This is not the government protecting you from "terrorists". This is the government protecting itself from YOU. From their viewpoint, we are all potential terrorists. Soon to be ex-President Assad of Syria is explicit on this topic, calling the forces attempting to kick him out "terrorists". The US government is not so explicit about it, yet. They can get a few more years in power by trying to keep all this under wraps.
The answer is "never" because it does not meet the definition of such a scheme.
Bitcoin does not take money from later investors to pay early investors, nor does it promise a high rate of return. It also does not have a promoter who takes a cut from investor funds. It also does not need to "pass any sort of compliance" because it is not a security. It is an accounting system, similar to what you can do with a spreadsheet, just distributed and cryptographically secured.
There is one global Bitcoin account book that records every transaction ever made, and which account numbers got how many arbitrary units credited (bitcoins or BTC). It takes work to verify transactions and secure the transaction history from tampering. That work is rewarded with fresh bitcoins for whoever finishes a chunk of work (block) first. That is similar to an accountant getting credited for work keeping a company's books by an entry to pay himself added to the books themselves.
Adding fresh bitcoins to the system this way is different than how the Federal Reserve creates dollars, but is no less valid. The Fed buys Treasury bonds and bad mortgages, and pays for them by crediting the seller with new dollars it magically creates, then backing those dollars with the bonds and mortgages it bought. If the Fed wanted to reduce the money supply, it would sell the assets it holds for dollars, and the dollars vanish back into thin air. Since these days all of that happens by computer between the Fed and private banks, the new dollars are merely data entries, just like bitcoins.
Everything past 2013 is fantasy at this point, because they don't have funding. Mars One is just promotional advertising for a reality show based on selecting astronauts instead of surviving on a tropical island, that's all.
Hoarding knowledge is effectively brain damage for civilization. The goal should be to have all of it available to everyone, everywhere, instantly, at the lowest possible cost. I am talking about real knowledge, like science and engineering. If the entertainment business becomes collateral damage in freeing the world's knowledge, too bad, they can go whine with the former slave owners. Enslaving ideas to the control of one person is as wrong as enslaving people.
What I expect is if there are severe structural flaws in the current Bitcoin system, the developers will come up with Bitcoin series 2.0, in an attempt to fix the flaws, and it will exist in parallel with the original. It's like having more than one stock on the stock exchange. Then people can transition to the new network at their own pace for their own reasons.
If the last digit of the Bitcoin accounting system, 0.01 microcoins, is equated to the US penny, then the 21 trillion microcoins in theory would be worth $21 Trillion US, more than the money supply of the top four currencies combined (Yen, Euro, China, US Dollar). I don't think we have to worry about that for a very long time, if ever.
There is only one global Bitcoin account book (known as the block chain). It records every transaction to and from every account number ever. If you use the official Bitcoin client, you have a full copy of the account book, and so do many other people.
When someone "makes a transaction", it is an order to transfer some number of coins from one account number to another. Two things have to happen, first, the sending account has to have sufficient coins to send, which is verified by checking all past transactions from that account. If it does not have enough, the transaction is rejected by the network. Second, the transaction has to be signed with the private key for the account. If you lost that, the account will sit forever with the last balance it had. There is no way to tell from outside if the person lost their key, or just has not had a reason to spend the coins. To rediscover the key would take an enormous amount of computer power. I don't know the exact amount, but it is comparable to cracking other modern encryption systems, because that is what it is.
It is not that the system is run by nobody, it is that new transactions are secured by a difficult cryptographic problem every 10 minutes or so. Once secured, it is nearly impossible to change a transaction. The system has plenty of bodies running it (including me at the moment, as I am "mining" right now), but it is a distributed system, with first one to solve the cryptographic problem getting the reward of some coins.
For the technically minded, the problem is: find a number (the nonce), which when added to a set of transactions, generates a hash value below a threshold set by the current "difficulty". When discovered, the nonce + transactions forms a "block", which is distributed to everyone on the network, and it is easy to verify the block is valid by finding the hash. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks (about two weeks) so the rate of new blocks stays about one per ten minutes on average.
Well, the Bitcoin money supply is already larger than that of 13 countries. Small countries, to be sure, but that is a pretty decent achievement for something that has only seen significant use for two years. ($12.35 per coin x 10.5 million coins = $129 million money supply).
