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Last Forking Warning For Bitcoin
ASDFnz writes "It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash. The culprit of the crash was found to be a bug that prevented pre version 7.1 bitcoin clients accepting large blocks that could be generated by version 8 clients. A temporary fix was put into place by Bitcoin Project lead developer Gavin Andresen that forced version 8 clients to generate blocks that version 7.1 could understand. It is important to note though, the fix was a temporary one! In just under two days on the 15th of May the fix will expire and version 8 clients will once again be able to make large blocks that older clients will not be able to understand."
Oh shit, the sky is falling.
Total disaster, never happens in real world, not virtual one. Except for all the times when 'real world' currencies undergo devaluations, revaluations, forced exchanges, just plain old inflation, all the things that lead to currencies collapsing. I mean name me a paper currency that lasted longer than 80 years on this planet without a major restructuring, without collapsing?
This is a technical problem, I am pretty certain it will be addressed. Not that I care much about Bitcoin in itself, but I like the idea of competing currencies and this is definitely a revolutionary one, so it's interesting to observe. I don't think it's going away any time soon even with technical issues.
You can't handle the truth.
Sound a lot more like blind naked short selling trick, than splitting of currencies.
In Naked Blind Short Selling, a stock is sold on the promise the share will be bought/borrowed in future, and it never is. So two copies of the shares exist, the one that was sold (and never existed) and the one that actually exists. The non-existent one that was sold, is there on the books.
Eventually the short is filled or reversed, and the fake asset removed by manual intervention. Here it ended with block 225461. The v7 block-chain becomes invalid because its shorter than the v8 version, so its not like it would be valid.
Or perhaps like Bernie Madoff, buying and selling shares that didn't exist, or Wallstreet and the crash of 2007/8... in that case the Fed decided to turn the fake asset into a real one by buying the insurance company and paying out on failed bets. Thank f*** that bailouts aren't possible in BTC!
In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway
What do you mean by that? I thought that the very idea of bitcoins is that at some time no more can be produced, thereby causing deflation.
"What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time?"
There's quite a few currency collapses, you really don't need to go back far, Argentina was the last major one in 2002, since then Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, quite a few African ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_%281999%E2%80%932002%29
It's the usual problem with fiat currencies, they spend more than they earn, they print money to cover it, the currency collapses.
When the US had a meltdown in 2007, they did a massive currency swap with the Eurozone. The effect of that meant that the US central bank had euros to sell as well as dollars, and could sell euros and buy dollars to prop the currency up if panic ensued. You came a lot closer than you realize, I find your comment somewhat glib, based on ignorance of how bad 2007 asset collapse was.
"Bitcoins" are kept in the blockchain. That means that there's tens of millions of "backups" all over the world. What people customarily mean by "bitcoins" is actually the private keys to sign them over other people (your bitcoin "wallet" contains not bitcoins - they're in the blockchain - but the decryption keys that prove that you own them).
Backing up decryption keys is not hard. If you use a deterministic wallet, you just need to remember a passphrase, making it even easier.
Try 2140, not 2020. Your larger point may stand, but the specific urgency of it happening in the next decade - Or even without our lifetimes - does not.
Consider this. Since there a some limit on the maximum number of Bitcoins any that are lost are gone forever. Wallet file misplaced or destroyed, coins stolen but unspendable (because although they are anonymous they are traceable), or simply sitting on forgotten hard drives somewhere.
Governments can print new notes to replace old ones that no longer exist or are presumed lost. Bitcoin has a hard limit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
With 21million BTCs dividable into 100million satoshis each I think the world will have plenty of artificial bits to spread around.
A) That is why people keep money in banks, B) Yes, you can, sort of. In the U.S. you gather up the burned remnants of your cash and send it to the U.S. Mint where they have an entire department consisting of people whose job is to go through such remnants and determine how much money they can actually identify and then that amount will be returned. Now, what happens if someone figures out a way to break the encryption? What happens if someone steals and makes public many of the decryption keys? What happens if someone makes an affordable quantum computer that can produce the keys in trivial amounts of time? The problem with using math as a currency is that a math trick can destroy the value of the currency.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Oh and Thailand in 1997, followed by Indonesia (dropped 83% of its value), South Korea... (remember the Asia crisis?), the post soviet Russian ruble collapse, Turkey Lira collapse went right up till 2001, in 2004 they had to knock *six* zeros of the end of the bank notes!
America had it's collapse of the continental, courtesy of the states printing money:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency
"Continental currency depreciated badly during the war, giving rise to the famous phrase "not worth a continental".[10] A primary problem was that monetary policy was not coordinated between Congress and the states, which continued to issue bills of credit."
Sound familiar?
The crash was not caused by a fork. The crash was caused by over-valuation coupled with the largest DDoS MtGox had ever experienced. The trading system slowed to the point that user's sell / buy trades weren't going through and it caused a panic. MtGox was taken down while they upgraded network infrastructure to deal with the shitty DDoS people. When they came back up, other exchange's had already begun the dive. It dove and corrected repeatedly, until it panned out and has been relatively stable since.
The article is bullshit.