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The_Rev

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I'm surprised there wasnt already a thread about this, I know Levi has been into Bitcoin for a year or two but I have to ask (and it's probably only Levi who can answer) has there just been a pump and dump with Bitcoin?    It was all over the news last week because it had reached a certain value, the equivilant of one billion US dollars in circulation and there were people coming out on places like Reddit saying they had made an absolute fortune with Bitcoin over the past few months.  Now it's lost 40% of it's value in a day, and I presume the people seduced by recent headlines are the ones who have taken the brunt of that loss.  

 

Any explanation? 

Edited by The_Rev
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It's a bubble (but then again, money is essentially by definition a bubble).

It's crazy to think that, for a post on a forum a couple of years ago, someone tipped me 0.10 BTC (so about 6p at the time). At one point a few hours ago, then, I had been paid GBP13-ish for a single forum post!).

Wouldn't bet against USD/BTC going to $50 or lower in the near future.

Wouldn't bet against USD/BTC going above $1000 in the longer term.

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  • 4 months later...

If I understand it correctly a bitcoin or litecoin is one of a number of finite solutions to a complex mathematical problem. These coins are "mined" by people using computer servers to solve algorithms. The coins can then be traded for real currency online the same as any other normal currency. 

 

The thing I don't get is that the bitcoins/litecoins have no real world value. i.e. they cannot be exchanged for goods and or services. Therefore they are worthless as in reality "normal" currencies are valued against what you can buy with them, e.g a barrel of oil costs ~$100.

 

Seems like a pyramid scam to me to be honest but maybe I am missing something.

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It depends on how you look at it.  Cash only has a value because everybody in society agrees it does when in reality it's just a bit of paper or a metal disc. 

 

Oh, and if you think bitcoins cant be exchanged for goods and services then you are very naive. 

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It depends on how you look at it.  Cash only has a value because everybody in society agrees it does when in reality it's just a bit of paper or a metal disc. 

 

Oh, and if you think bitcoins cant be exchanged for goods and services then you are very naive. 

Yup, i'm sure millions of bitcoins are being spent on the darknet every month. 

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It's a Tor hidden service, thus likely impossible to shut down.

 

That's what people  said about Tormail, and a bunch of other services on Freedom Hosting. It's certainly a lot harder to  shut down than a conventional site, but by no means are Tor services entirely anonymous. And even if the authorities can't decrypt and process data sent over the Tor network in real time yet, it's best to assume that it's being intercepted and archived in a data centre somewhere.

Edited by Davkaus
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That's why I said, "likely".

Considering the extent to which Tor is funded by the US security apparatus, it's not necessary trustworthy. I prefer I2P, bar the pesky detail of I2p only having a Java implementation...

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As for Freedom Hosting, I'm good friends with a professor at UMass who's perhaps the foremost expert on attacks against anonymity networks... basically Freedom Hosting had no clue what they were doing and was leaking their IP addresses to Tor. Dread Pirate Roberts has been much more smart about it.

If you know what you're doing, barring a crypto breakthrough that still looks unlikely for the NSA (because if the NSA had made this breakthrough, they wouldn't be wasting their time with the suite of techniques that they're known to have recently used), a Tor hidden service is unkillable (the same is true for I2P, barring a compromised Java VM). My concerns with Tor are with the exit nodes, the vast majority of which are located in Northern Virginia....

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  • 4 weeks later...

Dread Pirate Roberts has been much more smart about it.

 

 

Oops! It's just been shut down.

 

Rather large knock on effect for Bitcoins as well. Considering that the main use for them just went out of the window, I'm not sure the value will be coming back up.

 

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Edited by Davkaus
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Well, reading through the complaint, it sounds like he wasn't particularly bright. TOR is still fairly secure, he wasn't caught due to technical vulnerabilities. As is usually the case, the weakest point of security is the user.

 

If he'd behaved sensibly, they probably wouldn't have caught him, but when you're running the world's most well known drug trafficking site, you shouldn't be asking for technical support on Stack Overflow. And if you have to ask for technical support on Stack Overflow, you shouldn't put in a link to Silk Road. And you DEFINITELY shouldn't do it using an email address with your REAL **** NAME IN IT.

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Well, reading through the complaint, it sounds like he wasn't particularly bright. TOR is still fairly secure, he wasn't caught due to technical vulnerabilities. As is usually the case, the weakest point of security is the user.

If he'd behaved sensibly, they probably wouldn't have caught him, but when you're running the world's most well known drug trafficking site, you shouldn't be asking for technical support on Stack Overflow. And if you have to ask for technical support on Stack Overflow, you shouldn't put in a link to Silk Road. And you DEFINITELY shouldn't do it using an email address with your REAL **** NAME IN IT.

That he was using PHP says all you need to know, really.

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