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Wouldn't the MML leave lots of traces in the blockchain, a miner collecting unusually high fees over time?
I don't think it'd even be that hard. Unless new mined blocks are untraceable (as in, it's impossible to see which fees went to which new coins), then it provides no covering at all. It's the same as sending small amounts from one address to another.
Reasoning: BitCoin isn't, to my knowledge, a scheme where some private identifier is stored inside each "coin" whose ownership is revealed with a zero-knowledge proof; it's simply one where you have public and private keys and use those private keys to sign transactions saying "Take X1 out of my public key K1 and put X2 in public key K2, with X1 - X2 going to the miner." That is, BitCoins themselves, as I understand them, are just points in a big distributed videogame: they do not represent actual packets of data which are individually 'minted' in mining and stored on your computer until you spend them.
If that's correct, then there's no distinction if you tumble-via-miners versus tumble-via-tumblers -- either way the coins are 'freshly minted'; there's simply no other sort of coin.
The only real thing that you seem to be able to do here is to tumble via both the tumblers and the miners, which might create some binary tree of complexity if someone tries to "follow the money" -- but that doesn't seem to be what the author is saying.
Is there legitimately something in each coin which makes it easier to follow a given bitcoin via tumbling than through miner-money-laundering, or are they really just the same thing performed through different channels, with a much slower rate of success for the MML tumbling?
This reminds me of a similar error from 2005[1] where a trader mistook the "price" and "quantity" fields of the trading software. Instead of selling 1 share for 610,000 yen, 610,000 shares were sold for 1 yen. The mistake cost around $225 million. [1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/12/09/typing-error-causes-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So instead of a yes/no confirmation, you force the user to explicitly type what they are doing, i.e. "Sell 610,000 shares of stock X for 1 yen each." 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…
Back in the old days, I feel the broker would have gone to the market makers, said there was an error, and gotten out of the trade.
This reminds me of a similar error from 2005[1] where a trader mistook the "price" and "quantity" fields of the trading software. Instead of selling 1 share for 610,000 yen, 610,000 shares were sold for 1 yen. The mistake cost around $225 million. [1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/12/09/typing-error-causes-...
There's even a name for this - "Fat finger error". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-finger_error
I'd definitely keep that amount if I won it through mining. It's really hard swapping `amount` to `fee`, in coding, so I bet that this was a human mistake on sending btc, not coding mistake...
This reminds me of a similar error from 2005[1] where a trader mistook the "price" and "quantity" fields of the trading software. Instead of selling 1 share for 610,000 yen, 610,000 shares were sold for 1 yen. The mistake cost around $225 million. [1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/12/09/typing-error-causes-...
> Worse still, the number of shares in Mizuho's order was 41 times the number of J-Com's outstanding shares, but the Tokyo Stock Exchange processed the order anyway. There are a lot of simultaneous errors going on here...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So instead of a yes/no confirmation, you force the user to explicitly type what they are doing, i.e. "Sell 610,000 shares of stock X for 1 yen each." 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…
These sorts of mistakes happened when I was trading options more than a decade ago. In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters. Back in the old days, I feel the broker would have gone to the market makers, said there was an error, and gotten out of the trade.
Which is why I said you would enable it based on a threshold and/or only on unusual threads. These systems are capable of extremely complex decision-making at very high frequency. Surely something like "sell 610,000 shares for 1 yen" would have stood out as strange.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's even a name for this - "Fat finger error". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-finger_error
I think fat finger is more like adding too many zeros, or hitting the wrong numbers on the keyboard. This incident was a UI confusion; entering correct values in the wrong inputs.
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 e-currency example you read probably wasn't decentralized.