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Google Engineer Releases Open Source Bitcoin Client
angry tapir writes "A Google engineer has released an open source Java client for the Bitcoin peer-to-peer currency system, simply called BitcoinJ. Bitcoin is an Internet currency that uses a P2P architecture for processing transactions, avoiding the need for a central bank or payment system. Cio.com.au also has an interview with Gavin Andresen, the technical lead of the Bitcoin virtual currency system." Update: 03/23 16:22 GMT by T : Confused? BitcoinJ author Mike Hearn points out this video explanation of how Bitcoin works.
So will he be treated same as this man?
You can't handle the truth.
I've been working on a full client implementation in python https://github.com/phantomcircuit/bitcoin-alt
Just so people know BitcoinJ is not a full p2p node.
Is it just me, or is "don't say you're minting" an "" without a "href"? I know the editors here aren't great, but I thought if they could do anything right it would be html.
Emperor Norton the first, of the USA and Mexico would be proud.
Not Peter Norton, he ran out of ideas and sold his company to pay for freezing himself in suspended animation until the economy of the world got better.
So far Peter Norton is still frozen. Needs his girlfriend to dress up as a bounty hunter, and her brother the farmboy who wants to be a pilot/Jedi to rescue him with his Wookie first mate and two (not Google) androids and his old friend who sold him out and feels sorry for that.
I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over. While new bitcoins can still be mined, it's expensive, and takes time. Oh, the other big problem is that not enough people accept them. But, meh.
More implementations of the software are always good. But, they don't actually matter. It's the blockchain that matters. So long as the various implementations use the same blockchain (which is the cryptographic chain that indicates which address has how many bitcoins), things will stay together.
The biggest potential problem is Google, or another big organisation, starting a new blockchain, and splintering the bitcoin community. Google actually probably has enough processing power to mine quite a lot of bitcoins from the current blockchain anyway.
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I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse. Gold and other universally liked-by-all-humans minerals retains its value for the new owners if someone steals it. Cant say the same about BC.
That's why this will never go anywhere... look at e-gold, it was doing millions of dollars a day in transactions and then as soon as the owners ran into legal trouble (which could happen in any country) and had no means to defend themselves it collapsed overnight.
Having said that it's a nice hobby and probably someone is enjoying programming it, just don't see it ever gaining traction anywhere. Maybe this would be proved wrong if they found an island somewhere, established their own DNS servers and farms/militia which could be paid in BC etc...
With bit-mining screeching to a hault I wonder if *anyone* can be charged with minting a coin or three over the course of a few months...
This might potentially be a solution for spam. To send an email, you need a bitcoin. Bitcoins are easy to get in small quantities, maybe even free, but hard to get in bulk.
As a payment system, I don't see it. DigiCash had more promise as a distributed payment system, but Chaum blew the negotiations repeatedly.
How it works is irrelevant if it's coming from the wrong party. Unless you think it's ok to take candy from strangers in vans, of course.
Its enforced by cryptography.
The reason why police/soldiers don't have to guard transactions carried over SSL is the same reason why they're not required by a currency like Bitcoin.
I think you missed the point behind releasing it as open source.
It needs no central authority, a manager, owner or anything like this. So it does not depend on the party it comes from. Once it's in the wild it's completely independent.
The open source is a prerequisite for proof that the above is true - no hidden hooks, no backdoors and killswitches. Many eyes can prove this is legit.
Look how well it goes for RIAA to prevent copying and counterfeiting.
look at the source and let us know if you can copy/ counterfeit bitcoins without first cracking a cryptographic hash function (sha2) You don't have to trust anyone to use this if you read the source code and understand how it works.
Agreed, many can. How many do ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
My question is, how much electricity will be spoiled to "create" the 21 million bitcoins?
Let me answer your question with a question:
How much electricity will be spoiled to create the next 21 million actual/physical coins?
Mining, milling, and transporting actual silver (or zinc or whatever the government mints are making coins out of these days) isn't exactly an environmentally friendly operation, either. At least once the 21-million bit-coin market is established, the virtual coins will last indefinitely, which is more than one can say for their real-life counterparts.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's bad enough that thousands are spoiling electricity to run seti@home
Just so we're clear, to "spoil" electricity means to use it for something you personally don't approve of?
How much electricity are you spoiling by posting here?
after all, you have lots of machines around the world pretending to be creating money, but they may just as well be sending spam
Ah, ok, you think computers are magic, don't you?
sic transit gloria mundi
The big banks have proven to be evil. There is no such bad reputation about the trustworthiness of the strange person.
