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FWIW, China seems to be tacitly approving Bitcoin. State-controlled CCTV has been broadcasting more and more news segments about the currency that are all very

by mrb 13y ago

FWIW, China seems to be tacitly approving Bitcoin. State-controlled CCTV has been broadcasting more and more news segments about the currency that are all very favorable and positive(!) A lot of chinese Bitcoin users have reported this stance, eg: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=320260.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=320260.0

malandrew 13y ago
We've pretty much seen that no other currency is going to undermine the US dollar. It is the de facto reserve currency for the World. This has only been further cemented by globalization since everyone is now so far in bed with the US via trade that everyone has no choice but to let the US keep racking up a national debt. Questioning that debt and forcing default would be tantamount to economic mutually assured destruction. For China, it knows the Yuan is never going to be a real competitor to the US dollar, since there is even less trust in China, since it has been so willing to manipulate exchange rates with its own currency. AFAICT bitcoin presents the only real existential risk to the US dollar. It's a long long road to get there and it might fail spectacularly or simply become just another currency, but even if there is only 0.1% chance of it upsetting the US dollar, that is 0.1% chance more than any other currency out there. Personally, if this does play out, I see the US to be one of the last countries to get on the Bitcoin wagon and lose out. Our currency is the most fit and we have the least amount to gain in the short term from adopting it. But this does not change the fact that many countries with far less stable currencies and governments that have proven themselves untrustworthy with their monetary policies, where the citizens would flock to a currency like bitcoin once security and usability issues are addressed. I'd say that every country where inflation is over 4% per annum is a candidate for wanting to acquire bitcoins.
- brianwawok 13y ago
  Well if BTC has a .01% chance to replace USD, the Euro has at least a .005% chance to replace the USD
- jafaku 13y ago
  The US is already holding the largest stash of Bitcoins in the world. They seized about 144,000 BTC from Silk Road.
  - mrb 13y ago
    Actually MtGox (japanese company) owned 400,000 BTC back in 2011. I would be surprised if their bitcoin-worth has decreased since then.
    - TheCoelacanth 13y ago
      The bitcoins held by the US is only the largest held at a single address. MtGox's bitcoins are probably split between multiple addresses.
maaku 13y ago
/me wonders if some high ranking party official bought a lot of btc and is using his nation to pump a bubble...
bpodgursky 13y ago
Why would China not like bitcoin? They can - track all financial transactions by all people to find dissidents and find NGO funding sources - throw 10% of a datacenter at it whenever they feel like it and pull off a 51% attack - lock up a huge number of bitcoins via the above point
- blake8086 13y ago
  That would be one powerful data center if it has 5.1 times the hashing power of the bitcoin network.
  - jedunnigan 13y ago
    It wouldn't take but a few thousand wafers of 65nm ASICs to overpower the rest of the network. With direct access to chip manufacturing facilities this can be pulled off fairly easily.
- smaili 13y ago
  I think this is what makes me nervous about electronic currencies. A country, even just a person, could easily abuse it by throwing these huge machines at it. The only thing analogous to this with real currencies are printing presses that people somehow get a hold of and are able to print themselves. The nice thing about real currency though is we have some ways of knowing whether they're real or not (like looking under a light), but you can't really determine whether someone's bitcoins came from abuse because technically it's legit. Only solution I could think of would be if there's a way for the networks to have throttling so miners could only make so many per day or per hour or some other metric.
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  > throw 10% of a datacenter at it whenever they feel like it and pull off a 51% attack The rise of ASIC miners have made the BTC network essentially invulnerable to attacks from general-purpose devices. SHA is very amenable to being directly implemented in hardware, making general purpose computers useless for bitcoin. Because of all the new hashing power coming from all the new asic miners, difficulty has risen to the point that you'd need more than four hundred million modern cpu cores to take over the network. Using top of the line GPUs, you'd need more than 5 million of them. China could take over the BTC network, however, to do so they would have to attack it with ASIC miners. This would imply ~6 months of preparation, tens of millions in funding, and they'd have to make the decision to pull the trigger some 3-4 months in advance or the money would go to waste.

