61–70 of 205 posts
I'm curious, why hasn't anyone implemented a mining client in javascript, so you could in effect has visitors to your website mine coins for you. It might be a create way to fund content instead of advertising.
They have:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365 http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0 https://github.com/progranism/Bitcoin-JavaScript-Miner
One thing that hit me recently on bitcoin is I realized that for the first time in history micropayments are 100% possible. I'm thinking all kinds of startups should spring up from that, but I haven't thought of any yet. What are your thoughts?
Basically, you can do "tip $0.50" on reddit and a bot will parse your comment and process the transaction.
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You're totally right. The world is not ready, just like it wasn't ready for e-commerce in 1996. I mean, who's going to put their credit card online? Who wants to buy stuff without feeling it? BitCoin may always be more volatile than other currencies. That doesn't actually matter much as long as it's liquid with other commodities and currencies. Its primary purpose is transfer, not store value. It will however stabili…
I think eCommerce was a different situation than what you describe. People were already used to calling up and ordering things over the phone from a catalog using their credit card. Doing the same thing over the internet wasn't that much of a stretch.
As someone who was actually involved in ecommerce in 1995, I can tell this was one of if not the biggest concern for consumers.
In 20 years, perhaps you will tell us BitCoin was not a big leap since we were already used to electronic checks and fiat currency.
As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc. This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting ex…
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Or could you run a dedicated miner to only process your own txns (or does mining not work that way?)
As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc. This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting ex…
There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc. This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting ex…
I came across this last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvSYT7vhQY ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5459304 ) The phrase that really resonated with me was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvSYT7vhQY#t=404s : "When a few get something for nothing, at some point in a zero-sum game most will get nothing for something". That point may not happen anytime soon, but I think that's a very legitimate concern.
But lets say we accept its argument anyway, is it really applicable here? Would you really argue that the creation of a new cryptocurrency is a zero-sum event?
Couldn't it instead be the case that enormous new wealth is created due to the existence of a new payment infrastructure, and that the people who get something are capturing some of this new wealth?
I'm not saying Bitcoin is a sure thing by any means; just that its flawed to evaluate the wealth apparently coming from it as a zero-sum process.
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There are some real concerns with Bitcoin. For example, I was going to write an app that accepts Bitcoins as payment. However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes. What am I supposed to present to the user during this time? Am I supposed to tell them that their payment may or may not have been accep…
Sounds like an opportunity for a "bitcoin credit card" or "bitcoin charge card" where a trusted third party maintains complete control.
The problem is that all the advantages of Bitcoin is now lost, and you have transferred control of Bitcoin to the Bitcoin bank.
For example: you can gather Flexcoins, which allow instantaneous transfers and so forth. But by doing so, you no longer have Bitcoins. You only have Flexcoins, and if the Flexcoin bank goes under... you lose all of your bitcoins.
IE: Using Flexcoins (or any other form of Bitcoin bank) completely defeats the purpose of Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin micropayments are possible if you can solve the UX issues (copying and pasting addresses, etc.) and if you can avoid "recommended" transaction fees that are currently near 5 US cents.
I don't get the recommended transaction fee thing. What happens if someone pays 1 cent? Will no one process it?
So far, every transaction get processed. Eventually.
I've seen some no-fee transactions take several hours recently.
But there's also currently some issues with the overall load of transactions, due to a gambling site spamming tiny "dust" transactions as part of its system. That's caused there to be a lot more transactions, which means sometimes you'll have to wait a number of blocks for a no-fee transaction to process.
A block is supposed to happen an average of every 10 minutes, but it's not deterministic and there's a variance. It can take an hour or more for the next block to come up, in rare cases.