They are going to resume operation and earn money via trading fees. Assuming they get enough volume the profits will eventually be able to replay the depositors.
In other words they will try to earn their way out of insolvency.
For years Slashdot has published stories about copyright overreach, or whether or not it should even exist, but as as soon as some religious nut publishes a video that some people don't like they leap into action to use those same laws to their own advantage.
Judging by the number of dislikes on that video now I would say that no further action is necessary.
Star Trek is fantasy because in that universe technology is another form of magic. There was no consistent set of rules that applied to the story - new technobabble was invented as needed to serve the needs of the plot.
note: fractional bitcoins are not in the spec, either
Note: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Where there's profit to be made, protocol be damned. Bitcoin's just too geeky for wall street at the moment, but you can bet the quants are looking into exploiting it and offering pension funds and other investments based on "the future of money".
I truly wish them all the best.
They should note, however, there is no entity capable of printing new Bitcoins to bail them out when their bets go sour.
Is it me, or does this seem like how some HFT will go in and monetize BitCoin? I mean, 10 minutes is usually "good enough", but you can bet someone will see a way to make it instant.
Actually it's just you, because you haven't read the protocol spec and don't know what you're talking about.
According to some estimates I have seen, the spending will be around 3.5 to 4.0 trillion a year for this. All of it financed by China, Saudia Arabia and anyone else they can get to buy the bonds.
Have you seen how many bonds China and Saudia Arabia (aren't) buying these days? They aren't going to sell that many bonds to foreign investors on top of the existing deficit and monitization of the current deficit is already expanding the currency supply by 10% annually.
What's more likely is the drastic imposition of price caps and rationing.
Yeah, great. But what is the difference between a valid bitcoin and a made-up value that isn't really a bitcoin?
Bitcoin addresses are hashes of public keys. There isn't any such thing as "a bitcoin". There is a public transaction ledger listing transfers of balances between different addresses. The set of all addresses holding a non-zero balance is small enough to fit in RAM for a typical computer so it's not really difficult to verify.
How would someone receiving a million individual items be able to check that all of them are actually valid?
The network does that for you. Somebody trying to send from an address with no balance wouldn't get other nodes to relay their transaction nor the miners to include it in a block.
Sounds like the right approach would be to turn over a list of said identifiers on paper so they have to be keyed in individually, all million of them, while demanding the documents and all copies "right now!!!"
It might take a couple of years to validate all million identifiers.
That's not how bitcoin transfers work. What's broadcast on the network is an order to transfer funds from one address to another address, signed by the pubic key of the sending address. As mentioned before, invalid transactions are rejected automatically.
It is possible to effectively move bitcoin balances out of band by giving someone a private key to an address which contains a balance but it doesn't take long to verify it it's valid or not.
In any case sending 1,000,000 bitcoins requires a single transaction: (source address, destination address, amount). It doesn't involve communicating.a million identifiers.
It's because the information is public knowledege and easy to verify. Anyone can access the US Treasury's "Debt To The Penny" series and the Federal Reserve's Z1 table and see if debt is or is not increasing exponentially faster than economic output (from the BEA).
The mathematical unsustainability of the US government's deficits has been common knowledge since I was in grade school in the 1980s, anyone who's still in denial is being willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
But when you transfer bitcoin to another account, your IP is recorded.
Not really. Some services like blockchain.info keep track of the IPs their node first sees a transaction coming from in a database separate from the blockchain itself but since transactions are relayed it's hard to prove where a transaction originates from without the capability to simultaneously eavesdrop on every node in the network.
Here you're simply ignorant of how bit coins work. There are no "servers", it's P2P. The other end receiving the bitcoins would likely be a Tor node in Russia, where our FBI couldn't even trace the packets. The FBI could watch as the bitcoins get traded through many transactions, but they couldn't even identify what nation those trades occur in, and certainly not who owns the various bitcoin destinations. That's why bitcoins are valuable. They enable criminals to launder money.
Better than the person you were replying to but still not quite there. There is no "other end" of a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin is a public ledger. Coins are "sent" from one public key to another public key so don't reside on any particular server nor do they "move" from one computer to another. An attacker with sufficient resources to eavesdrop on every node in the network might be able to figure out where the person initiating the transaction is located from but with Tor nodes involved this is relatively difficult.
If a single trade pushes the price of some financial product up by 36% on any other exchange in the world, people would call it skyrocketing.
This is Bitcoin we're talking about - a 36% swing isn't as uncommon there as it is for other currencies (although this is becoming less true over time).
100,000 BTC is a big portion of the market available. I bet if they bought it all the price would skyrocket.
There's a bot in freenode #bitcoin which will answer this question, based on the current depth of the order book. Last time I checked buying $1000000 of bitcoins would push the final price to $15 (from $11), so not exactly skyrocketing. The depth of the market is much greater now than it was last year.
Actually, both democrats and republicans are amazingly stupid. If they weren't, we wouldn't have the Patriot Act, free speech zones, pointless wars, the TSA, etc.
Stupid? They are the ones becoming millionaires on your dime.
