Slashdot Mirror
195K Bitcoin Transaction
First time accepted submitter saidi writes "The Washington Post reports that yesterday a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred, from the article: 'In this particular transaction, bitcoins from 15 different Bitcoin addresses were consolidated and sent to address 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. The size of the transaction? 194,993 bitcoins. Given that one bitcoin is worth around $800 right now, the transaction is valued at more than $150 million.'"
A researcher did a bit of digging, and it appears that this was the Bitstamp exchange moving their balance around (business appears brisk).
This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
To be honest, Slashdot and http://phys.org/ are by far, my favorite websites for interesting stories news.
However, I am getting tired of fucking bitcoin stories. Enough is enough.
You don't have to read the summary. You don't have to click on the links. You don't have to post annoying comments. In fact, I think slashdot will be better if you do stop "reading" it.
But, yeah, I'll give you that there are way too many bitcoin stories...
No, I cannot allow that. Even if you leave Slashdot for whatever shitty site that is, I will come to your house, put a gun to your head, and force you to read Bitcoin stories much like Unknown Lamer does here. You must read them. This is not an option. If you had a choice, there would be some sort of summary on the front page with a link instead of how it is now where every bitcoin story locks your browser and won't let you navigate away unless you post.
This is simply good stewardship. One of the largest exchanges (actually not, Bitstamp, rather another ahem Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange site) had a rush of buy orders, so they decided to redeem an address they kept in cold, offline storage to meet demand.
This is a good thing(tm), as it means that there isn't any fractional deposit factoring going on.
If you create an account, go to options under your username after logging in, you can set terms to ignore and those stories should not appear on your front page. Setting a term Bitcoin should stop stories about bitcoin from entering your front page.
If you insist on posting anonymously, then simply log out after seeing what stories interest you and opening them in another tab.
I'm personally at a loss to why people think so highly of bitcoin. There are about 80 or so other virtual currency exchanges out there and it seems that none of them are stable in the sense of real currencies. I understand the concept of it being like a credit card with the limitations of a wallet (Ie if you lose your wallet, you lose only the funds in it where if you lose your credit card, it can be charged until it is shut off), but beyond that, I just don't get it.
What if I had bought $100 worth of Bitcoins in early 2010 (when the price was something like 5,000 BTC for $25 USD) and held onto them until it peaked at $800/BTC? I know what would happen to my bank account, but would that have thrown the entire system into chaos if I cashed in that many at once?
Basically, should I be kicking myself for NOT doing just that, or would it have flooded the market and crashed the price before I could have gotten the full value out of the transaction?
You have your own wallet in bitcoin right? It can be as secure as you make it. Why are people trusting their coins to a bank?
It is the first new currency since the Euro that actually matters worldwide. Its value only is going to go up as China moves into it, so it will be touching part of everyone's life eventually in one way or another. Plus, it can only go up in value as people pour real value into the coins, and there are fewer and fewer coins being minted.
Expect it to hit $10,000 soon per coin.
How do you steal cash that disappears when held too close to a match?
I will come to your house, put a gun to your head, and force you to read Bitcoin stories much like Unknown Lamer does here. You must read them. This is not an option.
Oh yeah? We'll I'll send their mother a case of Tentacle Grape Soda
with their name on it unless A.C. makes posts on every article they don't like.
I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before. If it's now at the point where there are $150 million transactions, that's significant. I sure hope the operators of that exchange don't disappear with the money, get hacked, or any of the other nastiness that seems to happen every couple of weeks. A $150 million heist would be a big deal, and damn few internet-connected systems are secure enough to thwart even moderately skilled crackers. For example, a certain national agency I'm familiar with that does cyber-security training is wide open to SQL injection and other attacks. I sure hope these bitcoin exchanges have better security than the agencies that set security standards have. If not, somebody's going to steal $150 million in bitcoins any day now, and that'll be a big deal.
Anyone with a clear head can see that BTC is in a massive speculative bubble, just like the housing market in '06, and .COM companies in '00.
