Topic: Tangibilization (Read 533 times)

As foxpup has ponted out, you need to spend a bit more time understanding how bitcoin and mining works.  ASIC are quickly reducing the effectiveness of FPGA, and the mining difficulty automatically adjusts every 2016 blocks to compensate for any change in mining rate.


What made you think that the case had anything to do with stolen fiat at all?  Read up a bit on pirate40 and the Bitcoin Savings and Trust Ponzi scam.

The mining "difficulty" is automatically adjusted to compensate for increasing (or decreasing) mining power such that one "block" (currently worth BTC25) is mined every 10 minutes on average. If blocks are mined faster than that, the difficulty will increase to slow them down, and vice versa if block are mined slower.

Wrong. Trendon Shavers did not steal a single cent of fiat. His scam was conducted entirely in bitcoins. He took people's bitcoins, promised to pay them even more bitcoins, and absconded with their bitcoins. Fiat never even entered the picture until he sold his stolen bitcoins.

The solution to these problems are cold storage (storing keys offline) and backups, respectively. Anyone with a large amount of bitcoins would be crazy to not do both.

Hello,

Thanks very much, great answers indeed. Except for quations 1 and 6:

Q1: in the pools you often see someone making 11 (well, litecoins) per day, I'd expect the government to be more than 336 times powerful than this person. Agreed that CPUs are not ideal for that stuff, but field programmable gate arrays specifically hard wired to solve this particular algorithm will do better, even if it was say 7000 coins per day, betweem the major governments -if they feel a threat - that can potentially be 35,000 BTCs per day, give it a year and they have the market. Sure they're contirbuting to the stability of it, but they're a major player then they hold the market.

But that's only BTCs. If they feel threatened by this then they would be targetting any new system, watchamacoin et al., getting all the millions when it's just the one week end for them, leaving the expensive work to the ones catching up.

Without being Reiligious about it, the precedence is in the New Testament where people in the Temple used to take the Commons' hard earned money and exchange it with a different kind of money that can be made as an offering (and then sold back to other commons). Jesus could not see this continue happening by people associated with the Clergy (their "cut") inside the house of God, and since then He became a threat to their ongoing control of the commons and they were in all their weight to have the romans do to Him what they could not do themselves.

I don't get why the legacy of those masterminders are not threatened?

Q6: this is someone stealing fiat not stealing bitcoins. The Police is here to protect the fiat, sure they will make an example that guy. The question was: if bitcoins were stolen, who're you gonna call? Is there like a Risk Register that shows what are the possible threats and what can or has been done about them? e.g. unlike the below, some risks will remain high and will need Police to interfere to reduce them, otherwise the system will have a high risk compoennt and therefore it is not safe for use(?)

Hazard: Someone stealing your wallet via screen capture viruses
Likelihood: High
Consequence: High
Initial Risk: high
Risk Reduction measure: generate keyss off the net. Use virtual keyboards in password fiels etc.
Resultant RisK: low

Hazard: Your latop is stolen and it is returned to you with a formatted hard drive.
Likelihood: Low
Consequence High
Initial Risk: Medium
Risk Reduction Measure: subsricve to the Federal Bitcoin Reserve Bank for daily storage of your wallet.

They'll have to do better than that. The combined computational power of current Bitcoin miners is the equivalent of 3 exaFLOPS.

Of course, both the U.S. government and other governments are free to mine bitcoins if they want (and can justify the expense to their taxpayers). Anyone who contributes their computing power to the network will be rewarded; Bitcoin doesn't discriminate.

Each bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places, providing a total of 2 quadrillion currency units (called "satoshis", in honour of Satoshi Nakamoto), enough for everyone on Earth to own about a quarter of a million satoshis each.

The goal of exchanges is the same as the goal of money itself: to allow people to trade things they have for things they want. When someone sells their coins for fiat, who do think is buying them? Obviously, it's someone else who wants to buy coins for fiat. And that's good, because how else would someone who has only fiat (which, incidentally, is most of the population of the world) acquire their first bitcoins?

