Bitcoins - anyone else mining? (1 Viewer)

[Kool-Aid Larry]

what do you guys think is going on with litecoins, et al?

is that just all public speculation based on bitcoin news?

Yeah. The system is basically identical to the Bitcoin except that it has a 2.5 minute block time (4 times as fast), makes 84 million coins (4 times as many), and was designed to be more resistant to an arms race (algorithm needs a lot of memory). The whole thing is still entirely deflationary towards early adopters, and it appears the gold rush there is missed too.

yeah, but why do you say that?

you could've said the same a year ago when bitcoin bubbled up to 200, or whatever it was.

is there any reason to believe litecoins will or won't follow in bitcoin's wake?

at some point the house of cards has to come down, I suppose, but is that today or tomorrow, or next week?

 

[DrJ]

what do you guys think is going on with litecoins, et al?

is that just all public speculation based on bitcoin news?

Yeah. The system is basically identical to the Bitcoin except that it has a 2.5 minute block time (4 times as fast), makes 84 million coins (4 times as many), and was designed to be more resistant to an arms race (algorithm needs a lot of memory). The whole thing is still entirely deflationary towards early adopters, and it appears the gold rush there is missed too.

yeah, but why do you say that?

you could've said the same a year ago when bitcoin bubbled up to 200, or whatever it was.

is there any reason to believe litecoins will or won't follow in bitcoin's wake?

at some point the house of cards has to come down, I suppose, but is that today or tomorrow, or next week?

Hey, I could be wrong and people will continue to get suckered. People are dumb and free money is attractive. And if you want to get in the business of taking people's money like this, more power to you. But the more I read about this, I'm actually kind of content that I stayed out of it. I'd rather make my money being productive and actually giving something to the world rather than swindling them in the name of "liberty".

 

[Kool-Aid Larry]

Here's what appears to be a nice archive of the original cryptography mailing list discussions:

http://search.gmane.org/?query=Nakamoto&author=&group=gmane.comp.encryption.general&sort=revdate&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zsatoshi&xFILTERS=Gcomp.encryption.general---A

I like #6 from "Satoshi":

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does notnecessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number ofpeople using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will bedeflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

that's just this, right?

 

[Kool-Aid Larry]

what do you guys think is going on with litecoins, et al?

is that just all public speculation based on bitcoin news?

Yeah. The system is basically identical to the Bitcoin except that it has a 2.5 minute block time (4 times as fast), makes 84 million coins (4 times as many), and was designed to be more resistant to an arms race (algorithm needs a lot of memory). The whole thing is still entirely deflationary towards early adopters, and it appears the gold rush there is missed too.

yeah, but why do you say that?

you could've said the same a year ago when bitcoin bubbled up to 200, or whatever it was.

is there any reason to believe litecoins will or won't follow in bitcoin's wake?

at some point the house of cards has to come down, I suppose, but is that today or tomorrow, or next week?

Hey, I could be wrong and people will continue to get suckered. People are dumb and free money is attractive. And if you want to get in the business of taking people's money like this, more power to you. But the more I read about this, I'm actually kind of content that I stayed out of it. I'd rather make my money being productive and actually giving something to the world rather than swindling them in the name of "liberty".

are you swindling people if you took an online poker pot?

as an aside, I notice a lot of people referencing value of large sums of bitcoins, like, they're 'worth' 10b, or some guy's wallet is 'worth' 100m, or whatever.

I think that's a little misleading, as those guys could never dump that volume for the market price -- I doubt there would be enough legit demand.

it's like a whale dumping 100k into a betting pool -- he kills his own odds.

 

[DrJ]

Here's what appears to be a nice archive of the original cryptography mailing list discussions:

http://search.gmane.org/?query=Nakamoto&author=&group=gmane.comp.encryption.general&sort=revdate&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zsatoshi&xFILTERS=Gcomp.encryption.general---A

I like #6 from "Satoshi":

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does notnecessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number ofpeople using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will bedeflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

that's just this, right?

The release was post #24 on that list. But post #6 in the earlier discussion phase indicates he has a very clear understanding that this would be deflationary for the early users as constructed in said release.

