This solves a different problem than the limited total supply of bitcoin. One bitcoin is still one bitcoin, and there are never more than about 21 million of those, no matter how small fractions you trade in. If you need smaller and smaller fractions to represent a price, the value of the bitcoin themselves increases.
There is already massive deflationary pressure on bitcoin simply by its design of limited supply. If you don't realise that, you don't understand deflation (hint: it means that prices of goods go down, and as such that the value of the currency used to pay for those goods goes up, albeit not necessarily reflected in the exchange rate of that currency towards other currencies). Which in case of bitcoin happens because demand for bitcoin outstrips supply (especially if it's really going to be used more and more).
it mainly means that the bitcoin you hold in your account may suddenly jump in value by a factor 10 if the world decides to move the decimal point one more position. Now how's that for a return on investment?!
If bitcoin deflates, tomorrow it may be worth $81.
If bitcoin deflates faster than inflation in your currency, it's a money maker for you. If it deflates faster than the stock market rises (over the long run stock markets always go up - the main question is: how much?) it makes a great investment even.
And before you know it the currency is all being hoarded, there is no liquidity to use it for actual payments, and you've got yourself a de-facto pyramid scheme.
Whether it will destroy the economy depends just on how high the value may go, and how fast and how much it may fall.
It only adds to the strong delationary pressure on this currency by more and more people starting to use it (and less and less new coins coming into existence as mining slows down, which is intentional). So demand increases much faster than supply (it seems bitcoin is actually gaining traction here and there), pushing up the value of bitcoin.
This obviously means it's getting more and more interesting to buy and hold them (use as investment rather than currency), making this effect stronger. Such large chunks of bitcoin potentially disappearing (this 600k is about 5% of all current bitcoin in existence!) is adding to that significantly.
It'd be good if someone can create a digital currency that's as secure and anonymous as bitcoin, but where it is possible to create more currency the way banks do in the traditional currencies.
Just out of curiousity: how do you keep those back-ups in sync, especially when you have some bitcoin, you backup them, spend some, and for whatever reason have to start using the backup copy which includes the already spent bitcoins.
Police just confiscates the password to the wallet (a copy of that wallet may come in handy), and has everyone else forget it. Those passwords are generally short enough to write down on a single post-it note, that can then conveniently be attached to the relevant documents.
Come time to release the seized/frozen bitcoin, they simply hand the post-it note with password to the owner.
Simple, isn't it? Even easier than seizing money that's in the banks, where you need to do stuff like warrants and getting the bank involved to cooperate with you.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
That still doesn't make it any less than the 5% of current total coins (or fractions of coins) around.
If you divide each by a million, it means he has 600,000,000,000 millionth of bitcoin. THat is still 5% of the "millionth bitcoin" around
And, as has been shown many times before so not going to repeat it, the mere fact that there is a limited number of bitcoin is an issue, making the value of a single bitcoin (or whatever small fraction - that's irrelevant) increase in value all the time. Maybe you use a whole bitcoin to buy a chair online now, if more and more people use it you'll say "oh, then you start using fractions!", then that chair is going to cost say 0.1 bitcoin later. Or even less. How many times you can divide the coin, doesn't matter, the problem remains the same. Having so large fractions of bitcoin potentially removed from circulation is the problem.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln). And bitcoin can not be recreated or added to, like a regular currency.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
Just looked him up on Wikipedia, and no notice of him actually committing a felony. He was charged, but never convicted, and not even mention of it being related to a TOS. And the charge was not for a felony, instead "... with intention to commit felony".
So again: what felony for violating TOS are you talking about?
For a personal web site, I'd love to play with it. Doesn't matter too much if it goes wrong, if it's slow (due to limited uplink speed), or goes down because someone tripped over the cable. I guess there are plenty of uses for such a server; and for many low-bandwidth uses your home connection will be more than good enough.
But for business, not so much. I used to do this (when I had an office with 20 Mb up/down line); now I went with a cloud server simply for reliability. I want my server to be available, well connected, and just work - so I can take care of the content of my site, so that I know that my e-mails arrive, etc.
