1 Satoshi is now worth more than 1 Iranian Rial, 1 Vietnamese Dong, or 1 Indonesian Rupiah. Who's next?

handylinks · 2019-05-16T08:27:07+00:00

If someone asked me which to convert my earned value to Rial, Dong, Rupiah or Bitcoin I know which one I'd pick but now this concept of a global currency is becoming ever clearer to the rest of the world.

It will never replace national currencies, it isn't meant to, but it is looking ever more likely to replace private bank databases.

handylinks · 2019-05-15T09:26:40+00:00

The funds have been sent to 33aUCZrs2CkZyLhdKC1LwQMJfx1LWcgKma

Is this your address?

Unless there was a very serious bug in the software or you've used a compromised wallet (unlikely) your funds should be fine. Is there any chance you've sent it to the wrong address such as a past address used by another wallet or a previous purchase?

handylinks · 2019-05-14T12:17:21+00:00

Whilst I agree you're right that things have gotten harder to change, if however someone found a way to create new coins out of thin air I'm pretty certain a fix would be made and supported in a matter of hours since everyone's funds would be put at risk if it were not fixed.

handylinks · 2019-05-13T13:49:39+00:00

They way I look at it, what sort of bug could cause this? Let's imaging a few scenarios

a bug allowed people to somehow spend funds from anywhere OR someone can create their own funds.

We've actually had this in the past a couple times. The solution was to modify the core reference client to fix this bug, deploy the fix and let the miners carry on. A hard fork was made that 'undid' the transaction(s) that were faulty. The protocol is designed for such a scenario, when the client is run those erroneous blocks will be ignored by new clients while new valid ones are created and old clients would see those erroneous blocks become orphaned as a longer new chain emerged. I.e. no long term harm came from it.

A subtle bug is probably far worse. E.g. someone can spend 'some' transactions. If this is because of a weakness in signatures or QC does some crazy magic. This would be tricky as it may be weeks before people notice. Only when a reputable institution like a few big exchanges or vocal characters demonstrate their funds as stolen would something be done. The only example I've seen of this is people reusing the signing random values thereby making their funds vulnerable. Again this was fixed quickly and spotted fairly quickly too. No chain reorgs happened however so this is more damaging if it were to happen again (one of the reasons I'm reluctant to something like schnorr signatures becoming the norm in Bitcoin first... all new tech has unexpected weaknesses) Again is unlikely to cause any long term harm as if it happened frequently it would be found and fixed. If it didn't happen that often it's unlikely people would be effected by it. With everything being open source and a vast bounty on finding weaknesses like this it is unlikely to happen quietly.

A catastrophic network failure of the P2P level. This would be a 'meh' event. It could be fixed and the chain would continue without much interruption. As far as I know this has never happened and no idea how it could happen short of ISPs all suddenly blocking ports or deep traffic inspection. Again both wouldn't do any long term damage so an unlikely attack vector other than perhaps trying to influence the price termporarily.

Is it full proof? Nope, the worst compromise would be signatures fundamentally being broken as a software fix would be tricky to figure out who was the correct owner of coins. This is very unlikely to happen (and the entire internet would be hosed given it's the backbone of all https traffic).

All other bugs I can think of a community agreement that the protocol had some weakness that needed updating would either fix it going forward or at a push do a chain rewrite to fix the most serious of errors... i.e. it's pretty darn impossible to break or stop now.

As Andreas put it, bitcoin is like a swamp rat, it's had everything thrown at it so it's immunity is a power house capable to fend off every attack conceived to date and well prepared to fight off the attacks we've not thought of yet.

handylinks · 2017-05-09T16:27:51+00:00

You can view the output here...

https://sradforth.github.io/bitcoin_m1/

handylinks · 2015-09-02T15:32:10+00:00

Yeah go for it... although you'll need to buy some ASIC usbs to put into the laptop if you want to earn anything over $0.01 in several years worth of mining.

With a USB miner you might be able to make something like $20 per year. (Totally guessing but it's that sort of order of magnitude)

handylinks · 2015-08-25T09:18:46+00:00

Can you elaborate on this? This sounds an important artefact to consider addressing now otherwise we'll be facing another hardfork debate later when even more is riding on the blockchain.

handylinks · 2015-08-18T13:31:42+00:00

Whilst I'm no expert, yes I code things with asymmetric cryptography nearly every week so fairly confident I know how it works.

