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Showing 20 of 27 results by toz
It really doesn't take a lot of effort to get out of here. 5 posts and four hours of perusing the fora...
This site is called "Bitcoin Forum", so the site is just one forum. And "fora"?! Are you from ancient Rome or are you one of those people who says "matrices" and "penes"?Re: Wouldn't it be more fair if the bitcoins were shared equally?
No, not everyone is free to mine gold. One must have physical access to the land, and the ability (legal and physical) to tear up the landscape. This is not true for at least 80% of the population of the Earth.
Exactly. And to mine Bitcoins you need access to power, GPUs, Internet, and so on. But you are free to acquire these things and mine, just as you are with gold.An attack would ruin the value of bitcoins, so you cannot count on fraudulent coins to offset the cost of the attack.
I'm assuming that's the attacker's objective since that's about the only reason someone would attempt a 51% attack. The more value Bitcoin has (the system as a whole) the more of a threat it is to our attacker and thus the greater the incentive they would have to destroy it.The point you are missing though, is that ASIC's technology has been around since before bitcoin got going, and it has been know from the early days of mining that ASIC's would be the final word on efficiency (in both watts and $$ per GH/s). If an strong adversary, lets just call him 'Uncle Sam', had decided to attack the network previous to ASIC development and adoption, they would only need to invest in their own ASIC research and manufacture. A few thousands of chips later, they would own the network.
This doesn't change that. They just also buy half the ASICs on the commercial market. You might argue that it makes an attack cost more, and that is true, but if it raises the value of Bitcoins, it also increases the value of an attack. So again, it would cancel out.Quote
In short, there was always a fear that the first person out with ASIC's could bring down the network easily. Now the only way is to make a whole shitload of chips, and the number (cost) required is growing by the day. There is not another foreseeable shortcut, except perhaps quantum computing, and that is why it is harder to attack now than pre-ASIC.
You're assuming the ASICs aren't being bought by the attacker. One could equally well argue that Bitcoins are more of a threat now than ever and an attacker might see the deployment of ASICs as closing their attack window and therefore, now would be the time for them to buy up ASICs to attack.However, I suppose there is another argument I can't refute -- people might expect ASICs to raise the value of Bitcoins even though there may be no rational reason for this expectation. If that is so, it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy as people buy in the expectation that the price will go up, driving it up. (This could actually happen.)
Well, my problem is that I don't have a GPU, so I can't mind Bitcoin, not like it'll be worth it now with ASICs.
Oh, I wasn't aware that "feature" could mean "bad decision that benefits you". 
Update: My dictionary does say that "feature" can mean "a distinctive attribute or aspect of something." So, yeah, bad decisions can be features so long as they are distinctive.
There seems to be suprising lack of focus on even litecoin's own website about what seems to me to be its biggest feature.
Litecoin crypt is based on RAM rather then parallelized math which makes it hostile to ASICs and GPUs.
A GPU is still faster (likely due to how obscenely fast GDDR is) but CPU mining is not obsoleted by it.
How is it a feature that an attacker can easily retask a farm of general purpose CPUs or a botnet to launch a 51% attack and then use them for something else at low cost?Litecoin crypt is based on RAM rather then parallelized math which makes it hostile to ASICs and GPUs.
A GPU is still faster (likely due to how obscenely fast GDDR is) but CPU mining is not obsoleted by it.
Here is the argument: A higher difficulty makes a 51% attack on the network harder to achieve. Since that is widely recognized, a higher difficulty makes people more confident in the long term viability of bitcoin, which leads to more hording and acceptance, and THAT drives up the price.
That makes no sense. You could equally well argue that ASICs coming out makes it easier to attack Bitcoin because the cost to achieve a 51% attack goes down. This is perfectly cancelled out by people who buy the ASICs raising the difficulty. The net effect is that the difficulty to attack the network is driven by the price, not the other way around.An attacker could be buying ASICs for all we know.
Basically i just want a set up that will return coins or fractions of a coin, don't care how long it takes....
You're about two years too late. You'd get pennies a week, if even. You would mine an amount equal to about a hundredth of the cost of the electricity you'd be using.Just bought my first club with bitcoin 
Who wouldn't love this currency?
Wait, you bought a club? Who wouldn't love this currency?http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QT55kh7mrvA/TzPtd22ocJI/AAAAAAAAH0A/7TIArnI0gSw/s1600/stop_clubbing_baby_seals.jpg
In other words, it's Bitcoin.
Except it isn't.
It's kind of like if I printed my own dollar bills. They'd be exactly like real dollar bills except that nobody would take them as payment.Except it isn't.
3. difficulty going up is guaranteed to drive bitcoin value up
The dependency only goes the other way. If the price of Bitcoin goes up, more people will find it profitable to mine and the difficulty will go up. An equilibrium will be reached as the rising difficulty drives marginal miners out of business.If new ASICs come out, people start investing in new ASICs instead of other types of mining equipment. Also, people who previously found it unprofitable to mine will start mining. The difficulty will go up. As the difficulty goes up, marginal miners who no longer find it profitable to mine will stop mining. The higher difficulty will drive away potential new miners.
There's no argument I know of that says an increasing difficulty that wasn't itself caused by a higher price would lead to a higher price.
Three things drive up price:
1) Speculation -- people buy Bitcoins in the belief that they will increase in value. This drives up the price as buyers compete for the limited supply. The increase in price encourages more speculation.
2) Demand for a means of exchange -- people buy Bitcoins to use in trade. If the trade volume goes up, that means more Bitcoins are needed to keep the exchange moving.
3) Demand for a store of value -- people buy Bitcoins to hold as a long-term store of value. This doesn't require them to believe they'll go up in value, only that the risk that they will decrease in value is acceptable.
Re: Wouldn't it be more fair if the bitcoins were shared equally?
Money is not fair. Nor is it ever equally distributed. If it was, I'd quit my job and become a bong tester. Inequality is also the incentive to do more.
And even if it was equally distributed, it would immediately become unequally distributed. The hard question is how to create prosperity, not how to spread it around if you assume it magically appears in abundance.Even if SHA-256 is partially broken (say easier to find hashes, but not fully broken), you-d see major resistance from ASIC miners. You might even get a split network.
I don't think this is a coherent argument.If some SHA-256 break makes it easier to find hashes, the difficulty will just go up and the network will be just as secure. Existing ASICs will be obsolete and will be replaced by new ASICs that take advantage of this break.
You'd need something that broke the difficulty mechanism for it to matter. It's almost inconeivable that there'd be a SHA-256 break such that adding more zero bits to the beginning of the hash didn't make them much harder to find. So the probability of this happening is near zero.
Any other break wouldn't require changing the mining algorithm. So long as difficulty still serves to measure work done, the mining need not change. And nobody has a stronger incentive than miners to fix any other problems with the system, and this is only going to increase.
Once the majority of mining power comes from ASICs, miners will have a huge investment in expensive equipment that is good for nothing but producing Bitcoins. Miners would be very quick to work to fix any defect that threatened the value of Bitcoins.
It's been Forbidden for the past few days.
What does this mean? Are you saying your browser is not letting you access their web page? If so, what's the precise error message you're getting?The criticism is fair if you believe we can be relatively certain that Litecoin will never get broad adoption. It's unfair if you think that Litecoin has a reasonable chance for broad adoption. Since there doesn't appear to be any actual advantageous technical differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin, it's hard to see any path to broad adoption. You'd have to imagine some large organization inexplicably chooses to back Litecoin.