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Showing 20 of 34 results by eugene2k
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Metal Engraved Keypair Cards! Coming soon!
by
eugene2k
on 05/07/2011, 15:20:58 UTC
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: My Response to Ben Laurie’s ‘Last Word’ on Bitcoin
by
eugene2k
on 05/07/2011, 13:32:30 UTC
which explains his view on why bitcoin is either not a decentralized system, or that if it is, how it could be a more efficient one.
Not being able to make up one's mind on what a certain subject is or isn't kinda hints at how much of an expert one is in that subject.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Metal Engraved Keypair Cards! Coming soon!
by
eugene2k
on 05/07/2011, 13:21:49 UTC
So... this thread got my imagination running...

Not so far future... You get notified that your uncle you didn't even know about died and your presence is required for reading of his will. You soon find out that your uncle was one rich bastard but all he left you was a small diamond. So you decide to see how much the diamond is worth and take it to a specialist. While looking at the diamond the specialist notices there is an engraving on one of the sides of the diamond. Looking closely you realize it must be a QR code. The QR code is your uncles private key for his wallet containing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. All in a small diamond Smiley
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: How to deal with seller fraud with services such as MyBitcoin?
by
eugene2k
on 05/07/2011, 13:07:27 UTC
This really confuses me. There is literally no protection against for the buyer to get scammed? Am I right or wrong?
You could try to sue them, but finding the real address would be quite a pain, I imagine. This also would be one of the things to look at before signing up as a customer.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Price of bitcoin to hit 50$/coin
by
eugene2k
on 04/07/2011, 17:11:21 UTC
Can you be more specific?

Or just speculating?
He's trying to manipulate the market.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Why bitcoin won't make it
by
eugene2k
on 04/07/2011, 16:07:20 UTC
MY-BIT-COIN-DOT-COM
Suppose they become the main bitcoin bank, and if they offer instant transaction confirmation already this will attract merchants and users. If there aren't any competitors, they could one day decide to charge you 10% on all transactions. And so you have a choice: either have instant transactions that cost 10% more or not have instant transactions. Now, this is a very far-fetched situation, and more than likely there will be more banks in the future offering instant transaction confirmations. Everyone wants to jump on the band wagon once they know that it's profitable, don't they. So more than likely is that we'll have more bitcoin banks popping up that offer the same basic service to merchants - instant confirmations. Now here's where it becomes a problem: as there are many banks, they compete with each other for users, so the market is fragmented (especially considering an almost nonexistent barrier of entry). For users that might not be so much of a problem as it is a benefit, but think about merchants for a bit and you realize that it's beneficial for merchants to work with as many banks as possible that would allow them to receive instant payments. It would be a huge pain in the ass to review each bank, not to mention that it's also a risk to rely on this instant confirmation before the transaction is actually confirmed by the network. Now lets forget about these issues for a moment and focus on the experience of a user that tries to pay with bitcoin: the user clicks a "pay with btc" button on the website and is shown a page with a list of banks to choose from, now the user has to search through the hundreds of banks on that page just to fucking make a payment. Compare this with paypal or google-checkout and it's obvious that the user will prefer other payment options to bitcoin.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Instant payments (Was: Why bitcoin won't make it)
by
eugene2k
on 04/07/2011, 08:12:00 UTC
Got your attention now, didn't I?  Grin

Anyway, I'd like to talk about one of the disadvantages of bitcoin over other digital currencies. Non-instant payments. In today's world we're used to instant payments. We go to the mall, pay with our credit card at the checkout and we're done, we use various digital currencies and payment systems online to again make payments in seconds. This is not possible with bitcoin even with 0 confirmations, and "0 confirmations" approach is quite insecure to be widely used. So in order for instant payments to be possible we need to have the payment confirmed in a faster way. The only one I can think of is by having trusted parties managing the money, thus when a trusted party confirms the money has been sent, you can be sure you'll receive a payment. In effect, these trusted parties are basically banks. However, because it's very easy to set up such a bank, because it takes few resources, anyone can create such banks. And this leads to the main question of this topic: how do we make sure fraudulent banks do not get included in the system? Or perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way entirely? What are your thoughts?
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Stock Exchange Security Standards
by
eugene2k
on 03/07/2011, 15:12:08 UTC
Therefore, what I am proposing is that the BitCoin community draft together a set of agreed security standards and best practices that all trusted exchanges should adhere to.
The bigger question is what do you do when a trusted exchange suddenly decides to take all your bitcoins and disappear? Which leads to another question: how do you know an exchange can be trusted?

