Well, I'm sure I'd heard of it at some point, but I'd never been so interested by anything that I'd heard as to note what the site was even about.
I guess I've always had places to put my files online if I needed, so I never thought they were even vaguely interesting.. The only thing that I could have told you about megaupload before his arrest, was what I could glean from the name.. AKA, "sounds like the either do, or allow you to do a lot of uploading"..... boring..
Even better.. Hire a reputable SEO company for yourself, and hire a dirtbag SEO company that does their best to cheat the system (link sites linking to more link sites etc) to promote the Ex's BS sites.... If you do it right, you should be able to promote your own a bit, and get google to ban the other sites for search engine manipulation.. Google has some very strict rules, and you just have to make sure you break them when promoting the undesirable site.. Wasn't it Sony that Google banned temporarily for improper search engine optimizations? I don't think Google's bans are normally temporary.. if they are though, I'm pretty sure they're not short term.. Sony had to kiss some butt to get into Google after only a few days..
I sometimes just work in the live environment while people are in and using it, depending on what I'm doing.. I'm very careful when I'm doing this of course, but sometimes the hotfix requires having the user's screwed up data to work with.
The rest of the time, I publish when I think I have something useful for the users.. Often a couple of times a day, but we're one of those very small nimble web 2.0 places, and the decision to publish is all mine.
Only if you like your currency easy to manipulate. Bitcoin was designed to make it nearly impossible to do this sort (or any sort) of manipulation. In order to do what you're proposing, you'd literally need to get thousands or tens of thousands of people to all agree to game the system and modify their software to allow that to happen. Then they'd either need to process invalid transactions (unsigned transactions for those accounts) essentially creating a corrupt transaction database with a broken trust chain, or roll back the entire block chain and invalidate all the transactions that have happened since then. The transactions since the theft include all balance transfers/payments from one individual to another and 50 bitcoins awarded every 10 minutes (or so) since the time of the theft.. 50 * 6 * 24 * (20 days) or 144,000 bitcoins stolen from valid, winners of their bitcoin bounty for processing transactions.... so that you can return 24,500 bitcoins to an exchange to perform a refund.. Now, I don't know if it's actually been 20 days, and I'm not going to look it up, but I think I'm being generously conservative, especially considering the amount of time it would take organize such a feat magnifies the problem..
Bitcoin it the largest distributed computing project in the world. That distributed computing project has the single minded goal of locking down transactions safely with cryptography. It will be *very* difficult to force someone else's will upon the distributed network..
No one can make any more bitcoins than the pre-defined scheduled amount, and no one can guarantee that they're able to make them for themselves.. It takes a lot of (computer) work, and a bit of luck.. You basically buy lottery tickets to winning newly created money by agreeing to do work to process transactions.. That's not exactly right, but it'll get you a lot closer to understanding the system than where you're clearly at..
Yep.. I'm a big-ol M$ hater, and I can say that MSSE is a pretty decent product.. FIrst thing I put on everyone else's computer after I fail to convince them to run Linux..
That's the only sure bet, but I've found that installing your favorite linux distro is a close second.
If a user's needs are simple enough, they might not even really notice the difference.. They just know to click on the E-bay icon, or the email icon.. The virus / trojans are generally ineffective on Linux.
There's not much to be done about the info leak though, it's true:(..
We fixed a drive by trading the pcb with another *IDENTICAL* drive (same rev of board etc)..
The funny part was that when we went to recover the files they desperately needed back from that drive, all we found were shortcuts to a network drive, where the files had been safe and sound the entire time.. The user just had no idea that they hadn't lost their files..
It's actually because it's easier to mine them than to counterfeit them.. If you have the resources to counterfeit them, you'd be better off just mining them.. And if you counterfeited them, it's unclear that anyone would honor them..
Bitcoin has an open ledger that is agreed upon by the miners.. If they see that you've got more than you should, they'll just overtake your block chain as long as more than 1/2 of them agree. Someone posted an example of them being counterfeited, but if you notice, it wasn't really successful because the problem was fixed, and soon the longest block chain didn't reflect that transaction.
You could try to brute force keys that already have a large balance, but then you're back to stealing, and it'd take today's largest supercomputers thousands of years to find just one... better hope the one you find has a balance that made it worth it.
As is always the case with cryptography: Bitcoin doesn't survive by making things impossible. It survives by making them impractical. My commodore 64 could brute force access to the pentagon....given a millennium or two to do it (actually a bit more I'm sure).
Oh... yeah.. you're probably picturing gold mining like you see it in the movies..
There is no gold just laying around on the ground.. People from 1904 picked that stuff up already..