Here's a quote from Hal in the early internet days regarding online Credit Card securirty:

Most current Web browsers, however, scramble data sent to Web sites, provided the sites in question support such encryption -- and almost all shopping sites do. This makes Net transactions (paying for something by typing your credit card information into an on-screen form) signi5cantly more secure than, say, paying a restaurant bill. While there have been several well-publicized crackings of low-grade versions of these encryption standards, the people doing the cracking -- to protest the use of those government-mandated, weaker "export-grade" encryption techniques in Netscape and other companies' Web browsers -- don't see a danger for current users.

"Our demonstration was political more than economic," e-mailed Hal Finney, a programmer and computer security expert in Santa Barbara, Calif. who recently challenged other programmers on-line to defeat Netscape's export-grade encryption (they did). "Due to the small volume of transactions and the relatively high cost to break even the weaker international encryption, I would not worry about sending a credit card number with that encryption."

Finney pointed to the future as grounds for concern, though. "Imagine in 5ve or ten years that almost all shopping other than at the local mall is done via the Net," he wrote. "That starts to become a target-rich environment."

A guy that's got a background and understanding of security like this, who notes in the early days that the net would become target rich as more people started using it, is all of the sudden willing to throw decades of experience out the window and expect the world's currency system to operate on "simple altruism". Pretty hard to buy unless this is a hoax.

 

[DrJ]

what do you guys think is going on with litecoins, et al?

is that just all public speculation based on bitcoin news?

Yeah. The system is basically identical to the Bitcoin except that it has a 2.5 minute block time (4 times as fast), makes 84 million coins (4 times as many), and was designed to be more resistant to an arms race (algorithm needs a lot of memory). The whole thing is still entirely deflationary towards early adopters, and it appears the gold rush there is missed too.

yeah, but why do you say that?

you could've said the same a year ago when bitcoin bubbled up to 200, or whatever it was.

is there any reason to believe litecoins will or won't follow in bitcoin's wake?

at some point the house of cards has to come down, I suppose, but is that today or tomorrow, or next week?

Hey, I could be wrong and people will continue to get suckered. People are dumb and free money is attractive. And if you want to get in the business of taking people's money like this, more power to you. But the more I read about this, I'm actually kind of content that I stayed out of it. I'd rather make my money being productive and actually giving something to the world rather than swindling them in the name of "liberty".

are you swindling people if you took an online poker pot?

as an aside, I notice a lot of people referencing value of large sums of bitcoins, like, they're 'worth' 10b, or some guy's wallet is 'worth' 100m, or whatever.

I think that's a little misleading, as those guys could never dump that volume for the market price -- I doubt there would be enough legit demand.

it's like a whale dumping 100k into a betting pool -- he kills his own odds.

No. But while there is an element of risk to investing, it's a stretch to make a direct comparison to people engaging in a game of chance for money. The people being sold on this are being told it's a good investment based on its merits, and that's a little dishonest if you don't actually believe it and are simply looking to make a fast buck on its wild swings.

 

[Kool-Aid Larry]

yeah, I don't understand your thinking at all.

everybody piling on is simply throwing money at a get rich quick scheme, same as buying scratch tix --- you aren't taking anyone's money, they're giving it, and that's assuming you cash out and the thing actually crashes instead of continuing upwards.

I think most playing poker would regard it as a game of skill, and that's basically what playing markets is.

do you avoid 'investing' in any market 'cuz some guy loses money in it?

 

[DrJ]

As for the idea of people referring to these amounts in people's wallets as "worth 10 million" and all of that, it gets you thinking. It's kind of like the housing market bubble in a lot of ways. The appraised value of everyone's house and all of the loans being created are all based on the last sale price. It has nothing to do with what people's houses could actually sell for if all of them hit the market at the exact same time or whether our economy can support these levels of prices long term. This is how bankers were able to print up trillions of dollars in "wealth", otherwise known as loans, and the fed is left to scramble to make up for all of the "wealth" that disappeared overnight. Bankers and the government are playing their own games with our money. That's what gives this idea some of its appeal, and why the genesis block was planted with the message that it was. But in the bitcoin world, despite the billing otherwise, this is even easier to pull off. You don't have to deal with the bank anymore, instead you have 50 dudes that grabbed up all of the currency before really telling much of anyone about it. And you're at the mercy of them and their technical abilites, a system that was designed on the assumption that everyone will play nice, a few chip makers and guys who run pools, and a bunch of maybe not so well meaning technology geeks who could take down the entire internet if they really wanted to but don't have any real benefit in doing so as of today - currently it's much more useful to just parasite off of us. But outside of that sounds pretty good in theory.

