Slashdot Mirror

Really, what is the difficulty of mining when all coins are mined?

"The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks." So if it takes 14 days (2016 * 10 minutes) to mine 2016 blocks, the difficulty is exactly the same. If it takes more than 14 days, the difficulty is lowered. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty is raised. The difficulty has nothing to do with how many new coins are being generated.

Thus, if there are fewer miners, it will take longer to mine the blocks at the current difficulty, so when the next 2016 blocks have been mined, the difficulty will decrease.

Also note that as the difficulty decreases, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine. So the difficulty will adjust to whatever it has to be so it's economically feasible based on the amount of fees gotten from the transaction volume.

Nor does he seem to grasp what "scarcity control" is.
 

For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.

As pointed out by another poster, 2.6 TB of transfer quota per month is trivial even by today's standards: anyone can afford that. And should Bitcoin ever scale to those levels it won't be relying on today's resources, it'll be relying on tomorrow's. So your own example falls apart almost immediately.

Also, rather than just guessing what the US population "needs" why not take a look at existing networks? 2000tps is about a fifth of VISA traffic for the whole world. Of course not every transaction goes via VISA, but it should indicate to you that maybe your numbers are once again a bit sketchy.

You can read an article I wrote a long time ago here: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. It goes over the various ways the system scales up. Performance is unintuitive, there's no substitute for just working it out on the back of an envelope. Bear in mind we live in a world where single websites can generate a large fraction of total internet traffic and not go bankrupt.

It's not the number of coins that's the problem ; they are divisible to a large number of decimal places, enough to cover most projected future needs.

The main problem is the capacity of the network as currently implemented to handle transactions, which can't scale : straight from the horses mouth

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Sca...

The attackers moved the BTC balances from the Flexcoin "hot wallet" to their own wallets (accounts). As soon as the bitcoin network validated the transaction, the coins were effectively "spent" - i.e., successfully stolen.

Although Flexcoin labelled themselves as a "bank" what they really were was an EWallet service. Why people still use these web-based services to store their BTC balances is beyond comprehension.

And next time someone comes in and robs them blind, will the perpetrators be buttpirates?

Already been done by "pirateat40" (aka Trendon Shavers).

Dude was offering 1% per week returns on an "investment" that he refused to give any information about because of his "proprietary business model".

There was no shortage of dupes lining up to give him their coins.

The mathematics are sound enough, but that doesn't make BitCoin sound.

After the MtGox situation, I tried to understand what exactly the transaction malleability problem they're blaming is. The best (?) starting point I've found is https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tra..., but while that gives you a high level overview, it also raises more questions. Why are there three distinct issues with BitCoin that share the same name? Why did the BitCoin designers ever think it's a good idea to take a signature over part of a message as verifying the entire message?

Mostly, though, I asked myself what it was they were signing and for what purpose, before going on to the previously stated questions. Several hours later, and I concluded that BitCoin is the single worst documented software system I've seen in a 15 year software engineering career.

Yes, I managed to get the information I wanted. No, it wasn't straightforward. Documentation is distributed amongst this wiki, forum posts (which are then badly copy & pasted into the wiki) and source code. Oh, and external sites like reddit or stackexchange. The wiki is very badly cross-linked, and the terrible naming choices (see above) mean it's not easy to search. Some vital information is effectively hidden from sight in image files, which wikis currently don't tend to index at all. And that's just about the stuff I was interested in at the time.

You should never trust a crypto system whose authors can't explain it cohesively and concisely.

If nothing else, it makes a security audit a nightmare.

That said, of course the BitCoin devs aren't stupid, and they plugged the holes documented in the transaction malleability page as best they could. The wiki still states they exist, incidentally, and since it's the de-facto documentation on BitCoin, it's IMHO fair enough to conclude that the BitCoin specifications are still broken even if the reference implementation is fixed.

None of which should mean that BitCoin itself did worse that MtGox - the latter certainly screwed up royally, and their screwup doesn't mean BitCoin is doomed.

But nothing I've seen of BitCoin so far goes to convince me it's trustworthy.

Well, 2 notes to this.

