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You Can Now Donate Bitcoins to the EFF

7 points by kiba 16y ago

kiba 16y ago
The effort to convince the EFF to put up a bitcoin donation address is a culmination of writing and revising a letter over and over again, collecting donation as well picking escrow, and a whole lot of patience. Just about when everybody in the bitcoin community is going to give up, the EFF suddenly put a link to a bitcoin address for anybody who wishes to donate. http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0 http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0 What is bitcoin? It's a Neal Stephenson plot device! http://bitcoin.org http://bitcoin.org
hfinney 16y ago
Bitcoin is really two ideas: an unforgeable digital datum based on "proof of work" or "hash collision" ideas; and a global, decentralized, distributed database to keep track of which data tokens have been "spent". The tokens don't yet have any true monetary value, but due to the design of the system, only a finite number of tokens will ever exist, so they would be candidates for being the basis of a monetary system. IOW they might be worth something someday. The interesting part is making the global DB immune to attack or takeover. Bitcoin relies on the long tail effect. The total compute power of the great number of honest users must outweigh that of a well-funded attacker. So long as this is true, token forgery is impossible.
- iwr 16y ago
  Even if an attacker can muster the computing power to overwhelm the current bitcoin network, these efforts would be very visible and traceable to a few sources. You could thus tell people are giving out fake coins. However, given the lack of inherent value (or backing) in a coin hash, bitcoins can't be used as money, only as money-substitutes (IOUs with an indeterminate recepient). The Dollar itself is "backed" by the US government requiring taxes be paid in it.
iwr 16y ago
For comparison purposes: using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz and the official bitcoin binary, it would take around 45 days before there's a 90% chance to get a block (50 coins).
- hfinney 16y ago
  Apparently graphics-card bitcoin generators are much faster than CPU based ones so that is where the bulk of the blocks are being created.

7 points by kiba 16y ago

kiba 16y ago

The effort to convince the EFF to put up a bitcoin donation address is a culmination of writing and revising a letter over and over again, collecting donation as well picking escrow, and a whole lot of patience. Just about when everybody in the bitcoin community is going to give up, the EFF suddenly put a link to a bitcoin address for anybody who wishes to donate. http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0 http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0 What is bitcoin? It's a Neal Stephenson plot device! http://bitcoin.org http://bitcoin.org

hfinney 16y ago

Bitcoin is really two ideas: an unforgeable digital datum based on "proof of work" or "hash collision" ideas; and a global, decentralized, distributed database to keep track of which data tokens have been "spent". The tokens don't yet have any true monetary value, but due to the design of the system, only a finite number of tokens will ever exist, so they would be candidates for being the basis of a monetary system. IOW they might be worth something someday. The interesting part is making the global DB immune to attack or takeover. Bitcoin relies on the long tail effect. The total compute power of the great number of honest users must outweigh that of a well-funded attacker. So long as this is true, token forgery is impossible.

iwr 16y ago
Even if an attacker can muster the computing power to overwhelm the current bitcoin network, these efforts would be very visible and traceable to a few sources. You could thus tell people are giving out fake coins. However, given the lack of inherent value (or backing) in a coin hash, bitcoins can't be used as money, only as money-substitutes (IOUs with an indeterminate recepient). The Dollar itself is "backed" by the US government requiring taxes be paid in it.

iwr 16y ago

For comparison purposes: using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz and the official bitcoin binary, it would take around 45 days before there's a 90% chance to get a block (50 coins).

hfinney 16y ago
Apparently graphics-card bitcoin generators are much faster than CPU based ones so that is where the bulk of the blocks are being created.