 

[DrJ]

yeah, I don't understand your thinking at all.

everybody piling on is simply throwing money at a get rich quick scheme, same as buying scratch tix --- you aren't taking anyone's money, they're giving it, and that's assuming you cash out and the thing actually crashes instead of continuing upwards.

I think most playing poker would regard it as a game of skill, and that's basically what playing markets is.

do you avoid 'investing' in any market 'cuz some guy loses money in it?

I'm not some final authority on any of this, so do whatever you're comfortable with. There's a thread from around the April point of this year on their forums called "Mistakes you've made with bitcoin". One of the guys said his friend was retiring around the time these were at $5 and asked him if it would be a good idea to put $5,000 into this to diversify his portfolio. He advised against it. I'd hate to be the guy that causes you to not be rich when they're the new world currency and worth 1 million dollars each and the dollar no longer exists. Especially if that's what will make you happy in life. But to me, it just doesn't seem all that honest. As for Litecoins - just realize, the world's not big enough for 2 currencies and everything you own might evaporate overnight if you don't get this right. So choose wisely.

 

[culdeus]

yeah, I don't understand your thinking at all.

everybody piling on is simply throwing money at a get rich quick scheme, same as buying scratch tix --- you aren't taking anyone's money, they're giving it, and that's assuming you cash out and the thing actually crashes instead of continuing upwards.

I think most playing poker would regard it as a game of skill, and that's basically what playing markets is.

do you avoid 'investing' in any market 'cuz some guy loses money in it?

I'm not some final authority on any of this, so do whatever you're comfortable with. There's a thread from around the April point of this year on their forums called "Mistakes you've made with bitcoin". One of the guys said his friend was retiring around the time these were at $5 and asked him if it would be a good idea to put $5,000 into this to diversify his portfolio. He advised against it. I'd hate to be the guy that causes you to not be rich when they're the new world currency and worth 1 million dollars each and the dollar no longer exists. Especially if that's what will make you happy in life. But to me, it just doesn't seem all that honest. As for Litecoins - just realize, the world's not big enough for 2 currencies and everything you own might evaporate overnight if you don't get this right. So choose wisely.

I know if I gave bad advice on the internet I'd never get over myself. I mean every bit of advice I get that could make me rich I should follow. I'd hate to make someone feel bad.

 

[Slapdash]

Here's what appears to be a nice archive of the original cryptography mailing list discussions:

http://search.gmane.org/?query=Nakamoto&author=&group=gmane.comp.encryption.general&sort=revdate&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zsatoshi&xFILTERS=Gcomp.encryption.general---A

I like #6 from "Satoshi":

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does notnecessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number ofpeople using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will bedeflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

that's just this, right?

The release was post #24 on that list. But post #6 in the earlier discussion phase indicates he has a very clear understanding that this would be deflationary for the early users as constructed in said release.

Here's a quote from Hal in the early internet days regarding online Credit Card securirty:

Most current Web browsers, however, scramble data sent to Web sites, provided the sites in question support such encryption -- and almost all shopping sites do. This makes Net transactions (paying for something by typing your credit card information into an on-screen form) signi5cantly more secure than, say, paying a restaurant bill. While there have been several well-publicized crackings of low-grade versions of these encryption standards, the people doing the cracking -- to protest the use of those government-mandated, weaker "export-grade" encryption techniques in Netscape and other companies' Web browsers -- don't see a danger for current users.

"Our demonstration was political more than economic," e-mailed Hal Finney, a programmer and computer security expert in Santa Barbara, Calif. who recently challenged other programmers on-line to defeat Netscape's export-grade encryption (they did). "Due to the small volume of transactions and the relatively high cost to break even the weaker international encryption, I would not worry about sending a credit card number with that encryption."

Finney pointed to the future as grounds for concern, though. "Imagine in 5ve or ten years that almost all shopping other than at the local mall is done via the Net," he wrote. "That starts to become a target-rich environment."

