Last Forking Warning For Bitcoin 334
ASDFnz writes "It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash. The culprit of the crash was found to be a bug that prevented pre version 7.1 bitcoin clients accepting large blocks that could be generated by version 8 clients. A temporary fix was put into place by Bitcoin Project lead developer Gavin Andresen that forced version 8 clients to generate blocks that version 7.1 could understand. It is important to note though, the fix was a temporary one! In just under two days on the 15th of May the fix will expire and version 8 clients will once again be able to make large blocks that older clients will not be able to understand."
Crap, the sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
Oh shit, the sky is falling.
Total disaster, never happens in real world, not virtual one. Except for all the times when 'real world' currencies undergo devaluations, revaluations, forced exchanges, just plain old inflation, all the things that lead to currencies collapsing. I mean name me a paper currency that lasted longer than 80 years on this planet without a major restructuring, without collapsing?
This is a technical problem, I am pretty certain it will be addressed. Not that I care much about Bitcoin in itself, but I like the idea of competing currencies and this is definitely a revolutionary one, so it's interesting to observe. I don't think it's going away any time soon even with technical issues.
No more like naked blind short selling (Score:1, Informative)
Sound a lot more like blind naked short selling trick, than splitting of currencies.
In Naked Blind Short Selling, a stock is sold on the promise the share will be bought/borrowed in future, and it never is. So two copies of the shares exist, the one that was sold (and never existed) and the one that actually exists. The non-existent one that was sold, is there on the books.
Eventually the short is filled or reversed, and the fake asset removed by manual intervention. Here it ended with block 225461. The v7 block-chain becomes invalid because its shorter than the v8 version, so its not like it would be valid.
Or perhaps like Bernie Madoff, buying and selling shares that didn't exist, or Wallstreet and the crash of 2007/8... in that case the Fed decided to turn the fake asset into a real one by buying the insurance company and paying out on failed bets. Thank f*** that bailouts aren't possible in BTC!
Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway (Score:4, Informative)
In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway
What do you mean by that? I thought that the very idea of bitcoins is that at some time no more can be produced, thereby causing deflation.
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
Argentina, Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, (Score:5, Informative)
"What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time?"
There's quite a few currency collapses, you really don't need to go back far, Argentina was the last major one in 2002, since then Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, quite a few African ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_%281999%E2%80%932002%29
It's the usual problem with fiat currencies, they spend more than they earn, they print money to cover it, the currency collapses.
When the US had a meltdown in 2007, they did a massive currency swap with the Eurozone. The effect of that meant that the US central bank had euros to sell as well as dollars, and could sell euros and buy dollars to prop the currency up if panic ensued. You came a lot closer than you realize, I find your comment somewhat glib, based on ignorance of how bad 2007 asset collapse was.
Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway (Score:2, Informative)
"Bitcoins" are kept in the blockchain. That means that there's tens of millions of "backups" all over the world. What people customarily mean by "bitcoins" is actually the private keys to sign them over other people (your bitcoin "wallet" contains not bitcoins - they're in the blockchain - but the decryption keys that prove that you own them).
Backing up decryption keys is not hard. If you use a deterministic wallet, you just need to remember a passphrase, making it even easier.
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time? Yes, they can fluctuate a few percentages, that is very very very different than 60-70% loss of value recently for Bitcoin (or 90%+ the last time the price crashed).
The question I would ask is less 'can real world currencies collapse?'(yes occasionally one does, albeit generally one of the lower-tier ones); but 'do real-world currencies collapse outside of conditions where things are going all to shit across the board?'
Given how much fun it isn't, it's not as though you go through a round of hyperinflation just for giggles. It's not as though everybody wakes up one morning and says "I can see it so clearly now! My fiat currency is nothing but a political construct subject to the whims of politicians! It's all over!" and the currency's value against real assets suddenly dives for the floor. If the situation, as measured in actual economic activity, commodity availability, etc. goes to shit, the currency may well follow; but at that point your problem isn't that your currency is a paper lie; but that things have gone to shit, at least within the jurisdiction that minted the currency, if not more broadly.
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
It's just that the new Bitcoin and the old Bitcoin are becoming two different currencies. People need to convert all their old Bitcoins to new ones to avoid this.
