There is no central mint involved. An initial number of coins will be pre-allocated in the genesis block. All of those coins will be sold
There is no central mint involved, but the eMunie creators specifically are tasked with minting the initial coins at the start, and then selling all of them? Does not compute. This sounds like it will function as a get-rich-quick scheme for them.
Anonymity systems like Tor, Freenet, and I2P exist and are pretty successful in case you haven't noticed.
The issue with Bitcoin anonymity isn't just that your IP is exposed (you can use Bitcoin over Tor after all). The issue is that the history of addresses that bitcoins have gone through is publicly known at all times to everyone.
That project is vaporware. Everything about it is "We don't have these flaws Bitcoin has" but doesn't give any proposals on how they solve the issues. They say that mining isn't required. Proof-of-work systems are still the only known way to solve the problem of initial minting in the fairest possible way. If proof-of-work isn't involved, then a central mint is likely involved, which means that this isn't even in the same category as Bitcoin.
The problem with tumblers like that is that they're centralized, and you have to trust them to actually return your money. A lot of people learned this the hard way.
You can already use Bitcoin over Tor. The problem with Bitcoin and anonymity is not (just) that your IP address is exposed. That part is easily solvable with Tor. The problem is that the history of addresses that bitcoins have gone through is easily traceable. I assume Anoncoin has that design feature too (unless it has already integrated Zerocoin or Coinjoin proposals).
That's just a bitcoin-fork with a button added to use their centralized mixing service, that you have to trust to give your funds back and keep your privacy. There are already many mixing services like that for Bitcoin.
They don't have to bundle all of their donations together before using them. For example, they use an exchange to sell Bitcoin that lets them generate unlimited addresses to fund their exchange account, and then move each payment they receive individually to a new address their exchange gives. If you trace the funds, you'll only see that it eventually mixes with the exchange's other funds (not specifically Wikileaks' funds).
Why do you expect that anonymity would weaken Bitcoin?
It's not like people successfully trace and reclaim stolen bitcoins today, so that wouldn't be lost. There aren't any agreements to block tainted funds, so that wouldn't be lost. Zerocoin's method of mixing coins makes it obvious coins were mixed, and the coins lose any individual identities, so it's not like you might get unlucky and receive a blacklisted coin by using it.
This is relevant because (as noted by the thread starter) there are other digital currencies that do not have the same bootstrapping problem that BitCoin faced.
All decentralized cryptocurrencies have faced Bitcoin's bootstrapping problems. The digital currencies that didn't were centralized, with central mints.
It's painfully easy for a government entity to take control, all they have to do is buy up all the available Bitcoins and not sell them.
If someone wanted to buy all bitcoins everywhere, they would have to pay a lot of money since that would drive up the price as they're buying it. I own some bitcoin. If the US wanted to buy *all* bitcoins, I'll be happy to tell them that I'm selling mine for a ten million dollars per BTC. Sadly I do not think this is a likely scenario.
It's much more complex than any other payment system
That partly has to do with it being a decentralized cryptocurrency. Without central authorities or trusted servers, it takes quite a bit more to force everyone in the network to work together and agree on the state of the system. (And as digital currency systems can go, it is still pretty far from the most complex. Look up older partially anonymous Chaumian currencies.)
it's value as a currency is wildly unstable
Because it's not widely used yet. You can't peg the value of a decentralized currency to a centralized one. Its value works just by supply and demand, and as demand fluctuates wildly, so will its value.
it's prone to all sorts of technical and security problems
The article is about a specific vulnerable site that got hacked, not the bitcoin system or software itself.
So, for security, you had to provide a telephone number? Ahahahahaha.
Bitcoin makes everything about currency handling harder for the average person.
That's not a feature of Bitcoin.
The only interesting thing with Bitcoin is that there's a limit to the amount of bitcoins. But just as a govenrment mandate detached the dollar from gold, a government mandate could change relevant representations+algorithms to allow the government to produce more bitcoins at will. And, just as everyone accepted who accepted US dollars accepted the former change, they'd accept the latter change too.
