Bitcoin The Concert
March 31, 2013 5:09 PM   Subscribe

Listen To Bitcoin in realtime (Chrome and Firefox 19+).
posted by Foci for Analysis (45 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
And they have gotten 30 donations already (albeit averaging 1 bitcoin cent each or $0.90 each).
https://blockchain.info/address/14zoTKB29NdsJRvk4qP3vB9mQZ3dcV3eWk
posted by brewsterkahle at 5:15 PM on March 31, 2013


By Maximillian Laumeister

Best Bitcoin name.
posted by Jimbob at 5:22 PM on March 31, 2013


I haven't followed all the recent bitcoin stories inspired by the current insanity, but..

I noticed more bitching about bitcoin's fluctuations making it useless for transactions, including talk about forking a permanent constant inflation protocol. Any serious forks sound wonderfully amusing.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:34 PM on March 31, 2013 [2 favorites]


Bitcoin keeps me up at night. It seems like something I should know about and have, but I don't and I don't. One day I'm going to buy groceries and they're going to say "we only accept B" and my money will be worthless and everybody will point and laugh and I won't be wearing any pants.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:37 PM on March 31, 2013 [25 favorites]


Bitcoin Sound Simulator.

As silly as Bitcoin is, this is still a very neat visualization of data.
posted by codacorolla at 5:39 PM on March 31, 2013


One day I'm going to buy groceries and they're going to say "we only accept B" and my money will be worthless and everybody will point and laugh and I won't be wearing any pants.

You shouldn't be trying to buy marijuana at the grocery store.
posted by localroger at 5:42 PM on March 31, 2013 [8 favorites]


This thing is worth it just for the block discovery sound.
posted by azarbayejani at 5:51 PM on March 31, 2013


You shouldn't be trying to buy marijuana at the grocery store.

Marijuana legalization is a desperation play by the government's Illuminati puppetmasters to stall Bitcoin's runaway momentum.
posted by cortex at 5:55 PM on March 31, 2013 [11 favorites]


I just saw a really, really large bubble. If the rate brewsterkhale said was true, that was about 230,000 something dollars. Is this real? Where do they get their information from? What transaction was that?
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:00 PM on March 31, 2013


What FNORD bubble?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 6:05 PM on March 31, 2013 [3 favorites]


Also wondering about where the data on the transactions is coming from.

Also, what are these blocks? Just watched one with 300 transactions and worth about $125,000 float by. What causes these transactions to be lumped as opposed to others?
posted by rollbiz at 6:20 PM on March 31, 2013


Also wondering about where the data on the transactions is coming from.
Because transactions are broadcast to the entire network, they are inherently public. - Wikipedia
Why the privacy-conscious technolibertarian crowd loves Bitcoin so much I'll never understand.
posted by DU at 6:29 PM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


The transactions are public (they have to be otherwise you'd need a central repository for transaction transfers, which would be vulnerable to coercive takeovers by for example governments). But the identity of the transferees can be hidden and if that's done right nobody knows where the bitmoney came from or where it went, just that it's in a different place now.

I do think it implies that, if you're tracking this stuff, you might be able to tell that a certain bit of bitmoney came from a potentially wonky transfer, or from a transfer involving someone you do know. But I'm not any kind of expert on how it works and hey, mail order marijuana!
posted by localroger at 6:59 PM on March 31, 2013


Immediately crashed Chrome on Windows 7 for me.
posted by ShooBoo at 7:00 PM on March 31, 2013


The transactions are public (they have to be otherwise you'd need a central repository for transaction transfers...

I'm not an economics expert, but I'm pretty sure barter doesn't have this problem. Nor would a "tokenized" barter using gold nuggets or whatever. No reason you can't do the same thing with bits as you do with atoms.
posted by DU at 7:32 PM on March 31, 2013


Silk Road's IP address was compromised recently. Without Silk Road I'd imagine Bitcoin would finally die, since buying mail order drugs anonymously is perhaps the one advantage that the service has.

No reason you can't do the same thing with bits as you do with atoms.

I agree, in principle, but the way I understand it the public transfer thing is absolutely necessary for Bitcoin's architecture. Once you get rid of the public transfer list you don't really have Bitcoin any more.
posted by codacorolla at 7:35 PM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


I wonder what sound it makes when the bubbles pop.
posted by fullerine at 7:44 PM on March 31, 2013 [2 favorites]


Schneier on Security: Analysis of How Bitcoin Is Actually Used
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:56 PM on March 31, 2013 [4 favorites]


There is a fundamental difficulty that all digital currencies must overcome, rollbiz and DU. Data does not behave like physical goods. If I give you data, I still posses the data, so I might give it to some else. Visa, banks, stock exchanges, etc. resolve this by being trusted authorities that know what everybody owns.