A guy that's got a background and understanding of security like this, who notes in the early days that the net would become target rich as more people started using it, is all of the sudden willing to throw decades of experience out the window and expect the world's currency system to operate on "simple altruism". Pretty hard to buy unless this is a hoax.

It is abundantly clear what is going on here:

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does not

necessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number of

people using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will be

deflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.

Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

 

[DrJ]

Here's what appears to be a nice archive of the original cryptography mailing list discussions: http://search.gmane.org/?query=Nakamoto&author=&group=gmane.comp.encryption.general&sort=revdate&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zsatoshi&xFILTERS=Gcomp.encryption.general---A I like #6 from "Satoshi":The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does not

necessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number of

people using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will be

deflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.

Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

that's just this, right?

The release was post #24 on that list. But post #6 in the earlier discussion phase indicates he has a very clear understanding that this would be deflationary for the early users as constructed in said release. Here's a quote from Hal in the early internet days regarding online Credit Card securirty:

Most current Web browsers, however, scramble data sent to Web sites, provided the sites in question support such encryption -- and almost all shopping sites do. This makes Net transactions (paying for something by typing your credit card information into an on-screen form) signi5cantly more secure than, say, paying a restaurant bill. While there have been several well-publicized crackings of low-grade versions of these encryption standards, the people doing the cracking -- to protest the use of those government-mandated, weaker "export-grade" encryption techniques in Netscape and other companies' Web browsers -- don't see a danger for current users. "Our demonstration was political more than economic," e-mailed Hal Finney, a programmer and computer security expert in Santa Barbara, Calif. who recently challenged other programmers on-line to defeat Netscape's export-grade encryption (they did). "Due to the small volume of transactions and the relatively high cost to break even the weaker international encryption, I would not worry about sending a credit card number with that encryption."Finney pointed to the future as grounds for concern, though. "Imagine in 5ve or ten years that almost all shopping other than at the local mall is done via the Net," he wrote. "That starts to become a target-rich environment."

A guy that's got a background and understanding of security like this, who notes in the early days that the net would become target rich as more people started using it, is all of the sudden willing to throw decades of experience out the window and expect the world's currency system to operate on "simple altruism". Pretty hard to buy unless this is a hoax.

It is abundantly clear what is going on here:

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does notnecessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number ofpeople using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will bedeflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

Yeah, and it's also abundantly clear that Satoshi/Hal did this intentionally.

 

[Ted Mullins]

DrJ, thanks for your posts in here - some of the most insightful information I have seen about this subject anywhere tbh.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

 

[DrJ]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Just noting this for future reference:

Paypal processed about $175,000,000,000.00 in transactions this year

As of 12/11/13 Bitpay has processed over $100,000,000.00 or about 0.05% of Paypal's volume this year - I'm surprised they have done that much, a ton of room to grow there

"Bitpay" ≠ "Bitcoin", but merely an electronic payment processing system for the bitcoin currency, albeit the largest

 

[DrJ]

Just noting this for future reference:

Paypal processed about $175,000,000,000.00 in transactions this year

As of 12/11/13 Bitpay has processed over $100,000,000.00 or about 0.05% of Paypal's volume this year - I'm surprised they have done that much, a ton of room to grow there

"Bitpay" ≠ "Bitcoin", but merely an electronic payment processing system for the bitcoin currency, albeit the largest

Run by the creators and controllers of the currency. That all makes me feel better.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

 

[[icon]]

This is actually brilliant...

• Create new currency
• Front load the #### out of the distribution to dramatically concentrate wealth
• Hype it and force supply shortages by decreasing rate at which new currency enters market
• Hold enough to manipulate price and artificially keep it high enough to bleed off your massive stockpile of said currency

• Let go of the joystick and let it collapse

It's the world's biggest ponzi scheme... brilliant, really

 

[DrJ]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

To an extent they can, but trying to act like this is gold is stupid. A network of hackers don't control almost all of the world's gold or resources to mine and secure said gold. Not to mention that Gold is a mature commodity that has stood the test of thousands of years.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Just noting this for future reference:

Paypal processed about $175,000,000,000.00 in transactions this year

As of 12/11/13 Bitpay has processed over $100,000,000.00 or about 0.05% of Paypal's volume this year - I'm surprised they have done that much, a ton of room to grow there

"Bitpay" ≠ "Bitcoin", but merely an electronic payment processing system for the bitcoin currency, albeit the largest

Run by the creators and controllers of the currency. That all makes me feel better.