Now days, people dig up a small city's worth of dirt with large equipment, and process it with extremely harsh chemicals and acids to dissolve and collect microscopic bits of gold out of the dirt. It's really quite destructive to any area they decide to mine gold in.. It ends up looking like a baron landscape like to moon, which, incidentally is where you might be able to just walk along and pick up some gold off the ground... at least the gold speculators haven't picked over most of the moon yet.
You need to use the correct word if that's what you meant.. You're confusing the word "stable" with the word "valuable"..
Stability is what Bitcoin needs to make it useful for that exchange. It doesn't matter what it's price is, as long as it's relatively stable, but if you exchange USD or gold for bitcoin to buy something that is roughly $10 USD, but by the time you go to purchase it, the bitcoin price has changed enough that you can't afford it and need to try again, then it's not useful for exchange.. Satoshi Nakamoto has made it clear a number of times, that he believes that the stability is far more important.. Instability always has the potential to help you out as much as it hurts you, but you need to know what to expect when you're using something as a currency, which is was Bitcoin was always intended to be. No one ever thought you could use Bitcoin to coat electrical contacts with it to prevent corrosion, but that works great with gold...so if you're talking stability (and you're speaking English) then when you try to say that gold is stable, you'd be mostly correct in thousands of years of history (room for different opinions there), but it certainly wouldn't be correct when looking at the last couple of years.. For Bitcoin's lifetime, bitcoin has been just about as stable as gold (not quite, but if you could get rid of July 2011, you'd be pretty close).
As far as what they cost to produce as compared to their actual value: Bitcoin is designed to allow an equilibrium to be met that always keeps those right about the same, and that will always be the case. People (not even Bitcoin miners) don't leave money on the table for no reason, and they don't throw it away either.. It will always cost about 1 bitcoin to produce 1 bitcoin. Gold is exactly the same way.. Right now, the ratio is off a bit (in the miner's favor), but that will balance out soon enough when either the gold bubble pops, or more people enter the gold mining market. It just takes a little longer in the non-virtual world.
Huh.. the funny thing is, that GOLD HAS NOT BEEN STABLE YOU IDIOT.
What was the value of gold 1 year ago.... 2 years ago.. 3? And what will it be next year? It's so inflated right now, that it's Bitcoin bubble is likely to burst soon.. Especially if the economy recovers and people start seeing the value of the dollar again (fingers crossed).
That's not backing it. That just says you can use it to pay debts legally in the US.
They don't tell you what the value of the currency will be. That's what people mean by backing the currency. Example: You can use your $1 bill to redeem 1 ounce of gold (I wish). That would be backing the currency.
The link you reference, simply says that you can use this to legally move numbers around: my $1 (of unknown value) pays off my $1 debt,.
The moving the numbers around part is the part that Bitcoin does very well, and is almost never brought into the debate.
Huh.. FinCen just processed the registration for BitInstant. Sounds like a nod from the US Treasury department to me.
If no other currencies are allowed in the US, MS is going to be getting into a lot of trouble with all those XBox points or XBox live points that they let you buy stuff with... Not to mention all those frequent flier miles scams, and credit card points scams others have going.. You know where you can buy a stupid pocket knife for your points..
Very true.. It's not really theoretical either. This scenario has played out a number of times already.. I own some of the other failed or soon to fail currencies. Maybe someday they'll get enough use to be worth something, but it's been quite a while now, and it still hasn't happened.
A lot of people seem to think that there is room for more than one Bitcoin like currency, and they may be right, but there clearly isn't room yet.
I've used the site.. I like it.. I hope you get more content soon, so you'll have to expand with a lot of search and categorization.. maybe Amazon like suggestions too.. That's down the road a bit.. In the short term, you should probably just pretty it up a little too:).. Get some artistic person in there to help you out a bit..
I was impressed by how well it worked too. My payment was received in about two seconds.. maybe less.
What exactly is being solved by the lights being on at Wells Fargo?
The difficulty ensures, in a round about way, that money can't be spent twice.
If you can tell me where the value comes from for the US Dollar I'd be impressed.
The value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to conduct transactions openly and inexpensively on the internet.
Think of the value as coming from missing banking fees. If you pay fees to a bank for something, you obviously saw some value in whatever they were providing. How is this any different?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm sure I'd heard of it at some point, but I'd never been so interested by anything that I'd heard as to note what the site was even about.
I guess I've always had places to put my files online if I needed, so I never thought they were even vaguely interesting.. The only thing
that I could have told you about megaupload before his arrest, was what I could glean from the name.. AKA, "sounds like the either do, or allow you to do a lot of uploading"..... boring..
Reddit announced the other day that they're taking them too..
Ya know, I had never heard of Kim Dotcom until he was arrested. I had heard of Reddit though..
