Ben laurie bitcoin value

A friend alerted to me to ben laurie bitcoin value sudden wave of excitement about Bitcoin. I have to ask: Or in the 20 years since the wave before that, in ?

Also, for what its worth, if you are going to deploy electronic coins, why on earth make them expensive to create? This is why all modern currencies are fiat currencies instead of being made out of gold. Bitcoins ben laurie bitcoin value designed to be expensive to make: It is far more sensible to use signatures over random numbers as a basis, as asymmetric encryption gives us the required unforgeability without any need to involve work.

If you want to limit supply, there are cheaper ways to do that, too. Incidentally, Ben laurie bitcoin value has recently been used as the basis for a fully-fledged transaction system, Open Transactions. I have not used this system, so make no claims about how well it works. This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, at You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.

Both comments and pings are currently closed. Ben, I like your work and I also ben laurie bitcoin value back the 10 or 15 years in digital bearer certificates. But what has changed from the Chaumian or even Brands days is that distributed p2p architecture ben laurie bitcoin value flourished. It has flourished not only for efficiency but for ultimate survival.

However, the more important consideration is that auditable reserves themselves create a point of ben laurie bitcoin value through confiscation. The transactional block chain has allowed decentralisation and that in itself is a major change. Realizing that all money is a mass illusion in some way, I would personally prefer to trust in cryptography than to trust in God and I thought you would as well.

Comment by Jon Matonis — 17 May Sounds a bit like sour grapes. What has changed since ? The Internet has gone from widely-hyped but still not really mainstream behavior to utterly pervasive and worldwide. The mining metaphor allows the coins to originate in the hands of the participants rather than with some central authority.

I have not seen any such proposals in the literature and certainly none in the field. The inventors of Bitcoin obviously have some political beliefs about inflation and how much trust we can put in central authorities not much. Bitcoin is modelled on gold where there is a finite amount in the ground, it takes ben laurie bitcoin value work to get smaller amounts of it and it takes a very long time to really exhaust the supply. Sure there are other possibilities personally I think monetary policy does slightly more good than harm although just barely and perhaps you should dust off ben laurie bitcoin value of your ben laurie bitcoin value systems and clean it up for the modern era.

But I think Bitcoin is one of those rare cases of a powerful idea made flesh and so far I am impressed and perhaps a little scared. It has to do with securing the network against attacks. Please go read the paper, and understand the system. And then go write another blog post after being fully informed. Comment by sad — 17 May However, it seems from reading your post that you have not bothered to understand it before criticizing it.

With bitcoin the proof of work is spread out over willing miners, and while they are paid every time they succeed, the whole network ben laurie bitcoin value from the collective effort. Ben laurie bitcoin value is nothing new in bitcoin technologically, but the specific combination of components is, AFAIK, new and useful. Comment by Brock Ben laurie bitcoin value — 17 May For those of us not familiar with the literature, can ben laurie bitcoin value elaborate on how to make Chaumian digital cash both scarce and decentralized?

Or do you think those properties are not valuable? I agree that botnets are problematic; the entire Bitcoin network currently has only about 8, GPU-equivalents. Comment by Wes Felter — 17 May BitCoin is the first decentralized digital currency to my knowledge. The only easier way to limit supply that I can think of is to make it centralized and give someone power to determine supply.

Comment by Zooko — 17 May Falk — 18 May 4: This is also why they fucking suck. You completely skip over the fact that Bitcoin is completely decentralised in both the way bitcoins are created and in the way transactions are validated, and the proof of work is how this is able to be achieved.

In addition, the proof of work also provides the mechanism by which rampant inflation can be limited with ben laurie bitcoin value de-centrally created currency. Whether the algorithms are an improvement is obviously an independent topic.

The conflation of limited supply and proof-of-work has probably already served its purpose: In the long term, the incentive to continue mining converts from creation of new coins to collection of coins via transaction fees. Bitcoin does use signatures to transfer funds.

Ben laurie bitcoin value create a transaction with one or more unspent outputs as inputs, an output to the recipient, and an optional output to yourself for change. Then you sign this transaction with your private key and broadcast it to the network.

Proof of work is for distributed double-spend protection. Since each block takes a statistically predetermined amount of work, and each block is connected to the last, in order to double spend ben laurie bitcoin value attacker must have enough computing power to out-grow the honest block chain.