by mrb 13y ago

malandrew 13y ago

We've pretty much seen that no other currency is going to undermine the US dollar. It is the de facto reserve currency for the World. This has only been further cemented by globalization since everyone is now so far in bed with the US via trade that everyone has no choice but to let the US keep racking up a national debt. Questioning that debt and forcing default would be tantamount to economic mutually assured destruction. For China, it knows the Yuan is never going to be a real competitor to the US dollar, since there is even less trust in China, since it has been so willing to manipulate exchange rates with its own currency. AFAICT bitcoin presents the only real existential risk to the US dollar. It's a long long road to get there and it might fail spectacularly or simply become just another currency, but even if there is only 0.1% chance of it upsetting the US dollar, that is 0.1% chance more than any other currency out there. Personally, if this does play out, I see the US to be one of the last countries to get on the Bitcoin wagon and lose out. Our currency is the most fit and we have the least amount to gain in the short term from adopting it. But this does not change the fact that many countries with far less stable currencies and governments that have proven themselves untrustworthy with their monetary policies, where the citizens would flock to a currency like bitcoin once security and usability issues are addressed. I'd say that every country where inflation is over 4% per annum is a candidate for wanting to acquire bitcoins.

brianwawok 13y ago
Well if BTC has a .01% chance to replace USD, the Euro has at least a .005% chance to replace the USD
jafaku 13y ago
The US is already holding the largest stash of Bitcoins in the world. They seized about 144,000 BTC from Silk Road.
- mrb 13y ago
  Actually MtGox (japanese company) owned 400,000 BTC back in 2011. I would be surprised if their bitcoin-worth has decreased since then.
  - TheCoelacanth 13y ago
    The bitcoins held by the US is only the largest held at a single address. MtGox's bitcoins are probably split between multiple addresses.

maaku 13y ago

/me wonders if some high ranking party official bought a lot of btc and is using his nation to pump a bubble...

bpodgursky 13y ago

Why would China not like bitcoin? They can - track all financial transactions by all people to find dissidents and find NGO funding sources - throw 10% of a datacenter at it whenever they feel like it and pull off a 51% attack - lock up a huge number of bitcoins via the above point

blake8086 13y ago
That would be one powerful data center if it has 5.1 times the hashing power of the bitcoin network.
- jedunnigan 13y ago
  It wouldn't take but a few thousand wafers of 65nm ASICs to overpower the rest of the network. With direct access to chip manufacturing facilities this can be pulled off fairly easily.
smaili 13y ago
I think this is what makes me nervous about electronic currencies. A country, even just a person, could easily abuse it by throwing these huge machines at it. The only thing analogous to this with real currencies are printing presses that people somehow get a hold of and are able to print themselves. The nice thing about real currency though is we have some ways of knowing whether they're real or not (like looking under a light), but you can't really determine whether someone's bitcoins came from abuse because technically it's legit. Only solution I could think of would be if there's a way for the networks to have throttling so miners could only make so many per day or per hour or some other metric.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
> throw 10% of a datacenter at it whenever they feel like it and pull off a 51% attack The rise of ASIC miners have made the BTC network essentially invulnerable to attacks from general-purpose devices. SHA is very amenable to being directly implemented in hardware, making general purpose computers useless for bitcoin. Because of all the new hashing power coming from all the new asic miners, difficulty has risen to the point that you'd need more than four hundred million modern cpu cores to take over the network. Using top of the line GPUs, you'd need more than 5 million of them. China could take over the BTC network, however, to do so they would have to attack it with ASIC miners. This would imply ~6 months of preparation, tens of millions in funding, and they'd have to make the decision to pull the trigger some 3-4 months in advance or the money would go to waste.