Even better.. Hire a reputable SEO company for yourself, and hire a dirtbag SEO company that does their best to cheat the system (link sites linking to more link sites etc) to promote the Ex's BS sites.... If you do it right, you should be able to promote your own a bit, and get google to ban the other sites for search engine manipulation.. Google has some very strict rules, and you just have to make sure you break them when promoting the undesirable site.. Wasn't it Sony that Google banned temporarily for improper search engine optimizations? I don't think Google's bans are normally temporary.. if they are though, I'm pretty sure they're not short term.. Sony had to kiss some butt to get into Google after only a few days..
I sometimes just work in the live environment while people are in and using it, depending on what I'm doing.. I'm very careful when I'm doing this of course, but sometimes the hotfix requires having the user's screwed up data to work with.
The rest of the time, I publish when I think I have something useful for the users.. Often a couple of times a day, but we're one of those very small nimble web 2.0 places, and the decision to publish is all mine.
Only if you like your currency easy to manipulate. Bitcoin was designed to make it nearly impossible to do this sort (or any sort) of manipulation. In order to do what you're proposing, you'd literally need to get thousands or tens of thousands of people to all agree to game the system and modify their software to allow that to happen. Then they'd either need to process invalid transactions (unsigned transactions for those accounts) essentially creating a corrupt transaction database with a broken trust chain, or roll back the entire block chain and invalidate all the transactions that have happened since then. The transactions since the theft include all balance transfers/payments from one individual to another and 50 bitcoins awarded every 10 minutes (or so) since the time of the theft.. 50 * 6 * 24 * (20 days) or 144,000 bitcoins stolen from valid, winners of their bitcoin bounty for processing transactions.... so that you can return 24,500 bitcoins to an exchange to perform a refund.. Now, I don't know if it's actually been 20 days, and I'm not going to look it up, but I think I'm being generously conservative, especially considering the amount of time it would take organize such a feat magnifies the problem..
Bitcoin it the largest distributed computing project in the world. That distributed computing project has the single minded goal of locking down transactions safely with cryptography. It will be *very* difficult to force someone else's will upon the distributed network..
No one can make any more bitcoins than the pre-defined scheduled amount, and no one can guarantee that they're able to make them for themselves.. It takes a lot of (computer) work, and a bit of luck.. You basically buy lottery tickets to winning newly created money by agreeing to do work to process transactions.. That's not exactly right, but it'll get you a lot closer to understanding the system than where you're clearly at..
Yep.. I'm a big-ol M$ hater, and I can say that MSSE is a pretty decent product.. FIrst thing I put on everyone else's computer after I fail to convince them to run Linux..
That's the only sure bet, but I've found that installing your favorite linux distro is a close second.
If a user's needs are simple enough, they might not even really notice the difference.. They just know to click on the E-bay icon, or the email icon.. The virus / trojans are generally ineffective on Linux.
There's not much to be done about the info leak though, it's true :(..
I should note though, that being able to fix a drive this way is fairly rare.. Most of the time you're hosed..
We fixed a drive by trading the pcb with another *IDENTICAL* drive (same rev of board etc)..
The funny part was that when we went to recover the files they desperately needed back from that drive, all we found were shortcuts to a network drive, where the files had been safe and sound the entire time.. The user just had no idea that they hadn't lost their files..
It's actually because it's easier to mine them than to counterfeit them.. If you have the resources to counterfeit them, you'd be better off just mining them.. And if you counterfeited them, it's unclear that anyone would honor them..
Bitcoin has an open ledger that is agreed upon by the miners.. If they see that you've got more than you should, they'll just overtake your block chain as long as more than 1/2 of them agree. Someone posted an example of them being counterfeited, but if you notice, it wasn't really successful because the problem was fixed, and soon the longest block chain didn't reflect that transaction.
You could try to brute force keys that already have a large balance, but then you're back to stealing, and it'd take today's largest supercomputers thousands of years to find just one... better hope the one you find has a balance that made it worth it.
As is always the case with cryptography: Bitcoin doesn't survive by making things impossible. It survives by making them impractical. My commodore 64 could brute force access to the pentagon....given a millennium or two to do it (actually a bit more I'm sure).
Oh... yeah.. you're probably picturing gold mining like you see it in the movies..
There is no gold just laying around on the ground.. People from 1904 picked that stuff up already..
Now days, people dig up a small city's worth of dirt with large equipment, and process it with extremely harsh chemicals and acids to dissolve and collect microscopic bits of gold out of the dirt. It's really quite destructive to any area they decide to mine gold in.. It ends up looking like a baron landscape like to moon, which, incidentally is where you might be able to just walk along and pick up some gold off the ground... at least the gold speculators haven't picked over most of the moon yet.
