Bitcoin Poised to Take Over The Dollar

FSP-Rebel said:
Not to mention, Bitcoin's network hashing rate (securing the blockchain ledger) is a thousand times more powerful than the top 500 super computers in the world. This worrying about compromising the blockchain is so 2014 at this point.
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..must be impossible then :)
 
brushfire said:
..must be impossible then :)
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There was some speculation back in 2014 and before as to whether it was possible to hack, compromise, 51% attack, whatever the Bitcoin blockchain but that was put to rest (no longer taken seriously or worthy of discussion by far greater crypto minds than I) as it seemingly became impossible as the network matured, strengthened, radically increased the network security hashing power over time. The hashing rate and difficulty to mine blocks of coins keeps going up rapidly as the amount of transactions on the network increase. From day one after the completion of Satoshi's white paper about the new bitcoin protocol, there was a built-in difficulty increase over time to increase the hashing rate that it takes to compete for blocks of coins. This hashing rate via miners simultaneously secures (publicizes all transactions) the blockchain and competes for new blocks of coins which currently produce 12.5 coins (as opposed to 25 prior to last July via the halving event which is triggered every four years) every ten minutes or thereabouts.

As the network expands naturally via increased difficulty, so to does the hashing power (output of hash function or speed of computing) needed to compete for the blocks of coins. Essentially, it's the electricity and the laws of mathematics that make and govern the blockchain. To give you an idea of the current Bitcoin difficulty and hash power: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty & https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate. You'll see that the current hashing rate is north of 3.5 million TH/s (tera or trillion hashes per second). -> Almost incomprehensible computing power

Steadily increasing difficulties tend to drive up hashing rates and the miners that produce those cost money and are becoming increasingly more powerful and thus more expensive. This can be seen as the network effect on the price of bitcoin over time as miners need fiat money to pay their electricity bills so there's a break even price that bitcoin needs to be at for mining to be profitable. Price speculation (over futures and world financial events) drives the price up from there. Simply put, w/ a hashing rate of this size and growing, Bitcoin is doing just fine regarding the strength and resilience of its blockchain.

However, one potential problem is the scaling debate about increasing blocksize via SegWit or Bitcoin Unlimited moving forward as backed up transactions (many of which are insignificant, dust payments) are becoming an issue thus driving fees up. For more on that, try Why Bitcoin Will Get Scaling Without Segwit or Large Blocks.
 
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brushfire said:
"decentralized" - Government states are the only entities with the compute resources required to compromise bitcoin, or the communication. That is both technically an economically feasible in an economic catastrophe scenario. Unlike gold, bitcoin can be manipulated or spoofed - its no more impossible than hacking the i-phone or any other device. The government has access to resources that are really hard to comprehend, but trust me - they probably "already have the keys to the bank", so to speak.

Gold, on the other hand, with all its disadvantages, has one significant advantage - it cannot be easily or economically synthesized, and there's no means to programatically compromise it.

If anything I would urge one to include both bitcoin and gold in their strategy, and probably put more investment into gold. I have no dog in either fight - just sayin.
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Bitcoin is near infinitely harded to "hack" than an iphone. You should look at how proof of work functions. If somehow some super genius figured out how to hack sha256, well we all are in trouble as banks, financials, etc... rely on that same hashing method to secure their data. So, if that happens TRILLIONS are exposed, forget about little ole bitcoin. Plus what would happen if sha256 got "hacked", within days the sha256 method would be replaced in bitcoin with an even more intensive method, and a hardfork would occur and likely refer to the blockchain state immediately before the "hack". That would require the "whole" of the bitcoin network upgrading their software, so it wouldn't be "forced", rather everyone would willingly do it eagerly, because not doing it would mean the super genius "hacker" would have near complete control of all bitcoin. Not happening.

That is SOOOOOOO unlikely though, and if it did happen, as I said TRILLIONS in the traditional fiat system would be compromised as well. Under such a scenario all ATM's, Credit cards, online payments, etc.... would halt immediately until the whole system could be rewritten to use a new method.

Bitcoin would likely be the first system, to reemerge using a new hashing method by the way, simply because its software footprint is miniscule compared to the 100,000's of software implementations made for the traditional banking system. Likely it'd take years for the banks to be a full function again.

Essentially if you believe bitcoin can be hacked as easy as an iphone, then as a consequence you must believe the traditional banking system can be hacked as easily as an iphone, they both use identical methods to hash in parts of the system securing them.
 
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I guess my overall point is that gold is pretty difficult to hack - I would argue its much more difficult than bitcoin, or paper money for that matter. iphones and NSA aside, gold has a solid history of being resistant to hacking (nearly 2000 years)... Granted, one might hear of gold fraud now and then, with the occasional tungsten fillers, but government price fixing is about as close as one can get to a systemic compromise...

Understand, I'm not trying to say that bitcoin is going to be hacked by some 13 y.o. in his parents basement. "easy" is a relative term. As someone who has worked in the technology industry, I've seen huge advancements in the last 30 years... Things that we thought were bullet proof 15 years ago are child's play today. Relative to gold, crypto-currency is in its infancy IMO - I dont consider crypto-currency as a replacement for gold. Perhaps other fiat currency, but not gold...

I must apologize to the OP that I took us on this tangent, but to me gold seems like the likely replacement for the dollar when it collapses. I'll not deny events that have occurred such as in Greece - perhaps I'm wrong, its entirely possible, but I'm not totally convinced that bitcoin will have the longevity that people hope it will have.

