No, I understand Silk Road. All it takes is some cops that set up a few sales, and see the same guy take the packages. This isn't that hard. And when you have no chance to go after sellers, you go after buyers and make an example of a few of them, and scare off people from using it. It's incredibly easy to set it up.

You may be right that laundering makes the velocity slow down tremendously compared to other types of sales. I'm surprised there aren't more "legitimate" businesses set up explicitly for laundering money. But I'm not going to blindly trust the SR community when it comes to anything dealing with economics. That would be silly. You may be right that eventually the price will be more reasonable and it will be a much better experience, even worth the premium price. You have more choices, more feedback chances, and better quality. However, it's not hard to get quality stuff from a local dealer, you just need to know the right people or ask for the right stuff. Their reputations matter too, so you do have control (or at least just as much as you would against SR).

I do think it's possible to solve the double spend problem better. Right now, there are huge amount of resources needed to log transactions for a small number of people. Who knows how well that scales when serious usage happens. You'll likely see a semi-decentralized system where a few serious players control most of things, and you can take your pick from them on who to trust, but you never see the actual Bitcoins yourself, and only large transactions ever enter the chain between the major players.

hmm, interesting.

maybe naming will evolve anyways.

Alberto's statement is true. Here is a list of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals on the wiki. Note that 8 of the 33 proposals have been accepted. The bitcoin protocol can be changed if a proposal clearly improves it. An improvement that would need to unwind the blockchain is absurd, but proposals have been integrated that make it so an old client will not work properly anymore after a certain date. Bitcoin is flexible enough to accommodate a lot. Any proposal could be accepted if the alternative meant that a a bitcoin competitor would win, and this was a big reason for the rushed acceptance of multi-signature transactions (BIP 16). These allow you to do two factor authorization. If a clone had this feature first, it could have been considered superior.

I will make sure to order multiple drug packages to Tom Collins' address then Seriously dude, getting a conviction on just this evidence is hard. And this idea that law enforcement could be selling tons of drugs on silk road to build up a reputation to raid a few guys who probably cannot be convicted is far-fetched. As soon as a couple guys were raided the seller would come under suspicion and lose his reputation anyway. When silk road is doing billions in business, they might try to do advanced traffic analysis on the tor network to try to bust dealers, or beef up mailing identity verification, but everything is safe for now. Mail order drugs have been around for decades. Bitcoin has just massively improved the usability.

I think it's possible too, just unlikely in the near future. If it takes longer than a few years, it will be irrelevant. Currently, the network is not terribly efficient, but this network was designed to scale up to visa/mastercard volume. That's why Satoshi picked a 10 minute average to confirm a transaction, instead of 3 minutes or less for some of the clones. It gives millions of transactions time to propagate through nodes around the globe. It's designed to be able to handle whatever the world wants, although semi-decentralization is a possibility as you said.

It can barely handle the current volume. The blockchain is like 2 gb. It will take the average person like 2 days to download it. Thus, they ignore the problem and go to light clients. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86679.0

2 days? People don't have 56k modems anymore, steel.

I think if you open up the client and let it download, via peer to peer it will take that long. I use a light client so I don't know. But unfortunately I don't think you can consider the whole system solid enough to put a lot of money on it.

Sounds like the problem is solved.

The downloading isn't the problem. On a newish desktop it takes a few hours max (with the new faster version of bitcoin) and some say 40 minutes, but on a netbook it will take days. The bottleneck is the indexing and verifying.

But yeah, the problem is solved. It is/was nice that every single participant could hold every single transaction while we got started, but that's really not necessary.

The real question is how will the big time nodes connected handle if traffic expands. The "Mastercard-level" of volume might be nowhere near realistic when you account for tons of microtransactions and massive mini-transactions used for laundering/disguising transactions.

But the end result could likely be nodes only taking higher transaction fees, such trivial transactions disappearing from the network since fees eat them up. There's no reason why Satoshi Dice couldn't just keep a balance from people and keep an internal record of balances. The interesting thing will be how high transaction fees will actually rise. You might see a much closer transaction structure to what we have today. Or maybe costs to operate keep dropping with Moore's law and we laugh about 2TB downloads in a few years.

Yeah, lots of sites keep balances, but Satoshi Dice can't or it wouldn't be Satoshi Dice anymore. It keeps working without a website as it is now, everything is publicly checkable that's what makes it Satoshi Dice.

Most 2tx per bet games will get pushed out. I could image a small niche long term. Kind of 'high class' gambling direct in the chain. But .01 bets or whatever won't last.

That reminds me, I wonder if there is any kind of market for some kind of block-chain public-like random number generator for gambling sites. I played on a really crappy gambling site (not poker) due to a bonus they had, and found out it was incredibly rigged (due to programmer incompetence, not anything malicious). I wonder if you had a chain that simply had a lot of random numbers in it, that anyone could check, and the site published how it converts them into cards. Not sure how you would know which random number corresponded to you, though. Plus, you would need to generate a lot more often than 10 minutes, although maybe the transactions are so simple it wouldn't bog down the network. Perhaps every minute or so, but it generates a ton of them? Just thinking off the cuff here.

For the clients or small time users it is solved, but for the miners and system it is not solved. Also the light clients weaken the network, as they don't protect it. Electrum and multibit work great. Electrum even works on android, it uses a remote blockchain from server.

Who cares if it's solved for the miners? This isn't supposed to be a free lunch for the miners.

What problem does it pose to the system? That fewer people will mine? Mining is going to evolve to specialty miners in the end game anyway. What really matters is how hard it is to overcome the computational power.

Bitcoins are back over $6, btw, but it's pretty shallow

Already blockchain based results can conceivably be manipulated since a nier could be playing and withhold a block that makes them lose. I would imagine this chain would pay a lot less and attract a high % of manipulators.

Also I don't know if it is a very big problem. I just opened a site that is cryptographically provably honest. The only thing using a chain setup would help is making the honesty of every game available to everyone instead of just the player.

I don't understand all the details but he releases hashes of lucky numbers in advance, then releases the lucky numbers later?

Right. You have to salt it too of course so it can't be reverse engineered. And to keep the player safe from me finding collisions I include a timestamp in the data. So they can see that I would have to have done thousands of years of calculations hoping to cheat on a bet at that very second. The cheat being finding a winner and a loser that hash to the same thing with specially selected salts.

i heard this term in a episode of The Good Wife,i thought it was just a name created for the episode

I've been talking about bitcoin in public and had someone interrupt and say "what? bitcoin is an actual thing?"

I think that show makes a habit of making up names for things that are similar to the real world name but not exact, but for bitcoin there was no one to hassle them so they could use the real name.

Now @ $7.20, silently creeping up for the last few months.

Daaaammmmmnnn .. I really need to do what I say I'm going to do and start getting some bitcoins!

Bitcoinica hacked again. 40,000 BTC and USD stolen. They hadn't even opened their doors for business again since the last issue and funds get hacked.

Those guys are clowns.

Britney Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again

now 8.5