Anonymous cash systems like Open Transactions have mints that issue coins using blind signing. In effect, coins represent contracts with the mint that users may trade. If I give you a coin, you must quickly contact the mint to claim the value, or another coin, so that I cannot give the same coin to anyone else. We assume the mint learned the original coin buyer's identity, say because he bought the coin with his credit card, but the blind signing process means the mint cannot identify that specific coin when it comes back, merely verify that they issued the coin and that nobody ever spent that coin before.

Bitcoin resolves this double spending difficulty by making all transactions public. You announce your transactions publicly so that miners can collect them into blocks and solve a computationally hard cryptographic problem based on the block itself. If your miner solves its problem first, then your proposed block and all the transactions it contains become official, thus awarding yourself any associated transaction fees and inflation. In principle, you could double spend all your bitcoins during a large scale of network interruption, perhaps fleecing some mixing services.

In short, all digital currencies must solve vaguely the copying problem for which the copyright monopolies tried DRM. And the currencies succeed only by (a) enforcing authorities like mints or the block chain and (b) restricting themselves to protecting essentially random data.

Anonymity in bitcoin derives from mixing services that take your bitcoins and give you back different bitcoins. It's tricky though because the entire history remains public, so sufficiently dedicated law enforcement could probabilistically track individual bitcoins, even through a mixing service. It's unlikely such analysis produces anything admissible in court per se, but it could help find previously unknown suspects, obtain warrants, etc. and worse it accumulates over time. In principle, a silk road drug dealer could safely consider their bitcoins a retirement investment that they plan on holding until the statute of limitations expires, the war on drugs ends, they move abroad, etc., assuming bitcoin survives that long. If you never spend em', they cannot be used to identify you.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:59 PM on March 31, 2013 [5 favorites]


Jeff: Does Silk Road's recent IP mishap mean that you can tell which transactions were made by them in the registry, or is it just bad because the site is supposed to stay off the open web?
posted by codacorolla at 8:08 PM on March 31, 2013


DU: "'transactions are broadcast to the entire network'... Why the privacy-conscious technolibertarian crowd loves Bitcoin so much I'll never understand."

There are many, many criticisms to be made about Bitcoin (and I am a huge critic), but that isn't one of the strong ones.

Public transactions are ostensibly a feature, not a bug. It means there's no need for centralized authority, since the entire network is the system of record. Given that Bitcoin's popularity is in large part a response to abuses – both real and perceived – by "trusted" financial authorities, this is a pretty crucial detail.

As far as privacy goes, the difference is that the transactions are public, but the participants can potentially stay anonymous, since there's nothing inherently linking a Bitcoin address to an individual user. Now of course, having money linked to an anonymous address isn't much good in and of itself, since you'll end up associating it with yourself as soon as you try to spend it on something. I'd guess the theory there is that you can use levels of indirection to launder it make it difficult to track, but I don't know how much protection that would be in practice.

Overall though, it's similar to why we should hash passwords instead of storing them. Privacy that's based on multiple parties keeping a shared secret is inherently unsound. Whether Bitcoin offers a better alternative is, however, a legitimate question.

[on preview...]

DU: "I'm not an economics expert, but I'm pretty sure barter doesn't have this problem."

Barter isn't really a substitute for currency, it just doesn't scale that way (aside: I'm currently reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years and there's a very interesting segment near the beginning arguing that the idea of a "barter economy" was pretty much a straw man meant to make certain economic principles look better by comparison; that while barter systems have certainly existed, no culture has ever tried to use it as a basis for a general economy).

As for tokens of "real" value like gold nuggets, they're simply not practical for common usage. While they may be useful as the backing for a currency (though I'd argue that their problems outweigh their benefits), it's just too difficult to use them for day-to-day transactions with any reliability and security. I'm not exactly going to send Amazon.com an envelope with ⅛ oz of gold when I want to buy a PlayStation.
posted by Riki tiki at 8:14 PM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


We learn nothing about Silk Road's transaction history form their IP address. We've no clue if Silk Road's IP reveals their server's physical location, maybe they run database access through a VPN or whatever. If authorities compromise Silk Road's database, say by seizing the server, then they'd learn whatever it knows.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 PM on March 31, 2013


Speaking of Bitstuff, has anyone gotten BitMessage to work? I have been testing out PyBitMessage and it grinds and grinds and does network traffic and network traffic, but won't allow me to send anything, telling me Work Is Queued (even when trying to ping the echo server to find out if all this work is doing something at all).

