http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/BitCoin-tp7584341p7584411.html
BitCoin.... hmmm...
The TechnoAnarchist in me likes the idea of such a currency,
though the CommunalHumanist in me prefers barter-supporting
systems such as
Ithica-Hours
and the Santa Fe Time Bank.
I find
HashCash
an interesting corollary item. Most notably used to weed out
spam/DoS attacks, it's underlying principle of Proof of Work (PoW)
(and apparently HashCash itself?) is used as part of the
distributed authentication of BitCoin claims.
Owen's question of "how does one put BitCoins in their will"...
BitCoin's tenderability depends entirely on "what you know"... so
the closest thing to putting your BitCoins in a Will is to put
"the keys" to a "Bitcoin Wallet" in their will? As I understand
it, the key to maintaining the value of a BitCoin is keeping it
"private"... *anyone* can spend a found/stolen BitCoin like they
could spend a physical coin. The physical coin can't be
double-spent except by good sleight-of-hand short-con types (see
opening scenes of The Grifters with John Cusack) which just means
defrauding the business or cashier of the value by
witholding/trading-out the token, but BitCoin relies on all
transactions being recorded in a distributed block-chain (I
haven't sorted out how this all is implemented and avoids race
conditions, etc.).
This leads to the question of BitCoin "mining". This seems to be
a significant misnomer. While BitCoins are being *minted anew* in
the process, they are also being *earned*.... BitCoin miners are,
by definition, doing useful work to maintain the integrity of the
whole system. It isn't clear to me what will motivate people to
dedicate resources to this process once we hit the "end of BitCoin
minting" at 21M BitCoins. The principle of halving the reward
(geometric shrinkage in "value"?) would seem to counterbalance
Moore's Law of doubling Computer Power every 18 months, but it
isn't clear to me (yet) how these are calibrated against
eachother. It seems that any superlinear growth in value
(currently exponential or geometric?) will unbalance the
equation, causing an acceleration in the total amount of resource
put against it. Perhaps by the time we reach 21M BitCoins (once
estimated to be in 2140???) the real *cost* of maintaining the
distributed blockchain will be low enough as to be incentivized
otherwise (a "tax" or negative interest on bitcoins? a
"transaction fee" to spend them?). Maybe by then there will be
enough "Money-at-Home" services running on your Screen Saver (WTF
makes us think that in 10 much less 130 years computing will look
at *all*like what it does today?). More likely the nanomachines
running in your bloodstream that took the place of your liver (now
an irrelevant, atrophied organ) have a background process running
to maintain blockchains? Hardly.
The idea of the NSA (or even darker/spookier/unknown/unnamed TLAs)
using their uber-massive computing power and bullpen of savants
(think Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting being interviewed by the
NSA) to corrupt/subvert this process is sad if not actually
terrifying. I could do the search (and probably will) but there
must be devastating implications of Quantum Computing on BitCoin
mining/security?
And what about lost or destroyed (or simply hoarded) BitCoins. I
suspect the USPS and the US Mint depends modestly on the amount of
their "currency" being lost/destroyed/collected ... for stamps
(especially today!) that could be in the single or double digits
of percentage... for currency/coin, I suspect a much lower (but
not insignificant) percentage goes down one drain or another (as a
child, I remember people drilling holes in pennies to make washers
for copper riveting because they were "cheaper"). Once the unique
signature of a minted BitCoin is "lost" it can never be
retrieved?
I also don't fully appreciate the implications of the transaction
history... it seems to fly in the face of anonymity? And does it
mean that some bitCoins will be worth more than others? virgin
BitCoins still in the hands of the minter? Bitcoins with a long
and checkered past provenance? "This BitCoin was once used by
Barack Obama to buy off John Boehner to pretend to oppose
ObamaCare before it was disclosed that ... " and then "it was
later used to pay off Ollie North for the long standing debt on
his part in both John and Bobby Kennedy's assasination". Ok...
identity isn't required for a transaction but the *sequence* and
*timing* of transactions would be inviolate? Those alone have
some residual/innate utility in sorting out who did
what/when/why/how? I guess this is why it has been suggested
that BitCoin isn't an ideal place to launder money?
- Steve
Bitcoin mining and the NSA does seem to me like a match
made in heaven. Mainly because they both spend a lot of time
and energy breaking hashes. The "Miners" do it to mine
bitcoins whereas the NSA does it to break encryption. It would
probably be really easy for a big NSA computer to mine some
coins. They may even know some secret math tricks for
reversing a hash that normal people do not.
As a bitcoin n00b, I found this site fun and informative
https://blockchain.info/
. They even have realtime some
webgl
vizualizations. You can also watch
bitcoins
being "minted".
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