First, Satoshi described a method for full validating nodes to purge old data, briefly described here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Sca...
This allows most nodes to operate with a reduced data set, yet still fully participate.

Second, most users don't need to keep their own copy of the full blockchain, and can use a lightweight client such as Electrum instead. Initial sync time goes from hours to about a minute.

Before you balk too much on the size of the transaction history, consider how much data Visa is storing to achieve similar goals. Do you think they have ever deleted a transaction record?

Because just pointing at the Wikipedia entry for Ponzi schemes doesn't make Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, and I've already explained why Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme in one of my above posts. It's now on you to explain why I (and the Bitcoin FAQ) are wrong.

Just to reiterate: Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it makes no guarantee of profits. Also, in a Ponzi scheme, only early investors can benefit (at the expense of later investors). With Bitcoin, everybody benefits from the existence of a peer-to-peer payment network.

(Here is the FAQ entry if you want it explained in slightly different words.)

If you believe Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, that means you must believe it makes a guarantee of profits, and you must also think that a system for making payments to people isn't useful. So, where does Bitcoin make that guarantee? And how do you justify claiming that being able to pay people money isn't useful?

Are you trying to say that Bitcoin is a scam because you think it's a Ponzi scheme?

Bitcoin makes no guarantee of profits, so it's not a Ponzi scheme. Early adopters took a bigger risk dealing with it, and ended up with a bigger payoff for that, and I'm certainly jealous of them for doing so, but that doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme either. And I see no reason to deny myself the useful aspects of it just because some other people took a gamble that paid off.

(This is covered in the FAQ.)

Myth: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme

Bitcoin is nearly opposite of a pyramid scheme in a mathematical sense. Because Bitcoins are algorithmically made scarce, no exponential benefit is derived from introducing new users to use of it. There is a quantitative benefit in having additional interest or demand, but this is in no way exponential.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_a_pyramid_scheme

Wrong. Whole Foods accepts bitcoin.

No Whole Foods here.

Wrong again

Less than 50 listed for all of North America, that's hardly a counter-argument.

Overstock.com, Amazon, CVS, Target, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, the list keeps growing.

Of course most of these stores actually use a payment processor that immediately converts the bitcoins to USD for them, but if more and more stores start accepting it, at some point the currency may become so practical that such conversions will no longer need to be made. If a company does business with another company that accepts bitcoin, they may as well take bitcoin from their clients and then use those bitcoins to pay their suppliers. Transaction fees are much lower than those for credit cards, you don't even need any middle men.

Yeah, and if enough people start trying to pay in tulip bulbs, and if they reeeeally believe...

I couldn't believe Victoria's Secret takes bitcoin, and sure enough they don't. They take gift cards.... that can be purchased with bitcoin. Which is exactly what the parent was arguing, "I can exchange BTC for my local currency and then go about my business, but that's about it."

Right now, I can't buy groceries with BTC.

Wrong. Whole Foods accepts bitcoin.

I can't take a friend out for lunch and pay with BTC.

Wrong again

I can exchange BTC for my local currency and then go about my business, but that's about it.

Overstock.com, Amazon, CVS, Target, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, the list keeps growing.

Of course most of these stores actually use a payment processor that immediately converts the bitcoins to USD for them, but if more and more stores start accepting it, at some point the currency may become so practical that such conversions will no longer need to be made. If a company does business with another company that accepts bitcoin, they may as well take bitcoin from their clients and then use those bitcoins to pay their suppliers. Transaction fees are much lower than those for credit cards, you don't even need any middle men.

So what you are saying is Bitcoin is like any other speculative investment. After all, Amazon takes penny stocks as well. Of course, I have to sell them through a broker who wires Amazon money.

Right now, I can't buy groceries with BTC.

Wrong. Whole Foods accepts bitcoin.

I can't take a friend out for lunch and pay with BTC.

Wrong again

I can exchange BTC for my local currency and then go about my business, but that's about it.

Overstock.com, Amazon, CVS, Target, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, the list keeps growing.

Of course most of these stores actually use a payment processor that immediately converts the bitcoins to USD for them, but if more and more stores start accepting it, at some point the currency may become so practical that such conversions will no longer need to be made. If a company does business with another company that accepts bitcoin, they may as well take bitcoin from their clients and then use those bitcoins to pay their suppliers. Transaction fees are much lower than those for credit cards, you don't even need any middle men.

