Didn't coindesk just report yesterday that the 'transaction malleability problem' that MtGox was worried about was already known and a non-issue?
[deleted]
Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
131–140 of 218 posts
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are these things called safes...
Are you going to put the safe under your mattress? Or do you think a secure encrypted and password protected wallet stored on a tiny USB drive or SD card might be more secure?
USB drives have the advantage of small. There's literally a hundred places I could hide one in my house. Hell, I could hide 20 fake ones haphazardly and one legit one really well.
The chances of everyone doing this and being comfortable with it is pretty low though. We need brain storage medium.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
part of the reason is that bit coin does not depend on any banks if you have 100 btc in an offline wallet, you will still have it tomorrow, despite whatever bugs/attacks hit the exchanges. imagine if your bank was hacked, many people would literally be removed of their money. With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts the…
Is that really true? Could a botnet not conceivably make transactions out of your wallet? Doesn't the distributed ledger have tentacles reaching under your mattress?
A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, such that the sender cannot deny having sent the message (authentication and non-repudiation) and that the message was not altered in transit (integrity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature
The purpose of the blockchain is to establish an ordered sequence of transactions.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also worth noting: you can't buy bitcoins on margin. So no margin calls to suddenly detonate the market.
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?
Transaction irreversability makes it a lot riskier, combined with the lack of support from the legal system. If you lend bitcoins to someone, and they run off with them, how do you recover your loss?
Conversely, unlike stocks, you don't need a broker, so there's nobody who would take on that dealer role.
Nobody has setup a "buy bitcoin on margin" service yet, and the first person to do so will lose a fortune to nonpayment of margin calls.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#135Day one: Slander the biggest exchange and hang your neck out calming the entrenched. "They are amateurs. This is that exchange's problem. $1000 is but days away."
Day two: Uhh... "Stay calm. This is just the expression of that non-issue looking like an issue. We know what we're doing."
Bitcoin has, generally, intrinsic crash protection right now. The price can't plummet if you can't find trading partners. Nobody really knows the price. The dotcom crash was from lofty to zero. As the price eats through panic sell thresholds, pants are shat. At least with commodities, people can point to the ones that went to 0 and stayed there. Since it hasn't happened with bitcoin, people can still sing the "it always bounces back" tune.
I've kicked the dead horse of stability. I've hinted at liquidity issues, but this is a grave lack of liquidity. The only thing left is any belief that there is value. If that starts to deteriorate due to the other issues, poof
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't secure cash under your mattress with a password, for one thing. That makes cash (and paper wallets) venerable to physical attack, even by vermin: http://metro.co.uk/2007/03/27/mouse-eats-cash-machine-makes-... There is no problem with value changing tomorrow as this is a potential problem with any new payment methodologies. Adoption does not appear magically overnight. The US Dollar is velocity stable due t…
A true story- My grand-uncle, who had lived through the Great Depression, never trusted banks. So he buried a considerable amount of cash in the forest behind his house in mason jars (seriously!). When he died, my grand-aunt, who always thought he was being silly, went out in the woods and retrieved all the jars. The cash had rotted and deteriorated to the point that it was unspendable. However, she was able to work…
this is why we buy gold and silver.
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#137It's interesting to watch actually, submit a transaction to the network at the moment and there's a rogue node that will mess with the padding of the signatures and rebroadcast it faster than the original. It confuses the reference client into duplicate display, which is what Gox is relying on for the failed/success display. That they're winning races over the normal related transactions isn't that unnatural as the t…
I actually removed the 100ms sleep.
I believe the change was made in release 0.8.6
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately in that respect Bitcoin is a bit of a one-trick pony. It relies on the honesty of a plurality of the network hash-strength. Systems which use the bitcoin mechanic need a lot of adoption before they become trustworthy.
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 improved was 1973. FDR temporarily unlinked in 1933 and we had the great depression [1].
This narrative is consistent with 1000s of years of history, e.g. Diocletian cutting his gold dinars with silver [2] (and enforcing its fiat trade value), many many examples in small european fiefdoms prior to the dark ages, and again at the end of the renaissance.
At the end of all of these periods, the survivor was gold, because it kept its value and inflation proved to be unsustainable and extremely destabilizing to the society by propping up incompetent economic and political 'winners'.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUvm9UgJBtg [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#Currency_and_inflat...
Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#139Re: Bitcoin Exchanges Under ‘Massive and Concerted Attack’
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are these things called safes...
Are you going to put the safe under your mattress? Or do you think a secure encrypted and password protected wallet stored on a tiny USB drive or SD card might be more secure?
If you burn your cash there's zero risk of it being stolen. But what matters is that you have access to it in the future, and I'm a lot more confident of that with a safe than with a complicated piece of electronics that can only be used by connecting it to an even more complicated piece of electronics.