What normally ends up as money is whatever is the most easily traded commodity in a given society. At times that has been cattle, gold, paper money, and now debit cards. But people prefer to accept that good which is most easily traded for what they really need and want. They would work directly for what they want, but finding someone to pay you in apartment leases (barter) is difficult, so they settle for whatever everyone else collectively has chosen to use.
I started with "what normally ends up...", but that can be subverted by force, as when a government bans some forms of money in favor of others (usually ones they produce themselves).
The distributed account book is what has value. It makes it easy to transfer funds between people, especially if they are in different countries. A bitcoin is just an arbitrary accounting marker in the book. It has no value in and of itself, only when part of a larger system that includes the whole account book and network. Since maintaining the account books is a useful function, the people who do that get credited with some coins by lottery, that is all that mining is.
Ask any business, bank, or brokerage house if keeping the accounts for the business has value.
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped right along with it.
Today the average price of the completed panels is $0.70/watt, and is expected to fall to $0.55/watt by the end of next year. So the argument that solar is too expensive is just no longer true. Please note that the panels are not the only cost for a utility scale plant, you have inverters and transformers, site prep, installation, and project overhead (design, permits, etc.), but the total cost of a solar plant is now competitive with other sources of power, especially in the US southwest. Rooftop panels are still about twice the cost of utility scale plants, because it is just less efficient to send out a crew to install a half dozen panels on a roof than to install literally hundreds of thousands in open desert.
Anyone who says solar is "too expensive" today has to explain why big utilities are signing power purchase agreements with the PV plant owners, and the banks and Wall Street are financing the plants at attractive interest rates.
10 to 15 years is too short to measure global temperature changes, because short term oscillations (such as El Nino, and North Atlantic) cause too much annual variation to separate a signal from the noise. So stop holding it up as data, it is "statistically meaningless". Also, focusing on air temperature is wrong-headed. The oceans have about 1000 times the mass of the atmosphere, and most of the planetary heating is going there, not into the air. The steady 3 mm rise per year of the oceans is pretty unmistakeable evidence of thermal expansion and glacier flow.
Apparently you are the one who misunderstands Bitcoin badly. It is nothing more than a distributed account book, denominated in arbitrary units (BTC). Whatever the total outstanding number of units are (10.4 million today, 21 million eventually) is all there will ever be, and the balances of all the accounts sum to that number of units. A Bitcoin transaction is simply a message to transfer some units from one account to another.
The usefulness of a distributed account book that uses a P2P network is the speed and small overhead for transactions. If people are willing to trust the security of the network and the account book, then they may be willing to exchange goods and services for an increment to their account balance. They can then later exchange their balance with someone else to get things they want. The total value of the account book is then set by what people are willing to exchange it for, just like any finite commodity.
Your repeated argument that 1 BTC would be too large to use fails to notice that the smallest unit is 0.000 000 01 BTC. Thus there will be 21 trillion microBTC, and those can still be divided down to 0.01 microBTC. So if bicoins become very popular, people would be using small fractions of a full BTC for transactions, but the software already tracks and reports down to the 8th decimal point. All we need do is adopt a convention what to call a millicoin and microcoin in everyday language.
It is capped at 2.1 quadrillion Satoshi. That should be enough currency units for a while.
1 BTC (bitcoin) = 100 million Satoshi 1 Satoshi = 0.000 000 01 BTC, and yes, the software manages and reports transactions to 8 decimal places, so the Satoshi is the smallest unit in the Bitcoin system, like the penny (cent) is the smallest unit in US currency.
If the value of 1 BTC gets large enough to not be practical for ordinary transactions, people will just shift to millicoins, and probably give them a name. Alternately they could refer to MegaSatoshi, which would be 0.01 BTC, of which there will be 2.1 billion. Computers have no problem dealing in small fractions, but humans do, so we will adapt by renaming a fractional BTC to be comparable to typical transaction amounts.
since it's fixed amount - the more people start using bitcoin, the less to go around, so either you'll need fractional coins, or you'll be paying $20 for a cup of coffee as that's the price of 1 coin today, and $40 tomorrow.
Bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places. So if you treat the last decimal place (0.01 microcoins) as a penny, the total of 21 million full coins to be issued would equate to $21 trillion US. That should be enough for any currency.
