Surely you don't suffer from the delusion that money is anything more than data? That hasn't been true for a very long time. Even prior to computers, only a tiny fraction of money was in the form of printed currency notes (dollar bills, etc). Money is, for the most part, numbers written in columns on spreadsheets. US$ are no different from bitcoins in that respect, and therefore, that cannot be the flaw in bitcoin, for it's true of US$ as well. Bitcoin has many flaws, but that isn't one of them.
If you're not interested in a story, don't click on it.
Websites judge the popularity and desire for news or articles on a particular subject based on how many people click on it. If enough people ignore stories about a topic, it'll drop off the radar.
On sites with forums, the amount of forum posts generated by an article serves as further measure for it's popularity. Indeed, for sites that thrive on discussions, a post in the discussion counts much more than simply a click on and reading of the article. So if you really want to see a particular topic covered a lot more, come in and post in the discussion of that topic!
Note: it doesn't really matter what you post. Positive or negative, as long as it's generating discussion, it's considered good and encouragement to post more on the topic.
Congrats. With your post above, you have helped ensure more bitcoin stories on/.
Encrypting with a password is useless (too cheap to crack)...
Err, no. A strong encryption algorithm and a strong password is far more expensive to crack than the value of most people's bitcoin wallet. It would be a monetary loss to bother doing it.
Suggestion: Skip over the headings that don't appeal to you and read the ones that do. Comment on things you feel strongly about. I, for one, enjoy my daily Bitcoin story.
But... having stories you have to skip over... the mere fact that stories are being posted that you're not interested in... this severely threatens your belief that you are the center of the universe. If you're that kind of person, the fact that such stories even get posted makes you extremely mad, and you really have no choice but to quit reading the cite that constantly rubs your face in the fact that you aren't the center of the universe. It's so cruel when a website doesn't tailor its output precisely for you...
You could encrypt the wallet, but with what? A password?
A good encryption algorithm and a password, yes. It's trivially easy to do this in such a way that the cost of decrypting the file without knowing the password exceeds the value of the wallet.
If you're not interested in a story, don't click on it.
Websites judge the popularity and desire for news or articles on a particular subject based on how many people click on it. If enough people ignore stories about a topic, it'll drop off the radar.
On sites with forums, the amount of forum posts generated by an article serves as further measure for it's popularity. Indeed, for sites that thrive on discussions, a post in the discussion counts much more than simply a click on and reading of the article. So if you really want to see a particular topic covered a lot more, come in and post in the discussion of that topic!
Note: it doesn't really matter what you post. Positive or negative, as long as it's generating discussion, it's considered good and encouragement to post more on the topic.
Congrats. With your post above, you have helped ensure more bitcoin stories on/.
It's not even for drug dealers! Drug dealers want MONEY for their drugs. This is only for the people at the top of the pyramid. You go somewhere trying to buy drugs with bitcoins and you're going to get stabbed.
To be fair, I've known a lot of people involved with drugs over the years, and none of them have ever been stabbed. Drug dealers generally only stab other dealers. Stabbing customers or even potential customers is not good for business...
I've actually noticed a huge amount of articles on Slashdot for bitcoin. However, not a single one of my nerd friends or I have ever discussed it nor read about it in any other news source. Either I've just completely missed a Big Thing, or/. is giving undue front-page time to bitcoin.
An alternate explanation would be that you and your friends are not, in fact, the center of the universe.
The difference, of course, is that typical currencies have their value backed by a government...
If that was what backed up government issued currency, it would be worthless. It's backed up by the goods and services you can buy with it.
...which is (usually) a stable organization that has the legal authority and, if necessary, the force of arms to guarantee the currency.
The value of a currency cannot be backed up by force of arms. Now, if the government will sell you guns for your currency, that would, in fact, back up its value, but I know of no government that backs up its currency with firearms. ("The bearer of this note is entitled to one AK-47." XD)
...it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight, unless there was a major world catastrophe, because it is backed by the U.S. government.
What does "back by the US government" mean in this context?
The US dollar is backed by the goods and services people will give you for one. This is based entirely on their belief that it has value. If people decide it has no value, there ain't a damn thing the US government can do about it.
...and to protect the private key for that, they can store that in the cloud, and protect it with another private key, which they can also store in the cloud if they protect it with another private key...
And since encrypted files can have their password lost, end up deleted, etc., it means that, over time, the number of bitcoins in circulation will actually decrease as more and more are lost (unlike gold, which has an ever increasing supply in circulation, despite occasional losses).
Come on Slashdot, I love Bitcoin and all, but enough already with the blatant advertisements! Is there anything other than allegations here? Even if it did happen, is there anyone who actually expects the police to be able to do anything about this?