"controllers of the currency" what are you trying to say here?

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

To an extent they can, but trying to act like this is gold is stupid. A network of hackers don't control almost all of the world's gold or resources to mine and secure said gold. Not to mention that Gold is a mature commodity that has stood the test of thousands of years.

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

 

[[icon]]

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

have you read any of the last couple pages regarding phantom trades at inflated values?

 

[DrJ]

This is actually brilliant...

• Create new currency

• Front load the #### out of the distribution to dramatically concentrate wealth

• Hype it and force supply shortages by decreasing rate at which new currency enters market

• Hold enough to manipulate price and artificially keep it high enough to bleed off your massive stockpile of said currency

• Let go of the joystick and let it collapse

It's the world's biggest ponzi scheme... brilliant, really

That's what I'm saying. And anyone that heard about this and did enough research could have easily figured that part out. But to really be rich you had to buy this whole bit hook line and sinker along the way. Knowing it's a ponzi scheme doomed to crash, are you going to sit there holding when it hits $100, when these guys push it back down to $60?

 

[DrJ]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

To an extent they can, but trying to act like this is gold is stupid. A network of hackers don't control almost all of the world's gold or resources to mine and secure said gold. Not to mention that Gold is a mature commodity that has stood the test of thousands of years.

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

Yeah, I'd say my posts on the last couple pages pretty much back this up. Care to take exception to any specific point?

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

have you read any of the last couple pages regarding phantom trades at inflated values?

Yes I saw people speculating, haven't seen any credible links but would be happy to read them if someone can provide one.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

To an extent they can, but trying to act like this is gold is stupid. A network of hackers don't control almost all of the world's gold or resources to mine and secure said gold. Not to mention that Gold is a mature commodity that has stood the test of thousands of years.

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

Yeah, I'd say my posts on the last couple pages pretty much back this up. Care to take exception to any specific point?

Give me a credible link - all I see is a bunch of poorly worded/spelled copy and paste posts.

 

[DrJ]

The answer for most was about the $100 or less range too it seems. I saw a post in one phase of this on their forums titled "when are you going to sell" or something like that. Options were like: $10-30, $30-50, $50-100, $100, $1000, When I can travel to the moon with them. This is what's so hilarious about it all too - most people were happy to let go of their "new world currency made in the name of liberty" for something on the lower end of the scale. I'd say it was like 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%. About 10% were saying $1000 and another 10% want to be able to travel to the moon with them.

These guys had this built in market data all concentrated in their forums and stuff - it's really some impressive stuff.

 

[DrJ]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.

Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

You sound like one of those guys saying gold and silver prices are manipulated as well.

To an extent they can, but trying to act like this is gold is stupid. A network of hackers don't control almost all of the world's gold or resources to mine and secure said gold. Not to mention that Gold is a mature commodity that has stood the test of thousands of years.

You keep using the word control - care to back that up?

Yeah, I'd say my posts on the last couple pages pretty much back this up. Care to take exception to any specific point?

Give me a credible link - all I see is a bunch of poorly worded/spelled copy and paste posts.

It's a mailing list. That's how they're formatted. The whole discussion is pretty interested if you're technically geeky, but the specific posts I referenced are #6, #17, #25, and #26.

http://search.gmane.org/?query=Nakamoto&author=&group=gmane.comp.encryption.general&sort=revdate&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zsatoshi&xFILTERS=Gcomp.encryption.general---A

In #6, "Satoshi" demonstrates a very clear understanding that he is well aware this system was deflationary as designed. #17 Hal wants to throw all of his background out the window and let this operate on "pure altruism", wants to see alpha code to demonstrate it all, and even provides a link to a Sourceforge project he "found" that has the same name as his earlier work. #25 "Satoshi" releases this. #26 Hal praises the release and starts worrying about the "value" of this new world currency set up in this deflationary fashion - not worrying in the slightest about evaluating the merits anymore or technical feasibility.