Yes, I know it is off topic, but...
posted by Samizdata at 8:48 PM on March 31, 2013


Holy crap.
posted by Chuckles at 12:32 AM on April 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


jeffburdges: "We learn nothing about Silk Road's transaction history form their IP address. We've no clue if Silk Road's IP reveals their server's physical location, maybe they run database access through a VPN or whatever. If authorities compromise Silk Road's database, say by seizing the server, then they'd learn whatever it knows"

Silk Road runs through TOR.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:04 AM on April 1, 2013


Yeah exactly, no VPN provides anything like the security offered by Tor. So presumably they personally communicate with their servers over Tor and pay their hosting provider anonymously. Yet, they might still want their database at another physical location from the webhead. If they learn the webhead got raided, they wipe the database it contacts remotely, and relaunch elsewhere. You might connect the webhead to the database through Tor of course, but that sounds like latency, so maybe you'd use a less protective VPN. Also, you might tollerate more latency here if only the messages database needs this extra protection.

Vaguely related : UPS Coughs Up $40 Million Because It Delivered Drugs From Rogue Pharmacies
posted by jeffburdges at 2:26 AM on April 1, 2013


I agree, in principle, but the way I understand it the public transfer thing is absolutely necessary for Bitcoin's architecture. Once you get rid of the public transfer list you don't really have Bitcoin any more.

I was responding to the implication that "decentralized" must necessarily entail "everything is public". For bitcoin, obviously it does. In general it doesn't.

Barter isn't really a substitute for currency, it just doesn't scale that way (aside: I'm currently reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years ...

I read that with interest too. But my point wasn't that we could switch to barter. My point was that you could have a decentralized system (e.g. barter) where nobody but the transaction participants would know anything about a transaction. In fact, the "put the goods in plain view and then hide in the bushes" system doesn't even require that much. Purely anonymous transactions.

I'm not too impressed by the privacy protections of a system that is "potentially" private "in principle".
posted by DU at 3:26 AM on April 1, 2013


I have not completely understood what issues BitMessage actually addresses so far, Samizdata, well the whitepaper seemed slightly ambiguous. As "all users receive all messages", there are likely issues with scalability, bandwidth, and latency.

I'd expect BitMessage provides more traffic analysis resistance than OtR over Jabber/XMPP, but traffic analysis could be performed after the fact, like with BitCoin. As an aside, OtR works great if you aren't worried about traffic analysis, just switch your friends to Jitsi, Adium, etc.

TorChat provides traffic analysis resistant instant messaging now, but supposedly TorChat is overly hard on the Tor network by opening new circuits all the time rather than keeping quiet circuits alive.

Appelbaum and/or Dingledine suggested Pond as currently the best strategy for traffic analysis resistant instant messaging in their 29c3 talk, but a usable version remains quite far off.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:01 AM on April 1, 2013


Marijuana legalization is a desperation play by the government's Illuminati puppetmasters to stall Bitcoin's runaway momentum.

Sooooo...By that logic, Indiana's drive to toughen marijuana laws is a transparent ploy to corner the Bitcoin market?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:04 AM on April 1, 2013


Chuckles: "Holy crap."

As was true in the days of the California gold rush, there is more money selling tools to miners than there is in mining itself.
posted by krinklyfig at 6:00 AM on April 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Actually, ASIC manufacturers can probably make more money running it themselves. Avalon's first two batches sold for $1300. Running one of their miners would net $13,000 per month at current difficulty levels (with negligible power costs). There's no reason for a company like Avalon to sell their ASICs. Even at 75 BTC (~$7,500) for their next batch, that's still far too cheap. Their stated reason is to ensure they are not responsible for a 51% attack, so it's out of goodwill or something supposedly.
posted by amuseDetachment at 6:43 AM on April 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


@tmotat

your "Schneier" guy is fine, but since I get all my info from internet people who are insecure about being nerds, I can safely say that the breakdown of Bitcoin purchases is 50% fedoras, 45% ponytail/beard grooming supplies, and 5% liquid, concentrated immorality
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:15 AM on April 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


Ironically, today is the day Bitcoins passed the $100 mark. (This is not a joke, it actually happened.)
posted by ymgve at 10:49 AM on April 1, 2013


When I heard about a bitcoin being worth over 1 ounce of silver, I went and dug up my old bitcoin stash. My new hobby project is to try to use the strategy I worked on in the "million dollar" contest MSNBC had a while ago, and see if it works with pseudo-real money.

