cgjaro

Joined 12 years ago

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Aug 3

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You couldn't buy BitFury for less than 200 or 300 million dollar. After all they expect this $100 million data center to be profitable so I am sure they value their company at least 2x or 3x this.

Comment · 11 years ago

It has always been the case that a single company could 51%-attack the network. No regression here. In fact the cost has continually increased over time. So, yes, progress.

Comment · 11 years ago

This DC cost $100 million. Not exactly pocket change. http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-...

Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million.

The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 nm chips. As the market migrate to these last generation chips, expect the cost to increase to $1+ billion in the next year.

Comment · 11 years ago

Besides Newegg, it is also at $699 on Microsoft Store: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/ASUS-Zen...

Comment · 11 years ago

Nobody talks about "percentage of tradable life" because this is a pointless metric. You don't see banks publishing prospectus saying "this investment gained x% over y% of its tradable life". %/year is what matters to all investors.

> So if Bitcoin goes down to $30, that's an amazing investment, right? After all, that's a 500% ROI!

Absolutely. Buying at $6 in january 2013, and selling even at $30 would be a 500% ROI and a great investment over 2 years. What is your point?

Comment · 11 years ago

Again, like azeirah said, this type of decline has happened in the past: after the $30 peak in June 2011, Bitcoin declined almost constantly. 12 months later it was still hovering around $5. That was a 80%+ decline! It took a total of 21 months before Bitcoin reached $30 again in February 2013.

I think journalists are finally understanding that a big decline in Bitcoin's price is far from a sign of its "death" (since it always survives these drops), and is not even a shocking news anymore. That's why they don't write about it that much.

Comment · 11 years ago

Being able to run the tool as non-root so it just spits out the key/cert pair is EXACTLY one of the mode of operations that they said will be available - see http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6397_-_en_-_...

Comment · 12 years ago

Are you denying all these metrics as a whole, and implying that Bitcoin's usage is either stagnating or declining?? You can't be serious, can you?

Comment · 12 years ago

Fred Wilson posted better adoption metrics which are a more accurate (and more impressive) record of how Bitcoin is doing: http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ It is smarter to look at these than at merely the number of transactions.

Comment · 12 years ago

Yes we want it to scale, even if it means full nodes run only by large organizations. The benefits of decentralization would be very real and tangible even if only, say, 1000 organizations (companies, universities, etc) were able to host and operate Bitcoin nodes. This would still make Bitcoin clearly decentralized compared to a single company (like MasterCard) processing all your CC transactions. For example Mastercard decided of their own accord to block CC donations to Wikileaks [1] but one of these 1000 hypothetical organizations running full nodes would be unable to do such a thing and block specific transactions.

The number of full nodes decreased in large part because in the early history of Bitcoin in late 2010 or early 2011 your only option to have a secure wallet or to mine reliably was to run a full node locally. But nowadays there are many alternative lightweight clients using the SPV protocol, and a lot of reliable mining pools (it was in mid-2011 that pools started mining more coins than solo miners running full nodes). So of course many users stopped running full nodes.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/wikileaks_latest/

Comment · 12 years ago

As the OP corrected, it's Western Union that does 10 tps. But even 100 tps would be easily within reach if the block size is bumped to 20MB, which is not that crazy.

Comment · 12 years ago

I do have a PayPal Security Key. My calliper measures 0.81mm, compared to 0.78mm for credit cards. So it is indeed pretty much the same thickness.

Comment · 12 years ago

You are, indeed, wrong: taxes are owed the moment coins are mined, even if they remain unspent or unused, see question Q-8 in http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

Comment · 12 years ago

No. Most of the costs are people costs as the article rightly explains, not fuel. Fuel is an extremely tiny fraction of the overall mission costs.

Comment · 12 years ago

Yeah but in practice no browser does this. There is no system call on Linux or Windows to push data as part of the SYN packet. You would have to craft TCP/IP packets and their headers with a raw socket...