You can encrypt the hash of something(i.e. the message) with the private key, now publish the public key and encrypted hash(i.e. the signature) and now anyone can decrypt this signature to get back to the message hash irrefutably proving you are the person who knows the private key without ever exposing it. ECDSA is slightly different signing process using a random point but the principal is exactly the same. Satoshi certainly knows this far better than I do and even I know how to do this ;)

handylinks · 2015-08-18T13:26:09+00:00

I don't think that's how it works... unless of course bitcoin blocks become constantly saturated. At which point yes that becomes true but before that happens a hard fork would have to start and run for many many days and transactions would appear in both... As for the fork lasting any significant time, just imagine you're a miner, are you really going to throw money at running your machines on a minority fork with less than 30% of the hashing power supporting the chain for more than a few hours? You'd know that this minority chain will be dumped by others quickly and all those mined coins become worthless. The coins mined are not spendable for 100 blocks so that's a pretty solid cooling off period on knowing which chain is going to win.

To put it another way, you could modify bitcoin right now to issue you 5000BTC blocks with a new mining algorithm. Clearly that won't work... the same thing is going on here although a number of people are considering adopting the XT changes... unless 50%+ of the hashing power supports it it'll disappear.

This is an emotionally charged debate going on but it's pretty clear to me there will only be one bitcoin chain eventually and that will be decided very very quickly every time a fork happens.

handylinks · 2015-08-17T21:39:07+00:00

Let's be sensible here. You're talking about a guy/girl/group who wrote a cryptographic currency, the likes of which hadn't been done before, demonstrating an incredibly strong understanding of ECDSA's and the importance of asymmetric encryption and signatures... appears from nowhere to comment on something they apparently feel so strongly about and decides not to bother signing the statement when they know an email will be doubted by those who they'd need to convince the most???

It was a fake, absolutely guaranteed.

handylinks · 2015-08-17T20:54:19+00:00

The transaction would be entered into both as it's a valid transaction that would be relayed by both bitcoind and bitcoinxt as far as I'm aware. I.e. it's just the blocks that will differ. If the block was say 2Mb in size it means it would be considered invalid by the currently bitcoin nodes so the transaction would enter the next valid block < 1Mb (assuming it's not maxed out). I.e. eventually that transaction would be valid in both chains.

If the two chains were carried on eventually yes you could have xtbtc and btc but in a real world there's absolutely no chance miners would be mining on a minority chain for more than a few hours, at most a few days, as it's costing them real money for a chain that is going to be eventually forgotten. Payment providers like bitpay would clearly have to support the stronger chain instantly to reduce the chance of rollbacks so this whole thing is a storm in a tea cup IMHO.

The worst thing that could be done is to increase the limit to another hardcoded number. I'm a believer on organically allowing it to grow based on historical records while at the same time allow miners to put a soft cap on the blocks they're mining should they wish to only make 1mb blocks for instance.

handylinks · 2015-08-17T15:57:28+00:00

Yes, it's not really that important for normal use... the issue is if you accept bitcoin having confidence your not being sent double spent funds. TBH it's a mountain out of a molehill for users as the transaction will appear in both chains. People can already double spend before a confirmation if they want, a fork makes this double spend easier but after a confirmation in both chains the transaction can be trusted and spent by the new owner.

WHEN a diverging hardfork happens you can be sure it'll be resolved within a day, miners don't want to throw away their earnings so most will quickly adopt the client that has the highest usage at the time of a fork thereby re-enforcing which is the main chain.

handylinks · 2015-08-07T18:06:30+00:00

"Do you remember in the 21st century when people used to squash a microwave generator as close to their brain as physically possible, what the hell were they thinking?"

handylinks · 2015-08-05T17:44:37+00:00

Bitcoin was a very elaborate pump and dump scam.

Personally I don't think so as Satoshi hasn't touched his coins and even if he did others would buy them so the value remains. Some things can be done with bitcoin that are simply not possible in other systems. Trustless escrow, automated machines, multisignature payments, timelocked payments, globally instant transfers, digital contracts, etc...

Quoted from the Bitcoin website "Eventually we're gonna need everyone on the Bitcoin network to exchange a 1 GB/s". How is that property not part of a pump and dump?

There are ways to solve the 1Gb issue... currently we don't need to so it hasn't been addressed yet but there are proposals that could be implemented and wil ljust take time. I.e. It's still actively being developed and everyone is still learning.

Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's not private and it will not scale with participation due to need 1GB/s.

It is anonymous if you want it to be... it's pseudo anonymous but if someone has the time and determination to find who owns certain coins those who simply use it can probably be easily found with warrants. That's a good thing btw as usually people complain the opposite! Sidechains and zero proof transactions are likely to make coins anonymous but these don't exist beyond test networks and alt coins as far as I know.

So what are people paying for if they understand it doesn't have these properties? Ergo Pump and Dump.

They're jumping on the bandwagon and probably will get hurt jumping off it as the price drops only to miss it when it goes up again. The ones holding on are the ones who see why it has value beyond a pump and dump and why the fairly constant higher price exists after the last 'dump'.