It's simple... I treat the market as a random number source, ignoring pretty much all market timing stuff, etc... and sell high, and try to buy back low, when fluctuations hit a stack of buy/sell orders.

I've got a bitcoin (less than 2, actually)... and now I'm selling off pieces of my bitcoin, and putting in orders to buy them back at much lower prices. If I'm right, someday I'll have 2 whole bitcoins. 8)

Looking at the MtGox market depth data its interesting to note that if someone were to try to buy up 100,000 bitcoins right now, the MtGox exchange wouldn't have enough, and the price would hit an upper bound of insane dollars/bitcoin.

If someone were to try to sell that same about, it wouldn't be a problem, and the price would be about $40... and would go to $7.82 if someone did it a second time. Low ball, but not zero.

It's interesting, and it's almost real money. Fun to play with.
posted by MikeWarot at 2:20 PM on April 1, 2013


Isn't treating speculative investments like a game how many people keep it psychologically healthy?
posted by jeffburdges at 6:51 PM on April 1, 2013


I call it pseudo-money because it's not something I can directly spend at the local stores, yet it took actual resources to acquire it. Its like Schrodinger's currency at the moment, only time will open the box and determine if it becomes widely accepted.

If it drops to zero value, I'll be sad, but wiser. If it takes off, I'll be a bit better off because, not because of any windfall profits, but rather because I'll have a better economic tool for trade, one less vulnerable to the predations of those who would silently steal via inflation.

Either way, I win, which is why I got interested in this in the first place.

Does that explain my position better? Have I left anything out?
posted by MikeWarot at 9:09 PM on April 1, 2013


The people who profit from inflation are those that get a seat nearest the printing press, who are the ones who get to spend money into existence. That would be the fractional reserve banking system, they get to create money, and have real assets put up as collateral to borrow that money, all based on their ability to leverage (and not lose) the deposits of their customers.

Of course, these days if they (the banks) are big enough, they simply hide all their losses, and bully the government into letting them continue to operate as if nothing at all was wrong... which removes all restraint on their behaviour. It's only inertia, and the overwhelming force of the American empire and/or the fear of the system collapsing, that keeps any value behind the US Dollar, and other fiat currency.

Go and buy a 5 LBS bag of sugar.... I dare you... they don't exist now, because all the packages have been made smaller to hide the price inflation. It's a widespread trend. (Yes, I could be wrong about the cause, but there's the assertion)

If I had a million yen, I could go to a currency exchange, take a hit of somewhere around 2% while exchanging it for dollars, silver, gold, whatever... and get tracked by the SWIFT system along the way... it's a cost of exchanging into Dollars in the above ground economy.

S&H Green stamps was a form of currency as long as you could redeem it for things you wanted, as are frequent flyer miles, Amex Points, Bitcoin, prepaid Visa, or LindenDollars... I distance myself from my particular bitcoin stash as a way of reminding myself it isn't real until it has brought me physical goods or services. Bitcoins in general, are real money... my bitcoins are "mad money", "pin money", "play money" or any other euphemism you care to use, to help me keep a distance from it and not make emotional judgements with it.

One has to have emotional distance from fiscal decisions to not get sucked into stupid decisions when money is involved, in my experience. I want to play for a long time with my bitcoins, and keeping them in that special distinct psychological realm helps.

The low (0.6%) cost of trading bitcoin to/from dollars, euro, etc... makes the MtGox exchange attractive for testing out my time/arbitrage theory of markets, and this is my chance to try with real markets and money, instead of pretend.

It's not all logical, nor consistent, but I hope I've explained some of my thinking in a lucid manner for a 2:12 AM reply.
posted by MikeWarot at 12:12 AM on April 2, 2013


Aren't real currencies are defined by people being forcefully compelled to pay their taxes in said currency or event compelled to accept it?

Inflation is tricky. Improvements in technology drive down the costs of virtually all complicated services, manufacturing, etc. over time, even healthcare delivery has radically decreased in cost. So inflation might benefit society by stabilizing prices and preventing deflation, especially if all that inflation were simply distributed as a basic income, i.e. high velocity money. Instead, there are influential minorities that reap most of the financial benefits of stabilizing prices, or even find themselves avenues to increase prices, as insurance companies and hospital billing offices do.

