What it produces in an ability that I can send you "something" from my computer to your computer without any central authority, so that you can be sure that I don't have that same thing anymore. And I can't cheat.
If you think about it, it is an interesting problem, because, how can you be sure that I indeed do not have that "something" on my computer. What happens if, after I send you that "something", I restore my computer from backup?
That is what the application produces, and that is what have value for some people, because, it basically becomes electronic cash, that mimics the real world gold, without the hassle of the real gold, and also without real world uses that actual gold has.
Mining profits will tend to go to zero, simply because anybody can do it. Miners enable transactions, so you can send currency around, and very soon mining itself will stop producing new coins. So, no, it is not a money-making scheme where you will get your 5%.
It all sounds like BS to me. Basically the crypto is just acting as a "proof of work" to limit the currency supply and make forgery difficult, but there's plenty of ways this could be done without the CPU cycles.
Plenty of ways? Name one.
Bitcoin does it in a distributed fashion, without central authority. When I read about how it all works, I thought it was ingenious.
"The bitcoin production difficulty is exponential"
Difficulty can go down as well.
Production difficulty is not set by anybody, it is just that right now bitcoin is becoming very popular so lost of people are mining. In fact, production of bitcoins is linear, 50 bitcoins each 10 minutes or so on average, but this will go down every 4 years. Nothing exponential about it.
Would you say e-gold was a scam as well? About $600 million was put into e-gold until US government shut it down. Only difference is that bitcoin is p2p, and thus, similar to bittorrent, unstoppable.
It would be something similar to Paypal, just without somebody telling you what you can do or can't (poker) do with your money. Also nobody can freeze your account. Also, free or very low transaction fees.
Also, you can't buy them directly from a company, you have to use trading exchanges to buy and sell them, so the price fluctuates.
If you accept Paypal as something you can use to buy stuff with, you can accept bitcoin, or at least I don't wee why not.
How can a big multi-billion company web site fail in such an obvious way? This is simply unbelievable.
On a similar tone, how can a geek site (slashdot.org) have such an obvious html bugs. The comment text spills out the right side of the window when you increase the font size.
You should check out Bitcoins. http://www.bitcoin.org/ The mathematics behind it are genius. I wander how long it will take before governments try to shut it down.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, a little competition is always good for everybody.
What it produces in an ability that I can send you "something" from my computer to your computer without any central authority, so that you can be sure that I don't have that same thing anymore. And I can't cheat.
If you think about it, it is an interesting problem, because, how can you be sure that I indeed do not have that "something" on my computer. What happens if, after I send you that "something", I restore my computer from backup?
That is what the application produces, and that is what have value for some people, because, it basically becomes electronic cash, that mimics the real world gold, without the hassle of the real gold, and also without real world uses that actual gold has.
The more people get in on it, the less valuable it becomes.
Wait, are you claiming that the thing that has a network effect, has less value the more people use it?
That makes no sense.
"How are they going to compel people into accepting them?"
Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker will start to accept bitcoins, so that even people that are not part of the free world could play.
It produces an ability to send "money" around for a very low cost. And as long as somebody is willing to buy them from you, bitcoins will have value.
If it's a scam, price on exchanges will go to zero, and you will have digital play money to send around.
Then, perhaps some multi-player online game will start to use it and price will again rise from zero to 0.01 per bitcoin, perhaps more.
After all, people are buying Zynga poker chips that you can never cash out. And Eve ISKs, and Wow gold.
The name of that online game for bitcons will be called "Economy online."
Mining profits will tend to go to zero, simply because anybody can do it. Miners enable transactions, so you can send currency around, and very soon mining itself will stop producing new coins. So, no, it is not a money-making scheme where you will get your 5%.
"...an ill-fated experiment or a scam"
It could also be an open source replacement for:
paypal
moneybookers
e-gold,
credit cards
It all sounds like BS to me. Basically the crypto is just acting as a "proof of work" to limit the currency supply and make forgery difficult, but there's plenty of ways this could be done without the CPU cycles.
Plenty of ways? Name one.
Bitcoin does it in a distributed fashion, without central authority. When I read about how it all works, I thought it was ingenious.
"The bitcoin production difficulty is exponential"
Difficulty can go down as well.
Production difficulty is not set by anybody, it is just that right now bitcoin is becoming very popular so lost of people are mining. In fact, production of bitcoins is linear, 50 bitcoins each 10 minutes or so on average, but this will go down every 4 years. Nothing exponential about it.
Would you say e-gold was a scam as well? About $600 million was put into e-gold until US government shut it down. Only difference is that bitcoin is p2p, and thus, similar to bittorrent, unstoppable.
It would be something similar to Paypal, just without somebody telling you what you can do or can't (poker) do with your money. Also nobody can freeze your account. Also, free or very low transaction fees.
Also, you can't buy them directly from a company, you have to use trading exchanges to buy and sell them, so the price fluctuates.
If you accept Paypal as something you can use to buy stuff with, you can accept bitcoin, or at least I don't wee why not.
and it seems like every week I have a random IP address connect to my box and try guessing 'Administrator' passwords once every five seconds or so.
So, your week lasts for about 5 seconds?
If there's no central authority, how is the one block every 10 minutes rule enforced?
By adjusting difficulty every two weeks or so.
How can a big multi-billion company web site fail in such an obvious way? This is simply unbelievable.
On a similar tone, how can a geek site (slashdot.org) have such an obvious html bugs. The comment text spills out the right side of the window when you increase the font size.
Who controls those things. Morons?
When you increase the font size in Chrome, the text in comments goes over the right edge of the window and disappears.
I thought the text wrapping problem was solved somewhere in the 1970's.
Is there a way to manually fix this, some external style file for Chrome or something?
The main page no longer lists the number of comments.
No 'yesterday' news?
Comments spilling way right off the monitor on the 1600x1200 resolution? WTF?
Slashdot going backwards in functionality.
"including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability."
I'll create one that runs in O(1) time and succeeds with very low probability.
Carbon trading? I'll buy 100 kg. In ashes please.
"a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like Chrome, if you will."
Is that a bit like Chrome 8.0?
Yes, but if you are going to write in that ugly low level language, there must be some other benefits. What are those benefits?
Any benefits to that?
(I mean about the over-primitive math axioms, not about list)
You replaced nice numbers with ugly '('s and 's's and you made all your strings longer, yet what exactly did you gain?
What exactly is:
-kit?
-EMC?
-BL trading?
National Football Conference payments??? Why would they do that?
So, he is like Jesus.
You should check out Bitcoins. http://www.bitcoin.org/ The mathematics behind it are genius. I wander how long it will take before governments try to shut it down.