With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank. Individual transactions are uniquely newspapers by their block index and hash. News bitcointalk Crypto World. Relay nodes if you run bitcoin-qt you're one of them verify and rebroadcast newspapers individual transactions and blocks. That term newspapers used all over the place in articles that discuss the anonymity of Bitcoin or lack thereofand I casascius we should adopt it here casascius. A CPU is a bitcointalk type of computing chip which is contains a few processing cores that are optimized for sequential bitcointalk processing. Here's a recent link to this topic in case someone wants to add casascius to the article.
bitcoin network hashes per second В»
Can I remove that? I've got some gold and silver as part of a saving fund. To me "record" noun is a mostly-acceptable less-technical alternative because in common parlance it means "a thing constituting a piece of evidence about the past, esp. March 06, , This sentence should be revised since the Chinese central bank has barred financial institutions from handling transactions in bitcoins; see http: A new item "value" was added to the infobox with the approximate current value of one bitcoin in US dollars. I can't find any reference to bitcoin.
knc titan bitcointalk forum В»
To be frank, as an industry we have not fared well in our ability to predict the end of financial products and services, such as the death of newspapers or the bank branch; we haven't even been able bitcointalk "kill" off bitcointalk cheque. To the best of my knowledge the block chain is casascius novel flavor, but a database newspapers the less. Newspapers this happens, what is the value of the physical coin? Relay nodes if you run bitcoin-qt you're one of them verify and rebroadcast both individual transactions and blocks. A directory of Indian newspapersnews sites casascius, and news channels sorted by many different languages and regions. Bitcoin is an open bitcointalk peer-to-peer payment network and digital currency introduced casascius by pseudonymous developer "Satoshi Nakamoto".
Since we are a largely charitable organisation, we lack the funds to purchase your gorgeous coins. If you ever have any spare, empty, model-quality, unusable, throwaway holographic samples, we would be very pleased to do a feature on them on our sites and in the media in the future. We can be reached via the supplied email address. I hope this message finds you well. Whatever you decide to do, it was an honour to communicate with you and everyone at the Lab wishes you all the luck for the future.
Note for your peace of mind: We have been nominated for several awards and our work has been reported by newspapers, TV and Radio all over the world. Our founder is also one of the national representatives of a scientific history society in New York and currently sits on the board of directors. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
Notify me of new comments via email. My ordering website is https: Or, does the coin continue always to have value but can only be converted once? I realize these may not be the best questions, but just started to look into Bitcoins. Caldwell, We run an historical and scientific research company and have all fallen in love with your holographic physical Bitcoin. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: I'm sure that the article works for many, but I can't figure it out; and if I can't, chances are many others can't.
Maybe if I check all the internal links and those in the footnotes I might figure it out, but the text in the article is largely unhelpful. So here's my understanding. A hunter exchanges a deer carcass for some flint arrows, or in a more modern times, a laptop. Aztecs used cacao beans in trade. I'm not sure what money is, but if you send some to the government, in what they call "taxes" they tend to leave you alone.
Banks keep money for you, as do the credit card companies, or they lend it at interest. When you spend some of it, perhaps some clerk gets a pen and marks off your balance and writes in a new balance, balance minus spent, and the does the same with a vendor's balance: These days a computer does it electronically. So when they say "electronic" or "digital" currency, they likely mean that some place is holding varying amounts in varying accounts and shifting things back and forth. Those who do it honestly tend stay in business.
The thoroughly at least dishonest ones tend to go out of business, and maybe get arrested. Oh yeah, and these transactions tend to be monitored lest the guv'mint doesn't get its cut and people trade in illegal things like contraband cigarettes or marihuana reefers, or engage in things like the hiring of prostitutes. Now the way I figure it, if you're going to cheat on your taxes or engage in illegal trade, your best bet is probably to use cash, i.
You want a colour TV, you could, say, sell a few "lids" of marihuana for money, or perform sexual favours for money, and you can use the money to buy that colour TV.
I suppose other items can be used for money: Now where does this bitcoin fit in? Is it a valuable, b portable, c hard to inflate, and d difficult for the guv'mint to trace? Okay, assuming it's just electrons or something-digital, I can accept it fulfills the portability requirement. As for value, I suppose that one can make people believe it's valuable—as some say such is the case with money-as-we-know it; but the important thing is, that issuers of our bills will take it back as payment.
If giving the guv'mint a few or 10 dollars, pounds, euros, whatever will keep you out of court or jail, then it has value. The guv'mint has a vast array of means of propaganda so they can also hype up the value of money.
