Posted on 02/25/2014 6:34:19 AM PST by BenLurkin
Embattled bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox appeared to be undergoing more convulsions, as its website became unavailable, signaling a new stage in troubles that have dented the image of the virtual currency.
(Excerpt) Read more at stream.wsj.com ...
Yep, See #20
Well, as far as I understand it, a big part of the appeal of Bitcoin is that it is ALMOST impossible to hack.
The problems at Mt. Gox do not amount to a hack so much as just an outright theft of Bitcoins from some exposed wallets.
Bitcoin CAN be hacked, but you would need to control more than 50% of the computers that have a copy of the blockchain on it, and even then it would take what amounts to a massive amount of computing power to modify and then re-encode the blockchain.
This is really an opportunity in disguise and they don’t recognize it yet.
How many users (like casual cell phone users, etc) would go for an online wallet rather than a local wallet because of the blockchain data?
If bitcoin can find a way to index the blockchains good, they could let everyone have a local wallet, as long as they held part of the blockchain on their device.
You could have a gig, I could have a gig, somebody else could have two gigs, whatever it takes.
P2P verifications could be easy and speedy, especially as the linespeeds continue to increase.
If anything was found wrong or funky with somebodys copy of the blockchain, an alert could get generated and read-only blockchains could be consulted, the person with the bad data would get kicked offline.
It’s not rocket science. Just queueing theory. I could do it in BASIC or REXX if I was way, way more ambitious!
has anyone here tried ‘mining’ for bitcoins?
What’s up with that?
I have about 10 old computers at home I could dedicate full-time to that, if it actually generates money
not worth it right now, it will cost you more in electric than you would make. There is still some money in mining other coins with AMD GPU’s, but not sure how long that is going to last. A R9-280 costs a $1 a day to run and currently is making about $2.50 a day mining DOGE.
I saw where you said you were involved in programming, at least at some point. Same here. I've written business frontends accessing millions of account records, some still running after 20 years operation.
It might behoove the developers of cyrptocurrencies to take technology, centuries old, from accounting past. What I'm thinking about here is the double entry method of accounting. When a new transaction cancels out an older transaction (i.e., balances it), both entries could then be sent to an archival ledger/file and deleted from the active blockchain file. No doubt it would take a 'bit' of modification to implement, but it is a proven solution to the scalability issue. In this case, not everyone would need a copy of the archive file on their device/PC/etc.
Well, people like you and I who have done these kinds of DB design data collection/archiving etc are aware of the problems of what to to with redundant or conflicting data.
There is a reason many of these big companies and government institutions are STILL running on mainframes using DB2/IMS, VSAM data set org, etc.
As far as I know even now, there are still no errors in the Bitcoin blockchain EXCEPT for one, when somehow a negative number got generated, and it caused some bitcoin apps to start looping.
But that was fixed by the 0.8.5 release
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