Unlike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths transactions are NOT anonymous.

The blockchain will soon grow disproportionally large. Right now it's probably managable, but you know what? I'm not downloading tens of gigabytes of blockchain just for the plessure of reading lols on decentralized blogs.

Nice idea though...

Apropos of nothing, where are you getting this meme?

I only ask because it doesn't happen to be true, yet it's an oft-repeated meme that everyone seems to put forth as the BitCoin "killer" flaw.

tl;dr Here's the relevant passage from that link:

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. [...] the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

If one wanted to kill an idea, if one wanted to wage a propaganda war on an extreme viewpoint or tool, here is one way to do it.

• 1) Assume people know the basics of the system, but not the details.
• 2) Construct a "problem" consistent with the basic knowledge
• 3) Loudly advertize that "problem" and let others pick up and repeat it

It certainly seems plausible given the basics. Every transaction will add to the blockchain, and we process a whopping-big number of financial transactions every day! The blockchain will soon become unmanageable, and BitCoin will fail!

I've seen this in other arenas, including politics. Al Gore invented the internet for instance. He didn't, he never said that he did, but he did say something vaguely similar. It certainly seems plausible that this is what he did say, and boy what a gaff! It makes him look sooooo silly!

We should promote our own agenda this way - the UK spam filter, for instance. What right risible meme can we invent that is close enough to reality that people would find it plausible, repeat it, and use it to label the filter as badly conceived?

Let's use the the same techniques our opponents use. Human psychology, for the win.

Btc and ltc are best run on ASiCs or perhaps AMD GPUs

btc hardware
ltc hardware

Perhaps this chip will change things, but for now, cpu mining is pretty inefficient

You mean the system that is processing many, many orders of magnitude more transactions that bitcoin? So many that bitcoin as it currently exists couldn't even begin to handle them without major overhaul?

The amount of mining done is irrelevant to transaction loads, it essentially controls the risk ratios for any given specific transaction that might be reversed. You get the same level of security for the same amount of mining regardless of whether that mining protects 100,000 transactions or 10 million.

Bitcoin can fairly easily scale to loads experienced by existing payment networks. PayPal only handles about 40-50 transactions per second, it's not very much. Visa does more like 10,000 per second, which a solid multi-core server could easily chew through with good optimisation of the software: processing a Bitcoin transaction is a lot cheaper than rendering your average PHP-driven, complicated database backed webpage. You can read a back of the envelope analysis of how Bitcoin scales here.

It's hilarious how its proponents have zero sense of perspective about their favourite little toy.

I think it's rather sad (not hilarious) how its detractors have zero understanding about how the system actually works, but decide to trash it anyway.

The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud. It serves no benefit to the consumer.

Minor correction - dispute mediated transactions have been a part of the design since day one. The problem is lack of surrounding infrastructure like "file dispute" buttons in wallets and the various protocols needed to organise that, companies that run dispute mediation services with those protocols and so on. But there is widespread consensus that it's a good idea and basically, it's just waiting for someone to do the design and implementation work to make it happen.

Its incredible volatility is the #1 reason that prevents any vendor from seriously adopting it.

It's certainly a PITA at the moment, yes, although when Bitcoin is out of the public eye and governments aren't busy banning it there have been relatively long stretches of peace and stability. During those times you HAVE seen vendors price things in Bitcoins, actually, although yes most prefer to peg to an exchange rate.

Over time the instability will go away because governments will all decide on their policies around it, the technology will mature and become boring, most people will have heard about it and decided what they think, etc. The huge volatility you see at the moment is because almost every day there's some important piece of news that affects people's perception of future value.

As to the /r/bitcoin posters, yes, the over-excitability there is quite something. But that doesn't mean all people who use Bitcoin or like it think the same way.

"except the possibility that he may one day "come back" and have several hundred thousand Bitcoin to himself. " According to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block the comment in the first block should prove, that there are no previous blocks, and all block created afterwards, should be known. So there should be no surprises.