Who ben laurie bitcoin value the Lucre mint? Any Ben laurie bitcoin value economy ben laurie bitcoin value a common trusted third party to do so. Bitcoin has downsides — expensive minting, transactions take an hour to be confirmed — in exchange for being ben laurie bitcoin value.

I suspect that it will be of value as a global currency, with systems like Lucre used for smaller economies backed by it, providing cheap, rapid, transactions within communities that can all agree to trust a mint, and then using slow Bitcoin transactions between mints. Comment by Alaric Snell-Pym — 18 May 9: Please tell me that you, of all people, know the difference between centralized and decentalized. For example, Lucre requires a central trusted mint: Not to mention that the amount of money wasted by the proof-of-work would still have to be paid in the centralized mint model: This is different because users will actually be willing to pay for their money, unlike e-mail where people expect to send it for free from a wide variety of computers and therefore any non-trivial proof-of-work would make e-mail unusable.

To be honest I think the greater danger of decentralized money is going to be lack of government control and all the money laundering issues it brings. Expect it to be severely crippled by regulation. People can trust that nobody at the mint is stealing coins for free. I am new to anonymous digital currency and so my thoughts are still naive. In any case, I wanted to find out more about bitcoin and I ended up on this blog post. After reading the criticisms, I had some comments that I hope you can comment on so I can learn a bit more about this domain.

Your point I take it is that the computational intensity of this busy-work is not necessary to accomplish this goal. But I thought the point of it was that if you remove the computational difficulty, then it becomes more likely that an attacker can generate ben laurie bitcoin value competing maximal chain of blocks with the same ease that someone could generate the legit chain of blocks, and this opens the way for double-spending and other attacks on the currency.

Do the no-work systems address this problem in a different way? Do you have comments on this, too? I suppose you might argue that these older systems also had some degree of hype surrounding them.

However, the very fact that laypeople are getting intrigued by bitcoin does seem to indicate that this particular system, for whatever reason, has greater penetration into popular visibility. I think you failed to fully understand a number of innovations that bitcoin brings to the table, most notably its decentralized ben laurie bitcoin value. This is worth a read: Bitcoin is a ben laurie bitcoin value bad idea. It is a scam.

It is not a currency. The economic assumptions underpinning the Bitcoin ecosystem are laughable, and ignore hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how currencies work with each other. Pingback by Last week on Twitter 15Mb: Hopefully I can clear up a few misconceptions. He did a calculation right, he just did the wrong calculation. On a single machine, this is a to one reduction. Once your reputation is high enough, stamp sizes drop down to where they are almost invisible. Most the objections raised over the years have been found to be overstated problems that have been fixed.

Pingback by My 2 Cents on Bitcoins - vwp-online blog — 2 Jun Following my admittedly somewhat rambling posts on Bitcoin, I decided to write a proper paper about the problem. RSS feed for comments on this post. Bitcoin A friend alerted to me to a sudden wave of excitement about Bitcoin. As far as I can see, nothing.

Following my admittedly somewhat rambling posts on Bitcoin, I decided to write a proper paper about the problem. Suggestions of where are welcome. By the way, Bitcoin fanboys: I see I have been taken to task for my heretic views on the Bitcoin forums. This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, at You can follow ben laurie bitcoin value responses to this entry through the RSS 2.

Both comments and pings are currently closed. Looks like good fodder for Financial Cryptography — http: Comment by Chris Swan — 3 Jul 6: Comment by Dave Birch — 3 Jul 9: Comment by Ben — 3 Jul Comment by Dave Birch — 3 Jul It is used not only to achieve consensus on checkpoints in the block chain, but also to decide all of the other technical details of bitcoin: However, the properties of this mechanism are such they cannot be used to achieve real-time consensus on a large volume of transactions.

It involves developers of bitcoin software, miners, and end users. It involves debates on mailing lists and message boards. It involves network effects that discourage people from starting their ben laurie bitcoin value bitcoin fork. It ben laurie bitcoin value people trusting certain developers and installing new releases. Both mechanisms complement each other. Consensus between people is less vulnerable to attack, but it cannot be automated.

Consensus between computers based on proof-of-work might be vulnerable to an attacker with a large amount of CPU power, but it can be automated.

Check these out http: Comment by Michele — 3 Ben laurie bitcoin value What the attacker can do is block my attempts to spend my bitcoins by ignoring my transactions. Now if profit is irrelevant, then yes — a big bank or rogue state initiative could pay the millions to some ASIC company to build the hardware necessary, operate it and cause some temporary grief to Bitcoin.