The market will correct itself, and all this nonsense volatility will leave a handful of people wealthy, but 99% of every other speculator losing their hides.
Plenty of time and reason to poo-pooh
Especially now that it has become ineffective as a currency and it isn't being backed by cost of production (vast amounts are produced by botnets, effectively for free to the producers).
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I'm sure in the desert you'd be rather annoyed if someone stole your water. However, that can simply evaporate in the sun!
heh, captcha: liquids
How do you streal something that disappears after a magnet is passed over it?
Are we talking about Bitcoins, or music?
31531.5315315... is the number of Bitcoins that must only be held in the wallet of the beast. Why, simple, because there are only 21 million to go around. Naturally if it is decided that a greater number of Bitcoins is necessary then this wallet will increase proportionally. Call this a sin tax but because of this. Here is what happens to those who send money to the beast's public key.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before.
I'll keep poo-pooing it.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins? You might offer to sell some good or service for 1 bitcoin. Then, a week later, your potential customers are laughing at you saying "one bitcoin for THAT? WOW talk about over priced, thats ridiculous!" and then they will buy from someone else.
Bitcoins simply cannot be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
If you look at how much a good or service costs in bitcoins you are probably and reasonably going to make a mental conversion into 'real' currency. Each week those goods and services effectively cost more and more.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
Ie in order to sell things in bitcoins and maintain a realistic price you have to keep charging less and less of a bitcoin. If you post a price in bitcoins and don't continually adjust it downward anyone who wants to buy and doesn't already have 'old' bitcoins is going to look at how much they now have to spend on bitcoins just to pay for your goods/services and, probably, think twice about it and probably go somewhere else.
How big a proportion of people who use bitcoins mined them themselves? How big a proportion got those bitcoins through selling goods/services for them? How big a proportion bought the bitcoins with 'real' currency? My guess is that most bitcoin users pay for them with another currency and these people are not going to use them to buy and sell; they are going to hoard them.
Therefore, bitcoins are useless for anything other than speculation which was not the original intention of the system; it was intended to be used to buy and sell services. Therefore bitcoins are now useless for their intended purpose.
WTF happened here? Has the bitcoin been deliberately sabotaged? Or is this just an unintended consequence? Do we need a new virtual currency that won't devolve into this and stay useful?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Financial markets like MtGox could easily maintain fractional reserves because many account-holders don't withdraw their entire balance of bitcoins every night. There is plenty of opportunity for the exchange to do whatever they want with a portion of the deposits. In essence "mtgox bitcoins" are already a fiat currency that are payable in real bitcoins upon request. They just haven't started paying out at less than 1 bitcoin per mtgox bitcoin yet, like half of the other bitcoin exchanges/banks/whatever have when they got hacked.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
And it's basically a no-brainer; set the prices in dollars or other local currency and do real-time conversion to bitcoin prices using the recent exchange history. It's almost certainly going to be converted to another currency at that exchange fairly quickly anyway. Bitcoin will be a payment method and not a stable currency for, in my guess, quite a long time to come. If not because of the speculation but because of its tiny market cap compared to global markets. As such, bitcoin will never become useless until its market cap is smaller than the smallest purchase one might want to make, or if all the exchanges die. In fact, the lack of exchanges would tend to stabilize the currency value so it could still be used to send a few dollars worth of value across the Internet.
Thats kind of what I mean; you can't set prices in bitcoins. That impacts the bitcoins utility as a practical unit of currency.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
you cannot have fractional deposits with bit coin because you cannot get more bitcoins. So there is no interest.
You can. Essentially; your deposit of Bitcoins to mt.gox your bitcoin balance would be a debt on their books.
Mtgox does not necessarily have as many bitcoins as the sum of users' deposits.
The only way you could prove that would be with audited financials, or if everyone cashed out theit BTC successfully. They would likely greatly increase fees, long before that could happen.
Neither form of evidence is likely to be available any time soon.
