The timing is strange, just as we are getting a rapid increase in 3rd party coverage after getting slashdotted. I hope there's not a big hurry to wrap the discussion and decide. How long does Wikipedia typically leave a question like that open for comment?
It would help to condense the article and make it less promotional sounding as soon as possible. Just letting people know what it is, where it fits into the electronic money space, not trying to convince them that it's good. They probably want something that just generally identifies what it is, not tries to explain all about how it works.
It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow:
- Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins
- The proof-of-work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (for the whole network)
- The coins given per block is cut in half every 4 years
I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
Does anyone want to translate the Bitcoin client itself? It would be great to have at least one other language in the 0.3 release.
The credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply CPU power.
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet.
Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock.
More like a collectible or commodity.
Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.
Does anyone want to translate the Bitcoin client itself? It would be great to have at least one other language in the 0.3 release.
How does everyone feel about the B symbol with the two lines through the outside? Can we live with that as our logo?
Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn't resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding.
Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.
Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
When someone tries to buy all the world's supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes. At some point, it gets too expensive for them to buy any more. It's great for the people who owned it beforehand because they get to sell it to the corner at crazy high prices. As the price keeps going up and up, some people keep holding out for yet higher prices and refuse to sell.
Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don't have a credit card or don't want to use the cards they have, either don't want the spouse to see it on the bill or don't trust giving their number to "porn guys", or afraid of recurring billing.
That would be nice at point-of-sale. The cash register displays a QR-code encoding a bitcoin address and amount on a screen and you photo it with your mobile.
I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
Those coins can never be recovered, and the total circulation is less. Since the effective circulation is reduced, all the remaining coins are worth slightly more. It's the opposite of when a government prints money and the value of existing money goes down.
A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990's. I hope it's obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.
There would be many smaller zombie farms that are not big enough to overpower the network, and they could still make money by generating bitcoins. The smaller farms are then the "honest nodes". (I need a better term than "honest") The more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, the higher the bar gets to overpower the network, making larger farms also too small to overpower it so that they may as well generate bitcoins too. According to the "long tail" theory, the small, medium and merely large farms put together should add up to a lot more than the biggest zombie farm.
Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There's nothing to relate it to.