/proving once more that bitcoins are the currency of thieves, drug dealers, pedophiles and gun runners. Their just begging for governments to declare open war on bitcoins....
Are you suggesting that government are opposed to those things?
A lot of people are starting to suspect the recent hackers to be mythical. The basic security precautions needed to prevent this kind of thing have been well-known since last year.
Did you know that modern web browsers have added new feature that will let you avoid reading stories which make you feel uncomfortable? All you have to do is not click on the link.
Try it out sometime and see if it works on your browser.
Slashdot Mirror
They are going to resume operation and earn money via trading fees. Assuming they get enough volume the profits will eventually be able to replay the depositors.
In other words they will try to earn their way out of insolvency.
They can't dilute the currency. They only way they can replace the coins is to earn them via business profits.
I'd have more respect for him if he'd actually do that instead of bowing to silly superstitions like writing "bats**t"
For years Slashdot has published stories about copyright overreach, or whether or not it should even exist, but as as soon as some religious nut publishes a video that some people don't like they leap into action to use those same laws to their own advantage.
Judging by the number of dislikes on that video now I would say that no further action is necessary.
Star Trek is fantasy because in that universe technology is another form of magic. There was no consistent set of rules that applied to the story - new technobabble was invented as needed to serve the needs of the plot.
Star Trek is more accurately classified as fantasy than sci-fi.
Note: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
I truly wish them all the best.
They should note, however, there is no entity capable of printing new Bitcoins to bail them out when their bets go sour.
Actually it's just you, because you haven't read the protocol spec and don't know what you're talking about.
I predict exactly zero rational discourse will be inspired by this study, on either side.
As existing bonds mature they are being rolled over into new ones with much lower (but still nominally positive) yields.
This has a very large effect on the NPV of the trust fund.
Have you seen how many bonds China and Saudia Arabia (aren't) buying these days? They aren't going to sell that many bonds to foreign investors on top of the existing deficit and monitization of the current deficit is already expanding the currency supply by 10% annually.
What's more likely is the drastic imposition of price caps and rationing.
Bitcoin addresses are hashes of public keys. There isn't any such thing as "a bitcoin". There is a public transaction ledger listing transfers of balances between different addresses. The set of all addresses holding a non-zero balance is small enough to fit in RAM for a typical computer so it's not really difficult to verify.
The network does that for you. Somebody trying to send from an address with no balance wouldn't get other nodes to relay their transaction nor the miners to include it in a block.
That's not how bitcoin transfers work. What's broadcast on the network is an order to transfer funds from one address to another address, signed by the pubic key of the sending address. As mentioned before, invalid transactions are rejected automatically.
It is possible to effectively move bitcoin balances out of band by giving someone a private key to an address which contains a balance but it doesn't take long to verify it it's valid or not.
In any case sending 1,000,000 bitcoins requires a single transaction: (source address, destination address, amount). It doesn't involve communicating.a million identifiers.
It's because the information is public knowledege and easy to verify. Anyone can access the US Treasury's "Debt To The Penny" series and the Federal Reserve's Z1 table and see if debt is or is not increasing exponentially faster than economic output (from the BEA).
The mathematical unsustainability of the US government's deficits has been common knowledge since I was in grade school in the 1980s, anyone who's still in denial is being willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
That's true of every Ponzi scheme too, right up until it isn't.
The law of exponents catches up with everything eventually. You can't bribe math.
Not really. Some services like blockchain.info keep track of the IPs their node first sees a transaction coming from in a database separate from the blockchain itself but since transactions are relayed it's hard to prove where a transaction originates from without the capability to simultaneously eavesdrop on every node in the network.
If you check the reddit thread for this story you'll see that those tiny transactions encode several steganographic messages.
Not any more. Four years of ZIRP have not been kind to the accounting fiction known as the "trust fund".
Better than the person you were replying to but still not quite there. There is no "other end" of a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin is a public ledger. Coins are "sent" from one public key to another public key so don't reside on any particular server nor do they "move" from one computer to another. An attacker with sufficient resources to eavesdrop on every node in the network might be able to figure out where the person initiating the transaction is located from but with Tor nodes involved this is relatively difficult.
This is Bitcoin we're talking about - a 36% swing isn't as uncommon there as it is for other currencies (although this is becoming less true over time).
There's a bot in freenode #bitcoin which will answer this question, based on the current depth of the order book. Last time I checked buying $1000000 of bitcoins would push the final price to $15 (from $11), so not exactly skyrocketing. The depth of the market is much greater now than it was last year.
Stupid? They are the ones becoming millionaires on your dime.
Are you suggesting that government are opposed to those things?
A lot of people are starting to suspect the recent hackers to be mythical. The basic security precautions needed to prevent this kind of thing have been well-known since last year.
Step 1: Build a bikeshed
Step 2: Ask a bunch of geeks what color to paint it
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Did you know that modern web browsers have added new feature that will let you avoid reading stories which make you feel uncomfortable? All you have to do is not click on the link.
Try it out sometime and see if it works on your browser.