cgjaro

You couldn't buy BitFury for less than 200 or 300 million dollar. After all they expect this $100 million data center to be profitable so I am sure they value their company at least 2x or 3x this.

It has always been the case that a single company could 51%-attack the network. No regression here. In fact the cost has continually increased over time. So, yes, progress.

This DC cost $100 million. Not exactly pocket change. http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-...

Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million.

The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 nm chips. As the market migrate to these last generation chips, expect the cost to increase to $1+ billion in the next year.

Besides Newegg, it is also at $699 on Microsoft Store: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/ASUS-Zen...

Nobody talks about "percentage of tradable life" because this is a pointless metric. You don't see banks publishing prospectus saying "this investment gained x% over y% of its tradable life". %/year is what matters to all investors.

So if Bitcoin goes down to $30, that's an amazing investment, right? After all, that's a 500% ROI!

Absolutely. Buying at $6 in january 2013, and selling even at $30 would be a 500% ROI and a great investment over 2 years. What is your point?

Again, like azeirah said, this type of decline has happened in the past: after the $30 peak in June 2011, Bitcoin declined almost constantly. 12 months later it was still hovering around $5. That was a 80%+ decline! It took a total of 21 months before Bitcoin reached $30 again in February 2013.

I think journalists are finally understanding that a big decline in Bitcoin's price is far from a sign of its "death" (since it always survives these drops), and is not even a shocking news anymore. That's why they don't write about it that much.

Being able to run the tool as non-root so it just spits out the key/cert pair is EXACTLY one of the mode of operations that they said will be available - see http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6397_-_en_-_...

Are you denying all these metrics as a whole, and implying that Bitcoin's usage is either stagnating or declining?? You can't be serious, can you?

Fred Wilson posted better adoption metrics which are a more accurate (and more impressive) record of how Bitcoin is doing: http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ It is smarter to look at these than at merely the number of transactions.

Yes we want it to scale, even if it means full nodes run only by large organizations. The benefits of decentralization would be very real and tangible even if only, say, 1000 organizations (companies, universities, etc) were able to host and operate Bitcoin nodes. This would still make Bitcoin clearly decentralized compared to a single company (like MasterCard) processing all your CC transactions. For example Mastercard decided of their own accord to block CC donations to Wikileaks [1] but one of these 1000 hypothetical organizations running full nodes would be unable to do such a thing and block specific transactions.

The number of full nodes decreased in large part because in the early history of Bitcoin in late 2010 or early 2011 your only option to have a secure wallet or to mine reliably was to run a full node locally. But nowadays there are many alternative lightweight clients using the SPV protocol, and a lot of reliable mining pools (it was in mid-2011 that pools started mining more coins than solo miners running full nodes). So of course many users stopped running full nodes.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/wikileaks_latest/

As the OP corrected, it's Western Union that does 10 tps. But even 100 tps would be easily within reach if the block size is bumped to 20MB, which is not that crazy.

I do have a PayPal Security Key. My calliper measures 0.81mm, compared to 0.78mm for credit cards. So it is indeed pretty much the same thickness.

You are, indeed, wrong: taxes are owed the moment coins are mined, even if they remain unspent or unused, see question Q-8 in http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

No. Most of the costs are people costs as the article rightly explains, not fuel. Fuel is an extremely tiny fraction of the overall mission costs.

Yeah but in practice no browser does this. There is no system call on Linux or Windows to push data as part of the SYN packet. You would have to craft TCP/IP packets and their headers with a raw socket...

Your suggestion is not equivalent. It is not realistic to ask the user to memorize the x.x.x.x IP address. The point of mrb's solution is that it fully takes care of problem of "typing <domainname> in the address bar and getting the content as quickly as possible without having to memorize IP addresses".

"converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end"

Perhaps you missed that part where the grand-parent explained you don't even need to convert bitcoins to dollars as merchants begin to accept them (DELL, Dish Network, etc). This is true at the other end too: you can just sell something for bitcoins - no need to use an exchange service.

Well numbers prove you wrong. A year ago 1 bitcoin was worth $125 and is now worth $480. A year ago 1 ARS was worth $0.17 but is now worth $0.12. One currency appreciated, the other lost value. Clearly an Argentinian would have been better off putting an investment in Bitcoin than in the Argentine peso.

Bitcoin certainly is volatile (down from $1000+), but on the long term, if you hold it for at LEAST 1 year, it seems to at least keep value, if not gain value.

I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years".

For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research (https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression calls per second. Say Moore's Law continues for the next 10 years and that 10 years from now a GPU can do 20 billion SHA-1 per second. So 10 year from now, 100 high-end GPUs should be able to produce a rogue CA with colliding SHA-1 signature in 7 month of compute time.

Change one little assumption and assume the best attack ends up being 2^60 instead of 2^65. In this case, a viable attack could certainly be carried out in the next 3-4 years.

You can't cross your fingers and hopes such an attack will not be discovered. The time to abandon SHA-1 is now.

You know nothing about credit card fraud. When it happens, the retailer has to pay up, and there is a fine and fees. Don't take my word for it. Listen to the CEO of a merchant who tells you how it works: "As Nichols mentioned, credit card fraud is an impetus. When a transaction is found to be fraudulent, the retailer is forced to pay up. To add insult to injury there's also usually a fine. "It's 90% to 95% of the transaction cost and on top of that they'll hit us with a fee, like $20 on top of a $10 sale," Nichols says." Source: http://mashable.com/2014/08/06/bitcoin-retailers/ (which I already gave you 3 posts above, and you apparently didn't read...)