It is also quite obviously in the middle of a massive bubble. If you look at the movement of the price, the shape of the curve, it is moving just like any other commodity that is being thinly traded and having massive speculation. That sort of thing might be good if you like to play the market and try to make a quick buck, but it's really really bad for anything trying to be a currency. It also is almost inevitably followed by a crash. Hence why bubbles are called that because they pop.
I suppose it is there radically possible that Bitcoin is some kind of exception and its value will continue to rise forever, but it would be the first time that is been true for anything that moved like this. Massive, volatile price changes are not the sort of thing that signal real growth, but rather a speculation bubble that is doomed to collapse sooner or later.
Naw, I'm pretty sure that parody has received strong legal recognition as funny, and completely harmless. America says "don't be such a pantywaist!"
Oops, wrong links. Or... maybe the US isn't the country I was brought up to believe in. Like being taught to believe in Santa Claus but having your dad come into your room on Christmas eve to smash all your shit up. And ground you for being such a pantywaist, based on the assumption that you were going to cry.
Nothing is truly anonymous if you have a big enough wrench.
I don't disagree, it sure looks like a major bubble, so on that point I still think it's very risky to get involved in. Where my perception has changed is that it looked like a toy, something tin-foil-hat people play with. I laughed it off. It seems it's now big enough that one shouldn't laugh it off. As an example, with over $150 million in a single exchange, an unlicensed bank, it probably makes sense to seriously look at appropriate consumer protections.
194,993 * $800 is roughly $150 million, indeed.
But try to throw (to sell) these 194993 BTC at MtGox (or elsewhere) at once.
Such a volume would move the BTC price to hell.
Hence the Bitcoin valuation is't real...
In your mind, are gold or silver money? I mean, they change price all the time, so I guess they're kind of worthless.
You are talking about the dollar right?
Right, which is what I'm getting at; the bitcoin is useless as a 'coin' that you can buy and sell goods and services for. Its only use at the moment is speculation.
You can't set prices of goods and services in terms of 'thinly traded commodities subject to massive speculation'.
You can't put bit coin price tags on things, this would be completely impossible. Yet I see this often online.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins?
Like this: https://www.bitcoinshop.us/
Yes, the price is different every time I visit.
And, although I admit I have not bought anything from that site, I can tell you that I *have* used bitcoins to buy Humble Bundles, which are another thing you can buy directly for bitcoins (optionally). There's just less overhead (complexity, time, effort, security, fees) in my perception of a bitcoin transaction over, for example, a paypal or credit card transaction... at least if you have a mobile device containing bitcoins that can scan QR codes easily.
I get your point that it's not really wise to spend bitcoins because 1) it's not wise to keep the majority of your wealth in bitcoins due to volatility and 2) it's not wise to spend bitcoins if you have other currencies because bitcoins are most likely to increase in value if you hold on to them. But for micro-transactions where I don't feel like I'm giving up a significant portion of my bitcoin investment, I do like making use of my bitcoins for convenience. It's also possible that if and when enough people are using bitcoins, their value will become less volatile. It might be an interesting path to get there, but barring some catastrophe, I don't see them going away completely, and I don't imagine that they can stick around for decades more without more people getting involved.
What makes socialism such a beast? Aren't we more productive as a collaborative community than individuals? Don't you think that bitcoin will gain much more acceptance if the government promotes it rather than fighting it? Did you notice how much more popular bitcoin got a few days ago when the government finally talked about it (and in a positive light!)? The value doubled in a day if I recall correctly.
To the average consumer who isn't necessarily aware of being tracked or of the fees paid to payment processors, it probably seems just like a credit card payment. To the person or business on the other end of the transaction, however, the two couldn't be more different. There's no approval process to accept bitcoin, there's no third party to charge processing fees and there are no disputed charges. In a lot of ways, it is more like cash.