"about nothing" - FTFY. The only thing that you can reliably buy with BTC is other currencies.

That seems like an awfully lot of "About nothing" , then. Yes, Bitcoin merchants tend to sell services rather than goods just by virtue of the sort of people who have actually heard of it; but I stopped counting sites listed on that page selling physical product at 300, and that included at least a dozen "general purpose" stores and 25-30 C2C markets (online BTC flea-markets, basically).


Besides, why would you want to spend BTC on a cup of coffee if that same BTC will double in price within a year?

I know you wouldn't believe it from reading the average Slashdot post about Bitcoin, but not everyone using Bitcoin does so as speculation. Some of us just really want to see the success of a currency outside the control of any of the irresponsible jackasses currently in charge of global fiscal policy.

Unsurprisingly, Germany seems like a real hotbed of BTC use - Imagine that, the single most responsible economy on the planet right now, and what do they get for it? "Thanks for bailing out Greece and Cyprus, can you get started on that check for Slovenia?"

More aptly, how is this different than printing out a paper wallet for a friend?

No different really, other than the jackboot of the SEC has not stomped on anybody's paper wallet yet, at least not that I am aware of.

More aptly, how is this different than printing out a paper wallet for a friend?

A lot of the comments here refer to either bip 32 or ZeroCoin, with their supporters giving each as a solution to bitcoin anonymity. Can anyone describe the differences for the non-cryptographer?

Alternatively we could keep using our bitcoins and just adopt BIP 32:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0032

You can't divide it infinitely.

Yes, you can. Eight decimal places is just a fairly arbitrary number. If it becomes necessary, smaller transaction can be supported.

Smart people like you are the primary reason why most bitcoin web services are so professionaly implemented and ran by competent people who are familiar with possible security scenarios. Thefts never happen, it's bad karma campaign by evil governments.

I agree people should focus more on security/technical aspect, unfortunately this does not align well with interests of BTC deep pockets financing development of stuff - everything has to be quick & dirty (with a lot of tweeting) because just like in everything else today, security comes last - important is to be first to the market and expand, and fuck the rest.

What you're saying is partially doable for OTC exchange (atomic swap between two blockchains) and buyer protection of goods (multisig or ECC based escrow), however it falls apart when fiat and need for central orderbook arbiter arises, OTC markets cannot compete in terms of efficiency.

There are few technical solutions around, but cumbersome and mostly in early stages of implementation. The motivation is simply not there as there are crowds of people very keen to remind us what needs to be done, yet they're silent when it comes to actual engineering issues, or, god forbid, actual code.

Smart people like you are the primary reason why most bitcoin web services are so professionaly implemented and ran by competent people who are familiar with possible security scenarios. Thefts never happen, it's bad karma campaign by evil governments.

I agree people should focus more on security/technical aspect, unfortunately this does not align well with interests of BTC deep pockets financing development of stuff - everything has to be quick & dirty (with a lot of tweeting) because just like in everything else today, security comes last - important is to be first to the market and expand, and fuck the rest.

What you're saying is partially doable for OTC exchange (atomic swap between two blockchains) and buyer protection of goods (multisig or ECC based escrow), however it falls apart when fiat and need for central orderbook arbiter arises, OTC markets cannot compete in terms of efficiency.

There are few technical solutions around, but cumbersome and mostly in early stages of implementation. The motivation is simply not there as there are crowds of people very keen to remind us what needs to be done, yet they're silent when it comes to actual engineering issues, or, god forbid, actual code.

One of the least uncertain aspects of Bitcoin is the number of BTC awarded per block mined. That is dictated by the protocol. The code is open source so you can check if you're willing and able.

Basically, though, the block reward gets halved every 210,000 blocks. That's happened once so far, and no-one pulled any switch to do it. Everyone running a Bitcoin node or miner simply runs code that has the same requirements to accept a block as valid. Some miner could have modified their software to produce 50-coin blocks even after block 210,000, but that would be pointless if other peers in the network weren't running software with the same modification.