Also, the money we know today was based on bills that could be used to do things like get the gold or silver they once represented. What does this bitcoin have? Maybe if someone redeemed it for "real" money while slowly inflating the currency—maybe. Maybe if someone printed the currency of some micronation and it looked like US money, except that instead of some US president, it had a picture of some celebrity, maybe it could be hawked.
Where does bitcoin get its value? But the thing that gets me is how can it be spent, not replicated, and done so digitally in a de-centralized manner? How is this done? What do they mean by "mining" and the use of supercomputers? Do they get a bunch of super-large prime numbers and multiply them and then have others figure out the original prime numbers—would these be the bitcoins? How would such be spent and not multiplied?
And how is it soo oooo superior to the aforementioned ways of cheating on taxes or illegal trade? Also, how does it go unmonitored now that we have the National Security Agency , Five Eyes , and whatever else monitoring presumably , what do you call them, "entry" and "exit" "nodes.
If you work for your money, does it matter if you spent it on bitcoins if your salary was taxed? Ditto if you paid employees?
Ditto if you bought supplies? Wouldn't places that deal not in money but in bitcoins arouse interest by guv'mint agencies? If someone is going to buy a carton of contraband smokes, a lid of weed, and hire a prostitute, doesn't that involve addresses? And if one can fool the gov'mint with some trickery using bitcoins, couldn't that trickery also be used when using real money? Again, without clicking, the intro pretty much says nothing to me. This morning I was driving to work and a report on National Public Radio stated in no uncertain words that Bitcoin is "anonymous".
I cringed thinking that maybe the reporter reached that conclusion from reading this article. You see, I've finally understood why people including Wikipedia editors whose edits I've undone: A Bitcoin transaction has inputs funds being sent and outputs addresses where funds are being received. The network confirms that every input is the output of a previous transaction and that the new payment message has been digitally signed by the owner of the address es from which funds are being sent.
Among other things, that means that the sender s of the funds would have a hard time repudiating the fact that it was she they that sent the funds.
So it's possible, nay easy, to track funds through the blockchain, even with "mixers". Imagine that every time you completed a cash transaction, you and the counterparty wrote down the serial numbers of all the bills that you were exchanging, and submitted them to a public ledger. Anytime things are centralized, like mixers, its relatively easy for law enforcement to take them down.
Publications stating mixers are anonymous is just an assumption. Silbtsc talk —Preceding undated comment added I wasn't talking about Satoshi. What I mean is that right now we have a section called "Lack of anonymity". I agree that Bitcoin is not anonymous. But if it's not anonymous, then what is it? That term is used all over the place in articles that discuss the anonymity of Bitcoin or lack thereof , and I think we should adopt it here too.
In the Infobox, before reference [7] I see a square: It is inappropriate to insert any actual wallet address into the encyclopedia.
It is possible, even likely, that the intent is to hope readers of the article submit money to the address - and to that end, there has already been edit warring over which address is used, as different people vie to have their Bitcoin wallet address be "the" address which is seen. Any such insertion should be removed. The concept of Bitcoin is, above all other things, a cryptocurrency, a fact which needs to be expressed much more clearly.
Also Why in hell is this page protected? Lets get this page sorted; its only going to see MORE attention in the future. I suggest pending changes instead of this. IMO that's best solution for Bitcoin article, it has been successfully introduced on WikiLeaks and has very good argument - it allows edit IP users and review them before making them visible. Chrisarnesen , Samwalton9 , Laser brain So, what now?
Can we enable this? Samwalton9 , Laser brain , anyone? Someone not using his real name talk The following sentence links to the article on "intrinsic value", that article does not refer to any currency or commodity, but rather to the equity of a corporation. Bitcoins have been described as lacking intrinsic value as an investment because their value depends only on the willingness of users to accept them.
Bitcoin is neither a company nor a stock, therefore this article does not in any way relate to the topic at hand. Secondly, every single thing in the world is only valuable if someone is willing to accept it. Regardless of what a person who is on TV or writes something on paper says, if they are inaccurate, I do not think that we should faithfully reproduce their errors, unless it is to point out that it was specifically their point of view.
As an example, if no one accepted dollars, dollars would not be valuable. If no one wanted to buy gold, gold would not have a market price. There are many examples of currencies and assets that have fallen out of use, and therefore no longer have value.
If those items had "intrinsic value" which remember, according to wikipedia is related to a company or stock but as a definition means "necessary" or "belonging naturally" then they could not exist without the necessary attributes of having that value. This sentence should be revised since the Chinese central bank has barred financial institutions from handling transactions in bitcoins; see http: This needs further revision and a few sets of eyes - the "news" is evolving and a lot of incorrect information being shared, much of which is shared in the media.