That is not how the Bitcoin network works. When you initiate a transaction, it goes out on the P2P network, and can reach the recipient in a matter of seconds (however fast the network is). People running the "mining" software validate the transaction by seeing what the balance was in the sender's account. That is possible because *everyone* has a copy of the transaction history, otherwise known as the "block chain". So every transaction in and out of the sender's account number is known, and therefore the current balance.
If the account had enough balance to perform the transaction, it gets included in the next block being generated (which happens on average every 10 minutes). If it did not, the transaction is rejected as invalid. Generating a block means solving a difficult cryptographic problem (finding the number which along with the set of transactions produces a hash value below the current difficulty). Therefore the chance of someone faking a transaction is low. They would have to do the number crunching to create a valid block. Once the block is generated, it goes out to everyone using the client software, thus updating the global transaction history.
Depending who you are, you can accept the first report of a transaction arriving, or wait till a valid block arrives with the transaction in it. Wordpress has chosen to recognize the transaction immediately, since it is payment for premium services from them, and they can always turn it off.
Once oil is used, it is used, and there is carbon pollution in the atmosphere. It will stay there for 1000 years, and there is no sane way to extract it
Plant lots of trees. Build useful things out of the resulting wood and keep them from rotting.
If you distribute the productivity gains fairly,... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.
What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.
L2 is actually significantly easier than going to the Moon, assuming you want to stop and not just crash. You need to expend fuel to slow you down in the Moon's gravity well, and for L2 you do not. Relative to the Earth, the Moon and L2 are very close in energy to reach, not counting the gravity well.
Bitcoin has utility to transmit funds easily between countries. Existing methods like bank international wire, or Western Union are expensive and complicated. Even after converting from your local currency at your end, and the recipient converting back to their currency at the other end, it can end up being a lot cheaper. So the value of the coins is not in holding them for their intrinsic value, but the use you get out of them.
The software to make easy use of the bitcoin protocol is still in early development.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the government protecting you from "terrorists". This is the government protecting itself from YOU. From their viewpoint, we are all potential terrorists. Soon to be ex-President Assad of Syria is explicit on this topic, calling the forces attempting to kick him out "terrorists". The US government is not so explicit about it, yet. They can get a few more years in power by trying to keep all this under wraps.
If I front some capital, can I become the next Shapeways?
It may already be too late. Staples is getting into the game: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1042071-staples-fires-warning-flare-to-3d-printing-market
I would not be surprised to see a home improvement or other big hardware chain get into it too. Think NAPA 3D parts for autos
The answer is "never" because it does not meet the definition of such a scheme.
Bitcoin does not take money from later investors to pay early investors, nor does it promise a high rate of return. It also does not have a promoter who takes a cut from investor funds. It also does not need to "pass any sort of compliance" because it is not a security. It is an accounting system, similar to what you can do with a spreadsheet, just distributed and cryptographically secured.
There is one global Bitcoin account book that records every transaction ever made, and which account numbers got how many arbitrary units credited (bitcoins or BTC). It takes work to verify transactions and secure the transaction history from tampering. That work is rewarded with fresh bitcoins for whoever finishes a chunk of work (block) first. That is similar to an accountant getting credited for work keeping a company's books by an entry to pay himself added to the books themselves.
Adding fresh bitcoins to the system this way is different than how the Federal Reserve creates dollars, but is no less valid. The Fed buys Treasury bonds and bad mortgages, and pays for them by crediting the seller with new dollars it magically creates, then backing those dollars with the bonds and mortgages it bought. If the Fed wanted to reduce the money supply, it would sell the assets it holds for dollars, and the dollars vanish back into thin air. Since these days all of that happens by computer between the Fed and private banks, the new dollars are merely data entries, just like bitcoins.
Everything past 2013 is fantasy at this point, because they don't have funding. Mars One is just promotional advertising for a reality show based on selecting astronauts instead of surviving on a tropical island, that's all.
The title says it all.
Hoarding knowledge is effectively brain damage for civilization. The goal should be to have all of it available to everyone, everywhere, instantly, at the lowest possible cost. I am talking about real knowledge, like science and engineering. If the entertainment business becomes collateral damage in freeing the world's knowledge, too bad, they can go whine with the former slave owners. Enslaving ideas to the control of one person is as wrong as enslaving people.
This is why I'm working on farmbots.