Bitcoin is an open source project, used by many to get away from centralized controls like that. Many people would stop using it, or work on making the proper version more anonymous rather than switch to some specific government's fork of Bitcoin.
why someone can just say a bitcoin is worth X dollars
Anyone is allowed to offer to buy bitcoins from you at a price they choose. That's normal free market bartering.
it's extremely confusing to actually try to use the "currency"
Have you ever used any bitcoin wallet software? It's pretty simple once you know that bitcoins are stored in addresses, and you can have as many addresses as you want. (Though it is sometimes a bit hard to find an exchange you can actually buy bitcoins from.)
and you can create money by "mining" for it with a graphics card
Bitcoin mining is the process of creating proof-of-work statements that verify the transaction history of the Bitcoin network. As a reward for this work, and as a way of accomplishing the initial minting as fairly as possible in a decentralized system, mining creates new bitcoins for the miner.
It feels like something created by criminal entities which will eventually collapse or found to be fraudulent
The whole system is open source and well-reviewed. I don't think it makes much of a difference who it originally came from.
Now that the whole plan is crashing down in flames
What? Did you read the article, or even its summary? A site named inputs.io which used bitcoins was hacked. Bitcoin itself wasn't hacked. Your post is like complaining the US dollar is going up in flames because a bank robbery happened somewhere.
Right. Any other block cipher, including AES, could have been mis-used in this same way. (The issues were that they encrypted passwords instead of hashing them, and that they used their cipher in ECB mode. The 3DES part smells of legacy but isn't a real issue in its own.)
The entire point of Bitcoin's mining process is to establish a decentralized trustless timestamping service, and to avoid the need for a trusted timestamping server. If you add a trusted timestamping server, you make most of Bitcoin's design redundant, and vulnerable to abuse by the trusted server.
You would have to reject blocks with timestamps that are around 10 minutes wrong. Many legitimate nodes' clocks on the network are further apart than that, so that wouldn't work.
The point of Bitcoin isn't mining. Complaining that you can't make money mining is like criticizing the dollar because you don't have a dollar printing machine.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no central mint involved. An initial number of coins will be pre-allocated in the genesis block. All of those coins will be sold
There is no central mint involved, but the eMunie creators specifically are tasked with minting the initial coins at the start, and then selling all of them? Does not compute. This sounds like it will function as a get-rich-quick scheme for them.
Are you on their payroll?
Every packet of information on the Net can be traced from its source to its destination.
You should inform the FBI of this immediately, as they've been having a lot of trouble finding certain people using these systems.
Anonymity systems like Tor, Freenet, and I2P exist and are pretty successful in case you haven't noticed.
The issue with Bitcoin anonymity isn't just that your IP is exposed (you can use Bitcoin over Tor after all). The issue is that the history of addresses that bitcoins have gone through is publicly known at all times to everyone.
That project is vaporware. Everything about it is "We don't have these flaws Bitcoin has" but doesn't give any proposals on how they solve the issues. They say that mining isn't required. Proof-of-work systems are still the only known way to solve the problem of initial minting in the fairest possible way. If proof-of-work isn't involved, then a central mint is likely involved, which means that this isn't even in the same category as Bitcoin.
The problem with tumblers like that is that they're centralized, and you have to trust them to actually return your money. A lot of people learned this the hard way.
You can already use Bitcoin over Tor. The problem with Bitcoin and anonymity is not (just) that your IP address is exposed. That part is easily solvable with Tor. The problem is that the history of addresses that bitcoins have gone through is easily traceable. I assume Anoncoin has that design feature too (unless it has already integrated Zerocoin or Coinjoin proposals).
That's just a bitcoin-fork with a button added to use their centralized mixing service, that you have to trust to give your funds back and keep your privacy. There are already many mixing services like that for Bitcoin.
They don't have to bundle all of their donations together before using them. For example, they use an exchange to sell Bitcoin that lets them generate unlimited addresses to fund their exchange account, and then move each payment they receive individually to a new address their exchange gives. If you trace the funds, you'll only see that it eventually mixes with the exchange's other funds (not specifically Wikileaks' funds).
Why do you expect that anonymity would weaken Bitcoin?
It's not like people successfully trace and reclaim stolen bitcoins today, so that wouldn't be lost. There aren't any agreements to block tainted funds, so that wouldn't be lost. Zerocoin's method of mixing coins makes it obvious coins were mixed, and the coins lose any individual identities, so it's not like you might get unlucky and receive a blacklisted coin by using it.
This is relevant because (as noted by the thread starter) there are other digital currencies that do not have the same bootstrapping problem that BitCoin faced.