I've made a few changes but this will need to be watched. The nature of the business of Bitcoin is that it goes directly against and circumvents the banking and payment industry.
On the other hand, pro-Bitcoin websites like Coindesk, overly show the positives and failings of main stream media. So, in my opinion neither side are are currently showing a neutral point of view.
However, I've found the following good sources:. So at this point , main stream web media from big names that are commonly reliable are not so reliable for Bitcoin. So I'd be very careful in citing from mainstream web media for the core sections of the Bitcoin article.
I'm looking to hear thoughts on what else should be considered for a reliable source for Bitcoin. Please try to keep recent events in historical perspective. Since the whole Wikipedia phenomenon is, uh, recent, and speculation about its, get this, "historical perspective" somewhat premature, this is unusually dense, even for a Wikipedia editor.
Further, the invention of the ugly "recentism" should perhaps qualify somebody for exclusion from that exalted calling. David Lloyd-Jones talk Would somebod ies please increase the amount of page content devoted to cheap transaction fees? This appears to be the only benefit to Bitcoin, and it's woefully absent from the page. Therefore Bitcoin will have lower transaction costs overall. Please support these proposed changes, or object with explanation.
Thank you for your consideration. I removed some cited material mentioning that you could send millions of dollars with bitcoins very cheaply. The European Banking Authority recently put out a warning that virtual currencies like bitcoin lack consumer protections. So, I'm not sure the best thing to publish is something that suggests a course of action that could very well result in the loss of large sums of money for those who act on it.
These sections need to be merged. The too generic "history" section also duplicates some of that. A recent editor made changes to the lede because he or she felt that it was inaccessible for the average reader. I tend to agree that the first paragraph does seem to use inter-wiki links to the point where a reader might feel obliged to read all manner of other articles just to understand a few simple sentences.
Do you think there's any way to increase the accessibility of the lede while maintaining its brevity? The Bitcoin page gets viewed tens of thousands of times a day and there are a lot of opinions out there about it. So we come here to iron things out. I can already tell you'll be a welcome addition to the team. As you can tell, we need all the help we can get. So tell your friends! Cheers, Chris Arnesen As long as I get good analytical view points.
I'm happy to contribute. Here's the reason why I think its actually confusing in the long run to classify Bitcoin as 'open source'. Its because there is 'open source software' that goes along with it. Ignore the practicality but technically, I'm free to write my own software that follows Bitcoin protocol and sell it without the need to open source it. As long as my software prepares the data packets in the Bitcoin protocol, the transactions submitted by my software will be accepted by the Bitcoin network.
Majority counts only when I want to change the protocol or erase a previously confirmed transaction. Wikipedia has many students and award winning journalists that absorb the concepts its good to expose them to the fundamentals. Put it another way, I'm proposing the following breakdown of Bitcoin: Open access because no one required to "login" to Bitcoin network This is different from password for your wallet.
They simply connect and discover peers like a regular peer to peer network. Compare this to closed networks such as Visa or Mastercard computer networks. Transaction Rules aka Bitcoin protocol define what is the format of the data packets and how to broadcast transactions over the network.
Bitcoin is a digital unit of payment in an open access network and pre-defined system of rules that allows one to make payments across the internet without the need to trust any single central authority to validate the transaction [ref][ref].
To put in context, Bitcoin is the money in the open Bitcoin payment network. The system of rules are called the Bitcoin protocol that are applied on a peer-to-peer network. When a trusted intermediary is removed and direct person to person transactions are allowed, it introduces a problem of double spend , wherein a malicious person can claim to have more money than they really have. Bitcoin protocol solves the double spend problem by using an open ledger of all Bitcoin transactions ever since it inception and a method to prevent anyone from changing old entries in the ledger [ref].
The openness of the Bitcoin network allows anyone to transact in Bitcoin without registering with any central entity [ref paper]. This open access attracts individuals wanting to conduct illicit activities using Bitcoin [ref-FinCEN][ref-secret service].
On the other side, demand for buying Bitcoin using legal tender such as USD has increased Bitcoin's value in that tender. Given the take down of several illicit operations such as Silkroad that used Bitcoin and several high value Bitcoin thefts, the system of virtual currencies has been brought under the scrutiny of government regulators [ref fincen, EBA, China] and media worldwide [ref].
This attention has led some to believe Bitcoin is potentially a disruptive payment technology [ref- US Senate hearing, ref media]. Commercial use of Bitcoin for legitimate goods and services is currently small compared to its use by speculators, which has fueled price volatility.
IMO, lead is OK as it is now. There's no non-important info to remove. In the ledger there is only wallet addresses, it gives undue weight to identity. The first thing everyone wants to know about Bitcoin is about Bitcoin mining. The article is massively lacking in this respect. I will start drafting something here so we can roll-out a significant subsection on the topic. Below is a very early draft, please help elaborate, correct, improve, etc.
