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Bitcoin Snafu Causes Miners To Generate Invalid Blocks
An anonymous reader writes: A notice at bitcoin.org warns users of the cryptocurrency that many miners are currently generating invalid blocks. The cause seems to be out-of-date software, and software that assumed blocks were valid instead of checking them. They explain further "For several months, an increasing amount of mining hash rate has been signaling its intent to begin enforcing BIP66 strict DER signatures. As part of the BIP66 rules, once 950 of the last 1,000 blocks were version 3 (v3) blocks, all upgraded miners would reject version 2 (v2) blocks. Early morning UTC on 4 July 2015, the 950/1000 (95%) threshold was reached. Shortly thereafter, a small miner (part of the non-upgraded 5%) mined an invalid block--as was an expected occurrence. Unfortunately, it turned out that roughly half the network hash rate was mining without fully validating blocks (called SPV mining), and built new blocks on top of that invalid block. Note that the roughly 50% of the network that was SPV mining had explicitly indicated that they would enforce the BIP66 rules. By not doing so, several large miners have lost over $50,000 dollars worth of mining income so far."
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You mean the money they just created out of thin air isn't really real?
Stop the presses.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The irony is that just a few stories down, there is a lot of talk about why more people don't drive EVs and how important it is for the world to get off fossil fuels.
So... how much power generated by fossil fuels was consumed "mining" bitcoins last month?
I can't think of anything less "green" than a computer pulling hundreds of watts sitting around 24/7 chewing on random numbers.
Fifty thousand dollars dollars?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
On the bitcoin.org website: "WARNING: many wallets currently vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions."
Offhand, I'd consider that a significant "compromise", given that vulnerability to double-spending dramatically undermines confidence in using Bitcoin. If this situation continues for any length of time, you can just about guarantee that the bad guys will begin to exploit it.
Are they vulnerable to double spending attacks for the indefinitely future because of one bad block or was it just during the block's formation? And the way I understand it, the mining pool that solved the block would have to be the one injecting the malicious data itself since the old method of block validation is good enough to prevent double spend attacks but I could easily be wrong about that.
Ever listened to reassurances from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank?
Probably a few coal trains.
Well sure, thus my question as to why people here rail against SUVs and such, but seem to love Bitcoin so much...
So... how much power generated by fossil fuels was consumed "mining" bitcoins last month?
Very close to zero. Bitcoins are mined where power is cheapest, which means where there is plenty of hydropower, like in Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest. It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Far less than the amount of power used to run the credit card networks.
Because government is bad, ...m'kay.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Please be assured that if you aren't currently free and are in possession or mineral resources, we'll be on our way to bomb you into freedom shortly... :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ah, screw that. It doesn't matter if you're free or not. If you've got oil or minerals, we're going to bomb the shit out of you...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How the fuck can anyone trust Bitcoin after this and the other incidents that have happened? How?
You can trust Bitcoin by learning how it works and following the proper procedures that you would if you playing with real money.
The Bitcoin system is highly resistant to "rouge" or bad actors in the system. Someone running mining software that does not follow the agreed upon rules for the system is an example of a rouge actor. When this happens the rest of the system votes down the decisions made by the rouge actors. In this case some miners were not following the system wide agreed upon protocol, generated bad data, and the rest of the system (correctly) rejected that bad data thus maintaining the integrity of the overall system as designed.
What was lost were some rewards that would normally have been paid out for operating correctly. Since the rouge actors were not operating correctly, they were not rewarded (for their invalid work). If you were hired to paint a house white and you painted it orange, would you expect to be paid? The miners did not do the work they were being paid to do. True, many miners mine within a pool and depend on the pool operator to do the right thing, but if the pool operator is not doing the right thing, it is not a flaw in Bitcoin. Lke the painting analogy, if you work for a painting company and the painting company gives you the wrong color of paint, you wouldn't expect the homeowner to pay you, if you want to get paid for your labor, your beef would be with your boss, the the homeowner.