All decentralized cryptocurrencies have faced Bitcoin's bootstrapping problems. The digital currencies that didn't were centralized, with central mints.
It's painfully easy for a government entity to take control, all they have to do is buy up all the available Bitcoins and not sell them.
If someone wanted to buy all bitcoins everywhere, they would have to pay a lot of money since that would drive up the price as they're buying it. I own some bitcoin. If the US wanted to buy *all* bitcoins, I'll be happy to tell them that I'm selling mine for a ten million dollars per BTC. Sadly I do not think this is a likely scenario.
tl;dr: At least one person who used Bitcoin in the first month also used Silk Road, so we made a news story about it. Could be DPR himself, who knows.
Bitcoin didn't fail. Some site named "inputs.io" did.
It's much more complex than any other payment system
That partly has to do with it being a decentralized cryptocurrency. Without central authorities or trusted servers, it takes quite a bit more to force everyone in the network to work together and agree on the state of the system. (And as digital currency systems can go, it is still pretty far from the most complex. Look up older partially anonymous Chaumian currencies.)
it's value as a currency is wildly unstable
Because it's not widely used yet. You can't peg the value of a decentralized currency to a centralized one. Its value works just by supply and demand, and as demand fluctuates wildly, so will its value.
it's prone to all sorts of technical and security problems
The article is about a specific vulnerable site that got hacked, not the bitcoin system or software itself.
So, for security, you had to provide a telephone number? Ahahahahaha.
Bitcoin makes everything about currency handling harder for the average person.
That's not a feature of Bitcoin.
The only interesting thing with Bitcoin is that there's a limit to the amount of bitcoins. But just as a govenrment mandate detached the dollar from gold, a government mandate could change relevant representations+algorithms to allow the government to produce more bitcoins at will. And, just as everyone accepted who accepted US dollars accepted the former change, they'd accept the latter change too.
Bitcoin is an open source project, used by many to get away from centralized controls like that. Many people would stop using it, or work on making the proper version more anonymous rather than switch to some specific government's fork of Bitcoin.
Not trusting bitcoins to web wallets doesn't mean you can't make encrypted backups.
why someone can just say a bitcoin is worth X dollars
Anyone is allowed to offer to buy bitcoins from you at a price they choose. That's normal free market bartering.
it's extremely confusing to actually try to use the "currency"
Have you ever used any bitcoin wallet software? It's pretty simple once you know that bitcoins are stored in addresses, and you can have as many addresses as you want. (Though it is sometimes a bit hard to find an exchange you can actually buy bitcoins from.)
and you can create money by "mining" for it with a graphics card
Bitcoin mining is the process of creating proof-of-work statements that verify the transaction history of the Bitcoin network. As a reward for this work, and as a way of accomplishing the initial minting as fairly as possible in a decentralized system, mining creates new bitcoins for the miner.
It feels like something created by criminal entities which will eventually collapse or found to be fraudulent
The whole system is open source and well-reviewed. I don't think it makes much of a difference who it originally came from.
Now that the whole plan is crashing down in flames
What? Did you read the article, or even its summary? A site named inputs.io which used bitcoins was hacked. Bitcoin itself wasn't hacked. Your post is like complaining the US dollar is going up in flames because a bank robbery happened somewhere.
Right. Any other block cipher, including AES, could have been mis-used in this same way. (The issues were that they encrypted passwords instead of hashing them, and that they used their cipher in ECB mode. The 3DES part smells of legacy but isn't a real issue in its own.)
Your password encryption method leaks the length of the password.
Bitcoin isn't intended to be a money-making investment tool.
The entire point of Bitcoin's mining process is to establish a decentralized trustless timestamping service, and to avoid the need for a trusted timestamping server. If you add a trusted timestamping server, you make most of Bitcoin's design redundant, and vulnerable to abuse by the trusted server.
You would have to reject blocks with timestamps that are around 10 minutes wrong. Many legitimate nodes' clocks on the network are further apart than that, so that wouldn't work.
Most proof-of-work systems are probabilistic. Can you cite one that isn't?
Anyway, if you're doing a lot of proof-of-works, then the average amount of work is pretty consistent.
The point of Bitcoin isn't mining. Complaining that you can't make money mining is like criticizing the dollar because you don't have a dollar printing machine.