Bottom line: there is, 99% of the time, no recourse for merchants. That's exactly why merchants are so wary of CC fraud! Or else why would they be wary of it if it was all magically covered by the CC company? Food for your thoughts.

Now, eridius, you are starting to repeat a point you already made and that I already rebuked. This is a sign you have no way to "win" this argument and you are merely trying to have the last word :)

So I will repeat the rebuke I already told you, but I will repeat it only ONCE. After this, if you repeat yourself again, I am done here, since you are wasting our time. You are bringing up scenario (3) and my rebuke was "nothing inherent to Bitcoin PREVENTS the merchant from taking all the same precautions he takes for credit cards: for example he could check your ID (like some supermarkets do in the US), check your credit score, verify your presence in his own database of high-risk customers, etc" Therefore Bitcoin with 0 confirmations is no more risky than credit cards to accept in brick-and-mortar stores where the customer can run away after paying.

The risk for credit cards is there. And yes it really is as easy as issuing a chargeback and maybe claiming your card was stolen. The only reason it is not occuring more often is because most people are honest, that's all.

I demonstrated to you that accepting bitcoins is safer than accepting CCs in most scenarios like (1) when the merchant's half of the transaction is cancellable, or (2) when the merchant waits for enough confirmations. Now in the last scenario (3) where not only the merchant does not wait for confirmations but the transaction is non-cancellable (eg. guy walking away with laptop), nothing inherent to Bitcoin PREVENTS the merchant from taking all the same precautions he takes for credit cards: for example he could check your ID, check your credit score, verify your presence in his own database of high-risk customers, etc. Bottom line is neither in (1), nor in (2), nor in (3) is Bitcoin inferior/riskier than CCs. In fact it is clearly superior to CCs in 2 out of 3 scenarios. There was a great Mashable article recently explaining merchants love Bitcoin precisely for this reason: http://mashable.com/2014/08/06/bitcoin-retailers/

MyBitcoin claim they were using 0 confirmations, not 1. (But many in the community and myself included think their whole story was a lie and that instead MyBitcoin stole the bitcoins, but I digress...) BetCoin also was using 0 confirmations.

I highly doubt it, but maybe you can contact the lawyers on the prosecution side and see what they suggest.

Merchants are ALREADY taking a risk with credit cards if, after walking away with a $2000 computer, the guy issues a fraudulent chargeback.

So if a merchant accepts the (non-negligible) risk of credit cards chargebacks, he will accept the (even smaller) risk of a Bitcoin double spend :)

Correct, best practices and doc says to wait for 6 confirmations. But in practice, very few people do this. For example you can send bitcoins to your Coinbase wallet and sell them without even waiting for 6 confirmations.

Let me explain to you why this is okay in practice. A merchant will in general send something to the customer (a seller would ship an item, Coinbase would send an ACH bank transfer, etc). But because sending the service or product to the customer takes time, this gives time to catch double spend attempts. So a merchant considers 1 confirmation as sufficient, and prepares the shipment right away, or initiates the ACH right away. But if in the next hour the 2nd-6th confirmations never come (eg. the 1st confirmation ends up in an orphaned block) then the merchant can cancel the shipment of the item, or cancel the pending ACH.

Barely 0.01% of the world population uses Bitcoin and we already see a technology on the market that is expected to significantly improve security, and this was the result of 1+ year of engineering effort from teams of engineers: hardware wallets like http://www.bitcointrezor.com So security isn't great overall right now, but clearly it is improving way ahead of time with respect to a potential mainstream adoption of Bitcoin.

Does anybody really use live wallpaper? They waste battery. On the other hand, you are rarely at the home screen, most often in an app where the wallpaper is in the background.

Upvote the parent!

"But that's rarely good enough"

Yes it is. The vast majority of Bitcoin services and users wait for only 1 confirmation. Waiting for 6 confirmations is "excellent" whereas 1 confirmation is "good enough" (when was the last time we saw a Bitcoin double spend attempt? Never!). But arguing whether 1 confirmation is good enough is a moot point. Bitcoin competes with traditional international payment systems where it is common for transfers to post in 1-3 days especially across weekends or bank holidays ("post" has a specific definition, look it up). So even waiting for 6 confirmations makes Bitcoin faster than traditional systems.

On the other point, true, many people rely on 1 exchange, or place their coins in 1 online wallet service, which makes them vulnerable to incidents typically affecting centralized systems. But this is not a problem inherent to Bitcoin. Not at all. This is solved by educating users, by new services (eg. hardware wallets like Trezor), and by "natural selection" (eg. people who lost coins on MtGox tend to learn their lessons, weak exchanges die, secure ones remain in use, merchants can very easily use multiple Bitcoin processors at once, etc).

~10 minutes = a few minutes.

BTC transfers are fast once you already have coins, and this is a reason why its adoption is increasing. People realize that having BTC on hand is useful, so they start holding it. There is a little friction to start adopting it, but once you use it, you truly appreciate many of its benefits!

It is not true that BTC is far from decentralized. There are more than a hundred exchanges in the world as of today. And more and more exchanges open up, so it becomes more and more decentralized over time! It is also false you need to trust a centralized entity. Switching from Coinbase to BitPay is trivial (Overstock did their integration with Coinbase in about 2 weeks).