You also stated block creation must be faster than one per 10 minutes on average now. It's possible that's temporarily true, but the network retargets the difficulty of finding a block to maintain the balance at 10 minutes per block. This is done by comparing the time it took to calculate the previous 2016 blocks, starting from the previous difficulty retarget, to the expected time of two weeks. If it's less, or more, the difficulty required for a block to be valid is adjusted to compensate, making it harder or easier to find a block. All the information needed to do this retargeting is publicly available.
You may want to have a look at: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

In brief, there are no mystery hands behind the curtains pulling strings to make things happen. You're right that many of the basic choices were arbitrary - the maximum of just short of 21,000,000 BTC and the block creation time being obvious examples. The rules are, however, transparent, and in order to change any of them you'd have to modify the core software and convince people to start using your modified version. That wouldn't be very easy, since it would create a competing currency forking off the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone holding Bitcoins would likely be pretty wary of such modifications, because the effects on the value of BTC could be deleterious.

> But each of those bitcoins can be subdivided into ten million pieces

100 million. Not that it makes a big difference right now.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths

If you have enough information to satisfactorily "report your lost Bitcoin", then you have the bitcoin itself.

For a bad analogy, think about a 20 dollar bill. You can't go into a bank and say "I a 20 dollar bill, can I have another 20?" and expect success. If you go into the bank and say "I lost a 20 dollar bill and I remember the serial number, can I have another 20?" you still won't succeed. If you could somehow go into the bank and say "I lost a 20 dollar bill and I remember the serial number, and I can prove that it is mine, and I can prove that I haven't already spent it, and that no-one else can spend it" then maybe you'd have a chance.

Once you can do all of that, you have enough information to "report your bitcoin lost"... but that means that you have enough information to rebuild your bitcoin.

The FAQ already covers this.

well, some markets already have mechanisms for short selling BTC, though it is debatable if any particular trader or exchange (esp ones outside the US) will actually honor the contracts.

Doesn't the Bitcoin protocol itself support contracts? Could it be adapted to these kinds of bets - both parties transfer their stakes to the betting pool, a Bitcoin price oracle decides which one the pool is transferred to?

That's one approach. I think most people who are actually concerned use a mixing service.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service

...don't be surprised when Bitcoin's two major technical flaws, massive block chain size and constantly increasing time to complete a transaction, finally catches up to it. The more bitcoin transactions, the larger the blockchain grows and the more drive space it costs you. The more people adopt bitcoin the faster it will become bloated to the point of usability.

Wow! A cogent, reasoned response, easily destroyed by a quick google search.

Apparently you can only win arguments against people who can't google. How's that working out for you?

In 10 years bitcoin will be seen the way an AOL dialup connection is viewed today, primitive and outdated, though there will likely still be a handful of dialup users left even then. Though much money will be made from trading them in the mean time, they will become worthless soon enough.

A bold statement. What's your reasoning? Because, like, your emotional energy isn't convincing me.

I see the complaint about Bitcoin transaction history all the time in these stories. From what I can gather, there are two downsides: theoretical loss of anonymity and data storage.

So, is it impossible for Bitcoin to eventually support some form of transaction truncation, where a chunk of transactions are authenticated and then replaced with a detail-losing marker?

According to Bitcoin wiki it should be possible:

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

This is what makes money laundering possible...BitCoin is not like this

It can be. Services exist that allow you to put your bitcoins in, have them mixed repeatedly with other users bitcoins, and get back different bitcoins. Silk Road had this feature built in, the user didn't have to ask for or configure it.

what IP address owned that wallet at the time

What is the IP address of a piece of paper?

They can give them to organizations that accept bitcoins as donations. I don't think that they will pick Wikileaks, the Pirate Party, or even free software with focus in privacy, but i.e. Khan Academy or Sugar Labs are good neutral enough candidates that even they can agree that could give a good use to that donation..

Unless Congress does it, that's called a "gift of public funds" and is, for obvious reasons, illegal.

They can give them to organizations that accept bitcoins as donations. I don't think that they will pick Wikileaks, the Pirate Party, or even free software with focus in privacy, but i.e. Khan Academy or Sugar Labs are good neutral enough candidates that even they can agree that could give a good use to that donation..