How is a story that makes bitcoins look bad an advertisement? And since when do the police have to do something in order for a story to be news? Do you honestly believe the police are doing something about all the other stories on/.? Out of curiousity, what do you think the police are doing about Microsoft releasing an SDK for Kinect?
This also overlooks the fact that there is not, in fact, a small finite supply of gold. Technically all material things in the universe are finite, but it fails on the "small" part, and anyone still invested in gold is going to have their net worth devastated by the time asteroid mining becomes common. Granted, this is not an issue anyone alive today probably has to worry about...
I read the original forum thread yesterday. It didn't sound authentic, it sounded a little "off". It sounded like it was semi-scripted, the voice was all wrong. Did anybody else get that impression?
You mean kinda like your post sounds like someone who is doesn't think logically, but just kinda "feels" their way through life using their gut and no actual thought beyond assessing the relative amount of that "truthiness" feeling everything has?
There are now apparently two copies of a whole lot of bitcoins around (one on the victim's computer, one on the thief's computer). Stealing in computer terms after all means "making an unauthorised copy". The original data is normally still there, no reason to believe that's different here.
This is fundamentally incorrect. What was on the victim's computer was the data needed to move bitcoins around, and this is what was copied. As for the "bitcoins themselves", they essentially exist in the cloud, as data distributed across hundreds of different computers. The theft of a file from the victim's computer did not duplicate or even steal any bitcoins at all. The bitcoins were only stolen when the hacker used the info from the victim's wallet to transfers the bitcoins to his or her own account. The bitcoins are now in the hacker's account. There are no duplicated coins at all, and never were.
Eh, maybe. A week might be pushing it if you don't want to devalue the market too much. A quarter of the entire market daily volume is a lot to unload, even over a week, without having a significant impact on prices. If I was looking to cash out that much, I wouldn't seriously consider doing it by more than one or two percent of daily volume per day...
Really. Not sure why your example, which proves the person you're responding to's point even further, would invoke a "Really?" It's yet another example of something that is now worth a different amount than its purchase price.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you don't suffer from the delusion that money is anything more than data? That hasn't been true for a very long time. Even prior to computers, only a tiny fraction of money was in the form of printed currency notes (dollar bills, etc). Money is, for the most part, numbers written in columns on spreadsheets. US$ are no different from bitcoins in that respect, and therefore, that cannot be the flaw in bitcoin, for it's true of US$ as well. Bitcoin has many flaws, but that isn't one of them.
Because people who don't take risks are people who never make much money.
If you're not interested in a story, don't click on it.
Websites judge the popularity and desire for news or articles on a particular subject based on how many people click on it. If enough people ignore stories about a topic, it'll drop off the radar.
On sites with forums, the amount of forum posts generated by an article serves as further measure for it's popularity. Indeed, for sites that thrive on discussions, a post in the discussion counts much more than simply a click on and reading of the article. So if you really want to see a particular topic covered a lot more, come in and post in the discussion of that topic!
Note: it doesn't really matter what you post. Positive or negative, as long as it's generating discussion, it's considered good and encouragement to post more on the topic.
Congrats. With your post above, you have helped ensure more bitcoin stories on /.
Encrypting with a password is useless (too cheap to crack)...
Err, no. A strong encryption algorithm and a strong password is far more expensive to crack than the value of most people's bitcoin wallet. It would be a monetary loss to bother doing it.
Argh... s/cite/site/
Suggestion: Skip over the headings that don't appeal to you and read the ones that do. Comment on things you feel strongly about. I, for one, enjoy my daily Bitcoin story.
But... having stories you have to skip over... the mere fact that stories are being posted that you're not interested in... this severely threatens your belief that you are the center of the universe. If you're that kind of person, the fact that such stories even get posted makes you extremely mad, and you really have no choice but to quit reading the cite that constantly rubs your face in the fact that you aren't the center of the universe. It's so cruel when a website doesn't tailor its output precisely for you...
You could encrypt the wallet, but with what? A password?
A good encryption algorithm and a password, yes. It's trivially easy to do this in such a way that the cost of decrypting the file without knowing the password exceeds the value of the wallet.
Password encrypting a file is not "security by obscurity".
If you're not interested in a story, don't click on it.
Websites judge the popularity and desire for news or articles on a particular subject based on how many people click on it. If enough people ignore stories about a topic, it'll drop off the radar.
On sites with forums, the amount of forum posts generated by an article serves as further measure for it's popularity. Indeed, for sites that thrive on discussions, a post in the discussion counts much more than simply a click on and reading of the article. So if you really want to see a particular topic covered a lot more, come in and post in the discussion of that topic!