Anonymous Coward, why do I see this in every freaking article on Slashdot?! You're always arguing with yourself like a deranged meth addict in withdrawal. Get some help, man ... and stop talking to yourself. People are gonna think you're crazy!
Isn't this concept similar to the peer to peer digital currency outlined in Snow Crash? I have to admit that I didn't read too much in the original post, but the idea that something even remotely close is being worked on is fascinating.
:)
...and yes, I stopped lurking for the last 10 years to post this :)
If I remember correctly from the book, a decentralized currency exchange system accepted by all was also unable to be reliably taxed by governments, despite attempted legal ramifications. This lead to the downfall of regular nation states due to complete fiscal insolvency essentially overnight.
I understand it was just a work of fiction, but would such an outcome be possible, or even desirable? Would we ever accept such a system as a replacement for the traditional banking conglomerates? Even worse, who do you trust more in this day and age, the bankers or the software nerds?
Given the current state of things, I won't be moving my Sealy Posturepedic retirement fund into the Bank-O-Bits, but the potential is somewhat mind blowing for the future.
I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse.
You almost hit Bitcoin's problem spot on. The reason that fiat money like the US$ is viable is that there is an entity - the US government - that can force a US$-denominated debt on you via taxation. This taxation creates demand for the money, which is what ultimately underpins the money's value, once you go beyond all the circular reasoning of "You work for US$ because Walmart accepts US$ in payment for goods because Walmart needs US$ to pay its suppliers because the suppliers need US$ to pay their employees, i.e. you".
Historically, no monetary system could remain stable and useful for significant amount of time unless it was backed by an appropriate power of taxation to jumpstart the value of the currency. No power exists that is able to force Bitcoin-denominated debt onto people, and so Bitcoin will never be widely used outside of the fringe of curious geeks and gold-nutters.
And this is just the problem of how Bitcoin could gain traction. If Bitcoin ever gained traction, then G** help us. Recessions like this one would be inevitable and prolonged, because nobody has the power to jump-start the economy out of a recession by unilateral stimulus spending. (Of course, given how the political debate is going these days, we might as well use Bitcoins, since governments refuse to use the tools at their disposal with which they could get us out of it.)
By the way, if you really want to learn more about how monetary system works, I recommend billy blog as a good source by a modern monetary theory economist. The entry A simple business card economy is probably a good starting point.
Do you mean a talking moose?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
That's the nice thing about Bitcoin: it is less dependent on trust than all other payment systems.
Most significantly, as a Bitcoin user, you do not have to trust a central authority or 3rd party (eg. Paypal or a bank) that may initiate chargebacks, or freeze your accounts, because there is no middleman in Bitcoin.
Of course you need to trust the Bitcoin design itself. But the system has proven its robustness so far, and will (hopefully) continue to do so. If you are curious you may find a list of attacks or flaws, that the Bitcoin network has successfully repelled so far here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents Personally I have rarely found an open source community that was so full of smart people. And I say this with 13+ years of using and contributing to a lot of open source projects.
...between bitcoins and WoW gp?
Why bother creating a new electronic currency when there is a perfectly viable one already in existence...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Written by someone who has absolutely no clue on how it works. Thanks for your incredible insight.
I've used Bitcoin and I can tell how it works. It's an elegant system for producing cryptographically signed "currency" which can be exchanged over P2P. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.
Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.
How could it collapse? In numerous ways. Various governments might start auditing / taxing people who use it as a form of currency. They might legislate against it, deeming it to be bogus financial instrument. It might get a reputation for money laundering and all the popular exchanges get shutdown along with the accounts. A rival to bitcoin might appear which is easier to use or has other benefits.Someone might develop a crack / exploit which allows them to inject "poisoned" transactions over P2P where the database is corrupted, or worse compromises Bitcoin such that wallets are wiped or drained of funds. A popular exchange is hacked and all the money is stolen. There might be a run on bitcoins if the system shows sign of collapse / compromise and the exchanges refuse to exchange bitcoins into dollars.
All of these scenarios are feasible and I think it only a matter of time before the system is hit by one of them. I have no issue with bitcoin per se but I do not see the long term viability in the system.
Yes but those real-life counterparts have near universal acceptance. It'd be a stretch to say even a .0001% of entities accept bitcoins.
But that's not about the environmental impact, is it?
Bitcoin's existence is essentially technically insuppressible at this moment: it is fully peer-to-peer, there is no central server or company that can be shut down.
