When someone tries to buy all the world’s supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes.
SHA-256 is very strong. It’s not like the incremental step from MD5 to SHA1. It can last several decades unless there’s some massive breakthrough attack.
If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.
If you’re sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.
The price of .com registrations is lower than it should be, therefore any good name you might think of is always already taken by some domain name speculator.
Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.
Imagine if gold turned to lead when stolen.
Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have.
It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.
I am not Dorian Nakamoto.
Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn’t cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.
It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.
The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead.
The requirement is that the good guys collectively have more CPU proof-of-worker than any single attacker.
The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn’t get more coins than before.
We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It’s much easier to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.
The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.
Bitcoin generation should end up where it’s cheapest. Maybe that will be in cold climates where there’s electric heat, where it would be essentially free.
Generation is basically free anywhere that has electric heat, since your computer’s heat is offsetting your baseboard electric heating. Many small flats have electric heat out of convenience.
At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.