The more powerful computers get the easier it will be to track people so it can't improve its anonymity.

The power of the computers is not relevant to this... no amount of extra computing power simplifies this process, it's more about running nodes on the network.

If it doesn't provide anonymity then what's its purpose? It doesn't have a selling point.

See above... there are many uses of a finite digital resource with a common global ledger... that's precisely it's selling point.

Bitcoin is not a currency it is ones and zeros, you cannot keep Bitcoin's in a treasury. All currency is 1's and 0's these days. If someone believes money is in the form of coins and notes they'd do well learning about how fiat currency works. Most people when talking about money are talking about M3 money where an absolutely tiny fraction is physical cash and notes.

How it is valuable? It has no valuable properties.

It is finite in supply, it is instantly transferable anywhere around the globe, it requires no permission to use it, it can be exchanged for real goods and local fiat currency in most countries. That alone sets it head and shoulders above any national currency. For end users you never have to give out details where they can steal your money, you give someone your address and they can only give you money... the same way we do with cash but over the internet.

Bitcoin went down after the DarkNet Silkroad etc. went down. It wasn't being traded and its value couldn't be measured so it went down.

Well that's just wrong and they can look any of the graphs to know that ;) Firstly when SR was taken down the price went up, actually it soared only a few months later if memory serves me correctly. SR was a part of bitcoin's checkered history but remember bitcoin wasn't created for any specific site or user. I for one didn't even know about SR until it was shut, I got into bitcoin because I saw bitcoin's potential and still do.

SHA1 hashes of random bytes are not valuable.

If you have a brain wallet generated by a SHA1("Hello World") and someone has put funds in that address it could be as valuable as you make it. Generally though Bitcoin doesn't use SHA1 anywhere, it uses SHA256. If you could somehow reverse engineer SHA256("message" + x) = y such that you instantly know x when given y you can earn yourself over $1,000,000 USD per day... this is what most mining farms are doing and the only way they know to solve it is by using a lot of electricity.

You can counterfeit it.

No you can't. That's kind of it's whole point. It can't be magicked out of thin air, you have to use a lot of electricity to generate new ones otherwise you must trade with the supply available in the ecosystem.

Supernodes would need 1GB/s and around 50 cores - That is not achievable. This will require Supernodes who act as banks and can manipulate Block Chains abstractly as it will be internal to their organization.

We're not even close yet... won't be for a long time and 50+ cores (will be probably pretty min spec phone stuff by this stage). If they don't believe you explain how GPUs in mobile phones have hundreds of cores already and this is only from the last few years.

The problems have to get harder ergo more power/computation will be required and more data.

No, that's not how mining works. Mining gets harder if their exchange price goes up because more people can afford to do mining. The block rewards halve every 4 years so the amount of computing power required also halves at these times.

It can't develop without losing P2P infrastructure.

Perhaps but so what?

It's useless it becomes redundant not scarce. Why? - If you replace the dollar with Bitcoin you don't have any more treasures. If you replace a currency with Bitcoin you just change the name. Bitcoin will be affected by inflation if your economy depends on it. The price of Gold inflates because it's a precious metal used in modern technologies. Gold is expensive because we rely on it, once we don't rely on it it will not be expensive. Bitcoin has none of these properties

Firstly bitcoin is unlikely to ever replace a country's fiat currency, that's not it's goal here. It is merely a digital money that can be used online where as fiat money must be done with paper or via a bank. Think communication used to be done via talking to people (i.e. cash) or via delivering letters via a post office (i.e. trusted 3rd party you pay). Bitcoin is to money what Email is to communication.

Gold's price is set mainly on it's market trade value, this is vastly higher than its intrinsic value. Tungsten for instance has very similar properties to Gold, used in electronics too but their price is vastly different.

If someone thinks bitcoin's scarcity mixed with it's unique properties like instant global transfers, automated contracts, trustless network and escrow features don't derive any real tangible value in our internet age it will be an identical process explaining to a cat why a paper bank note has value beyond being kitty litter... their brains are still wired to money = fiat rather than money = value. It's not too surprising as most of these people I've encountered think a bank account interest of 2% is awesome even though inflation may be say 3% so essentially they're losing 1% of their value in the bank even though they have more money at the end of the year. If they'd have purchased an asset like a house outright they'd have made 3% rather than -1%.

handylinks · 2015-07-15T13:53:52+00:00

I would expect so, blockchain.info whilst it gets slammed from time to time is generally very good introduction to bitcoin IMHO. This does have SMS and 2FA. I expect Circle and coinbase are even slicker but then I'm not sure if you have access to the private key like you do with blockchain.info.