On the transactional (non mining) side, if you are running an incomplete Bitcoin client, it is now taking longer to achieve a level of confidence that your transaction is officially as "approved" by the network. As always it is the responsibility of those making the transactions to wait an appropriate time to ensure that their transactions have been approved. This has always been the case with Bitcoin and has not changed.
Shortcuts? Since when has using not-up-to-date software been considered a "shortcut" to anything but being hacked?
It doesn't have to do with out of date software, but software that is pretending to say it has been updated to do checks when it doesn't to save cpu cycles. That is a shortcut, not doing proper checks.
Tell me, are "Rouge Actors" apt to break out in Song at the slightest provocation?
The whole thing is just a sneeze away from being compromised to the point of uselessness.
My power comes from coal and natural gas and costs less than 11 cents per kWh.
Are you suggesting that is too expensive to mine with?
Are you suggesting that no one outside of those areas are mining Bitcoin?
Very close to zero. Bitcoins are mined where power is cheapest, which means where there is plenty of hydropower, like in Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest. It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Bullshit. Give us one shred of evidence that this is happening. Anyone involved in bitcoin mining isn't one bit interested in environmental issues, and coal is still the cheapest form of energy.
Per transaction, or total?
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
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Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Bitcoins aren't printed...
How about blanc and bleu :)
Let's just ask the guy who set it up. We can't? He's in hiding? He's been hiding for YEARS? Oh yes, I can really trust it now.
From learning how it works it's a shameless pyramid rewarding those who get in early so long as a steady stream of people decide to sign up but there is zero value or trust holding up the pyramid. Short term users who use it as a barter item and unload it quickly are not exposed to much potential pain, those who are holding onto it, their future is barely floating in very deep water and I must say I'm truly amazed the entire thing has not sunk yet.
I thought the current plan was distributed malware so that somebody else paid for the power?
Fair enough...
How does Bitcoin solve that? Should it become more than a side show, do you honestly believe government will stay out of it?
Does the submitter know what it means?
The acronym is a pretty accurate description of Bitcoin.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I cant believe they wasted all that energy digging holes and filling them again, ....in the wrong place!
My power comes from coal and natural gas and costs less than 11 cents per kWh.
Are you suggesting that is too expensive to mine with?
Yes. That is about twice the price of wholesale hydropower.
Are you suggesting that no one outside of those areas are mining Bitcoin?
There are a few small miners outside these areas, but the big ASIC miners are located in areas where cheap hydropower is available.
Anyone involved in bitcoin mining isn't one bit interested in environmental issues
They don't use hydropower because it is "environmental". They use it because it is cheap.
coal is still the cheapest form of energy.
No it isn't. Areas with plentiful hydropower have electricity prices much lower than coal.
I thought the current plan was distributed malware so that somebody else paid for the power?
You would need to run and manage a botnet of thousands of computers to generate as many hashes as a single ASIC. It just isn't worth it. Nearly all new bitcoins are mined on ASICs.
However, in electricity usage per Bitcoin, the Bitcoin system is infinitely more efficient. In fact, the credit card network is just a transaction network. It has zero efficiency at actually producing dollars.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Perhaps my bad spelling makes me a moron, perhaps it doesn't. It does give my post a more humorous version of what I had intended to say.
At least they create it out of something.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Maybe this is out of date but that does seem to be exactly what was happening at one point:
http://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/11/potentially-unwanted-miners-toolbar-peddlers-use-your-system-to-make-btc/
As for thousands, why not? Botnets are huge these days.
There are a few small miners outside these areas, but the big ASIC miners are located in areas where cheap hydropower is available.
And there is no better use for this power besides running computers 24/7?
Your replies miss the point I'm afraid...
It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Jesus, Firefox now generates electricity too?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I always loose my mind when I see idiots writing rouge instead of rogue.
It really effects me deeply.
There is no reason to ask him anything, or trust him.
Everything in the bitcoin software and network is decided by the miners by vote. Each mind block counts as a vote, and everyone can mine blocks, as many as they want. The more cpu you spend on the network, the more votes you get. The whole design is to make it relevant who set it up, or what the original network did.
.