Here's the links cstu provided that demonstrate Finney's background (including the fact that he was the #2 developer for PGP):

http://www.finney.org/~hal/

http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/

http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/slides/slide001.html

Here's Finney's Wiki Page, link #5 in the references includes the quote from 1996 I referenced. It also references his earlier work that bares striking similarity to Bitcoin (a fact he never mentioned in any of these discussions) and the fact that he's a known cyptography activist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_%28cypherpunk%29

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Dr. J:

So your credible link is a mailing list that describes the bitcoin release schedule?

image

This was known from the start. I'm looking for a credible link describing this phantom trading that manipulates the day-to-day price which you and Icon seem pretty confident about.

 

[DrJ]

Actually, here's the original paper by the RSA guys.

http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bithogs.pdf

Page 11 talks about basically every large transaction stemming from a single 90K transaction made on November 10th 2010.

Other findings (Page 7):

- 78% were in savings accounts that never did any transactions.

- 36% of all owners recieved less than 1 BTC in their lifetime, 52% fewer than 10, and 88% fewer than 100.

- 4 owners received over 800,000 BTC's and 80 received over 400,000. And based on the findings from that 90K transaction, those owners seemed to like to pass around large amounts of them back and forth, never letting them hit the general public.

I wonder if there's any way to bring these guys up for fraud if they can prove they intentionally swindled people out of piles of money...and actually prove who this "Satoshi" entity is...

 

[[icon]]

I'm looking for a credible link describing this phantom trading that manipulates the day-to-day price which you and Icon seem pretty confident about.

Oh I'm sure they're out there documenting it with evidence on their blog

 

[DrJ]

The RSA paper:

Fig.5.
A Sub graph of Fig. 1: An owner is sending 90,000 BTC's to himself in a self
loop, then transfers it forward but gets it back via 90 transfers of 1,000 BTC's each,
all carried out on the same day. 31,000 of it is then transferred forward

But hey, I'm sure this is all on the up and up today...

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Actually, here's the original paper by the RSA guys.

http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bithogs.pdf

Page 11 talks about basically every large transaction stemming from a single 90K transaction made on November 10th 2010.

Other findings (Page 7):

- 78% were in savings accounts that never did any transactions.

- 36% of all owners recieved less than 1 BTC in their lifetime, 52% fewer than 10, and 88% fewer than 100.

- 4 owners received over 800,000 BTC's and 80 received over 400,000. And based on the findings from that 90K transaction, those owners seemed to like to pass around large amounts of them back and forth, never letting them hit the general public.

I wonder if there's any way to bring these guys up for fraud if they can prove they intentionally swindled people out of piles of money...and actually prove who this "Satoshi" entity is...

So you are citing a document from a year ago? (October 18, 2012) That references transactions from 3 years ago? (November 8th 2010)

Is your assertion from this document that when a quantum computer is built that bitcoin is doomed?

If you are referring to mixing bitcoins (into various wallets) this is also a pretty well known procedure.

There's quite a few comments on the paper you linked here (again from a year ago)

I'm not going to comment about the bitcoin market from 2010 - to be honest nothing would surprise me, the market was very immature then - what was btc trading at in the cents per bitcoin or something? However if you want to provide some sort of evidence / proof / anything credible that the market today in 2013 is being manipulated then please do. You are talking about stuff that happened in the first few months of bitcoin - price history when a bitcoin was valued at less than a cent to as high as 8 cents.

It wasn't until:

Feb 2011 – April 2011 $1 Bitcoin takes parity with US dollar

.

 

[DrJ]

Actually, here's the original paper by the RSA guys.

http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bithogs.pdf

Page 11 talks about basically every large transaction stemming from a single 90K transaction made on November 10th 2010.

Other findings (Page 7):

- 78% were in savings accounts that never did any transactions.

- 36% of all owners recieved less than 1 BTC in their lifetime, 52% fewer than 10, and 88% fewer than 100.

- 4 owners received over 800,000 BTC's and 80 received over 400,000. And based on the findings from that 90K transaction, those owners seemed to like to pass around large amounts of them back and forth, never letting them hit the general public.

I wonder if there's any way to bring these guys up for fraud if they can prove they intentionally swindled people out of piles of money...and actually prove who this "Satoshi" entity is...

So you are citing a document from a year ago? (October 18, 2012) That references transactions from 3 years ago? (November 8th 2010)

Is your assertion from this document that when a quantum computer is built that bitcoin is doomed?

