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1704
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Best practice for fast transaction acceptance - how high is the risk?
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on: February 14, 2011, 10:55:49 PM
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There are no incentives for doing that. If 98% of the network "discourages" a block, then those miners have a small chance of losing their blocks to the 2% that does not discourage the block. However, not discouraging a block has no penalty at all.
Excellent point. Although there should be a meta-incentive to make the bitcoin system successful, so there are lots of transactions (and lots of transaction fees for the miners). Certainly big payment clearing houses that want instant payments to work have the right incentives... |
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1705
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Economy / Trading Discussion / Re: A Heroin Store
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on: February 14, 2011, 10:39:38 PM
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The intrinsic value of bitcoin is in it's unique utility. That utility is adversely affected by wild price changes.
Price swings won't settle down until: 1. The bitcoin economy is bigger (a "market cap" of hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just a few million dollars). and 2. Bitcoin is mature enough for people to really trust it. Unless there is somebody out there with very deep pockets and a willingness to spend a lot of money smoothing out the fluctuations there's not a whole lot we can do about it besides make bitcoin better, easier to use, more secure, etc. |
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1707
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Best practice for fast transaction acceptance - how high is the risk?
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on: February 14, 2011, 09:12:30 PM
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The only way grocery stores could get on the network would be to have some sort of "MYBITCOIN"-like intermediary that does all the transaction processing, most of which would have to happen off the block chain.
Right... so then the question is "will the MYBITCOIN-like intermediary be able to verify transactions quickly without opening themselves up to systematic fraud." Without requiring users to pre-deposit funds with them, because users ain't gonna do that. Here's another possible simple rule for miners that might work (but, as Hal said, requires Deep Thought): "When I see a new block with transactions that I didn't see broadcast previously, mark those transactions as suspicious. If I see double-spends of those transactions, stop building on that block-- assume it is cheating. Switch to the previous block (or alternate block if there's a block race going on)." Miners won't try to rip off a grocery store for $50 worth of groceries if doing so makes their $50+ bitcoin reward for finding a block disappear. This rule would also give miners a strong incentive to detect and refuse to include EITHER side of a double-spend in their blocks (if they get both spends while they're working on the block). |
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1709
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoint stealing my money
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on: February 14, 2011, 06:29:56 PM
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Your second client hasn't downloaded all the blocks yet (according to the screen snapshot).
When it has, it will be able to verify that the send transaction is valid, and will update your balance there.
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1710
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Best practice for fast transaction acceptance - how high is the risk?
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on: February 14, 2011, 06:24:59 PM
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To cheat you, when he generates a block, he doesn't broadcast it. Instead, he runs down to your store...
I think the real danger is that a large mining operator would create a side business selling space in their blocks for these types of intentional double-spends. When they generate a block they could send a text message to a bunch of people saying "try to spend NOW". I wonder if there's some way to discourage that kind of anti-social behavior; could the network detect that was being done and "shun" that miner's blocks? |
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1712
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: 2 hours latency from bitcoin faucet ??
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on: February 14, 2011, 04:34:27 PM
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Here's what happens when you press the Get Some button on the Faucet and it sends you coins:
+ A Google App Engine task is scheduled to actually do the send.
+ The send tasks are (currently) scheduled to run at most once per minute, so huge spikes in demand for coins from the faucet are smoothed out.
The nice thing about App Engine tasks is that they're persistent little buggers-- they'll keep going until they succeed. If the send fails for some reason (I need to restart bitcoind for some reason, or the connection between the Google and my bitcoind server is down), App Engine will reschedule the task to try again after an hour.
So, you were probably just very unlucky and the send failed twice in a row, OR you on the tail end of a couple hundred people all asking for coins at about the same time (the faucet will service a maximum of 120 requests in two hours).
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1713
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Bitcoin / Technical Support / Re: Mac OS X -connect=IP Address
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on: February 14, 2011, 04:14:14 PM
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Easiest way would be to put it in the bitcoin.conf file.
Create $HOME/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf and put:
connect=IP ADDRESS
... in it. Any of the command-line options (except -datadir and -conf) can be put in the bitcoin.conf file.
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1715
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Payment to yourself detection
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on: February 13, 2011, 04:40:22 AM
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It is possible to generate transactions that "fan out" to an arbitrary number of recipients.
They're non-standard transactions right now, so they won't be relayed or included in blocks. But you should probably assume that they will be possible in the future (and a miner could, of course, include them in their own blocks now).
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1716
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Economy / Economics / Re: Mises on BitCoin
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on: February 13, 2011, 04:31:15 AM
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I agree with 1. Indeed I'm not sure bitcoin could be used simultenaously by billions of users.
Really? You don't think if bitcoin gets really successful and there are hundreds of millions of dollars poured into engineering efforts for it (and if it is wildly successful, big companies WILL invest huge amounts of money on it), that any scaling problems won't get solved? I bet I could find people predicting a few years ago that Facebook would never be able to scale to billions of users (it was written in PHP for pete's sake!). |
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1717
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Other / Off-topic / Re: An Anti-Libertarian FAQ Worth Talking About?
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on: February 13, 2011, 04:22:22 AM
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Therefore, No. There will always be some circumstances in which your right to conduct only voluntary and consensual relationships should not be respected by all. In a pride of lions, the top male decides. In our society, at present, there are laws which decide, but in a stateless society... damned if I know who decides. I have a big problem with libertarianism and conflict resolution. Help me to understand guys.
I think you're confusing libertarian with minarchist or anarcho-capitalist. Libertarians generally agree that police and a legal system to resolve disputes are a proper role for government. |
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1718
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Other / Off-topic / Re: An Anti-Libertarian FAQ Worth Talking About?
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on: February 12, 2011, 01:11:39 AM
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If you really want to sway people, you need to find areas of agreement and blissfully ignore things about which you strongly disagree.
There is a lot to agree with in that FAQ, in my humble opinion.
Oh, and you have to learn to ignore people who just won't listen to reason, or who are starting with different assumptions about how the world works than you.
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1719
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: transaction abuse?
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on: February 11, 2011, 11:59:51 PM
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The Faucet has several abuse prevention features in place. I'm not going to say what they are because then the 'bad guys' would have a road map for what to do to try to get around them.
They're not 100% foolproof, but they're pretty good.
The steady stream of transactions from the Faucet the last few days IS because of the increased interest due to the security now podcast and slashdot mention.
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1720
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Network-wide cost of a transaction
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on: February 11, 2011, 03:42:03 PM
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For example, "free" is a magical number.
Anything under a penny per transaction is as good as free, when the nearest competitor is PayPal. No, that's the point: 0 is a magic number in our heads. "1/50'th the cost of Paypal" will get, say, 5% of the people to switch. "Free" will get 50% to switch. (numbers pulled out of my ass, of course, but you get the idea) |
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