You need to use the correct word if that's what you meant.. You're confusing the word "stable" with the word "valuable"..
Stability is what Bitcoin needs to make it useful for that exchange. It doesn't matter what it's price is, as long as it's relatively stable, but if you exchange USD or gold for bitcoin to buy something that is roughly $10 USD, but by the time you go to purchase it, the bitcoin price has changed enough that you can't afford it and need to try again, then it's not useful for exchange.. Satoshi Nakamoto has made it clear a number of times, that he believes that the stability is far more important.. Instability always has the potential to help you out as much as it hurts you, but you need to know what to expect when you're using something as a currency, which is was Bitcoin was always intended to be. No one ever thought you could use Bitcoin to coat electrical contacts with it to prevent corrosion, but that works great with gold. ..so if you're talking stability (and you're speaking English) then when you try to say that gold is stable, you'd be mostly correct in thousands of years of history (room for different opinions there), but it certainly wouldn't be correct when looking at the last couple of years.. For Bitcoin's lifetime, bitcoin has been just about as stable as gold (not quite, but if you could get rid of July 2011, you'd be pretty close).
As far as what they cost to produce as compared to their actual value: Bitcoin is designed to allow an equilibrium to be met that always keeps those right about the same, and that will always be the case. People (not even Bitcoin miners) don't leave money on the table for no reason, and they don't throw it away either.. It will always cost about 1 bitcoin to produce 1 bitcoin. Gold is exactly the same way.. Right now, the ratio is off a bit (in the miner's favor), but that will balance out soon enough when either the gold bubble pops, or more people enter the gold mining market. It just takes a little longer in the non-virtual world.
Don't forget that you can buy a bitcoin/gold hybrid at https://www.casascius.com/.
You can get a coin that is 1 troy ounce of gold, with a 1000 BTC electronic redeemable value.
Of course, it's kinda expensive at 1415, but it sure is pretty... and liquid (financially).
Huh.. the funny thing is, that GOLD HAS NOT BEEN STABLE YOU IDIOT.
What was the value of gold 1 year ago.... 2 years ago.. 3? And what will it be next year? It's so inflated right now, that it's Bitcoin bubble is likely to burst soon.. Especially if the economy recovers and people start seeing the value of the dollar again (fingers crossed).
I'm sure if they took your dollars, they'd be bringing in the military right away :)
That's not backing it. That just says you can use it to pay debts legally in the US.
They don't tell you what the value of the currency will be. That's what people mean by backing the currency. Example: You can use your $1 bill to redeem 1 ounce of gold (I wish). That would be backing the currency.
The link you reference, simply says that you can use this to legally move numbers around: my $1 (of unknown value) pays off my $1 debt,.
The moving the numbers around part is the part that Bitcoin does very well, and is almost never brought into the debate.
I've had plenty of luck with it so far.. Thanx.
Huh.. FinCen just processed the registration for BitInstant. Sounds like a nod from the US Treasury department to me.
If no other currencies are allowed in the US, MS is going to be getting into a lot of trouble with all those XBox points or XBox live points that they let you buy stuff with... Not to mention all those frequent flier miles scams, and credit card points scams others have going.. You know where you can buy a stupid pocket knife for your points..
Very true.. It's not really theoretical either. This scenario has played out a number of times already.. I own some of the other failed or soon to fail currencies. Maybe someday they'll get enough use to be worth something, but it's been quite a while now, and it still hasn't happened.
A lot of people seem to think that there is room for more than one Bitcoin like currency, and they may be right, but there clearly isn't room yet.
I've used the site.. I like it.. I hope you get more content soon, so you'll have to expand with a lot of search and categorization.. maybe Amazon like suggestions too.. That's down the road a bit.. In the short term, you should probably just pretty it up a little too :).. Get some artistic person in there to help you out a bit..
I was impressed by how well it worked too. My payment was received in about two seconds.. maybe less.
What exactly is being solved by the lights being on at Wells Fargo?
The difficulty ensures, in a round about way, that money can't be spent twice.
If you can tell me where the value comes from for the US Dollar I'd be impressed.
The value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to conduct transactions openly and inexpensively on the internet.
Think of the value as coming from missing banking fees. If you pay fees to a bank for something, you obviously saw some value in whatever they were providing. How is this any different?
Forbes has actually done a number of articles on Bitcoin covering this and many other aspects of it.
Very true.. They talk a lot about having a US warehouse now, but I don't think it's really sped things up very much.
Sometimes I've forgotten I'd ordered something by the time I get it.. It makes for a nice surprise though (I wish I were kidding).
I repeat:
Finally, set up an rsync script or other mirror software to get those files off site
in case they actually try to steal your server.
If you have triggers set up right, you'll have the video of the person walking right
up to your server to steal it.