The only risk is social: in other words people could simply lose interest in it. But its network strength (hash rate) has demonstrated a remarkable exponential growth recently. It has doubled every 27 days, continuously, in the last 15 months: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=49 This implies, of course, popularity. So I would say it is very improbable for Bitcoin to just disappear tomorrow.
Here is a video, for non-technical persons, to help understand Bitcoin:
http://www.weusecoins.com/
It was just made very recently (today!)
You are correct that bootstrapping a currency is the most difficult step. However it appears to have done just that: it went from zero to hundreds of merchants in a little over a year: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
:)
Of course, there is still a long way to go (most of them are individuals or very small shops), but the very fact it has already grown so quickly and so fast is very encouraging. It was possible because of its truly unique and revolutionary features that really no other currency provide, notably the combination of: absence of middlemen, anonymity, cryptographically irreversible money transfers.
I like to tell people that when they first hear about Bitcoin, they will either instantly dismiss it as something that could never work, or they will immediately understand its large potential
When it comes to risking real money - I'd say enough.
What I am potentially concerned with, is not that the code itself contains some nasty stuff, but more that the algorithm behind creating and using the "coins" - the mathematics involved in it - is sophisticated enough that while some people will understand the general rule and find it sound, the author may know of some little-known caveat, exception, some specific parameter value that may compromise the security.
Still, the concept is interesting enough that I'm pretty sure many mathematicians will take interest and scrutinize it for algorithmic vulnerablities just as well as coders will scrutinize it for implementation backdoors.
Like md5 implementation can be sound, but md5 hash collision can already be generated using far less effort than the 32 bytes of enthropy would suggest.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
That's exactly how it works. You get all the information from people you don't know on the internet. It's money verification via an anonymous mob.
As others have already stated, most of what we use as money, be it banknotes, coins or bank accounts, consume a lot of energy. I think Bitcoin's system is much more favorable, though my belief is based on back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Plus, my god, chill out, it's a protocol, not a software. And it's an open protocol. And all clients are open-source. And what miners are doing is pretty basic (sha256summing like mad), you can even check it out yourself.
Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.
had you read anything about the idea behind this, you would know that that 'shortcoming' you speak of, was devised as a means to increase adoption rate of the system at the start - if you contributed to system early, you would get more coins. if you bought coins early, the would be worth more. this provided its fast adoption rate.
please dont talk out of your ass next time.
as for 'auditing/taxing' people, taxing is already a reality regardless of what means you use as money. tax is not relevant to money unit or coin that is used. that shows the extent of your naivete on the subject of taxes and accounting. what is taxed is not your money - your income. your income, may be in schamabazoos. and as soon as you convert this to property or merchandise, you get taxed.
as for legislating against it - that is not something that can be used as a shortcoming. the power holders already legislate against many things you take for granted in your life, because it is dangerous to them. are you stopping using them ? no.
im not even going to talk about your 'theory' about 'poisoning' transactions by injecting packets to erase wallets.
Read radical news here
i would call you a man with no brains - early adopters had basically 'made' the bitcoin network. they are the ones who helped it gain traction, while you were sitting on your ass. if you are jealous, you should have adopted bitcoin at the start like them. they deserve the coins they got, because they contributed to the system at the most critical moment.
Read radical news here
Well, if it's done by people who read Java, and understand the problem domain well enough use it, it's ok. If they share their insight with the less fortunate individuals, even better. But generally don't expect everyone to do their homework themselves. Think about it. Nobody (as in 'most of us') questions the authority of paper money despite the fact that paper money isn't what it used to be anymore. Nobody cares to look at how exactly paper money is generated (its value that is, because, obviously, it's just paper otherwise), and nobody cares that this process is in the hands of the banks and not even the governments like it used to be. And nowadays, people don't even trust their government in all cases (have they ever?). So, any kind of monetary system will be ultimately judged not by how easy or difficult it is to defeat the system, but how practical its real-life implementation is for most people, and how much stuff you can buy with it or sell for it (I say most people, because if it's not universally used as means of exchanging value, it has not value at all).
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Regardless of whether or not early adopters "deserve" to be rewarded, the fact that they got bitcoins easier than newer entrants provides a strong disincentive for people to join the bitcoin network.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I can only surmise that only fools would invest real money in this system. As I said it has the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme. People who "got in early", who set up the exchanges, who generated a reserve of bitcoins have most to gain. They're the people who'll sell their bitcoins for dollars at the first opportunity, probably already have. The remainder will be carrying the can when the system goes titsup, either through regulation, hacking, disinterest or because something better comes along.
you have provided reasons. they were not only invalid, but also off target. i dont even know what you are still discussing.
