121–130 of 205 posts
Basic BTC 101 question. Are there a fixed number of txns in a block or is it variable? (And what do you recommend I read to learn this kind of stuff)
As far as I know there is no limit on the number of transactions, but there is a limit on the total number of possible bitcoins (about 21 million IIRC)
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.
Basic BTC 101 question. Are there a fixed number of txns in a block or is it variable? (And what do you recommend I read to learn this kind of stuff)
Everything is in here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification
Or read the source code for the standard client: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp
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> The problem is that all the advantages of Bitcoin is now lost, and you have transferred control of Bitcoin to the Bitcoin bank. That isn't a loss of the advantages of bitcoin, because you got to choose which organization to trust, if any. With government currencies, you don't get to choose.
What is preventing me from converting my USD into Euros or Yen? I can choose whichever Government / Central bank fits me the best.
Bitcoin actually provides a new choice: government or no-government. People that want government/cb currency are free to choose it. People that want no-government money can choose Bitcoin.
Remember: "What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich." - Paul Krugman EDIT: To be clear - this quote is not intended (by me) to be a knock on BTC. It's just an elegant statement of my own opinion that the value of 1 BTC is not all that indicative of its value to the economy.
That's great for us and the economy. Personally, I'd prefer my money to increase in value. I'm not going to avoid a currency for the benefit of the economy, nor would that be consistent with expected economic behavior.
While I can appreciate the need for the Bitcoin model I refuse to take part of it due to level of fraud involved. How much Bitcoins have been acquired by malicious bot-nets and held by small number of black hats? How much of the value is directly linked to drug trade or worse? Sure, similar arguments can be made about using cash but there are fundamental moral issues with Bitcoin I can't agree with. I would like to b…
Or, are you implying that there is something fundamentally immoral about Bitcoin itself, which cannot be affected by having more honest users? I admit that this could also be the case, for example, if Bitcoin turns out to be such a massive success that it destroys the ability of nations to collect taxes, affect monetary policy, etc.
So, in a sentence: Bitcoin is being used by people as a highly liquid, defensive store of value from within Cyprus, where capital controls are preventing people from moving their money out through traditional means. This is what gold used to be used for. But gold is not liquid, and Bitcoin is. It appears that hackers have made something better than gold, the longest standing store of value in human history. What an i…
I think that depending on what the future looks like (no zombie apocalypse, massive wars, etc.), there will be some kind of cryptocurrency that basically replaces gold. It's very exciting.
At the current time, though, given that bitcoin hasn't withstood the test of time, it's a bit hard to claim that gold is outdated. It's not hard to convince someone that gold or silver have value because of all the historical precedents. That counts for something when considering in which money to invest.
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As hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky said, "Please stop trotting out that quote Steve Jobs once said because we've all heard it and there are very few hockey players who are actually great enough to really know where the puck's going, anyway. Don't automatically assume you're one of them."
True, apropos that today I heard someone call bitcoin "the Dunning-krugerrand"
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Original issue: "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." https://coinbase.com/merchants : "Confirmed in 1 hour" Underlying issue not addressed
"Arrives instantly" Which is faster than any credit card gives money to a merchant. As is a one hour final confirmation.
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My first idea would be to see if it's possible to create massive sell-offs by crashing through many people's "stop on loss" barriers. For example, let's say that the exchange rate is 100 USD per bitcoin at the moment and that you have tons of people who would absolutely sell their bitcoins if it went below 90. I'm not in the bitcoin game, but I think mtgox offers "stop on loss" features so that people could get out o…
Oh, this literally happened yesterday. Someone sold off 5k bitcoins (~USD $450k at the time). That's exactly what happened. Big sell off from 95 to 80ish, and then it sprang back to ~$90 today. There's low confidence in it right now, but that's because most players are actual players. They aren't using bitcoins for groceries, like a bank reserve (yet). They're playing them like stocks.
Imagine a hedge fund with an order of magnitude more monetary mass trying to provoke those kind of sell offs and benefit from them.