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posted by martyb on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the eggs-and-baskets dept.

This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @05:25PM (7 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @05:25PM (#670811)

    bitcoin 3 transactions per minute
    bitcoin cash 30 per minute.

    Global population: 7.6 billion. If we all use bitcoin cash, that's over 480 years to process a single transaction from every person on the planet.

    Still missing practical scale by several orders of magnitude.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:37PM (#670829)

    You know what does need a ZERO TRUST environment? Settlement, such as the settlement at the end of the day of 1 million coffee purchases.

    Fortunately, even for huge volumes of tiny microtransactions, it turns out that you don't have to trust others that much; hence, the development of second-layer protocols built atop Bitcoin, like the Lightning Network.

    Your confusion over the value of Bitcoin is not a fault of Bitcoin.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:25AM (5 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:25AM (#671039)

    So increase it to 300,000 per second - the threshold is entirely arbitrary, based on a large number of very adjustable variables.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:28AM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:28AM (#671115)

      Somehow, I have the feeling that if Bitcoin could scale from 3 per minute to 300,000 per second without losing security or increasing power demand, it would have done it. At 3 per minute, we're sucking down more electricity than all of Iceland (pre-BTC processing).

      After 10 years, Bitcoin cash is bumping up to 30 per minute. At that exponential growth rate (x10 every 10 years), we'll be at 300,000 per second in ~2080. Kurzweil is either brilliant or mad when he says that the singularity is coming with respect to immortality, unless he's brilliant, very few people over the age of 40 today will be alive to see 2080.

      I truly believe that cryptocurrency will get to 300,000 transactions per second, and before 2080 (Visa, MasterCard et. al. are most of the way there already), but, I believe it will be doing that without proof of work. I do hope it can do it in an open-source distributed manner, the cynical will observe that entrenched interests will be fighting that every step of the way.

      The fun/weird aspect of a truly cheap transactional system like that is how people might move from making an average of one financial transaction every few hours to one every few minutes. Your balance might show as you remove items from the shelf in the store, one at a time, without needing to stand in line to checkout.

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 24 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @01:20PM (#671138)

        I certainly hope you're right about the proof of work going away - it does seem a terrible waste. An alternative would be using the heat for something useful - but CPUs generally run at such low temperatures that it wouldn't be good for much beyond space heaters.

        As for the transaction rate - I don't know if Bitcoin specifically could securely scale as dramatically as I suggested, but it's currently limited primarily by two fairly arbitrary limits: the proof of work difficulty automatically scales to maintain roughly one block every 10 minutes, and blocks are limited to only 1MB in size. You might get into security problems lowering the proof of work time too much, but experimental forks have already shown that the block size can be increased to at least 1GB without problems. That's a 1000x increase in transaction rate right there.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:09PM (#671374)

          You might get into security problems lowering the proof of work time too much

          See, I think proof of work is a sham - important in the psychological adoption of the system, value of the coin (I worked hard for this, spent money, I'm not giving it away for nothing...), but... the bitcoin network is also vulnerable to timejacking attacks even with proof of work, and if you can prevent timejacking, do you really need proof of work? All you need is trust in your servers that compute and publish the blockchain, and if a server proves un-trustworthy they have burned their future income... As long as a majority of the servers in the network remain trustworthy, the bad actors should fall away.

          Ethereum may be on to something, trusting those who hold coin. A sham server that cannot point to escrowed coin should not be trusted with transactions larger than the coin they stand to lose (because: if they process a double-spend of some coin, they can just disappear into the ether, and who's to say that the shady processor isn't also the double-spender IRL?) When there's a critical mass of servers who have sufficient historical record and skin in the game, that should be enough to keep the network going.

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          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)

            by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:16PM (#671706)

            Proof-of-stake certainly has some merits, but the fact that it inherently concentrates power in the hands of the greatest stakeholders makes me a little dubious about it's value as a democratizing force in finance, which was once of the big appeals of Bitcoin in the early days. Of course as we've seen, proof of work isn't much (if any) better - power concentrates in the hands of those who can afford to buy the most mining nodes.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:43PM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:43PM (#671721)

              the fact that it inherently concentrates power in the hands of the greatest stakeholders makes me a little dubious about it's value as a democratizing force in finance

              I inherently agree, the motivators are key because without a strong base of transaction processors no system is going to work.

              However, a system need-not require proof-of-stake, it could be an option to the persons performing the transaction, if I'm going to trust this "miner" to handle my transaction (ensure that it is valid and recorded in _the_ blockchain), I have the option to check out their (disclosed) holdings - and I might not choose to process a 10 coin transaction through a processor that is only disclosing 0.0001 of coin holdings from that one transaction they processed 30 minutes ago.

              There are always problems, chief among these I see is miners might opt to freeze out new miners who don't demonstrate enough stake - the only motivation I can see for this is to eliminate competition, but... that's a pretty big one.

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