Beyond all of that, bitcoin is more interesting as a demonstration of what is possible and an indicator what will soon be possible. It's shown that individuals can cooperate for their own benefit at a global scale, without the need for government intervention. Maybe it's naive to expect that technology can effect substantial change in global politics, but you can't blame people for being excited about the potential to reduce the power of nationalist governments that wage wars and build prisons, and reduce the harm done by stupid, wasteful and corrupt politicians.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem. Hell, there's a mini-rush on every vendor whenever they mis-price in Euros because the Euro jumped and the dollar didn't, or vice versa.
And every business I've ever run or been a part of has to update its prices every few months anyway. If you work in a fast, competitive market, you are literally changing prices every day (e.g. large grocery chains, electronics suppliers, etc.).
The way you compensate is by "over-pricing" as much as everyone else. Because everyone does it. And you over-price so that, as the value increases, you don't have to re-price everything - you just make more profit at the beginning of that price and less profit at the end. And when you aren't making enough profit, then you ACTUALLY re-price.
If it's completely anonymous, it's a too good vehicle for criminals and all sorts of underground activities. I actually want a monetary system that is trackable.
Perhaps we should start exchanging goods and services with the exchange of WELL FUCK I DONNO goods and services?
You have a small business with several employees. It's time to make payroll so you whip out the goods and services box and...
We are living the libertarian dream with Bitcoin: a bunch of exchanges, none of them insured.
Libertarians feels that government regulation is unnecessary, but what recourse do those depositors have when one of these exchanges just disappears with their money? None.
I won't be using Bitcoin, no matter how lucrative, until a government agency or large bank insures deposits. It's just not worth the risk.
Frankly, I can't see any sovereign ever backing Bitcoin while they have their own currency, so I don't know how Bitcoin ever becomes a reliable, universal currency.
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem.
Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.
Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.
* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
This article is more at home on a financial site than a tech site. The radio tapping article is much more appropriate. With less comments in this article that's a good sign
A blog I run for the wealth
Thanks, this is how i'm gonna teach my (future) kids that Santa isn't real, when the time has come.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
No, gold and silver are not money. Money is something that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services. They're far from worthless but having value is not the only criteria for something to be money.
Bit coin value chart
Classic Market 'Bubble' chart/graph
Bitcoins as Money
(and Gold as Not)
keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency
Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.
Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of this discussion, has a formal definition. I will for expediency quote wikipedia:
The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.
Something that changes value all the time can be used as money, but it generally makes transactions difficult, so it's not a good idea. Another terrible idea is basing a national currency on the trade of a commodity that said nation does not control. The US has been doing pretty good on the petrodollar, but gold and silver were a pretty stupid idea, sorry.
Bitcoin is fairly interesting in being an international currency, albeit one that is struggling to escape the influence of the US Dollar. It's not quite safe to say that it fails to qualify as money at this point, but it has some interesting feedback loops built in which may allow it to actually bootstrap itself. I think that in the long run they are more likely to end up promoting the idea of cryptocurrencies than to actually succeed as one; the advantage gained by the first miners is at this point a market flaw. However, barring that or some mathematical attack, it may be in use for some time, as other cryptocurrencies gain mindshare.
Now, at what price in Bitcoins may I purchase a smarter AC?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Plotting wildly changing values on a linear scale is not really informative. The only relevant metric is relative change, so a logarithmic scale is the only thing that makes sense. Bitcoin does seem to be in a bubble that started mid October/start November, but in the long run, sorry, over the last three years, the price chart seems consistent with a steady increase of around a factor of 5 per year, overlayed with a number of bubbles. This slower increase could be another bubble, but then I wouldn't expect the increase to be that steady, particularly not spanning several bubble bursts. It doesn't seem consistent with the mechanisms of bubbles (but I have no training in economics, so I could very well be mistaken).
Silver, gold, platinum... that's gonna take one hell of a match! :-)
(granted most of what's in circulation is silver, copper, nickel, and lead)
Look closely at the voice coil setup. Notice those two magnets are very close together? The magnetic field lines are 99.9999% perpendicular to the surfaces; VERY little of the field extends beyond the assembly. (and effectively none extends all the way to the platter(s).)