Except you don't get to set what transaction fee you charge for processing them. The fee per transaction is defined here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

The problem with blind faith in cryptography is that cryptographic protocols are bloody difficult to get right. In the case of Bitcoin, the anonymity weakness seems to have more to do with the marketplace than the coins themselves.

it is possible to remain "anonymous".

Not if you buy anything meaningful. If both parties in a trade are fully anonymous, and there is no intermediary, trust cannot exist. Either the buyer can avoid paying for the goods, or the seller can avoid actually delivering them.

(If I recall correctly, there may be some extremely few information goods which can be securely sold in this manner, namely proofs of hard mathematical statements. Then you can mess around with blind signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. But the most advanced people have managed to get out of that is decentralized mixing services, which is essentially what zerocoin is. Mixing services are economically unsound, so this won't have any impact.)

Now, if you conduct multiple trades there can be some limited trust (if we overlook the question of why anyone should trust you the very first time). But at that point, you've abandoned anonymity and settled for pseudonymity.

the transaction fee is 0.5 mBTC

What transaction fee?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees
"Transaction fees may be included with any transfer of bitcoins from one address to another. ...
Transaction fees are voluntary on the part of the person making the bitcoin transaction, as the person attempting to make a transaction can include any fee or none at all in the transaction"

BitCoin is not an anonymous currency. It was touted as such, but if one really wanted an anonymous currency, they would have used one of Chaum's ideas (DigiCash, anyone?)

Bitcoin is decentralized, not anonymous. The previous more anonymous cryptocurrencies were centralized. Centralized cryptocurrencies sound much easier to regulate.

from the fact that it is centralized (which can cause someone offline to get fucked if someone hands them some coins and then spends the same coins to someone else),

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

to the tracability aspect

Bitcoin does have some privacy issues. Users are able to make it hard-to-follow their history if they try. I'm hoping some future Bitcoin improvements help make tracing harder. (BIP 32 could help as a side effect.)

to the fact that the whole system benefited the people who came in first and could grind the coins out on CPUs, no GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs needed, as is needed these days.

I can't fathom a way that this sort of thing wouldn't happen with a new cryptocurrency in one way or another.

More importantly, how can I pay with my bitcoins without using Visa or MasterCard? Can I check into hotels with them? Can I buy stuff online that I can't buy with national systems (like iDeal in the Netherlands or a Lastschriftzahlung in Germany)? Can I pay for food with them when I am not in Europe?

Bitcoins are a nice idea, but they have a long way to go. Not only does it have problems with normal every-day payments, lengthy waiting times for transactions and the requirement of Internet connectivity in order to be actually trustworthy, bitcoin also is not anonymous yet. It relies on a difficult to grasp and/or verify majorities. Distributing authority is a reasonable idea, but the bitcoin implementation of it seems to be difficult to verify, due to the ever-changing required computational effort.
However, the biggest hurdles for bitcoin remain convenience and availability.

Usually you use Local Bit Coins or any of the methods listed on this new user's guide.

I take my hat off to you sir. No one could top that. Ladies and gentlemen, the biggest troll in the history of the internet. I hope you have a massive short position to take that much time trashing it. You should post under your real name. You do have a few arguments, since these points are individually not that strong. For each of these points, some payment method already existed that had it. But to do ALL of these points at once.... Nothing even comes close to having all of them except bitcoin. That's why it is growing at 1000%. I would add that I live outside the US now, so I get a 95k tax break, effectively paying zero. Nice job alleging criminality. http://bitcoin.travel/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Wow the 'currency with no intrinsic value' argument, that's new and insightful. You seem very well informed! You must be an economist. Impressive work, no really, I bow to your superior analytical power. You've clearly researched this well beyond a casual review of the FAQ, and dug deep into the economic principles that others are missing.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoins_have_no_intrinsic_value_.28unlike_some_other_things.29

People continue to be distracted by the 51% mining control issue when in fact that is not the issue, or it is not the issue they think it is. This sort of attack doesn't only happen at 51% it can happen at any level of computing power, but the probability of success increases and the attackers relative computing power increases.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power

Further once and attacker has such power the ability they have to do damage to the system is limited to specific things. Things that importantly don't include taking all your bitcoin savings.