You couldn't buy BitFury for less than 200 or 300 million dollar. After all they expect this $100 million data center to be profitable so I am sure they value their company at least 2x or 3x this.
It has always been the case that a single company could 51%-attack the network. No regression here. In fact the cost has continually increased over time. So, yes, progress.
Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million.
The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 nm chips. As the market migrate to these last generation chips, expect the cost to increase to $1+ billion in the next year.
Nobody talks about "percentage of tradable life" because this is a pointless metric. You don't see banks publishing prospectus saying "this investment gained x% over y% of its tradable life". %/year is what matters to all investors.
> So if Bitcoin goes down to $30, that's an amazing investment, right? After all, that's a 500% ROI!
Absolutely. Buying at $6 in january 2013, and selling even at $30 would be a 500% ROI and a great investment over 2 years. What is your point?
Again, like azeirah said, this type of decline has happened in the past: after the $30 peak in June 2011, Bitcoin declined almost constantly. 12 months later it was still hovering around $5. That was a 80%+ decline! It took a total of 21 months before Bitcoin reached $30 again in February 2013.
I think journalists are finally understanding that a big decline in Bitcoin's price is far from a sign of its "death" (since it always survives these drops), and is not even a shocking news anymore. That's why they don't write about it that much.
Fred Wilson posted better adoption metrics which are a more accurate (and more impressive) record of how Bitcoin is doing: http://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-adoption-metrics/ It is smarter to look at these than at merely the number of transactions.
Yes we want it to scale, even if it means full nodes run only by large organizations. The benefits of decentralization would be very real and tangible even if only, say, 1000 organizations (companies, universities, etc) were able to host and operate Bitcoin nodes. This would still make Bitcoin clearly decentralized compared to a single company (like MasterCard) processing all your CC transactions. For example Mastercard decided of their own accord to block CC donations to Wikileaks [1] but one of these 1000 hypothetical organizations running full nodes would be unable to do such a thing and block specific transactions.
The number of full nodes decreased in large part because in the early history of Bitcoin in late 2010 or early 2011 your only option to have a secure wallet or to mine reliably was to run a full node locally. But nowadays there are many alternative lightweight clients using the SPV protocol, and a lot of reliable mining pools (it was in mid-2011 that pools started mining more coins than solo miners running full nodes). So of course many users stopped running full nodes.
As the OP corrected, it's Western Union that does 10 tps. But even 100 tps would be easily within reach if the block size is bumped to 20MB, which is not that crazy.
Yeah but in practice no browser does this. There is no system call on Linux or Windows to push data as part of the SYN packet. You would have to craft TCP/IP packets and their headers with a raw socket...
Your suggestion is not equivalent. It is not realistic to ask the user to memorize the x.x.x.x IP address. The point of mrb's solution is that it fully takes care of problem of "typing <domainname> in the address bar and getting the content as quickly as possible without having to memorize IP addresses".
"converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end"
Perhaps you missed that part where the grand-parent explained you don't even need to convert bitcoins to dollars as merchants begin to accept them (DELL, Dish Network, etc). This is true at the other end too: you can just sell something for bitcoins - no need to use an exchange service.
Well numbers prove you wrong. A year ago 1 bitcoin was worth $125 and is now worth $480. A year ago 1 ARS was worth $0.17 but is now worth $0.12. One currency appreciated, the other lost value. Clearly an Argentinian would have been better off putting an investment in Bitcoin than in the Argentine peso.
Bitcoin certainly is volatile (down from $1000+), but on the long term, if you hold it for at LEAST 1 year, it seems to at least keep value, if not gain value.
I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years".
For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research (https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression calls per second. Say Moore's Law continues for the next 10 years and that 10 years from now a GPU can do 20 billion SHA-1 per second. So 10 year from now, 100 high-end GPUs should be able to produce a rogue CA with colliding SHA-1 signature in 7 month of compute time.
Change one little assumption and assume the best attack ends up being 2^60 instead of 2^65. In this case, a viable attack could certainly be carried out in the next 3-4 years.
You can't cross your fingers and hopes such an attack will not be discovered. The time to abandon SHA-1 is now.
You know nothing about credit card fraud. When it happens, the retailer has to pay up, and there is a fine and fees. Don't take my word for it. Listen to the CEO of a merchant who tells you how it works: "As Nichols mentioned, credit card fraud is an impetus. When a transaction is found to be fraudulent, the retailer is forced to pay up. To add insult to injury there's also usually a fine. "It's 90% to 95% of the transaction cost and on top of that they'll hit us with a fee, like $20 on top of a $10 sale," Nichols says." Source: http://mashable.com/2014/08/06/bitcoin-retailers/ (which I already gave you 3 posts above, and you apparently didn't read...)
Bottom line: there is, 99% of the time, no recourse for merchants. That's exactly why merchants are so wary of CC fraud! Or else why would they be wary of it if it was all magically covered by the CC company? Food for your thoughts.