BitCoin.... hmmm...
The TechnoAnarchist in me likes the idea of such a currency, though the
CommunalHumanist in me prefers barter-supporting systems such as
Ithica-Hours <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours> and the Santa
Fe Time Bank.
I find HashCash <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash> an interesting
corollary item. Most notably used to weed out spam/DoS attacks, it's
underlying principle of Proof of Work (PoW) (and apparently HashCash
itself?) is used as part of the distributed authentication of BitCoin
claims.
Owen's question of "how does one put BitCoins in their will"...
BitCoin's tenderability depends entirely on "what you know"... so the
closest thing to putting your BitCoins in a Will is to put "the keys" to
a "Bitcoin Wallet" in their will? As I understand it, the key to
maintaining the value of a BitCoin is keeping it "private"... *anyone*
can spend a found/stolen BitCoin like they could spend a physical
coin. The physical coin can't be double-spent except by good
sleight-of-hand short-con types (see opening scenes of The Grifters with
John Cusack) which just means defrauding the business or cashier of the
value by witholding/trading-out the token, but BitCoin relies on all
transactions being recorded in a distributed block-chain (I haven't
sorted out how this all is implemented and avoids race conditions, etc.).
This leads to the question of BitCoin "mining". This seems to be a
significant misnomer. While BitCoins are being *minted anew* in the
process, they are also being *earned*.... BitCoin miners are, by
definition, doing useful work to maintain the integrity of the whole
system. It isn't clear to me what will motivate people to dedicate
resources to this process once we hit the "end of BitCoin minting" at
21M BitCoins. The principle of halving the reward (geometric shrinkage
in "value"?) would seem to counterbalance Moore's Law of doubling
Computer Power every 18 months, but it isn't clear to me (yet) how these
are calibrated against eachother. It seems that any superlinear growth
in value (currently exponential or geometric?) will unbalance the
equation, causing an acceleration in the total amount of resource put
against it. Perhaps by the time we reach 21M BitCoins (once estimated
to be in 2140???) the real *cost* of maintaining the distributed
blockchain will be low enough as to be incentivized otherwise (a "tax"
or negative interest on bitcoins? a "transaction fee" to spend them?).
Maybe by then there will be enough "Money-at-Home" services running on
your Screen Saver (WTF makes us think that in 10 much less 130 years
computing will look at *all*like what it does today?). More likely the
nanomachines running in your bloodstream that took the place of your
liver (now an irrelevant, atrophied organ) have a background process
running to maintain blockchains? Hardly.
The idea of the NSA (or even darker/spookier/unknown/unnamed TLAs) using
their uber-massive computing power and bullpen of savants (think Matt
Damon in Good Will Hunting being interviewed by the NSA) to
corrupt/subvert this process is sad if not actually terrifying. I
could do the search (and probably will) but there must be devastating
implications of Quantum Computing on BitCoin mining/security?
And what about lost or destroyed (or simply hoarded) BitCoins. I
suspect the USPS and the US Mint depends modestly on the amount of their
"currency" being lost/destroyed/collected ... for stamps (especially
today!) that could be in the single or double digits of percentage...
for currency/coin, I suspect a much lower (but not insignificant)
percentage goes down one drain or another (as a child, I remember people
drilling holes in pennies to make washers for copper riveting because
they were "cheaper"). Once the unique signature of a minted BitCoin is
"lost" it can never be retrieved?
I also don't fully appreciate the implications of the transaction
history... it seems to fly in the face of anonymity? And does it mean
that some bitCoins will be worth more than others? virgin BitCoins
still in the hands of the minter? Bitcoins with a long and checkered
past provenance? "This BitCoin was once used by Barack Obama to buy
off John Boehner to pretend to oppose ObamaCare before it was disclosed
that ... " and then "it was later used to pay off Ollie North for the
long standing debt on his part in both John and Bobby Kennedy's
assasination". Ok... identity isn't required for a transaction but the
*sequence* and *timing* of transactions would be inviolate? Those alone
have some residual/innate utility in sorting out who did
what/when/why/how? I guess this is why it has been suggested that
BitCoin isn't an ideal place to launder money?
- Steve
Bitcoin mining and the NSA does seem to me like a match made in
heaven. Mainly because they both spend a lot of time and energy
breaking hashes. The "Miners" do it to mine bitcoins whereas the NSA
does it to break encryption. It would probably be really easy for a
big NSA computer to mine some coins. They may even know some secret
math tricks for reversing a hash that normal people do not.
As a bitcoin n00b, I found this site fun and informative
https://blockchain.info/ . They even have realtime some webgl
vizualizations
<https://blockchain.info/nodes-globe?series=topBlockRelay>. You can
also watch bitcoins being "minted" <https://blockchain.info/blocks>.
Cody Smith
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Marcus G. Daniels
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 11/29/13, 9:58 AM, Barry MacKichan wrote:
Are we in danger of making the NSA financially independent of
Congress?
Not yet, the whole market is `only' about 12 billion. Maybe someday..
Marcus
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