If you are referring to mixing bitcoins (into various wallets) this is also a pretty well known procedure.

There's quite a few comments on the paper you linked here (again from a year ago)

I'm not going to comment about the bitcoin market from 2010 - to be honest nothing would surprise me the market was very immature then. However if you want to provide some sort of evidence / proof / anything credible that the market today in 2013 is being manipulated then please do.

.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the way "simple altruism" kicked in.

 

[DrJ]

And if you'd actually read the paper - it was done in late 2012, their cutoff point for the data was May 2012. At that point 348 of the of the 363 largest transactions all stemmed from that single 90K transaction in November of 2010. Basically all of them. With a whole lot of moving them around nonsensically in between.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Actually, here's the original paper by the RSA guys.

http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bithogs.pdf

Page 11 talks about basically every large transaction stemming from a single 90K transaction made on November 10th 2010.

Other findings (Page 7):

- 78% were in savings accounts that never did any transactions.

- 36% of all owners recieved less than 1 BTC in their lifetime, 52% fewer than 10, and 88% fewer than 100.

- 4 owners received over 800,000 BTC's and 80 received over 400,000. And based on the findings from that 90K transaction, those owners seemed to like to pass around large amounts of them back and forth, never letting them hit the general public.

I wonder if there's any way to bring these guys up for fraud if they can prove they intentionally swindled people out of piles of money...and actually prove who this "Satoshi" entity is...

So you are citing a document from a year ago? (October 18, 2012) That references transactions from 3 years ago? (November 8th 2010)

Is your assertion from this document that when a quantum computer is built that bitcoin is doomed?

If you are referring to mixing bitcoins (into various wallets) this is also a pretty well known procedure.

There's quite a few comments on the paper you linked here (again from a year ago)

I'm not going to comment about the bitcoin market from 2010 - to be honest nothing would surprise me the market was very immature then. However if you want to provide some sort of evidence / proof / anything credible that the market today in 2013 is being manipulated then please do.

.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the way "simple altruism" kicked in.

So you are basing your entire paranoid distaste for Bitcoin on a few trades that occurred when Bitcoin was in its infancy and have no proof for any "control" or "price manipulation" that goes on today? Gotcha, carry on.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Here's a review of your credible source

 

[DrJ]

Actually, here's the original paper by the RSA guys.

http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bithogs.pdf

Page 11 talks about basically every large transaction stemming from a single 90K transaction made on November 10th 2010.

Other findings (Page 7):

- 78% were in savings accounts that never did any transactions.

- 36% of all owners recieved less than 1 BTC in their lifetime, 52% fewer than 10, and 88% fewer than 100.

- 4 owners received over 800,000 BTC's and 80 received over 400,000. And based on the findings from that 90K transaction, those owners seemed to like to pass around large amounts of them back and forth, never letting them hit the general public.

I wonder if there's any way to bring these guys up for fraud if they can prove they intentionally swindled people out of piles of money...and actually prove who this "Satoshi" entity is...

So you are citing a document from a year ago? (October 18, 2012) That references transactions from 3 years ago? (November 8th 2010)

Is your assertion from this document that when a quantum computer is built that bitcoin is doomed?

If you are referring to mixing bitcoins (into various wallets) this is also a pretty well known procedure.

There's quite a few comments on the paper you linked here (again from a year ago)

I'm not going to comment about the bitcoin market from 2010 - to be honest nothing would surprise me the market was very immature then. However if you want to provide some sort of evidence / proof / anything credible that the market today in 2013 is being manipulated then please do.

.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the way "simple altruism" kicked in.

So you are basing your entire paranoid distaste for Bitcoin on a few trades that occurred when Bitcoin was in its infancy and have no proof for any "control" or "price manipulation" that goes on today? Gotcha, carry on.

If you can't grasp the simple concept that 50 guys having provable control of more than 50% of your currency (and possibly even much more) allows them to easily manipulate it, I don't even know what to say. And right now a handful of ASIC manufacturers and pool owners control all of the power for securing this. If you don't get that, I'm really not sure what to say either.

 

[DrJ]

Here's a review of your credible source

By Jeff Garzik, another creator of the bitcoin and lead developer at BitPay. You've called my credibility, and even chose to raise. Oh my.