I think the whole premise of comparing a gourmet chef with a burger flipper at McDonald's quite disturbing. The only thing that relates them is that both work with food. So do farmers, who are mostly much more skilled than a burger flipper.
An illegal alien who is a gourmet chef will be able to demand more than the minimum wage. If they would want to go to the US in the first place, as for a gourmet chef there'll definitely be well paying jobs where-ever they are from.
The last sentence of TFS is of course even more stupid than your reaction to it, clearly indicating both the submitter and you have no idea what you're talking about.
So, assuming that a certain portion of the population will always be unskilled, and assuming the portion of unskilled jobs is shrinking, the unemployable underclass will continue to grow.
And yet, somehow, that doesn't seem to be happening. Sure unemployment figures are high all over the world at the moment, but a few years ago these figures were very different. Current unemployment is mostly caused by economics rather than technology.
I think that in more advanced economies, where more and more simple jobs are being replaced by machines (it's indeed mostly the unskilled positions that are replaced by technology), education keeps improving as well, meaning there are less and less unskilled workers in the population.
Nowadays pretty much everybody goes through primary and secondary school, and most will continue in some vocational training. Even people who stop studying after secondary school are hardly unskilled, at least not comparable with some 100 years or so ago when many people only did primary, or 200 years ago when schooling was for the elite only. And even in that time many people did learn a job, though it was mostly learned in the workplace, the apprentice/master system.
The amount of money you paid to those ISPs (which were for sure part of those big telecoms you love to hate so much) was definitely a lot more than what you pay now, for a lot less bandwidth. If you were in a building they happened to have a line running to. You couldn't get those connections at home.
If you want to run servers, you're likely to use a lot more bandwidth than an average user. Makes sense you have to pay for that. Ask your ISP for a business account which has fixed IP and is allowed to run servers, you'll pay more, but still it'll be a lot less than you paid back in the day.
All in all, believe it or not, we're much better off now than back then.
At home i'd have to pay the electricity for a server that's up all the time, and maybe buy a separate computer for it.
Also it allows me to acces my mail and files from just about anywhere, at high speed, without worries. My uplink from home is simply too slow - also an issue for web visitors, this way their pages load much faster.
It doesn't "violate net neutrality"; for net neutrality there is no need for just anyone to be allowed to run a server at just any connection. If you want to run your own server, get an appropriate connection for that.
And as such there is absolutely no grounds for a class action suit.
Most of our electronics are reasonably new. Our old washing machine used to be a real issue, we have a new one now. Fridge maybe a decade old, no more. Really I've been searching a few times really hard when the problem occurred: power would go down all of a sudden, and just wouldn't go on again. Once I had to switch off all power groups, switch them on one by one, finally find out there are two that each would trip the breaker. That's strange, you'd expect one. Anyway in the end I never found the culprit. Narrow it down to a single group: unplug everything, connect power, plug it all in one by one to see which device causes problems: and then nothing happens?!
Most recent was a few trips due to the rice cooker not being dry enough after a thorough washing. Took two days, now it's fine again:-) But had to walk down to reset the power a few times. That makes sense.
I'm running my own server for mail, my web site, and various other little bits.
Not running from home: bandwidth is a primary issue, especially my uplink is too slow. My host has at least some 100 Mbit for me, maybe more - shared of course with many other sites but it's there for those bursts, so the few people daily that visit my site have a quick response.
Other concerns are dynamic IP (will need dynDNS, not sure how well that works), uptime, power use, hardware management... I pay some USD 350 a year for my virtual server. All in. Fixed IP, fast hardware, fast bandwidth, reliable connection - more reliable than from home with our over-sensitive RCD. More than enough for a small setup, a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day. Not going to run that from home: more work, more cost, more trouble.
I too really wonder who that target may have been. It must be a pretty high profile or valuable site, for an attacker to throw that big an attack against them.
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This solves a different problem than the limited total supply of bitcoin. One bitcoin is still one bitcoin, and there are never more than about 21 million of those, no matter how small fractions you trade in. If you need smaller and smaller fractions to represent a price, the value of the bitcoin themselves increases.