What I expect is if there are severe structural flaws in the current Bitcoin system, the developers will come up with Bitcoin series 2.0, in an attempt to fix the flaws, and it will exist in parallel with the original. It's like having more than one stock on the stock exchange. Then people can transition to the new network at their own pace for their own reasons.
If the last digit of the Bitcoin accounting system, 0.01 microcoins, is equated to the US penny, then the 21 trillion microcoins in theory would be worth $21 Trillion US, more than the money supply of the top four currencies combined (Yen, Euro, China, US Dollar). I don't think we have to worry about that for a very long time, if ever.
There is only one global Bitcoin account book (known as the block chain). It records every transaction to and from every account number ever. If you use the official Bitcoin client, you have a full copy of the account book, and so do many other people.
When someone "makes a transaction", it is an order to transfer some number of coins from one account number to another. Two things have to happen, first, the sending account has to have sufficient coins to send, which is verified by checking all past transactions from that account. If it does not have enough, the transaction is rejected by the network. Second, the transaction has to be signed with the private key for the account. If you lost that, the account will sit forever with the last balance it had. There is no way to tell from outside if the person lost their key, or just has not had a reason to spend the coins. To rediscover the key would take an enormous amount of computer power. I don't know the exact amount, but it is comparable to cracking other modern encryption systems, because that is what it is.
> Except one can not buy bitcoins with a credit card or paypal,
You are incorrect: https://www.virwox.com/index.php
It is not that the system is run by nobody, it is that new transactions are secured by a difficult cryptographic problem every 10 minutes or so. Once secured, it is nearly impossible to change a transaction. The system has plenty of bodies running it (including me at the moment, as I am "mining" right now), but it is a distributed system, with first one to solve the cryptographic problem getting the reward of some coins.
For the technically minded, the problem is: find a number (the nonce), which when added to a set of transactions, generates a hash value below a threshold set by the current "difficulty". When discovered, the nonce + transactions forms a "block", which is distributed to everyone on the network, and it is easy to verify the block is valid by finding the hash. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks (about two weeks) so the rate of new blocks stays about one per ten minutes on average.
Well, the Bitcoin money supply is already larger than that of 13 countries. Small countries, to be sure, but that is a pretty decent achievement for something that has only seen significant use for two years. ($12.35 per coin x 10.5 million coins = $129 million money supply).
What normally ends up as money is whatever is the most easily traded commodity in a given society. At times that has been cattle, gold, paper money, and now debit cards. But people prefer to accept that good which is most easily traded for what they really need and want. They would work directly for what they want, but finding someone to pay you in apartment leases (barter) is difficult, so they settle for whatever everyone else collectively has chosen to use.
I started with "what normally ends up...", but that can be subverted by force, as when a government bans some forms of money in favor of others (usually ones they produce themselves).
The distributed account book is what has value. It makes it easy to transfer funds between people, especially if they are in different countries. A bitcoin is just an arbitrary accounting marker in the book. It has no value in and of itself, only when part of a larger system that includes the whole account book and network. Since maintaining the account books is a useful function, the people who do that get credited with some coins by lottery, that is all that mining is.
Ask any business, bank, or brokerage house if keeping the accounts for the business has value.
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped right along with it.
Today the average price of the completed panels is $0.70/watt, and is expected to fall to $0.55/watt by the end of next year. So the argument that solar is too expensive is just no longer true. Please note that the panels are not the only cost for a utility scale plant, you have inverters and transformers, site prep, installation, and project overhead (design, permits, etc.), but the total cost of a solar plant is now competitive with other sources of power, especially in the US southwest. Rooftop panels are still about twice the cost of utility scale plants, because it is just less efficient to send out a crew to install a half dozen panels on a roof than to install literally hundreds of thousands in open desert.
Anyone who says solar is "too expensive" today has to explain why big utilities are signing power purchase agreements with the PV plant owners, and the banks and Wall Street are financing the plants at attractive interest rates.
