Funny if it was Mount Gox trying to prove a point.
Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
201–210 of 218 posts
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on. Isn't that just a matter of someone setting up a market and contracts for it? What you mean is that no one has setup bitcoins margins market yet right? Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental about BTC that prevents margins?
You can trade contracts for difference (CFDs) on Bitcoin with 1:10 leverage, including shorting them, at places like Plus500 Great way of taking the risk created with the volatility of Bitcoin and multiplying up the risk massively so you can lose money even faster...
How are those contracts validated and enforced on sites like that? The SEC used to watch naked shorts relatively closely before 2008 and it's been banned since then; but how is that arranged in practice with a currency whose primary selling point is its anonymity?
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, but the bitcoins themselves need solid liquidity before becoming a feasible currency. That's impossible with the impending cap. Right now, bitcoins are treated like digital gold. People hoard them and treat them like investment assets. And for the same reason the world's major currencies unlinked from gold, bitcoins also exhibits recessionary behavior. (bad news for a currency)
Another narrative goes as follows: The world's major governments unlinked their currencies from gold because it proved inconvenient for their regressive redistribution activities - cronyism, military-industrial complex, propping up the banking system, etc (not saying it's a conspiracy, just a natural consequence of authoritarianism). Note that the US unlinked in 1970 and the last year that the GINI coefficient improv…
The gold standard is also inconvenient for progressive policies: it removes the floating of currency exchange rates, which tends to act as an automatic stabilizer. See the Eurozone to see how this played out over the last few years, since the Euro has the same technical effect on the member countries. If a country like Spain had had its own currency with a floating exchange rate, that currency would have automatically devalued against other European currencies, which would have acted as a big boost to the Spanish economy via increased exports. Instead, Spain got atrociously high unemployment.
The gold standard is just inconvenient, period. It restricts the policy space for governments. This can be a good thing, but in democracies - where the government mostly does act in the interest of the population[0] - I would say that it mostly ends up being a bad thing.
> FDR temporarily unlinked in 1933 and we had the great depression
Yes, both of these things happened. The important thing is the order in which they happened: The great depression happened first. Abandoning the gold standard was a somewhat late and indirect reaction to that. In fact, countries recovered roughly in the order in which they abolished the gold standard (see e.g. [1] for references).
Edit to add: As to the history of coin debasement, I genuinely wonder whether historians have got their causality right. There appears to be a self-reinforcing belief that historically, coin debasement always caused inflation. At a superficial glance, that story seems to fit the data, hence the self-reinforcement. However, there are some episodes in the Roman empire where it seems plausible that causality could have run in the other direction: Inflation came first, and the coins ended up being debased to match the reality of how much (or how little) they were still worth.
I know that gold bugs must deny the mere possibility of such a "reverse causality" on quasi-religious grounds, but a sober look at the data leaves quite a lot of room for this. Some of the inflation values use price data that is almost a century apart, and a 5x increase in price over a century is actually relatively modest inflation on a year-over-year basis, if you take the exponential nature of inflation into account. This level of inflation could easily arise endogenously, say out of modest wage-price pressure effects. Changing the coins to adjust to a new reality after a century is then merely reasonable administration.
This is not to say that the story of "bad emperor flooded the market with coins to fund wars" never happened. It's just to say that perhaps history was sometimes more complicated than what fits into a bug's brain.
[0] Yes, yes, come at me with your cynicism; and indeed modern democracies are imperfect. But compare today to the middle ages without prejudice, and you'll see what I mean.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't find the article now, but there have been several good articles explaining the lack of gravity on bitcoin in general. Basically, the price goes up quickly when new people are attracted to bitcoin and rush to buy. When the price dips however, because so much is bought for long term speculation, the price doesn't really dip much, as no one is incentivised to sell and hold out for when it gets better. At some po…
> If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore. Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.
I dont think the person you replied to meant a crash, but rather an implosion. i.e. a massive failure in the bitcoin protocol that renders it useless. This is the only way in which no one will want to buy coins. In that situation your best bet is sending your coins to an exchange and selling them into the listed buy orders which have not been removed because the person who listed them is either asleep or unaware of the news.
However this is incredibly unlikely, bitcoin went though a fork last year that caused some problems but was quickly rectified, this current maleability issue is also being worked on to get a resolution. These sort of network wide problems are problems with the fundamentals of bitcoin and should, by right, affect the price of bitcoin much more than say government regulations in China or India, that they dont is because most holders of bitcoin understand that these problems can be resolved with some dev time and BTC has some great and comitted devs working on it.
Namecoin (NMC) had a similar issue where it meant that web addresses linked to NMC were not secure, that caused a crahs but no where near going to zero and that is a coin with minimal developer support.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.
More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.
Really that means nothing though. Neither Peercoin or Dogecoin have merchant or payment processor support. No one is interested in taking dogecoin in payment for goods and services, right now it is just a toy coin that people can use to learn about cryptocurrencies cheaply and that is pretty much what it will always be. If dogecoin had a maleability issue it does not have the dev support to resolve it in a reasonable time frame, a fork like there was in BTC last year would have a similar result. There are lost of transactions because you can send 10 or 100 or 1000 coins to anyone and you still have sent less than a few bucks. Lots of transactions does not equal a big currency it equals a lot of transactions. And in this situation these transactions count for very little economic activity.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curiosity. I thought they copied the code from Litecoin and I was not sure if in any of the intermediate steps someone decided to fix this. It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems). Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
There isn't really any development team comparable to that of Bitcoin in a different coin. Things that get fixed in Bitcoin are not fixed in other coins. But if another coin happens to fix something, it will be fixed in Bitcoin too. Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
It is quite short sighted to think that all digital currencies are "forked" from bitcoin: see http://www.openudc.org/ for instance:
"The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space."
The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The attack started prior to the disclosure.
No, someone intentionally or accidentally used gox's poor handling of mutant transactions to extract double-payment from their customer support team. Gox blamed the bitcoin protocol for their own stupidity. Then after the press release, someone started a massive DoS attack against the bitcoin network. What happened to gox over the last couple of months is totally different from what what is going on right now.
No, you are wrong, sir. There are many who are recording all Bitcoin network traffic, myself included. I can see that Gox had all their outbound transactions slightly changed and rebroadcast. After that went public, being now outed and in the open, having nothing to gain from stealth the attacker moved to attacking everyone they could.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> imagine if your bank was hacked, many people would literally be removed of their money. Are you sure about that? For the most part those transactions would simply be reversed. Bitcoin exchanges seem a lot more exposed to computer security breaches to me. > With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts them. Paper currency…
You need to be connected to send them but not receive them.
You certainly need to be connected to confirm that you have received them!
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
If BTC drops, below 500 or less, why exactly 500? Why not wait for 400? I'm new to this but maybe we need to make it easier to move money from wallet to wallet, from wallet to "hard" currencies and back, etc. Right now it's practically impossible to get verified on an exchange, get money out, paying anywhere with it, etc. You are lucky if you have a bitcoin ATM where the rate is probably not that good but at least yo…
> maybe we need to make it easier to move money from wallet to wallet, from wallet to "hard" currencies and back Thank you Captian Obvious!
Well if it's that obvious it probably means that people who could easily simplify the process are too busy playing casino instead? :)
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, a botnet can't ever achieve 51%. One modern ASIC rig is equivalent to a few thousand average CPU+GPU computers that make up a botnet.
What about a botnet of modern ASIC rigs?
How would you get one?
ASIC owners are paranoid about their earnings. They would notice they are getting less than they usually do the next day after the infection.