So instead of the proof of work being based on the block chain hashing you propose the proof of work being the existing of a node. Of course, the result is spinning up multiple ben laurie bitcoin value. If I can runnodes which is trivial versus your 1 node I would earntimes more than you. I have every confidence that your assessment of Bitcoin is correct, Ben laurie bitcoin value, however I cannot resist pointing ben laurie bitcoin value that the Ben laurie bitcoin value Mint is an anachronism dating back to the days when coins had intrinsic worth.

I find very few people understand how our current money system works, which makes me somewhat cynical of attempts to replace it. In the long run however, blocks will only be rewarded with transaction fees and a market equilibrium will form where the cost of producing the hashing power needed to find a block will be equivalent to the total of transaction fees in that block. Assuming transaction fees are much lower than the value of transactions in a block, the cost of forking a block are then much lower than the rewards of the double-spended coins.

Comment by Steven Mooij — 4 Jul No country today could resist an invasion ben laurie bitcoin value a coalition of the rest of the world, and that coalition could easily abolish its currency. With Bitcoin, the equivalent of 1 is that any group that had the resources to do that would gain much more from mining Bitcoins, and 2 probably no single group can out-compute the Bitcoin network right now — it has more computing power than the top supercomputers combined.

While your point makes sense, it is unlikely to be a practical problem for Bitcoin, just as a foreign invasion is unlikely to be a problem for the U. If you refer to the total computing power of Bitcoin right now, please realize that about I think it would be reasonable that if normal bitcoin operation is discussed that rewards new blocks with only transaction fees to only refer to the part of that computer power that is payed for by current transaction fees about 0. Comment by Steven Mooij — 5 Ben laurie bitcoin value Of course, doing that and catching up with the current state of the system would probably take quite a bit more than 1.

Comment by Ben — 6 Jul There are a lot of talk going on around ben laurie bitcoin value world about virtual currency such as Bitcoins and others. Bitcoin is probably the most known and talked virtual currency in these days.

From what we can see in the exchange markets, that have been created to trade Bitcoin, there is a lot of daily activity in the trading environment. What we cannot see is a similar activity in the retail environment either for on-line or real world transactions.

Aside from a few examples, this virtual currency does not seem to be taking off. This means that if you want to have some of this Bitcoinyou can exchange them for your fiat currency on the exchange markets. Ben laurie bitcoin value Bitcoin allows you and the seller to have a cost free transaction in ben laurie bitcoin value same way you would ben laurie bitcoin value if you would hand over your cash money to the vendor.

In addition handling cash money is also a cost both for you and the vendor. Third, is the vendor giving you any additional advantage if you pay in Bitcoin like, for example, a small discount? Not that I am aware of. But might be possible that same are doing it. What I know for sure is that if you pay with real cash money instead of your credit card, you have a very high possibility to get a small discount if you dare asking for it.

Fourth, there are the exchange markets that makes the conversion rate change and it is difficult for you and the vendor to forecast its future value. Or it has increased. This uncertainty, surely complicates the matter even more. Unless you see into Bitcoin a form of investment in the hope that its value will go sky high someday.

All fiat money of course are subjected to inflation and deflation. And the conversion rate between them vary daily. Some might also argue that fiat money might collapse and that you would end up having a bank account filled up with numbers that have no purchase value at all. So, it seems ben laurie bitcoin value what we need for a virtual currency to become a usable currency is a sort of stability of its value. In order to accomplish this, we have to reduce the trading and increase the actual use of our beloved virtual currency.

It is my opinion that the present monetary system is just a paradigm, a model. Therefore it is subjected to a shift. And a Global Virtual Currency not necessarily Bitcoin could be a good entry point for the shift to occur. But it needs to be available for everybody.

Comment by Michele — ben laurie bitcoin value Jul So if you are willing to invest more than the compounded mining profit, you can take the majority vote and influence consensus, by expanding the computing power of the world in the form of efficient mining machines. We could talk about governments, banks, competing currencies, lulz etc.

Furthermore, as the network expands the window of opportunity closes to exclude small scale lulz-motivated attackers, and allow only governments or large corporations. Ben, your analysis reads as though you took your well-known and long-standing bias against proof-of-work and reverse engineered that ideology to fit into an ad hoc ben laurie bitcoin value of bitcoin cryptography.

Comment by Jon Matonis — 10 Jul RSS feed for comments on this post.