Feel free to use your fantasy about how the bitcoin network works, if you can't be bothered to look it up. Just realize that there are more than enough people who do know how it works, and still more who trust the opinions of these people.
Let's just ask the guy who set it up.
Even if he was still around, he might have set up a broken system. Instead, you should learn about how it works and check the mathematical proofs.
We can't? He's in hiding? He's been hiding for YEARS? Oh yes, I can really trust it now.
I'm not sure why a public figurehead of something like this would be inherent trustworthy. I'd actally say some public CEO type pushing a reality distortion field would be less trustworthy than a bunch of open source software backed by provable, verifyable maths.
Short term users who use it as a barter item and unload it quickly are not exposed to much potential pain,
And that's why it's popular. For people who use it as a form of currency in transactions, the risk isn't high, so there's the trust. The thing with large crowds is that a huge number of people putting a small amount of trust in something equates to a large amount of trust. As long as people find it useful for transactions, money will keep cycling through and it will stay afloat.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you disagree with this, you're obviously okay with the government stealing everyone's money with inflation, and you're also a worthless lazy bastard who's probably in debt and on the government dole.
So what you're saying is that your argument doesn't stand up without insulting and attacking anyone who disagrees with you?
Bitcoin is also intentionally designed to have its own built-in and unmodifiable monetary policy separate from any government or regulating body.
And when the government outlaws bitcoin exchanges? Oh sure, there will be a black market, there always has been. But it will prevent it from being anything more than a minor thing.
The current monetary policies of central banks aren't perfect, but they are far better than what we'd have if the whole world was stuck with a currency that couldn't be managed.
How many bitcoin banks have decided to cut and run at this point?
The best part about bitcoin is that there's no takebacks or market controls. Meaning when you get scammed like happens so often, your money is GONE. Definitely the currency of the future, better than credit cards with all those shitty government and business protections. Obviously the wild west mentality is better than anything with protections.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
It is Iceland. Producing needed heat is not a waste. Free computation becomes a side effect.
I don't get your logic, because both EVs and computers use electricity. Are you saying that EVs get their electricity from green sources, and Bitcoins are mined with filthy old fossil-fuel power?
Also, consider monetary systems where banknotes are hauled around in armoured trucks, vs. a computer network that accomplished the same with a fraction of the resources.
In general, people should do more with computers/networks, instead of driving around to offices.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Only if they congregate at Moulain.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Oh. Never heard of the enlightenment then,
How many bitcoin banks have decided to cut and run at this point?
Bitcoin is cash. What you call a "bitcoin bank" is really just a "bitcoin wallet" in somebody else's possession, and it is about as safe as trusting somebody with a wallet full of cash.
The closest thing to a bitcoin wallet involving a bank is putting cash in a safe deposit box. If you do that in the US it isn't protected by the FDIC. If you want to be protected by banking regulations you have to deposit your money.
Bitcoin was never designed around letting others hold your money. The design was really for individuals to hold their own money.
No, this is exactly the reason why open source is having such a problem. 'You can always audit the source code'. Yeah okay buddy, because I have the time/money to spend on extra programmers just to audit the problem you created.
You do realize that you can purchase open source software commercially, right? Then you get the same level of support that you get with proprietary software, and you get the source code as well.
It also calls into question the reliability, stability, and maturity of Bitcoin as a fully digital payment & store of value system.
And this is where it gets to the hard part, the interface beween Bitcoin mathematics theory and the actual real world.
Just like in a high-end stereo system, you have to put most of your money in the transducers.
Yep. How many times has the Fed said "jeez, sorry, you know that cash that we issued, really it's not valid, you need version 2.137 of the cash, you lose.
And the original point stands... have you audited the source code? Have you compiled / built the product from the source code? If not, then have the alleged source code isn't any better than trusting the Windows source code.
And the original point stands... have you audited the source code? Have you compiled / built the product from the source code? If not, then have the alleged source code isn't any better than trusting the Windows source code.
Circular argument; I take it that you have done both?
Just because an individual states they do not have the competency to verify an action, it does not immediately make the original action invalid.
