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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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quote:
Originally posted by kkeerroo:
I think I will stick with the current forex system. At least they are not making it up as they are going along.
Want to bet ? "Making it up" is exactly what fiat currencies are designed to enable. Thats the whole point of Bitcoin. Its a currency where you *cant* just print more of it any time you feel like your economy needs a few billion more.
Thus avoiding the automatic devaluation of every poor sucker whose $ savings in the bank suddenly lost major chunks of its value any time the gov feels like it needs to spend some more or bail out some of their friends.
Decide for yourself whether you think its worthwhile or not.. I just thought I'd share a "hey, check this out" with you guys.
Ive been learning about it for a few months, studying the history of money, fiat currencies, gold backed currencies, transaction systems, historical value transfer systems (like Hawala and others), Government Fiscal Policies (haha), P2P distributed databases, Merkle Trees, Cryptography, and so on, and Im convinced its worth a shot. I imght be wrong, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Up to you.
Someone put it this way - "Imagine a worldwide virtual community of thousands of geeks, coders, future economists , investors, and so on all working away to invent a better open-source monetary system for the digital age.. investing their time and $ into it. and you can buy stock in this company, just by buying some bitcoins"
Time will tell, but by then it will be too late to get in early. Bitcoins have already appreciated in value over 300% in the last 6 months and they just keep on going up.
I think theyre well worth looking at, and just thought Id share the possible opportunity with some friends, but read up on the forum and make your own decision if you are interested in holding what is now the second most valuable currency in the world.
@aaron. there are records in the blockchain, but they are relatively anonymous, so no, there are no "chargebacks".. this is digital cash.. sending bitcoins is the digital equivalent of handing over notes.. once they are in the other persons hand, theres nothing you can do about it.The way cash should be.
If you dont trust the person you are trading with, you do it via an escrow service like www.clearcoin.com. Chargebacks are what credit card companies and paypal do, and there is nothing to stop someone operating a credit-card service or "bank" on top of the bitcoin system, but this is about the currency itself, not the service beaureuas that operate within that currency. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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Sun May 01, 2011 6:52 pm |
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Valen
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 4436
Location: Sydney
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Actually the current forex/general banking systems are just a giant big teetering pile of crap.
its layers of CSV, splattered on top of emulated VAX systems running unmaintained cobol and fortran applications pretending to read transactions off tape streams pretending to be punched tape.
Look at the giant stuffups that have happened in the past year with people not getting paid, getting paid twice etc etc.
International transfers are so much worse than all that. A good % of them are processed by hand.
My missus works in the industry and tells me the stories, you would think that being a bank they would have everything *right* its not, they are some of the worst hodgepodges I've ever seen.
They have multiple databases, customers exist in them both, and its up to the customer service rep when dealing with a customer to keep them both in synch. IE a typo in one means the hole thing comes tumbling down then it comes time to send term deposit expiry letters out.
</rant>
Knightrous their website lacked the 25 words or less description I was looking for too which sucks.
Anyway my understanding is this.
Basically, they have these coins, which are treated the same as a physical coin (IE an asset), not like money in a bank account.
The whole way it works is the "transaction log" is public, and published.
So if I transfer a coin to you I tell the whole world that ownership of this coin is now passed to you, that way the whole world knows that its yours to spend. Every 10 minutes or so they bundle up into a block all the transactions that have happened in those 10 minutes and pass it around and sign it.
So essentially the "database" of accounts *is* the transaction log.
They say keeping track of all this isn't that hard, and it probably shouldn't be, My biggest concern would be with a bit of work it wouldn't be too hard to de-anonymise it all. Its a fairly detailed and statistical method and I'm not 100% on my understanding of the system before I call it but still. _________________ Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets
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Sun May 01, 2011 11:10 pm |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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There has been a price spike in the last month due to a number of factors. Press Coverage, Cascade awareness and lots of online mentions in various forums, VC/Startup newsletters etc. Apparently one of the development team is being paid to go and give a talk to the American CIA on Bitcoin. (whooa)
Yes, apparently some of the Online Gambling websites that are under attack from the USGov have been looking into it as a future currency as well.
There is an 10 year experienced professional market analysis guy who has been tracking the growth of bitcoins and believes the outlook for them is very positive and issues regular reports on the market trends here http://blog.bitcoinwatch.com/
There is a lot of discussion on the forums over what the governments of the world (particularly the USGov) might do once they notice whats happening..
Theories range from "nothing, they are just digital tokens, no more illegal than trading in baseball cards" right up to "OMG, you guys are financial terrorists, tax evaders and drug dealers (the only scareword missing so far is kiddy porn) and are going to jail ! You're not allowed to do that to our money system !"
Everyone has an opinion..
I like it, because having done a moderate amount of research into the history of money, I have come away fairly appalled at just how badly/evilly nearly every currency in the history of the world has been "managed" - everything from hyperinflation, confiscation of gold, governments fiddling the books to allow themselves to keep spending money they havent got (placing future generations that havent even been born yet in their debt), war financing and profit and subtle manipulation designed to put invisible shackles around people's lives and freedoms.
If you dare opening your eyes and trying "The Red Pill", have a quick look around starting with this famous quote.
"Give me control over a nations currency and I care not who makes the laws"
-quote from one of the Rothschilds - the worlds biggest bankers
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&hs=t51&rls=en&q=i+care+not+who+makes+the+law&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
So far to me, Bitcoin looks like it might just be the first system with designed-in features to prevent the fiscal abuses of the past from happening again in the future.
Maybe Im just being idealist, but a possible future currency that works on the same principles that Linux does (open source, community driven, P2P) appeals to me.
To the naysayers - consider that the idea that a free Operating System developed largely by a bunch of amateur volunteers (rather than a big corporation) that has similair principles could go from nothing 20 years ago to now running over 60% of the worlds servers, and a huge number of phones, embedded devices (my webcams run linux), supercomputers, movie rendering farms, and desktops around the world.. An idea that was inconcievable until the Internet made it possible.
Why shouldnt the ancient creaking corrupt money systems of the world get a similair network technology treatment ? _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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Mon May 02, 2011 10:24 am |
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