Sort of an open source paypal. I checked out their forums and they appear the be full of Austrians and Paulites but I still think it is kind of a neat idea.
http://www.bitcoin.org/
If you install it be prepared to tinker a bit. It gobbles CPU cycles.
hmmm well that sounds pretty interesting. it would be awesome if it would actually work.
That was my thought. So far the easiest things to buy with bitcoins is paypal balance as far as I can tell. However a guy did set up a site similar to craigslist. It doesn't have anything on it yet though. (which doesn't bother me yet, it only got set up yesterday)
whats the exchange rate per coin for paypal balance right now?
Quote from: Requia ☣ on July 17, 2010, 01:55:30 AM
whats the exchange rate per coin for paypal balance right now?
Currently I believe a bitcoin is worth about 8 cents. Yesterday they were 4 cents each, which was, apparently, signficantly high. A lot more people have joined the network lately, dunno if this is a bubble or not.
I'll have to see if this takes off, and what the white hats say about its security, a way to do microtransactions without fighting that 25 cent minimum card fee would be awesome, and if its actually secure thats even better.
I want to crack this system.
All I have to do is break SHA-2, or at least figure out a way to do SHA-2 really quickly, and then not let anybody else figure it out. And do it before SHA-3 comes out.
How hard can it be?
If I'm reading this right, there's no way this is feasible in the long run. No transaction is confirmed until checking every previous transaction, ever. They want to steer an entire currency system through dead reckoning. That might work for now, when almost no one uses it, but "download every monetary transaction using this currency ever" is going to be a major bottleneck in the system. I'm probably misunderstanding this because nobody is that stupid or that optimistic about network speeds.
I'll come back to this once I'm more awake.
I dunno. They have a forum and you could mention this problem and see how they approached that. The forum is also full of paulites, which could be fun for you trolls out there.
Quote from: Golden Applesauce on July 17, 2010, 06:27:53 AM
If I'm reading this right, there's no way this is feasible in the long run. No transaction is confirmed until checking every previous transaction, ever. They want to steer an entire currency system through dead reckoning. That might work for now, when almost no one uses it, but "download every monetary transaction using this currency ever" is going to be a major bottleneck in the system. I'm probably misunderstanding this because nobody is that stupid or that optimistic about network speeds.
I'll come back to this once I'm more awake.
I intend to browse their pdf paper (linked in the FAQ), which I assume explains on how to deal with this problem.
There's one thing you are already misunderstanding, and that's as far as I've understood, they "only" seem to track the transaction history per individual bitcoin. Of which there will always be maximum 21 million. I wonder how they came up with that number. OTOH I don't see how that would work since bitcoins can be subdivided to 8 places behind the decimal. But if they figured something smart for that, you could easily keep the system feasible by "washing" bitcoins, that is, converting them temporarily to another currency and then using that to build one with a clean transaction history.
It could also mean that bitcoins with a very long history, as they become slower to process, become worth less as this happens, they "wear out", so to say?
Also if this should ever turn feasible, the bitcoin should become worth something like 10-100 dollars. Or maybe even much more, once Pareto's law kicks in and 1% of the population holds 99% of the resources.
So I guess the lesson here is, "Don't try to figure out a new cryptographic and/or economic system at 2 am."
eta: can anyone else see their homepage? I'm getting this:
Quote
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yeah getting the same. obviously the black shades guys at the federal reserve got wind of this and figured it just might work, if not for an unfortunate software/hardware/wetware glitch ...
homepage is working fine for me. Maybe it is being blocked from Europe?
Nah, I get the screwy homepage too, other places on the site work though.
Quote from: BabylonHoruv on July 17, 2010, 12:25:10 AM
That was my thought. So far the easiest things to buy with bitcoins is paypal balance as far as I can tell. However a guy did set up a site similar to craigslist. It doesn't have anything on it yet though. (which doesn't bother me yet, it only got set up yesterday)
Where is this? I've some DVDs I've been meaning to sell, but I can't stand dealing with paypal, might as well give it a shot.
http://www.bitlist.tk/
Looks like there are a few things up for sale now, mostly computer hardware.
Hmm, I may have screwed this up on my price.
it seems the other things being sold there suggest a BTC value far higher than what the exchange services are paying.
Quote from: BabylonHoruv on July 17, 2010, 08:57:10 PM
homepage is working fine for me. Maybe it is being blocked from Europe?
Doubt it, GA is Amurrican based, IIRC. Also, what Requia said.
Quote from: Requia ☣ on July 18, 2010, 12:55:01 AM
Hmm, I may have screwed this up on my price.
it seems the other things being sold there suggest a BTC value far higher than what the exchange services are paying.
I think it is more likely the others screwed up. bitcoinmarket.com is a pretty good indicator of the dollar value of bitcoins.
I keep reading the title of this as "bitchcoins".
heh, might have some trouble trading in those. On the other hand they might get awfully popular.
I'm a little more optimistic about the idea now, after reading that PDF. (The site works again now.) I still have some concerns, though. Treat everything below as moderately uninformed speculation; my only credentials are knowing what the words "hash," "public/private key," and "computational complexity" mean, and I still don't fully understand their system.
The main security comes from the assumption that the vast majority of nodes hashing the transaction history are honest. Probably okay, but the hidden assumption is that the network is homogeneous. If I try to buy a widget from a seller in the Russian network and from a seller in the US network with the same coins, two things can happen. If the Russian network and the US network are heavily interconnected, then one transaction will make it into a block first and both networks will count the larger chain as legit. If they are only loosely interconnected, then the transaction sent to the Russian network will get added to a chain that's kind of local to the Russian chain and the US transaction will get added to a chain kind of local to the US. Eventually the Russian chain and the US chain will get compared and the shorter chain will get cut - invalidating one of my transactions, but possibly after the seller had already mailed me the widget. Would that also invalidate every transaction that was only on the fork of the chain that got shorter? I need to research their system more.
It could also be possible to 'spoof' to a target node and masquerade as an entire network. Suppose Alice buys a widget from Bob; Bob waits to see that enough other nodes accept the transaction before acting on it by mailing me the widget. But Alice has somehow cut Bob out of the main network; Bob thinks he's talking to a random sample of nodes, but in fact a huge proportion of them are Alice's sockpuppets. Is that viable?
If the network is too anonymous, I could see other problems. If I understand correctly, the only thing that happens if you try (and fail) to double spend your coins is that one of the transactions falls through - which is no worse for you than if you hadn't tried to cheat in the first place. So even if there's only a small chance of getting away with double spending, as long as trying doesn't cost you anything, a huge proportion of people are going to try it. There must be some way of providing for a mechanism of identifying known cheaters - but to do that you'd need to be able to link multiple transactions to the same account (once could be an accident, more attempts would be intentional.) But if you can link multiple transactions to the same account, then you can deduce the transaction history of people and start putting together PI. Not sure how you can detect cheaters without being able to figure out any given person's transaction history. Also, since failed attempts at cheating are simply discarded, is anyone (besides the victim) even going to know if there was an attempt? Keeping track of failed transactions doesn't help you hash new transactions, so it isn't profitable - someone would need to be payed to do it, probably.
The main thing, though, is that people would be using this system on their home computers. If I understand correctly, if someone else gets a hold of your private key, you're toast and there's nothing you can do about it. How well is the typical user going to be able to protect his data? There's a reason banks pay the big bucks for computer security professionals - it's necessary when the stakes are people's life savings. I think my computer is reasonably secure, but I wouldn't bet my college tuition on it.