41–50 of 156 posts
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Damn that's huge. You'd assume that the software checks the dollar amount and asks for a confirmation, or better yet permission from a higher up, if it exceeds some value.
The problem with confirmation is it trains the human to always press "yes". You need a system that only activates if something really unusual or wrong.
Sort of unrelated but, "According to my calculation, a single Bitcoin transaction uses roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day." http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-unsustainable I find this interesting thinking about Bitcoin as a currency. The first cryptographic currency example that I had read, from a cryptography book, didn't involve active power. I'm really surprised that B…
The electricity used is the level of security, the number of transactions supported are completely separate and could easily be orders of magnitude larger if the block size gets expanded (which is a whole other issue, but unique to bitcoin at this moment).
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Those older examples suffered from the "double spend problem" where you could spend the digital currency twice (or more). Kind of like cheque fraud. The Proof of Work part of bitcoin (the part that consumes all that electricity) creates a consensus record so that if double spends are performed, only one of them will stick. Now double spends are a "feature" called "replace by fee." Preventing double spends is worth mi…
Yes, and maybe that was the main obstacle to implementation. Reading some of the original literature, and glossing over the textbook, it seems like many of the issues involved with double spending and counterfeiters are _eventually_ resolved with someone going to jail, rather than being able to resolve the financial payments in order. A naïve solution - which might save some energy - what about using signed timestamp…
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> So each transaction costs 11000/2000=5.5 USD No, each transaction costs at most $5.50 USD. You haven't established any lower bound in your calculations. A better approach would be to calculate the average number of hashes required to mine a block and the power efficiency of the latest generation ASIC miners. Also, for what it's worth, $5 is much cheaper than a Western Union or SWIFT wire transfer so even this upper…
Except environmentally, you need to look at the energy footprint of Western Union compared to the network of Bitcoin miners, not the price of electricity or amount of coins awarded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those older examples suffered from the "double spend problem" where you could spend the digital currency twice (or more). Kind of like cheque fraud. The Proof of Work part of bitcoin (the part that consumes all that electricity) creates a consensus record so that if double spends are performed, only one of them will stick. Now double spends are a "feature" called "replace by fee." Preventing double spends is worth mi…
Yes, and maybe that was the main obstacle to implementation. Reading some of the original literature, and glossing over the textbook, it seems like many of the issues involved with double spending and counterfeiters are _eventually_ resolved with someone going to jail, rather than being able to resolve the financial payments in order. A naïve solution - which might save some energy - what about using signed timestamp…
The whole point of bitcoin is permissionless transactions. It is to make transactions even if the authorities don't want them to happen.
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Yes, and maybe that was the main obstacle to implementation. Reading some of the original literature, and glossing over the textbook, it seems like many of the issues involved with double spending and counterfeiters are _eventually_ resolved with someone going to jail, rather than being able to resolve the financial payments in order. A naïve solution - which might save some energy - what about using signed timestamp…
Part of the point of bitcoin is that it is decentralized.
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The problem with confirmation is it trains the human to always press "yes". You need a system that only activates if something really unusual or wrong.
unusual, like paying 1 billion times over recent prices?
Is MML(miner money laundering) a viable concept? I thought that the transaction blocks were randomly distributed so it would be hard for a launderer to "target" a miner they trust. If someone has a bit more technical insight about whether this makes sense, or is viable I would be interested. I would also contend that even if it was trivially easy to do, it would probably make more sense to just route transactions to…
Presumably the high fee transaction could be withheld from the network until the block was mined. I don't know if that is possible, but if it is it would ensure that a given miner was getting those fees.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4942/what-is-a-fi...
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Damn that's huge. You'd assume that the software checks the dollar amount and asks for a confirmation, or better yet permission from a higher up, if it exceeds some value.
The problem with confirmation is it trains the human to always press "yes". You need a system that only activates if something really unusual or wrong.
This is similar to how Github forces you to type the name of a repository when you try to delete it.
You can also configure a threshold such that the "hardcore" prompt kicks in only if the system detects that the user is trying to do something unusual, i.e. sell a stock for much cheaper than it is.
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Each bitcoin block takes 25 BTC (11000 USD at time of writing) worth of electricity to mine, because that is the maximum that the sum total of miners can afford to spend and still break even. Currently it's only possible to fit somewhere around 2000 transactions in each block, because there is a hard-coded limit on the size of a block (1 MiB). So each transaction costs 11000/2000=5.5 USD, which is indeed the approxim…
> So each transaction costs 11000/2000=5.5 USD No, each transaction costs at most $5.50 USD. You haven't established any lower bound in your calculations. A better approach would be to calculate the average number of hashes required to mine a block and the power efficiency of the latest generation ASIC miners. Also, for what it's worth, $5 is much cheaper than a Western Union or SWIFT wire transfer so even this upper…