Source code verification and auditing is a problem in ALL fields, and is not a particular malignancy associated with any particular programming methodology. However, the ease at which one may perform a public audit, and verification, of any code in question is greatly enhanced when anyone can view the code. Furthermore, a closed source audit relies on trusting the entity doing the auditing, with no possible method of performing ones own personal audit unless one is prepared to enter into an agreement with the original owner of the source code in question.
At some point you have to trust something, and trust relies on repeated positive outcomes, or consistent outcomes; you can trust that something will fail in a given scenario, and something can be trustworthy even with known flaws (an aircraft's landing gear has several inherent flaws, but a pilot knows not to fly with it deployed all the time.) In this particular case the system is performing as expected, and the original source code is performing as expected. That several other pool operators deliberately altered their source code, and concealed this from their users and did not publicly publish the code, does not diminish trust in the original system, but diminishes trust in those who thought it would be a good idea to make a system variant that lied about its status and support. They are now paying for their transgression, figuratively and literally, as the correctly working part of the system mops up after their mess.
I always loose my mind when I see idiots writing rouge instead of rogue.
It really effects me deeply.
Agreed, I see red too...
BTW, it's "affects" :)
And lose. Pretty sure it was trolling.
Bitcoin leaves open the problem that people can scam you and take your money. Credit card companies and paypal and what have you mitigate that problem, but do so at the cost that people can falsely accuse you of scamming them and taking your money, pretend to pay you but don't, confiscate or freeze your money with little accountability, and do a lot of other nasty things.
Are the ways to abuse the system worse than the things the system is supposed to protect you against? I don't know. But it's a valid question - one that is likely to have different answers at different times and places. The answer may vary for different people too. For that reasons, bitcoin is a good thing. Whether the wild west mentality is better is one thing, but having the option of the wild west mentality can't really be bad.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Isn't 'snafu' an acronym:
Situation
Normal
All
Fucked
Up
Does that describe bitcoin and this 'glitch' properly?
That's why they're called "plugins".
If Dogecoin ever replaces Bitcoin (including its value per coin), I'll be freakin' rich!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Even worse, what prevents any large government with sufficient resources to deliberately destabilize the protocol by injecting bad data?
What about spending ridiculous amounts of electricity to print your own money (mining) ?
Cute but oh so clueless.
Bitcoin is hip, it's new, it's not your dads money.
If you use bitcoin you're part of the future not part of the past.
You want to be part of the future, cutting edge don't you ?
That's the fashionable crowd.
For others there is the partially correct impression that bitcoin is much more anonymous than credit/debit cards.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
I don't get your logic
Yea, clearly you're not alone there... that is what I find so amazing...
If you don't get it, I don't know what else I can say. It is plain as day to me, if it isn't to you... well, I'm at a loss as to how to explain how pointless it is to run RNG for days/weeks/months for such a purpose...
AIUI we have a situation where some miners are enforcing stricter rules than others.
If the strict miners significantly out mine the loose ones then not much will happen. The blocks that don't pass the strict rules will quickly be forked off and die and noone sensible accepts a one-block-confirmed transaction for anything important.
However if the loose miners out mine the strict miners you get a long lasting fork between the strict and loose miners. People whose clients only enforce the loose rules will see what is going on in the loose fork. People whose clients enforce the strict rules will see what is going on in the strict fork. The two forks will most likely contain most of the same transactions but there may be some cases where someone manages to engineer that the same bitcoins are transferred to different places in the two forks, newly mined coins will also go to different people in the two forks.
If the mining rate of strict and loose miners are approximately equal then you have a mess. The two forks could run in paralell for some time and then the strict fork could either hit a run of good luck or be boosted by miners switching to the strict rules and kill the loose fork. AIUI that is the present situation.
It is most likely this will end with the strict miners outnumbering the loose ones, any transactions that only happened on a loose branch will then be killed.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't get your logic, because both EVs and computers use electricity. Are you saying that EVs get their electricity from green sources, and Bitcoins are mined with filthy old fossil-fuel power?