The same thing that stops people from writing software to do anything and tricking other people into running it: not much. That's why malware is such a major problem in the world today.

Mining does do real work. Not just real work, but necessary work. It is the process of validating the record of all Bitcoin transactions, in such a way as to make fraudulent modification of this record next to impossible. If you were wondering what stops people from simply "copying" a bitcoin and spending it in more than one place (the so-called "double-spending problem"), this is it.

SHA256 is used for more than just Bitcoin. It is used in many, many other cryptographic applications including electronic banking, military intelligence, digital forensics, etc. If it were ever "cracked", we're not the only people who'll be in a world of shit. In any case, it's most unlikely to happen overnight. What's far more likely to happen is "weaknesses" will be discovered in the algorithm, which might theoretically lead to it being eventually cracked, say, several years afterwards. In that case, there'll be plenty of time to switch to a new algorithm.

Guess you haven't been reading the news lately.

deep question needs good answer.

Hello,

I've been mining for a number of days now and very happy with the results. I've been discussing a lot with friends and stuff and some questions came up that I could not answer. I've watched all the youtubes there are out there (i think!) so any help os much appreciated. You'll be amazaed the questions you get but I want to understand the answers myself.

Q1: What prevents the gvmnt from flicking on one their Main Frame computers / data centres and mine the whole lot or the rest of it. There are a number of sites who can do more than 1 peta floating point operations per second. If this is a "threat" indeed to what they've been controlling us with, or say if at least it's one form of "good" investment for "them", they pay for fuel with fiat money, even with a credit number in an account, so obviously unlike us they don't care about the coin/watt ratio, so why don't they pocket all those coins out htere? and if it's not the US, then why isn't any other sizeable government flicking one or two or three main frames to farm the whole lot. I mean the story about prisoners in china mining coins is not that strong, you just leave the pc on running, you don't need a person physically doing the work?

A1: ?


Q2: If a currency is one day to become an alternative currency, then shouldn't there be at least so many coins out there as there are people? and at least say 100 coins per person so you can buy and buy, not buy and sell and always remain coinless? what is the point in investing in a currency that has 20 million or 100 million coins only? there will be people left out who will need to create their own currency? isn't it better to have a currency that has say 500-1000 billion coins and that'd become truly worldwide?

A2:

Q3: Why would anyone exchane BTC/LTC/xC... for fiat currency on any exchnage. Isn't the true purpose behind the system to create an alternative currency? If somone is in it to pay so much for watts and then get more fiat then they put for the BTCs they generate, then isn't the fiat their ultimate goal in this case? wouldn't the day come where one day they will say oh my God what did we do, we had useful non fiat coins and we exchanged them for fiat that have become worthless? Having an exchange is a good way for the system to breath, allowing people to quit, but it seems to have become a goal, and people buying $$$$$ machines to make $$$$$, not to make a reserve wealth for an alternative currency?

A3:

Q4: What prevents someone who knows how to write software from creating a mass online job on BOINC or other mass computing farm, label the job as "research to help the poor around the world" or something, and actually what they'll be doing is distributing work and getting the coins back themselves?

A4: ?

Q5: One  day when the fiat ends people will deliver goods and services in return for coins. This sounds good. What does not sound good is the following: i am running my pc thus burning energy and damaging the environment, and I am getting virtually rich doing it. I am not doing any physical work. Seems the ultimate nerdy way to do nothing and get rich? just leave a machine on? Why isn't earning bitcoins NOW happeneing in a "deserved" way?

A5:

Q6: If someone forges a fiat currency, the government will lock them in jail for the rest of their lives. This is one way to proctect the sheep. Don't tell me there will NOT come the day when they discovered some 14 yo geek who has reverse hacked the thing or did this and that, or they created a quantum machine that can decrypt this SHA256 algorithm in a jiffy, what happens to all the energy you spent then? Put it in a totally different way, can you go to a Police and say "someone stole my bitcoins" and that will be an actual offence they can take action on?

A6:

Thanks a lot for anywhone who can shed some light on any of the above!