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One of these things will happen: (1) A successful attack on Tor, (2) A successful attack on Bitcoin, (3) The Silk Road's (or similar site's) share of the black

• jerguismi 15y ago
  It seems pretty inevitable in the longer term. If current technologies break up, new technologies will be popping up. I guess law enforcement has already lost this battle (in the long term), similarly as RIAA/MPAA has lost to piracy. It should also be noted that criminal use doesn't raise the price of bitcoins, since criminals don't necessarily hold their bitcoins. For them bitcoin is just an another money laundering system.
  • bdr 15y ago
    It should also be noted that criminal use doesn't raise the price of bitcoins, since criminals don't necessarily hold their bitcoins. For them bitcoin is just an another money laundering system. Disagree. There's a "float" period between when the order is placed and when it's completed (service/goods verifiably delivered). The dollar-value volume in this float period sets a floor on the market cap of Bitcoin. I'm clearly fascinated by all this, and a little surprised that more people aren't. The Bitcoin protocol is one of the great recent innovations in distributed systems, and this particular application of it is the culmination of a lot of crypto work into a cypherpunk fantasy.
    • VladRussian 15y ago
      >a cypherpunk fantasy yep. All your transactions are recorded for posterity and law enforcement can access them at anytime. The moment i first time heard about bitcoin i immediately read their paper and this was the instant end between me and BT - it is either a honeypot or an NSA's distributed "calculate these hashes@HOME" project. Most probably it started as the latter and once NSA had gotten enough results and withdrew the funding (which supported the currency valuations stable growth before speculation rushed in), the BT now is only the former.
      • DiabloD3 15y ago
        Satoshi's white paper disproves everything you just said. Either your comment is out of ignorance or out of malice. Go read the white paper.
        • VladRussian 15y ago
          our reading of the same paper seems different (i mean if you did really read it). Well, don't believe me, check this out: http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-... "Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users."
          • DiabloD3 15y ago
            Thats a misinterpretation of what jgarzik said. Basically, if the cops grab your box with your Bitcoin crypto keys on it, they know all of your transactions. This is why you need to encrypt your keys if you're doing something illegal. tl;dr: Nothing ties you to your address but evidence not inside of the chain.
          • icebraining 15y ago
            You don't even need "sophisticated techniques", you can follow the transactions in http://blockexplorer.com/ http://blockexplorer.com/ ALL transactions, including the receiver and sender addresses are public. They have to be, since the global bitcoin network has to verify and add them to the blockchain. A full copy of a currency's block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can find out how much value belonged to each address at any point in history. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_chain https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_chain
          • morsch 15y ago
  • pessimizer 15y ago
    I beg to differ. If people can buy drugs or launder money easier with bitcoin than with coin coin, people are going to want bitcoin.