Also, consider monetary systems where banknotes are hauled around in armoured trucks, vs. a computer network that accomplished the same with a fraction of the resources.
In general, people should do more with computers/networks, instead of driving around to offices.
FlyHelicopters isn't too bright. He's wrong a lot of the time, and every time somebody explains why he's wrong, as you did in your third and fourth sentences, he responds with shock that no one can understand why he's right. It's a rather childish defense mechanism, but he can't seem to help himself.
A value that fluctuates every single second (e.g. an exchange rate between Euro and USD for instance)
A value that decreases over time (inflation, etc.)
Do you understand sharing billions among the governments so that every country owes every other country money and vice versa? Because I sure as hell don't.
Do you understand Quantitative Easing? I don't.
Do you understand quite a lot about any currency whatsoever beyond you earn a number, you have that number in your bank, and at some point you "cash out" that number for physical goods that may, or may not, be the same price as last time you did that?
How much is billions of Euros of Greek asset worth at the moment? How about Zimbabwean dollars?
Bitcoin is no different to anything else. Your USD or GBP or Euro means NOTHING except by common agreement between all parties as to what it means.
So don't give me that shit.
Per transaction, or total?
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
---
Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Fair point. There are some initial costs to upgrading fintech and creating a fairer form of currency that doesn't rob people with unexpected inflation, bail outs, and bail ins. Even if you prefer inflationary fiat currencies instead of dis-inflationary ones with a planned social contract owned openly by the users you should be grateful that this competition will at least temporarily keep governments and banks slightly more honest.
Yes, that is out of date. It really isn't worth the botnet operators time to mine with CPU's and GPU's these days. They are better off holding the computer hostage with malware like crypto locker which encrypts their hard drive and demands ransom with Greendot cards and bitcoin.
"those people who thought they'd mined a new coin, but really didn't, feel gypped." F2Pool and Antpool, among others, were using a strategy to earn more by mining from the block headers, thus eliminating the time it would take to download a new block. A side effect of this is that they would mine empty blocks. This strategy increased the income of those pools, while reducing the security of the bitcoin system and reducing the amount of transactional load the system could handle as well. It was calculated that the money lost by these major pools by not implementing their software correctly while publicly claiming support for BIP 66 is less than the money earned by their mining from block headers. So I hope they feel more than gypped, because they are douchebags. In this case, considering the security of the protocol, it's not that their software was out of date in it's security implementation, but in the method it used to begin its proof of work, which with the strict implementation of the network rules enforced, did not work for them.
There is plenty of evidence that most bitcoin mines are moving to use hydroelectric power and geothermal. They aren't doing so out of a sense of environmental altruism , but simply because "greener" power is less expensive. http://gizmodo.com/why-bitcoin... http://www.datacenterknowledge... https://www.cryptocoinsnews.co... http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20... http://www.coindesk.com/my-lif...
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
Does "turn in your Silver Certificates and take these Federal Reserve Notes" or "we don't use copper, nickel or silver in our coins any more" count???
With a name like linuxrocks123, I would have thought you would have a positive opinion on liberty, and freedom of choice, but then come the torrent of fear mongering and statist comments. Don't be so fearful that you become weak. I'm saying this and I don't like atlas shrugged or ron/rand paul. I just want to be free. I want power decentralized and of course money is power. And if as you elude. you're not okay with the government stealing money through inflation, and you're not lazy, in debt or on welfare it was implied, then why be such a tool for the government, banksters and corporations? Are you against decentralization of power but for the open source movement? It would seem paradoxical.
I'm not opposed to the idea of Bitcoin, or competing currencies.
I'm just opposed to the idea that it consumes tons of power to run RNG and that it will be required to run for more than 100 years.
The irony is that I get the need the reduce our consumption of Earth's resources. If we had magic fusion reactors and unlimited power, then I wouldn't care.
But we don't. :)
I always loose my mind when I see idiots writing rouge instead of rogue. It really effects me deeply.
Agreed, I see red too...
