umadbro? Yep, if it gets anywhere near 15/btc I'm selling all of mine locally to invest in some more junk silver. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfhbjkge4fs[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwGu5k6R--o]AVTM End of the World Crypto-Party! Phil Zimmerman, Alan Reiner, John Light - YouTube[/ame] Alot of great bitcoin discussion @ 2:09:00
If everyone used it, it would bring a great deal of I formation about money transfer. If every transaction was recorded digitally, you could find trends in the economy much more accurately and quickly. You would be able to study human behavior and movement like never before. But I would have no trust having my money saved in binary code that will get hacked. Counterfeit bit coins will flood the market. But if it is all digital, you could probably find counterfeits rather easily. But a digital economy is very vulnerable to solar flares, magnets, hackers, and government.
If you watch the clip in guest @ 2:09:00 they go over all the downside risks from the micro side (getting hacked, or physical harm to your hardrive) as well as potential macro risks like the potential of an small group consolidating processing power enough to essentially steal bitcoin, which is only possible if a single entity created a CPU processing unit with more power than the bitcoin community as a whole.. but according to these guys the exponential processing power of CPU's to come into play in he next decade, in combination with the bitcoin community growing at such a rapid pace is making the above more and more difficult. It's still in its infancy but as of right now, bitcoins success is already pretty extraordinary if you ask me.
Have there been report of hacking yet? I think it would be rather easy to find where counterfeiters bit coins would be inserted into circulation. But one could crash the system. Digital currency would be huge though. You would have millions of exchanges recorded and predicting economic booms and busts could become very helpful. You could warn people of collapses which could help minimize loses.
The biggest "hacks" going on in the bitcoin community are large botnets (large swarms of infected computers) being used to mine bitcoins and people gaining access to servers with wallets that have bitcoins and then transferring the bitcoins to their own wallets (think burglary, but virtual). There are vulnerabilities inherent in bitcoin's design, but they're nearly impossible to exploit. It is theoretically possible to double spend bitcoins if you could control most of the computing power being utilized in the Bitcoin network. Also, a DDoS attack could stop transactions from going through, but there are ways to mitigate this by paying a company like cloudflare or Verisign.
I think the whole idea is retarded. You can't.hack gold. Precious metals are the only real.currency base
Well, what's the difference? I wonder if at some point companies would be willing to "secure" peoples funds much like credit/debit cards do. (I have X amount of time to report theft, etc.) But then it wouldn't really be as anonymous as it is now. Right?
You can also manipulate the price. Ex-Goldman trader blows whistle on silver and gold manipulation by JPMorgan, HSBC - NYPOST.com
The same thing could happen with bitcoins. Also, credit/debit cards are not anonymous in any sense of the word. Bitcoins aren't even necessarily anonymous; although, you can gain a certain level of anonymity using TOR and a few other services.
Oh, I know. Nothing is ever foolproof. I stray away from Mt. Gox, I've been buying off localbitcoins.com.
The difference is one is actually worth something and one is an.imaginary piece of data that the government claims is worth something