To conclude, I appreciate those who have taken the time to respond to my posts. I have read them and I understand - I dont want to stir trouble, but what would a distributed attack look like? Not all attacks must be on the encryption or hash itself, and may not be immediately obvious. I've seen very clever, sometimes surprisingly simple ways of compromising a system - POD comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
 
brushfire said:
"decentralized" - Government states are the only entities with the compute resources required to compromise bitcoin, or the communication. That is both technically an economically feasible in an economic catastrophe scenario. Unlike gold, bitcoin can be manipulated or spoofed - its no more impossible than hacking the i-phone or any other device. The government has access to resources that are really hard to comprehend, but trust me - they probably "already have the keys to the bank", so to speak.

Gold, on the other hand, with all its disadvantages, has one significant advantage - it cannot be easily or economically synthesized, and there's no means to programatically compromise it.

If anything I would urge one to include both bitcoin and gold in their strategy, and probably put more investment into gold. I have no dog in either fight - just sayin.
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I think they do, too.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...Police-Surveil-the-Blockchain-to-Make-Arrests
 
Suzanimal said:
I think they do, too.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...Police-Surveil-the-Blockchain-to-Make-Arrests
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What they did in that news story is essentially the same as if you were to record the serial numbers on some 20 dollar bills, and then you gave them to someone to buy drugs, then you had scanners at all the stores that would record the serial numbers. Essentially you could implicitly construct a trail from one drug dealer to another when the second spent it at the store.

All bitcoin transactions have a public key which everyone can see, once you tie that public key to a real identity you can track who they paid, and get implicit evidence they are working together. IT's not a hack of the system though. I could do what they did no problem, just requires access to gobs of data until you catch the perp revealing their identity when using bitcoin. As in, if I used my bitcoin at Newegg.com and entered my home address for shipping, they would now know I own that bitcoin address, and then they could watch for other addresses I paid to, and datamine the new address, and form a link between the two of us.

That's not a failure, or a hack, that is just having accessing to bitcoin exchange data, and merchant data, etc.... It also doesn't give them access to the bitcoins, they can just observe how it moved around the system.
 
RonPaulIsGreat said:
What they did in that news story is essentially the same as if you were to record the serial numbers on some 20 dollar bills, and then you gave them to someone to buy drugs, then you had scanners at all the stores that would record the serial numbers. Essentially you could implicitly construct a trail from one drug dealer to another when the second spent it at the store.

All bitcoin transactions have a public key which everyone can see, once you tie that public key to a real identity you can track who they paid, and get implicit evidence they are working together. IT's not a hack of the system though. I could do what they did no problem, just requires access to gobs of data until you catch the perp revealing their identity when using bitcoin. As in, if I used my bitcoin at Newegg.com and entered my home address for shipping, they would now know I own that bitcoin address, and then they could watch for other addresses I paid to, and datamine the new address, and form a link between the two of us.

That's not a failure, or a hack, that is just having accessing to bitcoin exchange data, and merchant data, etc.... It also doesn't give them access to the bitcoins, they can just observe how it moved around the system.
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It's traceable then? I was under the impression it anonymous and that was a selling point for me. I just started Bitcoin so forgive me if don't fully understand the ins and outs.
 
Suzanimal said:
It's traceable then? I was under the impression it anonymous and that was a selling point for me. I just started Bitcoin so forgive me if don't fully understand the ins and outs.
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It's anonymous up to the point you can tie that anonymous public address to an identity.

Like your public key might be 1Eq3vZHZ9uJbjDdENpbkrizN9Ji6HB4Fxc you received 2 Bitcoins at that address. No one knows it's yours, so you are anonymous. However, you go buy something from newegg.com and you open your wallet and pay, well, now it's going to be recorded in the blockchain that 1Eq3vZHZ9uJbjDdENpbkrizN9Ji6HB4Fxc transferred some bitcoins to an address owned by newegg, and when you ordered you would put a shipping address in, and name. So, now the government can get that shipping address and data from bitpay (newegg payment processor for bitcoin), and see oh that is suzanimals home address. So, now the government will know 1Eq3vZHZ9uJbjDdENpbkrizN9Ji6HB4Fxc is Suzanimal, but when you pay for something unless all your bitcoin inputs are perfectly matched to your payment output you will be producing some "change addresses back to yourself as well which they'll see as well as belonging to you. So, then you go pay for some drugs in theory on the darkweb using the same bitcoin wallet, you pay and they can connect the public address dots.

So, they can just keep collecting all that type of data from exchanges and retailers, and eventually connect identities to addresses. Plus when a drug dealer gets busted they'll look at all his addresses and those that sent to him, and add that to their database of known addresses.

You can remain anonymous, but I'd guess 99% of bitcoin users aren't going to do all the necessary hoop jumping to remain so. Also, if you receive bitcoins from someone that knows you, and they get busted for something and spills the beans on their bitcoin activity, the person could just say, oh yeah that is suzanimals bitcoin address I sent her some bitcoins, and now they know. In essence that bitcoin wallet is no longer anon.

If you want to remain anon forever, well, you can never use a bitcoin at a place that can identify you, and you can't ever accept bitcoin from anybody that could identify you.

Also, the sneaky NSA, I'm sure is monitoring people typing bitcoin addresses in google, like the bitcoinrichlist, etc.... If they see you searching for some "non-famous" bitcoin address that would imply you have some association to it. They also likely run some bitcoin nodes as well, which if one of their bitcoin nodes is connected to your node, and you sent a payment from bitcoin, they could see your ip address originating that transaction, and then well, they can find out who you are.
 
Suzanimal said:
I THINK IT'S BUYING THOSE EXPENSIVE RECHARGEABLE ONES. THEY'RE NEVER VERY GOOD, IMO. I GET BETTER LIFE OUT OF DOLLAR TREE EIGHT PACKS.
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My eneloops from Costco seem pretty decent. We'll see how long they last.
 
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