BTW, it's "affects" :)
Woosh :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
There's also those who support decentralization of power and the sovereignty if the people.
socially constructed concepts, like money, ARE, just like us, an emergent property of the universe.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
With most other currencies, there is always the chance that once a payment is done, it can be taken away. For example, you sell something on $AUCTION_SITE, get paid via credit card, then find the CC company slurped the money back out, as the credit card owner has disputed the charge... now it is your job to sue the individual and get your cash back, although you were technically "paid".
Or, you get a check, cash it, and get a NSF charge because of it bouncing.
Even cash has this problem. You take a $20, only to find it is a $1 note, except someone cut and pasted a part from a higher denomination bill on that, or the bill could be an entire counterfeit.
The good and bad about BitCoin is that once the transaction is made and runs through the system, it is permanent. No backtracking. That currency has transferred hands irrevocably, and outside of breaking cryptographic protocols, there is no reversing it, so a wallet with coins can have them pulled out without the wallet's private key.
If one knows that, and always takes that into account, it makes one extremely leery of exchanges and "BitCoin bank accounts", because eventually, someone is going to make off with the goodies, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Caveat emptor.
This doesn't mean BitCoin is perfect either. If you want to be sure you are not going to on the losing end of a double-spending, you have to run the entire blockchain before accepting a transaction, and this takes a lot of time and a good net connection. Any shortcuts only can cause grief in the long run. BitCoin was designed so you didn't have to trust anyone, so might as well take advantage of it.
Sorry for responding a second time as I didn't realize you were the same person. The bottom line is that you may have been misled into thinking that Proof of Work is the only security mechanism for bitcoin and it will scale indefinitely as an arms race wasting power. This is a fair concern to have but also one that is exaggerated because PoW is only one security mechanism and in the future 99% of transactions will be done either off the chain or through inter-payment channels where there won't be direct payment to fund the "waste of resources" therefore no incentive to fuel a never ending arms race of "wasting electricity". To give you an idea of where we are right now -- there are between 100k -150k Tx per day but this represents only a small fraction of the volume as most volume right now exists "off the chain" and therefore not fueling the arms race of ASICs. In the near future Inter-payment channels will make settlement of on the chain a very small fraction of 1 % of the total volume. Bitcoin is actually much less environmentally dangerous than traditional fiat and payment rails.
Have any links about anyone who has successfully done this in any sort of volume? Nice theory until it's shown to actually work.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Ending large-scale war and dictatorships will be the most amazing thing to happen for humanity in the past six thousand years.
Yeah, folding proteins is also important.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Everything about bit coin is scammy from the get go. From the psychopath term mining bit coin, you are not mining, you are simply insanely burning energy for nothing wasting computing cycles on a complete illusion. Secret transaction seem to be the goal, especially for the originators who computer cycled huge numbers of bit coins for little effort, the top of the pyramid scheme. Who backs bit coin, no one, don't compare it to a countries currency, a whole country and it government backs that and they still fail, so what chance does an imaginary currency whose only benefit is the facilitation of crime and tax evasion have, considering that countries can effectively zero it's value by legally making it illegal at any time and you know it is just a matter of time.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 and later never had any problems because it could detect which blocks were invalid.
In other words, it is a complete non-issue for people who update their software more often than once a month. Think about it this way, 95% of miners accomplished this.
Nickels are still made of nickel. They're the only bullion coin left, though.
I caught the "loose" one to!
Well, I think current US monetary policy has done pretty well over the years. We haven't had another great depression since the Great Depression, and I think that's a pretty big success. I also think moderate inflation of about 2% per year or so is generally okay and normal for a healthy economy.
I don't consider myself a tool of the government, "banksters", or corporations, although I do think governments, banks, and other corporations have important roles to play in the modern economy. And I wouldn't call myself a statist, although I think personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, sexual freedom, 4th/5th Amendment rights, and freedom to make choices about your own body, such as whether to get a tattoo or take drugs, are a lot more important than the freedom to start a coal-mining corporation without the government telling you you have to make sure your workers don't get black lung disease. So I guess I'd say I'm okay with the government intervening in our economic lives a lot more than I'm okay with the government intervening in our personal lives.