Yes, all the private banks and government contractors benefit from our inflationary fiscal policy by sitting "near the printing press" without passing that money on, effectively removing the newly "printed" money from circulation and creating the need for even more inflation. Yet, I'd consider the word "printing" a gross over simplification here, bonds don't work exactly like cold hard cash.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:50 AM on April 2, 2013


Cold hard cash - that would be copper/silver/gold coins... or equivalents that are readily exchanged for them.
posted by MikeWarot at 2:46 AM on April 2, 2013


Go and buy a 5 LBS bag of sugar.... I dare you...

We buy sugar in 25 lb bags. It's cheaper that way. </married to a baker>
posted by Elementary Penguin at 3:14 AM on April 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


Metric is a scam, it's for lazy people who don't want to convert between fathoms and miles and yards, feet and inches. Why, it's too complicated to remember that 5280 feet is a mile, and thus 2640 feet is 1/2 mile, and there are 128 ounces in a gallon....

It's simple
1000 mils in an inch
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
2 yards in a fathom
16.5 feet in a rod
4 rod in a chain
10 chain in a furlong
8 furlong in a mile

See... so simple.... or 5280 feet per mile if you want to skip some steps.

Now the whole quid/farthing/pence system must have driven people crazy by comparison. ;-)
posted by MikeWarot at 9:13 AM on April 2, 2013


Actually, ASIC manufacturers can probably make more money running it themselves. Avalon's first two batches sold for $1300. Running one of their miners would net $13,000 per month at current difficulty levels (with negligible power costs). There's no reason for a company like Avalon to sell their ASICs. Even at 75 BTC (~$7,500) for their next batch, that's still far too cheap. Their stated reason is to ensure they are not responsible for a 51% attack, so it's out of goodwill or something supposedly.
When Avalon started, there was another company that was going to start selling ASICs, and it looked like they might corner the market. But since then that company has had months and months of delays.

The other thing to remember is that the price had basically been flat or growing really slowly for over a year. Bitcoins were worth about $5 for a long time, then jumped to $10 and sat there, again for a long time. It would have seemed like selling ASICs would be a around the same profitability as mining, and it would take a while to earn back the money. Since the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed faster then the network hashrate, that's all screwed up at the moment, and mining with an ASIC should be immensely profitable in pure dollar terms (if not in bitcoin terms) - so now it actually does look like Avalon will start mining on their own once their initial orders have been shipped out.
Metric is a scam, it's for lazy people who don't want to convert between fathoms and miles and yards, feet and inches.
What are you talking about?

Anyway, it's obvious the answer is no, you don't know what the inflation rate is. You can spew out all the pseudo-intellectual drivel you want, if you can't specify an actual number for how much inflation you think there actually is then you obviously have nothing to say.

Btw, the purpose of metric is to avoid conversion constants when using different physical quantities. How long does it take to figure out how many btu's of energy does it take to accelerate a 4,000 pound car to 50 miles per hour? On the other hand, if you ask how many joules of energy it takes to accelerate a 2,000 kg car to 20 meters/second the answer is just 2000 * 202 = 800,000 joules - all the conversion factors are '1'. And yes, it uses decimal numbers because they are easier to work with. The metric system can help reduce errors for people who are not working with computers, and pretty much all engineering work is done in metric.

___
The sudden rise is bitcoin is kind of insane. It's obviously in a bubble that will collapse at some point, but it's hard to know when that will be. If it gets to, say $1000, it might collapse back to $200 or something.
posted by delmoi at 4:17 PM on April 2, 2013


Treating everything as a game is a good idea

ohhhh nope

nope nope nope
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 10:00 AM on April 3, 2013


The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency
There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:50 PM on April 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Last time there was a Bitcoin bubble brewing, I bought $500 worth just to see what would happen. And what happened was that my $500 worth of bitcoins collapsed to under $100 worth in a day, so I set up bitcoind on my server box and took them out of Mt Gox and stuck them in my own wallet and bought a couple of things online just so I could see how that worked and then forgot about them.

Tonight I cranked up bitcoind for the first time in almost a year, transferred most of what was left - about a third of what I'd originally bought - back to Mt Gox (who had in the meantime apparently forgotten about my account) and I've just sold those for a shade over $1300.

You'll hear no complaints about Bitcoin volatility from me. I now own < 1BTC; that can stay in my wallet.dat until the day I buy a house with it.
posted by flabdablet at 10:43 AM on April 10, 2013


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