Read radical news here
the point of network is to provide an exchange currency. not a means for making money. the people who adopt the network, should be adopting it for the exchange currency already. you are not supposed to make any coins out of thin air, unless the network is small and needs help.
Read radical news here
If I had a virtual dollar for everyone in this thread who has no idea how BitCoin actually works...
Funny how you are so pissy about it being a pyramid scheme when you go on to describe a pyramid scheme to a T.
But then, that's about all any form of fiat currency is--a pyramid scheme. It goes from those with the printing press to the government to the corporations to the businesses to you. You pay the most to the inflation tax demons, while those higher up the pyramid gain purchasing power by getting quicker access to the freshly printed money.
This is why no fiat currency has ever lasted more than about 60 years (the Flying Money of the Yuan dynasty in China, though they had three different issues, all ended with hyperinflation, the longest lasting of their currency regimes was about 60 years), with the mean being about 20 years, and the average being about 30 years. The dollar has been full fiat for 41 years now.
Also, taxing is VERY relevant, considering that if there is a floating exchange rate, you will be taxed on any "gain" that comes from the increase in value of your currency relative to the dollar. Also taxed is any situation where the dollar loses value while your currency stays the same. They aren't taxing you on more, they are taxing you on the same, and now you can't even buy as much as you had to begin with. This is why gold doesn't circulate as currency alongside dollars. It is treated rather brutally by the tax code (taxed as a collectable--even worse than using foreign currency, which is taxes as capital gains).
I've used US Dollars and I can tell how it works.
It's an elegant system for producing paper "currency" which can be exchanged for products. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.
Namely, it is the people who got in early, when the purchasing power of those pieces of paper was higher and there were much fewer of them, or they got them at Fed discount window who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would go as far as calling it a pyramid scheme.
How could it collapse? In numerous ways. Various governments might start auditing / taxing people who use it as a form of currency. They might legislate against it, deeming it to be bogus financial instrument. It might get a reputation for money laundering and all the popular exchanges get shutdown along with the accounts. A rival to US dollar might appear which is safer to use or has other benefits, like being an actual valuable asset. Someone (the Fed/Congress) might develop a crack / exploit which allows them to inject "poisoned" transactions into the monetary system in forms of 0% interest on borrowed money, bail outs, stimulus packages, gov't spending items, or worse, just prints so many dollars that wallets are wiped or drained of purchasing power. A large bank may become insolvent once the long term interest rates go above the US bond returns, and then all the balance sheet start bleeding red ink. There might be a run on banks if the system shows sign of collapse / compromise and the stores/merchants stop accepting dollars as money.
All of these scenarios are feasible and I think it only a matter of time before the system is hit by one of them. I have no issue with a paper currency that is fully backed by some form of reserve per se but I do not see the long term viability in the system, which allows politicians to meddle with the monetary and economic policy and print their own ticket.
You can't handle the truth.
It's also amusing how you're bleating how we should be paying in silver funny money and now you're leaping to defend bitcoin. A system which involves hash functions and cryptographic signatures. Computer bits. At least be consistent in your arguments.
Actually they're quite valid and you've chosen to ignore them. It won't be my loss if the system goes titsup as it probably will in one way or another.
> As you appear to be an apologist for liberty dollars...
That's not true for the GP post, anyway. So you've done an ad hominem. If he defends the liberty dollar, reply on that thread, it will look better.
I think that he simply said that "fiat money is fiat", not defending this or that.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
That's the nice thing about Bitcoin: it is less dependent on trust than all other payment systems.
That's the thing that makes Bitcoin pointless - that is misses the point of money completely. Money is not a store of value, it is a mechanism for adding elasticity to exchanges of value. It is a promise that you can acquire something with real value in the future. When I take money in payment for work, it is for the sole purpose of later exchanging that money for goods or services at a later date.
The value of money is not some intrinsic property of the money, it comes from the fact that someone is willing to accept it in exchange for something of value. This used to be some precious metal. For example, one pound sterling (British pound) could be exchanged for one pound of sterling silver. Now it's usually done by governments promising to accept currency in payment of taxes, guaranteeing that there will be people who need the currency and so who will accept it in payment for (at least some of) their goods or services. Bitcoin doesn't address this in any way.
It uses the same model as a currency backed by a precious metal, but, unlike the precious metals (which have real uses, so there are always people willing to give you some currency in exchange for them) it backs it with the result of some calculation that no one actually wants.