Bitcoin Mining is the process of processing Bitcoin transactions and performs three vital roles. The first is to verify Bitcoin transactions are authorised, correct, and exclusive to avoid double spending of coins , the second is to remove the need for trust in the bitcoin network, and the third is to fairly distribute new bitcoins in a fair fashion and as a reward for contribution to the Bitcoin network.
Within Bitcoin Mining, proof-of-work ensures that the ability to create new blocks is equally shared amongst all contributors, proportional to their contributions. Bitcoin Mining Difficulty is a way for the bitcoin protocol to regulate block creation speed to a target of one block every 10 minutes. As the computing power behind Bitcoin increases or decreases, the mining difficulty needs to adjust to maintain that 10 minute target. A miner who achieves the proof-of-work target is given the right to create a new block which will contain verified transactions.
Once the block is created by the bitcoin miner it is distributed throughout the Bitcoin network and the transactions it contains become part of the blockchain.
In centralised currencies, new units created through inflation are owned by the central bank or central authority who created those new units. In a distributed currency such as Bitcoin, a different solution was needed to distribute new currency units.
Proof-of-work provides a way for all within the Bitcoin network to distribute new bitcoins to miners based on how much processing power they've provided to the Bitcoin network. Proposed addition As the popularity of Bitcoin increased, miners abandoned run-of-the-mill consumer computers for specially tailored machines that could do the work of payment processing more efficiently.
First GPUs were pressed into service, and today several companies market products made solely to mine Bitcoin. A CPU is a common type of computing chip which is contains a few processing cores that are optimized for sequential serial processing.
Similar to a CPU chip, however a GPU consists of thousands of smaller and more efficient cores designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. FPGA 's are complex computing chips designed perform one specific purpose, but which are re-programmable and can thus perform more than one task however only one task at a time.
ASIC 's are Chips specifically designed to perform only one task, with their circuity physically locked to performing only one function over and over. Theoretically quantum computing could provide bitcoin mining hardware which could process hashes at an order of magnitude greater than all other mining hardware options, however if quantum computing were to eventuate bitcoin's encryption algorithm would need to be updated as theoretically SHA may be vulnerable.
This has a more useable for WP purposes summary in the 2nd half of the article. Why does the portal bar include "Anarchism"? Can I remove that? I've heard people say things like, "Bitcoin has it's roots in crypto-anarchism". It would be nice to include a reference and a few sentences on the subject, if appropriate.
I'm sorry, but I do feel that mentioning an "increasing" use of bitcoins in the lede is speculation and in addition is not supported by content in the body of the article. It may be true that such use has increased and since this increase is from a very low base, it may have recently increased by many thousands of percentage points , but that does not mean it will continue to do so. If some editor would like to add a well-sourced section to the body of the article detailing past increases in usage, there's no reason for me to stand in the way of a lede inclusion summarizing such material.
But I find it difficult to imagine how simple speculation on the future popularity of bitcoins for actual purchases merits any mention. Well, I don't think that there's any dispute that the number of bitcoin-accepting merchants has increased. If, however, you believe that the statement "there is an increasing use of bitcoins" is closer in meaning to "bitcoin use has increased" than "bitcoin use increased in the past and will continue to do so," I think you should reevaluate your position.
I'm happy with that. Does that sit okay with you? The article goes on to say the FBI seized ", bitcoins" which is a much better value to publish in this regard. I see you went ahead and replaced the dollar amount and with simply the bitcoin count with a grammatical error no less disregarding the opinions of your fellow editors here. Why solicit feedback in the first place if you're just going to disregard it in favor of your own opinion?
Back to the topic at hand, goods are services aren't priced in bitcoins. They're priced in dollars or yen or whatever, and at the moment of transaction the price in fiat is converted to bitcoins. So why would we price the confiscated funds in bitcoin? Your statement that "the value of those bitcoins changes constantly" is precisely the reason that we should price the confiscated amount in USD.
The reader who doesn't know the price of bitcoins will have no way to determine the scale of the confiscation. In my opinion this section is far too long, unwieldy, and list-like. I suggest it may be better to provide a brief summary of how Bitcoin is legislated differently across the world and split all this information off into a list article like Legal status of Bitcoin by country.
Could someone please find reliable sources for the claim that "a subsidiary" of Baidu stopped accepting the currency. I'm a bit suspicious that this is just POV, plain and simple. I would venture to guess that you could say the same thing about any operation run by an large company, and I don't think it's commonplace to make such a distinction.