Bzzzt. Users of Bitcoin don't need to do anything beyond download a client written in the past year. They don't need to convert anything, they don't need to send themselves their balance to make sure the new program sees it, they don't even need to re-download the block chain. Just update their software.
Nothing about the currency itself has changed; just the removal of an artificial cap on block size placed in the original client, from back before the early developers expected it to take off so well.
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:2, Informative)
The US dollar is still collapsing. and will continue to collapse fast for the next 5-10 years.
When you have real double digit inflation and cost of living increases you have a collapsing dollar. And yes, it's real double digit, the Fed is downplaying it to avoid a panic.
When you cant buy a week's of groceries (real food not ramen) for two people and stay under $80.00 you have a economic crash happening. Clothing, food, housing, gasoline. Cars are at disgustingly high prices... really an econoBox car is $15,000?
I am actually surprised the poor are not starting to band together and start killing the rich and stealing their stuff.
Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Consider this. Since there a some limit on the maximum number of Bitcoins any that are lost are gone forever. Wallet file misplaced or destroyed, coins stolen but unspendable (because although they are anonymous they are traceable), or simply sitting on forgotten hard drives somewhere.
Governments can print new notes to replace old ones that no longer exist or are presumed lost. Bitcoin has a hard limit.
Re:Rather obvious isn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
With 21million BTCs dividable into 100million satoshis each I think the world will have plenty of artificial bits to spread around.
Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:4, Informative)
I can, I live in one of the countries in Eastern Europe. We remember economical crash of nineties and the time when paper money become almost worthless - people were losing savings of entire life. There was once a popular form of saving for houses for your children, backed by goverment, paid when kid enters adulthood. In one month you could buy for these savings nice two room flat, in next month you could buy for them maybe TV set or personal computer.
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:2, Informative)
If it's troll, it's a 0/10 one. If it's not: "blocks" are basically pages in a global bitcoin ledger. This 7.1/8 fork was because 8 uses inch step for binder's punch holes, and 7.1 used 2.5 cm, so they can't file new pages from 8. The only effect of your client producing blocks too big is getting them not accepted by anyone else.
Thailand, Indonesia, Ruble, Turkey, America (Score:2, Informative)
Oh and Thailand in 1997, followed by Indonesia (dropped 83% of its value), South Korea... (remember the Asia crisis?), the post soviet Russian ruble collapse, Turkey Lira collapse went right up till 2001, in 2004 they had to knock *six* zeros of the end of the bank notes!
America had it's collapse of the continental, courtesy of the states printing money:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency
"Continental currency depreciated badly during the war, giving rise to the famous phrase "not worth a continental".[10] A primary problem was that monetary policy was not coordinated between Congress and the states, which continued to issue bills of credit."
Sound familiar?
2 months ago (Score:4, Informative)
The crash was not caused by a fork. The crash was caused by over-valuation coupled with the largest DDoS MtGox had ever experienced. The trading system slowed to the point that user's sell / buy trades weren't going through and it caused a panic. MtGox was taken down while they upgraded network infrastructure to deal with the shitty DDoS people. When they came back up, other exchange's had already begun the dive. It dove and corrected repeatedly, until it panned out and has been relatively stable since.
The article is bullshit.
Re:Argentina, Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, (Score:2, Informative)
My Great Grand Father lost more currency value then you want to imagine by insisting on holding the Weimer Currency. I am guess just under a 1/2 billion in today's dollar valuation, also he lived in sweden, so it wasn't like he had to own weimer's money. It didn't ruin him but it cost him most of his wealth. So I know that the Weimer wasn't some fly by night currency people bought it and held it just like you might hold Europes, Yen, etc. The lesson I've taken from this is that paper money is meaningless always invest in real companies and things. I don't know if holding stock in Germans biggest companies would mean we'd still own stock today but it possible. My dad also lost value due to inflation. We where cleaning out my grandfathers house when we came across some Swedish bonds given to my father as a 16th birthday gift. Since they only paid interest for 10 years, they weren't worth the hassle of redeeming due once again to inflation. My dad when he first saw them again said. "Couldn't they have bought me stock in volvo or some other big company."
Re:Crap, the sky is falling (Score:5, Informative)
Just so you know - You have that exactly backward.