just commented on an article at turncoatresource.com. in case it gets quashed by the moderator, I'll post it here too:
useful and informative article, but a few points of clarification and/or correction:the algorithms don’t necessarily have to change as more miners come online. what changes is the difficulty of finding an arrangement of bytes that will hash to a low enough number. here’s an example:
jcomeau@aspire:~$ md5sum /bin/* | sort -r | tail 0f897806d7c027fc643531ab20333ac9 /bin/grep 0e39d6f2898ceaaf1e3d9fcb6fee0950 /bin/tempfile 0dd7f553945e453a2415936bd2d3a002 /bin/mv 0d46e555b7bc8016f1ee8d713003d499 /bin/ntfscat 0c8422f5e415cd767be9af29dc20e35a /bin/sed 0a599dea3c1affe616539219ec31b152 /bin/ntfsck 0a4e1fd11e53fc180e8f748d681945df /bin/readlink 0a3a702f716cece1c0f0456a66ca7228 /bin/fgrep 091c718ef54f50acdd17c9f5f82f6834 /bin/ntfswipe 04a77c42b5ff03838e08925db76d479e /bin/dfimagine you had to find a program that hashed to ’0000000000000000000000000022a65e’. forget about it. now let’s say you could change the last 8 bytes of each program to whatever you wanted before you hashed it (the ‘nonce’ and timestamp). now let’s say you could partition the program into about 30 pieces and rearrange them however you wanted except for the first one (the transactions in the block). this is now getting in the realm of feasability, and is a pretty good analogy of bitcoin mining.
you also said “bitcoin is not meant to hold on to for any significant period of time”. why not? it’s inflation-proof, in fact somewhat deflationary. the dangers lie in what the world’s governments might have in store to thwart it, and some as-yet-unanticipated flaw in the system that renders it valueless overnight.
as for gold and silver, you say both “[t]he value of precious metals is not artificially determined by parasitic ‘governments’” and “[u]nfortunately their success is hinged on the inability of Central Bankers to keep their prices artificially suppressed” which seems to indicate you do realize the latter is happening. funny money is flowing from the Fed, through JP Morgan and other firms worldwide, to buy and sell (short and long contracts) gold and silver with the net result, if not the express purpose, of controlling the price; and that pressure has been almost uniformly downward for years.
last updated 2014-03-29 18:23:05. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com