And if you look through my previous comments, you'll see I'm pretty hostile to Libertarianism. I think it's an excellent example of a philosophy that's simple, logical, easy to understand, and obviously wrong. But it's impossible to talk people out of it because the arguments for it are basically all circular. The absurdity of the philosophy is such that I could almost see someone make the "free market for hitmen" argument in my post and be entirely serious about it. So, instead of beating my head against the wall by trying to argue with Libertarians and change their minds, I just parody them. Hopefully some people will find the parodies funny at least, and maybe it will prompt someone someday to find the truth on his own.
It's sort of like religion. You're never going to talk someone out of believing in God. So, if you want to do something productive in the religious debate field, you just joke around with parodies like the FSM and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. It's funny, and maybe it will accelerate someone's maturation by letting him see the absurdity on his own.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Bitcoins are drachmas...
Last I heard the largest "bitcoin bank" was a Magic the Gathering online trading card exchange site (MTGOX) - and it blew up in a truly spectacular fashion.
Currency is utterly worthless without trust due to it's very nature.
Apathy, mostly. Why would a government do that?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Let's look at a real-world application: I want to pay a certain amount of money to somebody else. With Bitcoin, there has to be expensive computation to transfer them. With a credit card charge, or bank transfer, there may be very little computation. The idea of Bitcoin mining is not fundamentally to produce Bitcoin, but to encourage people to verify transactions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sure, but having the bitcoin sitting in the bitcoin wallet doing nothing makes it kinda worthless, yah? The whole idea is to use it for commerce, at which point you are vulnerable to all sorts of scams and theft that you would normally be protected from.
The design is similar to cash. When you give $20 to the fast food joint down the road and decide you didn't like the food, your only recourse it to ask them for the money back. You can't phone up your credit card company and ask them to cancel the charges.
Sure, that is a model with pros and cons, but nothing prevents people from doing legitimate commerce in bitcoin.
Then there's liquidity. Most transactions are off-block-chain (as in one block-chain transaction per every ~400 or so off-block-chain transactions). They have to be, because putting a transaction on the block-chain takes too long.
That is definitely a limitation of bitcoin. It cannot be used safely and quickly at the same time. If you're not in a hurry there is no need to compromise safety though. I personally wouldn't use it for anything where a transaction needed to be done in seconds.
And then of course there's the volatility of the buying power of bitcoin itself. It's one of the most unstable and volatile currencies in existence.
That is just the nature of low-volume financial instruments of almost any kind. Look at penny stocks and such - they're extremely volatile. If it were used in real commerce it would stabilize pretty quickly, since if the price went up significantly somebody would just sell 30 tons of steel for bitcoins and make a huge profit, and when the price drops significantly they'd buy back the 30 tons of steel. What keeps currency stable is the HUGE market full of stuff whose vendors don't adjust prices 3 times per minute.
The reality is that the value of the dollar goes up and down by pennies all day long and yet the price of a carton of eggs at Walmart stays the same all day long. That means that at different times of day the profit of selling those eggs actually changes. If everybody did with dollars what they do with bitcoins and dynamically priced based on the currency value then you'd see much larger swings in the value of the dollar, because it wouldn't have the weight of the entire economy pinning its value. Governments would also not be able to play the same games they do with inflation. The whole "Grexit" thing is about Greece not wanting to cut pensions and such, but one possible solution they talk about is switching to Drachmas, which basically amounts to just cutting pensions by paying the same number of currency units but devaluing the currency in the process.
And the original point stands... have you audited the source code? Have you compiled / built the product from the source code? If not, then have the alleged source code isn't any better than trusting the Windows source code.
I have done both. So, I guess you'd say I'm fine then?
Most people who use FOSS audit it in the same way that any major corporation does due diligence for stuff they buy. They make sure that people they trust are looking into it.
Sure, you can sneak stuff into reputably-distributed FOSS just like you can sneak stuff into Windows CDs. The fact is that there probably still are a lot more people checking the integrity of something like RHEL than Windows, simply by virtue of it being FOSS.