Note: it doesn't really matter what you post. Positive or negative, as long as it's generating discussion, it's considered good and encouragement to post more on the topic.
Congrats. With your post above, you have helped ensure more bitcoin stories on /.
It's not even for drug dealers! Drug dealers want MONEY for their drugs. This is only for the people at the top of the pyramid. You go somewhere trying to buy drugs with bitcoins and you're going to get stabbed.
To be fair, I've known a lot of people involved with drugs over the years, and none of them have ever been stabbed. Drug dealers generally only stab other dealers. Stabbing customers or even potential customers is not good for business...
I've actually noticed a huge amount of articles on Slashdot for bitcoin. However, not a single one of my nerd friends or I have ever discussed it nor read about it in any other news source. Either I've just completely missed a Big Thing, or /. is giving undue front-page time to bitcoin.
An alternate explanation would be that you and your friends are not, in fact, the center of the universe.
The difference, of course, is that typical currencies have their value backed by a government...
If that was what backed up government issued currency, it would be worthless. It's backed up by the goods and services you can buy with it.
...which is (usually) a stable organization that has the legal authority and, if necessary, the force of arms to guarantee the currency.
The value of a currency cannot be backed up by force of arms. Now, if the government will sell you guns for your currency, that would, in fact, back up its value, but I know of no government that backs up its currency with firearms. ("The bearer of this note is entitled to one AK-47." XD)
...it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight, unless there was a major world catastrophe, because it is backed by the U.S. government.
What does "back by the US government" mean in this context?
The US dollar is backed by the goods and services people will give you for one. This is based entirely on their belief that it has value. If people decide it has no value, there ain't a damn thing the US government can do about it.
It wasn't worth nearly that much last month...
Please tell me that was a joke... XD
...and to protect the private key for that, they can store that in the cloud, and protect it with another private key, which they can also store in the cloud if they protect it with another private key...
And since encrypted files can have their password lost, end up deleted, etc., it means that, over time, the number of bitcoins in circulation will actually decrease as more and more are lost (unlike gold, which has an ever increasing supply in circulation, despite occasional losses).
Come on Slashdot, I love Bitcoin and all, but enough already with the blatant advertisements! Is there anything other than allegations here? Even if it did happen, is there anyone who actually expects the police to be able to do anything about this?
How is a story that makes bitcoins look bad an advertisement? And since when do the police have to do something in order for a story to be news? Do you honestly believe the police are doing something about all the other stories on /.? Out of curiousity, what do you think the police are doing about Microsoft releasing an SDK for Kinect?
This also overlooks the fact that there is not, in fact, a small finite supply of gold. Technically all material things in the universe are finite, but it fails on the "small" part, and anyone still invested in gold is going to have their net worth devastated by the time asteroid mining becomes common. Granted, this is not an issue anyone alive today probably has to worry about...
4. It can be used to impress the other sex and get you laid.
For that, it's actually less useful than more liquid assets like fiat currency...
If a bunch of libertarians designed it, it would be backed by gold, not GPU cycles.
That's a bit unfair. Not all libertarians are idiots.
I read the original forum thread yesterday. It didn't sound authentic, it sounded a little "off". It sounded like it was semi-scripted, the voice was all wrong. Did anybody else get that impression?
You mean kinda like your post sounds like someone who is doesn't think logically, but just kinda "feels" their way through life using their gut and no actual thought beyond assessing the relative amount of that "truthiness" feeling everything has?
Some value, yes, but not necessarily 100% of the value that others attribute to it.
Correct. It's only worth 100% of the value that the buyer attributes to it. Everyone else is just blowing hot air...
There are now apparently two copies of a whole lot of bitcoins around (one on the victim's computer, one on the thief's computer). Stealing in computer terms after all means "making an unauthorised copy". The original data is normally still there, no reason to believe that's different here.
This is fundamentally incorrect. What was on the victim's computer was the data needed to move bitcoins around, and this is what was copied. As for the "bitcoins themselves", they essentially exist in the cloud, as data distributed across hundreds of different computers. The theft of a file from the victim's computer did not duplicate or even steal any bitcoins at all. The bitcoins were only stolen when the hacker used the info from the victim's wallet to transfers the bitcoins to his or her own account. The bitcoins are now in the hacker's account. There are no duplicated coins at all, and never were.
Eh, maybe. A week might be pushing it if you don't want to devalue the market too much. A quarter of the entire market daily volume is a lot to unload, even over a week, without having a significant impact on prices. If I was looking to cash out that much, I wouldn't seriously consider doing it by more than one or two percent of daily volume per day...
Really. Not sure why your example, which proves the person you're responding to's point even further, would invoke a "Really?" It's yet another example of something that is now worth a different amount than its purchase price.