Topic: A consensus network, or how to stop a big lose (fork it!) - page 2. (Read 4551 times)

You are wrong. Transactions are reversible but it's "computationally impractical" to do so, though in some extreme situations the network agrees that it's better for the majority to reverse/fork the blockchain. As we already discussed in this thread last year a technical problem within old clients "splitted" the network in two, the longest chain was abandoned by the consensus of the miners in order to join the network and give time to people to update their clients. IIRC the Bitcoin Foundation retributed bitcoins for those who lost money.

So we are using a hard-fork of the blockchain, did we changed the name of Bitcoin? nop.

If we already hard-forked the blockchain for technical (and in many ways economical) reasons, why we shouldn't consider to fork when some potential catastrophic situation could destroy our economy?

btw I am amazed that some people here thinks that a currency could work with one bad actor owning 40% of the market cap.

So what you lot going to call this new fork? Obviously you can't call it Bitcoin, as Bitcoin's transactions are irreversible, which is why we trust it, hence giving it value.

So what you lot going to call this new fork? Obviously you can't call it Bitcoin, as Bitcoin's transactions are irreversible, which is why we trust it, hence giving it value.

So what you lot going to call this new fork? Obviously you can't call it Bitcoin, as Bitcoin's transactions are irreversible, which is why we trust it, hence giving it value.

The point is that you are wrong and the price would not go to $1.  Not even close.  

First, there are a lot of orders, a lot of large orders, that are not listed in the public order books that you are using.

Second, many people have large sums of USD and other currencies at the exchanges that are not currently committed to orders, it is just sitting there not in the order book.  I personally, and many others, have a large stash of cash at the exchanges just waiting for a meltdown.  In the case of a meltdown we jump in and buy from all the panic sellers.

You cannot use the order book to make any realistic assumptions about where the price would go in a large sell off so please stop trying.

I don't understand your point. Obviously when I said "demand" I was referring to the bids in the order books.
If the bad actor sells only 10% of its loot in BitStamp the price would go to $1.

I just wish these folks who start all these "let's fork the blockchain because ______" threads would stop talking about forking for their favorite reason du jour and just get off their ass and do it.

I for one can't wait to cash in all the alt coins created for me and buy real Bitcoins with the proceeds.

I have a suspicion that the reason that it is always just a bunch of hot air and no on every actually does it is because all these "fork the chain" folks know that their alt forks are doomed out of the gate and it would be a total waste of their time to even try it.

it looks like either you're full of fear yourself or trying to spread fear in 'masses'.

you have no idea what the real true demand is at any price point below current, you only see demand that is on display on order books. at the very worst or best, depending how one looks at it, 850k btc priced at $0.01 for instance costing $8500 would be snapped in an instant.

that's your worst case scenario which btw has close to 0 chances to play out in reality

In the light of possible collapse of value of Bitcoin, what do you people think it will happen to strongest alt-coins out there: LTC, PPC... Would they suffer the same fate, or they will shoot up so hard?

In the light of possible collapse of value of Bitcoin,

The problem is that 850k is more than the whole demand of bitcoins in all the exchanges combined. Actually I think it's almost three times the current demand. We don't know the intentions of this bad actor, the only thing we know (in our universe of discourse...) is the amount stolen. The bad actor could manipulate the market for years, for example one could mix those coins and sell otc just small fractions (best case scenario), or send everything to one single address, write some scary message (like "in one hour I will drop 100k in BitStamp") and sign it, get profit from shorts, or talk with some external entity who hates Bitcoin and make some real deals with them. If I were a big bad bank I would try to find the hacker right now, create an alt-coin, destroy bitcoin's economy with occasional drops, let people speculate about future drops.

if they lost their BTC 3 weeks ago they sold me BTC they didnt have 1.5 weeks ago

Well that is an unproven assumption.  MtGox has provided no clarity.  We have no idea how many coins were stolen.  MtGox has never explicitly articulated how many coins were stolen, by how many people and over how long of a time period.

As for "controlling" the exchange rate.  So they dump it, ok now they don't have the coins anymore and the exchange rate will recover.   Bitcoin rewards the "smart" thing to do.  If an attacker had 800K BTC they could sell it off slowly and be rich for the rest of their lives, or they could dump it all, very likely never be able to cash it out due to AML/KYC type requirements, and cause a short term drop in the exchange rate.  Are you always afraid of every shadow?  There is no evidence that a single attacker has all the coins, and if they do there is no evidence they would be downright idoitic with them.  

I mean do you really believe that Bitcoin can be completely annihilated by a single entity acquiring 800,000 BTC and selling them?  If so why are you here?  You do know that at current exchange rates buying that many coins would be trivial for a well financed bad actor.  It would be a tiny fraction of the cost of a 51% attack and your claim is that short of a network killing fork there is nothing that can stop them from destroying Bitcoin by just clicking the sell button.

Some of us believe Bitcoin will do just fine, and the biggest risk is implementing some dubious "fixes" based on little more than "we have to do something".

Then why make the thread to begin with?  Don't bother I won't be able to see it.  Life it too short.

I already said that I am not 100% serious with this thread because three weeks is too much.