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The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.
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It's time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.
One of the fundamental building blocks for such a system is digital signatures. A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership. It works well to secure ownership, but leaves one big problem unsolved: double-spending. Any owner could try to re-spend an already spent coin by signing it again to another owner. The usual solution is for a trusted company with a central database to check for double-spending, but that just gets back to the trust model. In its central position, the company can override the users, and the fees needed to support the company make micropayments impractical.
Bitcoin's solution is to use a peer-to-peer network to check for double-spending. In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. For details on how it works, see the design paper at http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending.
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>>1001522
I hear ya, bro. It won't be Bitcoin though. You guys already derped the distribution and the initial infrastructure.
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The distribution was perfectly fair in the sense of the halving curve being public, and early adopters taking a risk by mining and buying something that was literally worthless (1 BTC = 0 dollars). Those visionaries must be rewarded for their amount of risk taken by being there first. Ever heard of risk/reward ratio? Bitcoin respects that.
Bitcoin was released publicly and everyone that stumbled upon it at first ignored it for years except a few that saw value in it before it even had a pricetag. This is exactly how people get rich: Getting in before the average joe sees any value on it. Complaining against this logic is exactly what a communist, or an altcoin bagholder, would say.
Even if you gave 1 person = 1 BTC, equally distributed across every person on earth, the smarter guys would end up amassing all the wealth. There's no escape to this fundamental basic law of life.
If you look at the graphic, you'll realize we are still under the early adopters phase. With the knowledge presented here, you should know what to do, unless you want to continue whining at life and coping with a "Bitcoin 2.0" fantasy.
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>>1001517
>/biz/ is NOT a place for ADVERTISING or SOLICITING. Do NOT use it to promote your business, ventures, or anything you may have an interest in. Anything that looks remotely like advertising or soliciting will be removed.
Your move, janitors.
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>>1001566
Is this how you cope?
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>>1001564
>early adoption phase
Hell no. You threw out the argument of "Bitcoin is still in infancy" when it hit the cover of The Economist. Don't be stupid.
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>>1001626
>cope
You keep using this word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
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Wouldn't a p2p ledger type thing make all monetary flows public? Big companies who could parse the data could gather reliable statistics as to the cost of production of commodities and also their selling prices at various places in space and time. This would definitely minimized prices and profits by increasing competition.
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>>1001681
It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow:
- Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins
- The proof-of-work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (for the whole network)
- The coins given per block is cut in half every 4 years
You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.
As an example, if there are 1000 nodes, and 6 get coins each hour, it would likely take a week before you get anything.
There is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don't know a way for software to know the real world value of things. If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.
In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.
As far as privacy goes, it will only keep getting better. Trying to spy on someone else's business will be futile:
http://insidebitcoins.com/news/reusable-payment-codes-could-make-blockchain-analysis-companies-obsolete/35899
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I will be around if someone wants a serious Bitcoin discussion.
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>>1001973
>serious discussion
Cherry picks data. Doesn't realize that every single stock on here has outperformed Bitcoin by magnitudes the last couple years.
When you want to have a serious discussion stop posting stupid bullshit. Then we'll talk.
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>>1001989
You are just focusing on a pic I use to trigger dumb nocoiners like you, meanwhile not a sound counter argument against Bitcoin was seen that day.
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You have made this thread before.
Do you really value your time so little you keep remaking this shit?
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>>1001635
You mean the Rothchilds economists magazine?
The one with the illuminati symbol on the bitcoin logo?
Na bitcoin will fail obviously.
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>>1002301
>the pic was just trolling, I swear!
Kek.
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>>1002309
The ilerminaty! I hate it when they create buttcoins and stuff.
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Btc is going the way of the dodo. ethereum will be the main blockchain.
It has been written.
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>>1001522
Bitcoin appreciated against the dollar by the same ammount that the russian rouble depreciated against the dollar.
This chart appears to show all currencies depreciating against bitcoin and no coiners btfo.
Thread posts: 19
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Thread images: 7