Topic: The 80% attack (Read 808 times)

Romney clearly said that Obama only has 47% in his pocket. You don't think 51% would be enough to sway him to switch to red team? 

+1

lol!!! that would take greater then 51%

I don't think thats how it works.

Acquire 51% hash rate > tell the network that Obama is a Republican > ? ? ? ? > Obama becomes Republican.

Yep, and most of it's happening in one place. That's why when Gox tanks, everything tanks.

+1

Is the volume the amount of coins being exchanged?

We need more options and now people may change the way they do business with bitcoins after this. Hopefully we can see a number of good exchanges with competitive fees. Hope right!

Well, the main problem is that it's a decentralized currency, with a centralized exchange. This is a Bad Thing®.

So what does the volume on MtGox stand for? Thanks for the responses.

Yup, if someone takes 51% control of the network they can start dictating what is true or false, effectively starting a fork in the block chain with whatever tomfoolery they want the rest of the network to believe.

An actual 51% attack is when one person or group gains control of a majority of the network's hash power.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power

The 80% is a reference to the amount of trades that occur at Gox.

What exactly does this 51% attack mean?

yeah... that would work, there is enough money in circulation for every person on earth, but then we have to consider that we are excluding an enormous chunk of people that are still using the national fiat currencies. It is already very hard to get bitcoins... but hmmmm

what if everyone started promoting bitcoin? get your friends into it, help setup their machines, get more miners on the network with whatever cards they have... if it is profitable, then show them how to calculate their expenses so they know how much each bitcoin they created is really worth. that way they get it in their hands.

now I'm thinking, how do we regulate the price? the merchants are immediately converting it into fiat currency for security, there would have to be a concensus, and at the moment we have little concensus, the movement of national fiat currency holders into bitcoin is so great they can destabalize bitcoin if they come in too fast.

the factors that I know affect the price of bitcoin to USD: buyers wanting to get into the market, what volume of new bitcoin customers is optimal?  The sellers set the price according to the demand this is tied to the influx of new Bitcoin customers. The miners who create the available currency into the system control the bottom price, how low the price goes is determined by what they think their efforts are worth.  Lag and delay within the system affect the speed at which the market can correct itself.

but then again... who cares about the price when people can buy any denomination of bitcoin they want, it just has to be stable.

Ditch fiat ASAP, make all services payable with Bitcoin, problem solved.

They don't have to be, The exchanges could be run by a algorithm running on an extra layer of Bitcoin, the bitcoin network is the most secure network ever built, only the data getting encrypted is vulnerable, so if The bitcoin client got turned into an exchange system with all other currencies, all users can participate at any given moment.

but the hard part would be tying the system into the real world, the centralized exchanges are our front end to interact with the national currencies, they are taking care of the legal aspect for us.

of course it would be interesting to create another Semantic Web machine that coupled with Bitcoin, the Banking component of bitcoin is currently being developed... and that is the exchanges.

now what ideology do we follow for the trade algorithms? after all we would have to convert our thoughts and ideas on it into pure math that can be programmed.  anyone got any ideas?

Bitcoin was built to be absolutely secure... and in so doing seems to be following the Austrian School of economics ideology, that I am sure was not intentional, a consequence of making it ultra secure, do we follow the same ideology for the p2p exchange?

My question is, why do exchanges have to be centralized? If money doesn't have to be, can't exchanges be networked too?

Also, there has to be some way where exchanges can accept more common forms of fiat funding while limiting fraud so they can eat the cost and better serve the customers. Mind you, I think if they would accept paypal (decentralizing things removes Paypal's ability to track the fact that the payments are for Bitcoin) and properly vet the account holders that the massive increase to Bitcoin trading would not only boost Bitcoin significantly overall, but also more than compensate for the level of fraud that would come with it.

After all: I'm someone who, by very principle, believe that human beings are literally, radically evil things. Yet even I have to recognize that most people aren't going to pull chargebacks. Most people are honest clients, and there are ways to weed out most of the ones that are trying to jack yo' crap up.

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