There is already massive deflationary pressure on bitcoin simply by its design of limited supply. If you don't realise that, you don't understand deflation (hint: it means that prices of goods go down, and as such that the value of the currency used to pay for those goods goes up, albeit not necessarily reflected in the exchange rate of that currency towards other currencies). Which in case of bitcoin happens because demand for bitcoin outstrips supply (especially if it's really going to be used more and more).
it mainly means that the bitcoin you hold in your account may suddenly jump in value by a factor 10 if the world decides to move the decimal point one more position. Now how's that for a return on investment?!
Your bitcoin today may be worth $80.
If bitcoin deflates, tomorrow it may be worth $81.
If bitcoin deflates faster than inflation in your currency, it's a money maker for you. If it deflates faster than the stock market rises (over the long run stock markets always go up - the main question is: how much?) it makes a great investment even.
And before you know it the currency is all being hoarded, there is no liquidity to use it for actual payments, and you've got yourself a de-facto pyramid scheme.
Whether it will destroy the economy depends just on how high the value may go, and how fast and how much it may fall.
It only adds to the strong delationary pressure on this currency by more and more people starting to use it (and less and less new coins coming into existence as mining slows down, which is intentional). So demand increases much faster than supply (it seems bitcoin is actually gaining traction here and there), pushing up the value of bitcoin.
This obviously means it's getting more and more interesting to buy and hold them (use as investment rather than currency), making this effect stronger. Such large chunks of bitcoin potentially disappearing (this 600k is about 5% of all current bitcoin in existence!) is adding to that significantly.
It'd be good if someone can create a digital currency that's as secure and anonymous as bitcoin, but where it is possible to create more currency the way banks do in the traditional currencies.
Just out of curiousity: how do you keep those back-ups in sync, especially when you have some bitcoin, you backup them, spend some, and for whatever reason have to start using the backup copy which includes the already spent bitcoins.
It's really easy to seize bitcoin.
Police just confiscates the password to the wallet (a copy of that wallet may come in handy), and has everyone else forget it. Those passwords are generally short enough to write down on a single post-it note, that can then conveniently be attached to the relevant documents.
Come time to release the seized/frozen bitcoin, they simply hand the post-it note with password to the owner.
Simple, isn't it? Even easier than seizing money that's in the banks, where you need to do stuff like warrants and getting the bank involved to cooperate with you.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
That still doesn't make it any less than the 5% of current total coins (or fractions of coins) around.
If you divide each by a million, it means he has 600,000,000,000 millionth of bitcoin. THat is still 5% of the "millionth bitcoin" around
And, as has been shown many times before so not going to repeat it, the mere fact that there is a limited number of bitcoin is an issue, making the value of a single bitcoin (or whatever small fraction - that's irrelevant) increase in value all the time. Maybe you use a whole bitcoin to buy a chair online now, if more and more people use it you'll say "oh, then you start using fractions!", then that chair is going to cost say 0.1 bitcoin later. Or even less. How many times you can divide the coin, doesn't matter, the problem remains the same. Having so large fractions of bitcoin potentially removed from circulation is the problem.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln). And bitcoin can not be recreated or added to, like a regular currency.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
That's charged, not convicted.
Besides, still no word where the TOS come in play.
Just looked him up on Wikipedia, and no notice of him actually committing a felony. He was charged, but never convicted, and not even mention of it being related to a TOS. And the charge was not for a felony, instead "... with intention to commit felony".
So again: what felony for violating TOS are you talking about?
And: what people expect from it.
For a personal web site, I'd love to play with it. Doesn't matter too much if it goes wrong, if it's slow (due to limited uplink speed), or goes down because someone tripped over the cable. I guess there are plenty of uses for such a server; and for many low-bandwidth uses your home connection will be more than good enough.
But for business, not so much. I used to do this (when I had an office with 20 Mb up/down line); now I went with a cloud server simply for reliability. I want my server to be available, well connected, and just work - so I can take care of the content of my site, so that I know that my e-mails arrive, etc.
I think the whole premise of comparing a gourmet chef with a burger flipper at McDonald's quite disturbing. The only thing that relates them is that both work with food. So do farmers, who are mostly much more skilled than a burger flipper.