It may be an elegant solution, but it's a solution to entirely the wrong solution. If you want a better currency, then you want to create a system for tracking the transitive closure of reputation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thought I'd write up a quick 'getting started' guide for anyone that wants to give bitcoin mining a go:
#1 - Download the bitcoin application from bitcoin.org, install and fire it up. It will connect and sync with the p2p network, downloading approximately 114700 blocks.
#2 - Download and install the OpenCL driver for your graphics card / OS.
You might also need the full SDK, my drivers were supposed to include OpenCL support, but the GPU miner still didn't work. For AMD/ATI cards, this link should work:
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx
#3 - Download and unpack "PyOpenCL bitcoin miner" somewhere. You'll find windows binaries here (7zip-compressed):
https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/downloads
#4 - Using the bitcoin client, create a new 'receiving address' which you call 'mining income' to track payments.
#5 - Sign up for a mining pool. You'd rather have a few cents an hour than wait months for a random shot at 50 BTC. I'd go with:
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/newuser.php
as they're free, while the others charge a fee of 2-3%. Wallet ID is the thing you created in step 4.
You'll find the other pools here:
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?board=14.0
#6 - Stuff the following into a .bat file and run it. Might want to try from the console first, to make sure all is ok.
This of course assumes you're on windows, and installed to a directory named d:\bin\bitcoin\poclbm..
Setting the f options to a higher value will cause less stress on your system. 30 is the default, shoot for 120 if your screen is lagging too much.
The d option is the device id of your graphics card. Mine's device 0, it could also be 1, 2 or whatever.
If the above worked, you should see a console window containing output like this:
Apologist for Liberty dollars?
How about you are an apologist for fiat?
As to government guarantees, and guarantees of banks that are guaranteed by governments, keep them.
As to Bitcoin - it's a competitor to official garbage fiat, so it's good, as long as it works and cannot be faked.
--
Anyway, nice Ad Hominem there.
You can't handle the truth.
You say that Bitcoin is elegant, but solves the wrong problem. I disagree. Read some of the introductory material that explains the flaws of the existing currency models that Bitcoin is trying to address:
be careful which pool you choose to participate in. some of these pools may look good, but delay their stats and have been suspected of ripping off those who participate. it seems that the bitcoinpool.com is the only one that has fully transparent statistics for every user and doesn't delay their stats pages, which keeps everyone honest. Another important point is that you should start mining today before the value of bitcoins drops from 50 to 25. This will happen in about another year or so, which means the gold rush is still on!! Start mining if you haven't before it's too late.
This is why no fiat currency has ever lasted more than about 60 years
The split tally lasted in Brittany about seven centuries (XII to XIX centuries, if I recall correctly). More recently, both the Canadian Dollar and the British Pound have been fiat since 1931 according to wikipedia and the bank of Canada, respectively, which makes them both exactly 80 years old so far.
The idiots who want transaction fees don't get it: The whole point of a peer-to-peer system is to eliminate middle man rent-seeking. There is, however, a reasonable service that some might confuse with a "transaction fee" and that is transaction insurance. Transaction insurance is just a scaled down form of title insurance everyone is familiar with who has ever purchased a house. The transaction insurer is simply someone who underwrites the risk for one of the parties that a transaction will go bad. There is no need for the transaction to go through the transaction insurer, nor is there always a need for transaction insurance. Get rid of the bozos who are blithering about transaction fees NOW.
Seastead this.
I wish more people understood this. So many otherwise bright individuals end up tilting at the fiat vs metallic windmill instead of realizing that "value" isn't subject to storage in the first place. The value of currency comes from the ability and willingness of other people to produce goods and services.
I would argue that it is about the environmental impact.
I am one of those who thinks this bitcoin thing is not going to be really used, on the other hand the environmental impact is going to be very real.
If and when countries produce less physical coins because people switch to bitcoin, then we can revisit the subject.
Well I am, and many others have been using it for some time. But if the majority is generating coins and merely selling to hoarders and doing nothing else, which is a possibility, then you may be right. However, my counter argument is that, that kind of behavior would lead to the collapse of Bitcoin economy before it could be considerably harmful to the environment. Something that has no use can't have value. Let me remind you that the real purpose of the computation being done is to make network resilient to attacks.
"A rival to bitcoin might appear...or has other benefits."
Like...Ripple. Ripple already is a bitcoin rival, although a smaller one but it definitely has other benefits.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.