10 to 15 years is too short to measure global temperature changes, because short term oscillations (such as El Nino, and North Atlantic) cause too much annual variation to separate a signal from the noise. So stop holding it up as data, it is "statistically meaningless". Also, focusing on air temperature is wrong-headed. The oceans have about 1000 times the mass of the atmosphere, and most of the planetary heating is going there, not into the air. The steady 3 mm rise per year of the oceans is pretty unmistakeable evidence of thermal expansion and glacier flow.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_figures/sea-surface-temp-figure1.gif
Apparently you are the one who misunderstands Bitcoin badly. It is nothing more than a distributed account book, denominated in arbitrary units (BTC). Whatever the total outstanding number of units are (10.4 million today, 21 million eventually) is all there will ever be, and the balances of all the accounts sum to that number of units. A Bitcoin transaction is simply a message to transfer some units from one account to another.
The usefulness of a distributed account book that uses a P2P network is the speed and small overhead for transactions. If people are willing to trust the security of the network and the account book, then they may be willing to exchange goods and services for an increment to their account balance. They can then later exchange their balance with someone else to get things they want. The total value of the account book is then set by what people are willing to exchange it for, just like any finite commodity.
Your repeated argument that 1 BTC would be too large to use fails to notice that the smallest unit is 0.000 000 01 BTC. Thus there will be 21 trillion microBTC, and those can still be divided down to 0.01 microBTC. So if bicoins become very popular, people would be using small fractions of a full BTC for transactions, but the software already tracks and reports down to the 8th decimal point. All we need do is adopt a convention what to call a millicoin and microcoin in everyday language.
It is capped at 2.1 quadrillion Satoshi. That should be enough currency units for a while.
1 BTC (bitcoin) = 100 million Satoshi
1 Satoshi = 0.000 000 01 BTC, and yes, the software manages and reports transactions to 8 decimal places, so the Satoshi is the smallest unit in the Bitcoin system, like the penny (cent) is the smallest unit in US currency.
If the value of 1 BTC gets large enough to not be practical for ordinary transactions, people will just shift to millicoins, and probably give them a name. Alternately they could refer to MegaSatoshi, which would be 0.01 BTC, of which there will be 2.1 billion. Computers have no problem dealing in small fractions, but humans do, so we will adapt by renaming a fractional BTC to be comparable to typical transaction amounts.
since it's fixed amount - the more people start using bitcoin, the less to go around, so either you'll need fractional coins, or you'll be paying $20 for a cup of coffee as that's the price of 1 coin today, and $40 tomorrow.
Bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places. So if you treat the last decimal place (0.01 microcoins) as a penny, the total of 21 million full coins to be issued would equate to $21 trillion US. That should be enough for any currency.
That is not how the Bitcoin network works. When you initiate a transaction, it goes out on the P2P network, and can reach the recipient in a matter of seconds (however fast the network is). People running the "mining" software validate the transaction by seeing what the balance was in the sender's account. That is possible because *everyone* has a copy of the transaction history, otherwise known as the "block chain". So every transaction in and out of the sender's account number is known, and therefore the current balance.
If the account had enough balance to perform the transaction, it gets included in the next block being generated (which happens on average every 10 minutes). If it did not, the transaction is rejected as invalid. Generating a block means solving a difficult cryptographic problem (finding the number which along with the set of transactions produces a hash value below the current difficulty). Therefore the chance of someone faking a transaction is low. They would have to do the number crunching to create a valid block. Once the block is generated, it goes out to everyone using the client software, thus updating the global transaction history.
Depending who you are, you can accept the first report of a transaction arriving, or wait till a valid block arrives with the transaction in it. Wordpress has chosen to recognize the transaction immediately, since it is payment for premium services from them, and they can always turn it off.
Once oil is used, it is used, and there is carbon pollution in the atmosphere. It will stay there for 1000 years, and there is no sane way to extract it
Plant lots of trees. Build useful things out of the resulting wood and keep them from rotting.
If you distribute the productivity gains fairly, ... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.
What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.
L2 is actually significantly easier than going to the Moon, assuming you want to stop and not just crash. You need to expend fuel to slow you down in the Moon's gravity well, and for L2 you do not. Relative to the Earth, the Moon and L2 are very close in energy to reach, not counting the gravity well.
Bitcoin has utility to transmit funds easily between countries. Existing methods like bank international wire, or Western Union are expensive and complicated. Even after converting from your local currency at your end, and the recipient converting back to their currency at the other end, it can end up being a lot cheaper. So the value of the coins is not in holding them for their intrinsic value, but the use you get out of them.
The software to make easy use of the bitcoin protocol is still in early development.