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Btcd - a Bitcoind Alternative Written In Go!
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Conformal have announced btcd, an alternative full-node implementation to bitcoind, written in Go! They have released the first of their core packages, btcwire, available for download at GitHub. As a bitcoin user myself, I love the idea of a full alternative. It will only make bitcoin stronger and more independent. This will be great for the Go community, too!"
Yep. What the world really needs right now is a new currency whose value fluctuates like a share price.
(Because it's based on the same premise - that it's only worth what people are willing to pay for it).
No sig today...
TFS mixes the two: written in Go! and great for the Go community
TFA says: it's Go not Go!
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
While technically true, have you seen any major currency fluctuate over >1000% within a month lately? Ignoring what actually happens in real life does not help your argument.
That's funny. I see it as the value of a dollar fluctuates and bitcoin is constant. I guess it's all a matter of perspective. ;)
What have you bought over the last year? How has their price varied in dollars and in bitcoins? No currency's value is constant, but some are a lot more constant than others.
The price of food can double in a single day and you think it's normal? Luckily your wages do the exact same thing, right?
No sig today...
All they have released is a handler for the network protocol. This doesn't verify blocks, send transactions or anything else. Are the other parts closed source or do they just not exist?
Which makes you a target for such scams :(
Schools used to have subjects called things like "social studies", "civics" or something similar to try to give kids a rudimentary bullshit detector to protect against bent politicians, naturopaths and pyramid schemes. Whatever happened to those?
My 6 year old loves to doodle with his crayons. Lately, I've been having him draw money. So far, the good ones are really rare. So I figure they are probably worth a substantial amount of money. I'm going to start releasing them as currency soon. I'm also working out a deal with Paypal to accept them.
Given the (currently tiny) market for goods buyable with bitcoins, their 'value' is heavily dependent on the health of the exchanges where you can cash out into some other currency.
Incidentally, those exchanges appear to get hacked and/or DDsSed every couple of months...
With the GPU, FPGA, and ASIC miners either online or coming-real-soon-now, bot-herding in order to outcompete honest nodes is a substantial computational challenge, CPU miners are just too pitiful; but it would seem that the real weakness to exploit is the (much softer) underbelly of conventional web infrastructure and the price swings that attacks on that part of the bitcoin economy can create.
The trade between bitcoins and USD looks sort of like the buying and selling of stock, in a world where it's totally normal for the NYSE to be firebombed multiple times per year...
Which is one of the problems of euro, since it means that neither industry nor tourism get a boost from prices effectively falling. Euro will eventually collapse, of course, once enough countries have gone bankrupt that the rest can't carry it anymore, but it'll be too late for Greece.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Your post is extremely interesting, but the mandatory conclusion I make from it is the exact opposite of yours. If the original code is so full of idiosyncracies and gotchas then it's an extreme liability to everyone who values Bitcoin, and quite likely contains backdoors or deliberate weaknesses that are hidden by the obscurity.
There can be no more important task for the Bitcoin community I think than to specify all elements of the static protocol and dynamic behavior of all parts, and reimplement them in other languages, especially safe languages.
Go is certainly a good candidate for this large body of work, safe, clean, and fast.
I can't pay my taxes in BTC
;)
You can't pay your (US) taxes in Euros, either. Does that say anything about the legitimacy of the Euro? Though in fairness, if you wanted to consider that particular example one of a failing currency, I'd have a hard time disagreeing.
As for overall confidence, there's a sucker born every minute, as long as there are suckers having confidence in it, it will remain, until such a time as it becomes so mind blowingly obvious that even the most idiotic supporter can't deny it.
I literally cannot think of a better argument against fiat currency. "Here, suckers, work for 40 years to collect enough of these papers we prooooomise will still hold (30% of) their value when you retire, and when they don't, hey, at least you'll have <snicker> Social Security to fall back on". And for the record, it actually comes out to more like eight suckers born every minute (in the US alone). That doesn't necessarily make BTC any better - But as with my point about the Euro, any argument against something you dislike that applies equally well to something you like, doesn't really have much persuasive power.
even with that "relatively stable" 90-120 range you're still talking about a 30% fluctuation, which is both unpredictable and dangerous for people who are trying to use it for normal currency stuff.
Barnes & Noble has a market cap of 1.3B - Roughly the same as Bitcoin. It shot up, yesterday alone, by 30% (well, 26%, anyway). Most people, even its own investors, expect it to go the way of Borders within a year or two.
Barnes & Noble stock, however, does not count as a currency. So take that as you will.
In the long term it will deflate out of existence, I just hope that there are some criminal prosecutions for the folks that are boosting the currency for personal gain.
I merely disagreed with you up to that statement. But that? Why? Why would you hope for criminal prosecutions over something you have gone so far to minimize as little more than a fad? Do you wish the same for collectors of Beanie Babies and Hummels, or do you reserve your bitterness for collectors of failed foreign currencies?