An illegal alien who is a gourmet chef will be able to demand more than the minimum wage. If they would want to go to the US in the first place, as for a gourmet chef there'll definitely be well paying jobs where-ever they are from.
The last sentence of TFS is of course even more stupid than your reaction to it, clearly indicating both the submitter and you have no idea what you're talking about.
So, assuming that a certain portion of the population will always be unskilled, and assuming the portion of unskilled jobs is shrinking, the unemployable underclass will continue to grow.
And yet, somehow, that doesn't seem to be happening. Sure unemployment figures are high all over the world at the moment, but a few years ago these figures were very different. Current unemployment is mostly caused by economics rather than technology.
I think that in more advanced economies, where more and more simple jobs are being replaced by machines (it's indeed mostly the unskilled positions that are replaced by technology), education keeps improving as well, meaning there are less and less unskilled workers in the population.
Nowadays pretty much everybody goes through primary and secondary school, and most will continue in some vocational training. Even people who stop studying after secondary school are hardly unskilled, at least not comparable with some 100 years or so ago when many people only did primary, or 200 years ago when schooling was for the elite only. And even in that time many people did learn a job, though it was mostly learned in the workplace, the apprentice/master system.
The amount of money you paid to those ISPs (which were for sure part of those big telecoms you love to hate so much) was definitely a lot more than what you pay now, for a lot less bandwidth. If you were in a building they happened to have a line running to. You couldn't get those connections at home.
If you want to run servers, you're likely to use a lot more bandwidth than an average user. Makes sense you have to pay for that. Ask your ISP for a business account which has fixed IP and is allowed to run servers, you'll pay more, but still it'll be a lot less than you paid back in the day.
All in all, believe it or not, we're much better off now than back then.
Will see, it's been a while that we had a spontaneous cut. Usually can just switch it on and everything is fine.
At home i'd have to pay the electricity for a server that's up all the time, and maybe buy a separate computer for it.
Also it allows me to acces my mail and files from just about anywhere, at high speed, without worries. My uplink from home is simply too slow - also an issue for web visitors, this way their pages load much faster.
Will work fine for a few days.
After that you have reached your data limit for the month.
Don't be ridiculous.
It doesn't "violate net neutrality"; for net neutrality there is no need for just anyone to be allowed to run a server at just any connection. If you want to run your own server, get an appropriate connection for that.
And as such there is absolutely no grounds for a class action suit.
Most of our electronics are reasonably new. Our old washing machine used to be a real issue, we have a new one now. Fridge maybe a decade old, no more. Really I've been searching a few times really hard when the problem occurred: power would go down all of a sudden, and just wouldn't go on again. Once I had to switch off all power groups, switch them on one by one, finally find out there are two that each would trip the breaker. That's strange, you'd expect one. Anyway in the end I never found the culprit. Narrow it down to a single group: unplug everything, connect power, plug it all in one by one to see which device causes problems: and then nothing happens?!
Most recent was a few trips due to the rice cooker not being dry enough after a thorough washing. Took two days, now it's fine again :-) But had to walk down to reset the power a few times. That makes sense.
Thanks, not living in UK. Would have two decades ago though... it's one of your former colonies. Now part of China.
To make matters worse, at my home only ADSL available. No fibre.
I'm running my own server for mail, my web site, and various other little bits.
Not running from home: bandwidth is a primary issue, especially my uplink is too slow. My host has at least some 100 Mbit for me, maybe more - shared of course with many other sites but it's there for those bursts, so the few people daily that visit my site have a quick response.
Other concerns are dynamic IP (will need dynDNS, not sure how well that works), uptime, power use, hardware management... I pay some USD 350 a year for my virtual server. All in. Fixed IP, fast hardware, fast bandwidth, reliable connection - more reliable than from home with our over-sensitive RCD. More than enough for a small setup, a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day. Not going to run that from home: more work, more cost, more trouble.
What felony?
I too really wonder who that target may have been. It must be a pretty high profile or valuable site, for an attacker to throw that big an attack against them.