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

7 page thread discussing it as well, enjoy

 

[Jojo the circus boy]

Here's a review of your credible source

By Jeff Garzik, another creator of the bitcoin and lead developer at BitPay. You've called my credibility, and even chose to raise. Oh my.

Did you read it? As you previously posted, feel free to poke holes in his response.

Read the comments as well, they provide some valuable insight.

On top of that they talk about Bitcoin in terms of Bitcoins, while for the period they studied the value changed dramatically. Their example of the 90k transaction in Nov 2010 with no descendants is extremely misleading when that was only about a month after MtGox trading picked up to the point where coins really had any nominal value at all. For all we know that was just someone experimenting with some transaction making code, and accidentally losing their wallet.

 

[DrJ]

Here's a review of your credible source

By Jeff Garzik, another creator of the bitcoin and lead developer at BitPay. You've called my credibility, and even chose to raise. Oh my.

Did you read it? As you previously posted, feel free to poke holes in his response.

I'd like an explanation as to why you feel Garzik is a more credible and less biased source than the guy that created RSA.

 

[DrJ]

I do like this quote from Garzik though:

"Any bitcoins that are permanently lost, due to wallet deletion, also appear within the data as old, unmoved coins. One cannot distinguish between unspent "coins under the mattress" and lost/destroyed coins."

So when we say that 50 guys control xxx%, that doesn't even take into account that many of these technically don't even exist anymore. So it's actually worse than that.

 

[[icon]]

Here's a review of your credible source

By Jeff Garzik, another creator of the bitcoin and lead developer at BitPay. You've called my credibility, and even chose to raise. Oh my.

And even a guy as dramatically biased as that has to admit "We do not claim this wholly invalidates their statistical results,"

 

[DrJ]

Here's a review of your credible source

By Jeff Garzik, another creator of the bitcoin and lead developer at BitPay. You've called my credibility, and even chose to raise. Oh my.

And even a guy as dramatically biased as that has to admit "We do not claim this wholly invalidates their statistical results,"

Yeah, Garzik seems to be relatively careful when discussing this stuff. He's obviously heavily vested and is a cheerleader, but tries to be at least somewhat careful and reasonable about it. Here's an interview from earlier this year:

http://bensonsamuel.com/bitcoin-3/talking-bitcoin-with-jeff-garzik/

Question: Do you see Bitcoin as the end product or are there forked technologies that may take over as the anonymous currency of choice?

Answer: Bitcoin is just the beginning of a brand new category of algorithms. Bitcoin itself may fail, but it is the first of a new category of “crypto-currencies” based on the proof-of-work algorithm method.

Question: What is your Vision on the future of money?

Answer: Bitcoin, the Euro, the US Dollar, China’s RMB will all exist on an even playing field. You may choose which type of currency you hold in your wallet, and transact with.

 

[5 digit know nothing]

I do like this quote from Garzik though:

"Any bitcoins that are permanently lost, due to wallet deletion, also appear within the data as old, unmoved coins. One cannot distinguish between unspent "coins under the mattress" and lost/destroyed coins."

So when we say that 50 guys control xxx%, that doesn't even take into account that many of these technically don't even exist anymore. So it's actually worse than that.

How is that a bad thing?

Between lost btc's and only half way through the 21MM release cycle it kind of nullifies your point.

 

[DrJ]

I do like this quote from Garzik though:

"Any bitcoins that are permanently lost, due to wallet deletion, also appear within the data as old, unmoved coins. One cannot distinguish between unspent "coins under the mattress" and lost/destroyed coins."

So when we say that 50 guys control xxx%, that doesn't even take into account that many of these technically don't even exist anymore. So it's actually worse than that.

How is that a bad thing?

Between lost btc's and only half way through the 21MM release cycle it kind of nullifies your point.

Because each person's share is larger than what is described by the number issued. And no one even knows how much.

 

[bagger]

That was one quick bubble.

Define quick.Define bubble.

Price is at $745, is it volatile? Of course.

The "price" can be anything the bitcoin moguls want it to be.

Bubble is being generous - call this what it is, an elaborate hoax.

this.

 

[Rove!]

Overstock.com will start accepting bitcoins in 2014

http://www.businessinsider.com/overstockcom-will-take-bitcoin-next-year-2013-12