Until you involve a few lawyers from a few countries that could answer those questions, you can't really consider any exchanges to be trustworthy no matter how secure they claim to be.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin too valuable to spend
by
eugene2k
on 03/07/2011, 09:06:38 UTC

I've just been listening to an interview on Agorist Radio with Justin from Voucher-Safe (podcast here http://agoristradio.com/?p=433)

The interview is about what Voucher-Safe tries to solve, and what it doesn't. While talking about gold he mentions that, after the thrill of buying something with a gold-based currency wears off, people rarely use it. Instead they tend to hoard it, keeping it as a store of wealth. A good example of this is http://www.goldmoney.com/ with 1.8 billion in gold, available digitally, that for the most part just sits there as a gold savings account. He then predicts that if bitcoin turns out to be as good as its proponents say it is, it will have the same problem.
Why? Because if a merchant accepts both Bitcoin and Fiat currency people will always prefer to pay with fiat currency simply because the equivalent bitcoin is seen to be more valuable (i.e. $100 woth of bitcoin is > 100$ fiat).

I think this is an interesting point. Thoughts?
If gold is so good for savings, why have any fiat currency at all? Why not save your money in gold from the very start right until you need the money and only then convert them into fiat? It would be stupid to have always inflating fiat currency when you can have always deflating gold/bitcoin, wouldn't it? The problem with gold lies in the conversion to/from fiat currency. It's either too costly or too cumbersome. If it was easy you would prefer to store all your money in gold, and only convert into fiat currency when you need to. In a trade though, you would prefer to pay with gold because converting isn't free and involves a third party.

Bitcoin, however, is not gold, in the sense that it's very easy to convert to and from fiat currencies. The problem with bitcoin is in the risk of having it. You don't know what the price of bitcoin will be tomorrow, whether it's going to be 2x its price today or 0. And until you do you'll want to store some of your money in bitcoin, while still keeping most of it in fiat currency, since you don't want to lose everything in one day because you were storing it in bitcoins, but you also don't want to be the loser that didn't invest into bitcoin early and become rich with little effort. In other words if one wishes to solve the hoarding problem of bitcoin, one needs to up the chances of bitcoin becoming mainstream. Built-in deflation has nothing to do with hoarding.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Huge Television Ad for Bitcoin on All the Major Networks
by
eugene2k
on 03/07/2011, 07:10:25 UTC
Bad idea as a means to popularize bitcoin. Don't know if it's any good as a means of selling a digital product (likely not)

The best idea ever on these forums was paying bitcoins for getting merchants to provide bitcoin payment option. I think it should be expanded upon (one could make a website where some could donate bitcoins for the purpose and others could earn them by getting a website to accept bitcoins).
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Board Off-topic
Re: The ultimate bitcoin generator?
by
eugene2k
on 31/07/2010, 21:58:21 UTC
Will the unix' version of bitcoin work on PS3?  Huh
It might if you build it from source.
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Board Off-topic
Re: Nmap now includes a Bitcoin signature
by
eugene2k
on 31/07/2010, 21:54:36 UTC
OTOH, it facilitates finding Bitcoin clients, which isn't a good thing.  MITM anyone?
Your bitcoin client facilitates finding bitcoin clients even more Smiley
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Board Marketplace
Re: Coin Collecting
by
eugene2k
on 31/07/2010, 18:40:50 UTC
Ahh... I missed that somehow Smiley
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Board Exchanges
Re: New Bitcoin Exchange (mtgox.com)
by
eugene2k
on 31/07/2010, 18:39:17 UTC
mt.gox, you need to fix your charts. The dots for the same exchange rates are not on the same line.
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Board Marketplace
Re: Coin Collecting
by
eugene2k
on 31/07/2010, 11:57:50 UTC
Umm... as far as I understand, you really can't collect bitcoins. All that the system keeps are transactions between peers.
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Board Trading Discussion
Re: A Heroin Store
by
eugene2k
on 30/07/2010, 21:04:07 UTC
Can anyone see a way to attack the store?
Hacking always seems to work.
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: BitSlack - bitcoin OS in development
by
eugene2k
on 29/07/2010, 10:12:26 UTC
I think you should first define your priorities. Why would anybody want to use your OS? Surely not just because it has a few programs installed by default?
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Board Economics
Re: Greece, the EU, and Bitcoins
by
eugene2k
on 29/07/2010, 08:28:24 UTC
the fact that they have openly turned down funds from some sources and offers simply because of the nature of those funds.
Well I would also turn down funds from a mafia-owned business. You might want to do the same, considering the consequences.

Quote
In spite of suggestions that Moore's law is going to somehow stop
It is physically impossible to build a transistor smaller than an atom. So yes, Moore's law is going to stop.
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Board Economics
Re: Deflation
by
eugene2k
on 29/07/2010, 08:14:14 UTC
Quote
If you are from out of town, home prices have fallen almost 50% in many of those areas.
Yeah, nothing could be worse than an increase of buying power. The reason you experience deflation there is because people lost their buying power in the first place. Or rather because that buying power didn't have anything to back it. Thus in order for businesses to survive they have to lower their prices to match the actual buying power people now have.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Introducing: Bitcoin Networked Economy Specification v0.01-DRAFT
by
eugene2k
on 29/07/2010, 07:52:37 UTC
I too am a bit skeptical of the power of the spec in the merchant market, but I think it would be great for exchanges, which need to get scraped often.
Not until there are many exchanges dealing with the same currencies. And I'm doubtfull that many more will be popping up.