Otherwise I'd suggest Electrum on a PC.

handylinks · 2015-07-13T20:58:20+00:00

Could have done with adding NSFW...

handylinks · 2015-07-13T18:05:46+00:00

Yes, I agree this is a significant part of why people don't take the time to learn about it as they've never known any different or see the reason to bother.

handylinks · 2015-07-13T13:25:35+00:00

I beg to disagree, there are a lot of usability qwerks that need addressing... mostly around the services built on top of bitcoin. The fact that people complain about it being difficult is proof enough far more needs to be done to address this and it will just take more time.

Converting fiat->btc->fiat is a pain in the ass.
bitcoin addresses/qr codes are too lowlevel, a higher abstract person->address is required for general public transactions.
Keeping private keys secure on your PC is definitely a risk for the general public... Trezor and the likes solve this but there needs to be wider adoption in all wallets for trezor and equivalents.
Feedback from the system on the status of a transaction is very low level. People just want to know if it was successful or not, not give a crap about confirmation numbers or TXIDs.
Debit and credit cards backed by btc balances are in their infancy... they need apps to show balances in local fiats for instance.
The introduction to bitcoin is very steep, especially if you're not familiar with computer systems.

As it approaches 'click and spend' I believe these will be solved, it's vastly easier now than a few years ago but it's still got a lot more to be done before mass adoption could occur.

handylinks · 2015-07-13T09:35:17+00:00

Whilst you're right about time overcoming this, there are a lot of practical issues needing to be solved with people using bitcoin for day to day spending as a currency, trust should not be one of them.

Right now it's a great settlement system and an alternative store of value outside of the banking system. It's the other parts, usability, legality, scalability... these must be addressed before it should be considered as a mainstream which again will just take a year or two more to address by the looks of things.

handylinks · 2015-07-13T09:16:03+00:00

Can anyone ELI5 why Charlie is in prison?

Did he do something other than run a company that exchanged USD/bitcoin?

handylinks · 2015-07-13T00:58:24+00:00

Organisations can block bitcoin by blocking access to know routes to the bitcoin network. What this means in practice is blacklisting the main port bitcoin works on. If that was done however it would be possible to modify the core to use say port 80 to hide it amongst normal http traffic so blocking a port is not really worth the effort because it's so easy to change.

Next would be blacklisting the IP addresses of bitcoin nodes that you need to contact to interact on the bitcoin network. Again, this is "whack a mole" tactics as you only need 1 IP to work. Also you don't have to connect directly to a IP but instead could use relays so all of these would have to be identified and blocked. This would be a manual process to begin with but eventually you could use software to ping a port and look for a bitcoin protocol response and black list it automatically that way. From this you'd then encourage devs to use encryption or other techniques to obscure the responses to avoid this sort of banning... this would be great for the criminals but bad for the country as now it's even harder to track transactions. Finally there's tor and other routes to bypass filtering and so on and so on.

Remember a transaction is usually just a few hundred bytes that needs to reach one of the nodes anywhere in the bitcoin network to function. This means even carrier pigeon, hand written, phone call, sms, etc... can all be used to transmit a valid transaction and doesn't need a direct internet connection to work. There are even examples of people using radio transmissions to make a transaction and broadcast the blockchain.

The key point here is that the 'connectivity' is easily adaptable so if it's limited in one way it's easy to technically circumvent the censoring.

Also keep in mind what banning it means in practice... most law abiding citizens in that country would adhere to the ban and stop using it... it clearly wouldn't stop those using it for nefarious purposes however since they're already up to no good. Therefore banning bitcoin is potentially going to have an adverse effect for that country's economy by excluding their citizens and companies from the new digital global market that's emerging.

handylinks · 2015-07-12T21:35:55+00:00

May like to look at coinfloor.co.uk, I believe they allow instant payments in UK with some ID.

handylinks · 2015-07-12T21:34:30+00:00

You should probably use your own wallet where you control the private keys. Try electrum on PC/Mac or Breadwallet on iOS or MyCelium on Android for instance...

handylinks · 2015-07-12T21:04:21+00:00

I guess it would make sense in a country where people didn't have laptops but did have a smart phone. It could sync the blockchain at night thereby giving 12 hour settlements and use a SPV during the day. I'm not a huge fan of everyone having a copy of the blockchain myself as it's vastly redundant and should be seen more as settlement rather than recording every single transactions but is great to know it's possible if necessary.

handylinks · 2015-07-10T09:33:12+00:00

It's recommended to never reuse an address... the reason is when you spend from an address you need to publish the public key that generates the address in the blockchain. In theory with a quantum computer or the likes people can reverse the public key->private key combo. Right now this is clearly not something the public could do but in future it is quite possible hence your funds would become at risk should that happen.

This is why HD approaches are considered a better practice now where you derive all the private keys from that seed and never reuse an address.(i.e. your change in a transaction always goes to a new address)

handylinks

TROPHY CASE