end as that is all there will ever be.
byofrcs wrote:As a wide-stab-in-the-dark imagination In 100 years time when we are asteroid mining and have fusion reactors and are moving towards a post-scarcity world then bitcoins will be the only scarce currency (unless other scarce money is created).
GrahamH wrote:If there is a limit of 21 million bitcoins and they are currently trading at around $5 that's a global economy of only $105m ?
When the first quantum computers start "mining" somebody gets very rich and as "the system automatically makes it harder as time goes on for a new coin to be made" every one else hits hard times and "their mines dry up".
It's an interesting idea, but....?
SeriousCat wrote:byofrcs wrote:Yup - that is why you use GPUs or custom FPGA to get the most flops per joule plus the system automatically makes it harder as time goes on for a new coin to be made. The coins are limited by design to 21 million but these can be chopped up into fractions of 8 decimal places. It is a deflationary currency in the end as that is all there will ever be.
It's amazing to think how far computer graphics has come. In a few short years, we have close to real-life graphics and supercomputer vendors are starting to see this. Why use a 64-bit CPU when you could use a 256-bit GPU? They're all just calculating mathematics. Cloud computing has supplanted most of the power of supercomputers, as well as being cheaper. Byofrcs, do you see cloud computing as becoming the next tool in BitCoin mining, or is it used already?
byofrcs wrote:As a wide-stab-in-the-dark imagination In 100 years time when we are asteroid mining and have fusion reactors and are moving towards a post-scarcity world then bitcoins will be the only scarce currency (unless other scarce money is created).
I don't see that happening, since scarcity can be artificially created (e.g. fiat currency, diamonds, gold). Post-scarcity would requite near unlimited power being generated, which could theoretically produce anything material that could be bought anyway. However, it still won't be able to buy certain things, such as people—unless slavery is reinstated, God forbid—only hire their time if they are putting themselves on the market. I can certainly see post-scarcity causing depreciation of physical assets, but those things that cannot be made will have relatively high economic value (e.g. real estate in the universe). I wonder if such an environment could derail any attempt at creating an artificially scarce currency, forcing the economy back into a barter system. But we're a long ways from that...
byofrcs wrote:GrahamH wrote:If there is a limit of 21 million bitcoins and they are currently trading at around $5 that's a global economy of only $105m ?
When the first quantum computers start "mining" somebody gets very rich and as "the system automatically makes it harder as time goes on for a new coin to be made" every one else hits hard times and "their mines dry up".
It's an interesting idea, but....?
If there was quantum computing then someone would get rich anyway selling ..... quantum computers. There are no such things as quantum computers for such tasks and probably won't be by 2033 when the 21 million bitcoins trends to the limit.
As the bitcount can be fractioned by 100 million then that 21 million is actually 2,100,000,000,000,000 bits of a bitcoin and they will be whatever price anyone wants them to be.
A. Bitcoin utilises public-key cryptography. A coin contains the owner's public key. When a coin is transferred from user A to user B, A adds B’s public key to the coin, and the coin is signed using A's private key. B now owns the coin and can transfer it further. A is prevented from transferring the already spent coin to other users because a public list of all previous transactions is collectively maintained by the network. Before each transaction the coin’s validity will be checked.
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