Realcent.org

PennyPauper wrote:Doesn't stop me for one second. Two Senators joining the drugwar for more PR.Spend more tax money,to get the same results.
There are to many holes in the dam at this point,the system is going down. It is what their own party wants.It's a PR stunt,just like Ronnies drug war.I'm sure it saved some people,but for its costs it did nothing.Legalize them all and let Darwin sort it out.
How many bills have these two put forth to save the real economy?

mortarman wrote:Well I'll be saved. There's been speculation that this would be the first avenue taken to attempt to confront the currency head on, but I didn't think they'd be this quick to move on it. I'm with yall, figuring the untaxability is the key issue.

theo wrote: I agree. The federal income tax essentially gives the federal government access to virtually all of our financial transactions. I've also heard it argued that one reason for declaring drugs illegal was to justify the passage of strict anti-money laundering laws, expanding the Government's power to monitor commercial transactions.

psi wrote:A search on my local craiglist turned up a few people offering to buy bitcoins for cash, and one guy offering silver maples and eagles for them. I guess to do an in person deal you both bring computers and go somewhere with wifi. The risk is that potentially you could get robbed of your computer and your 'hoard' at the same time though!

psi wrote:A search on my local craiglist turned up a few people offering to buy bitcoins for cash, and one guy offering silver maples and eagles for them. I guess to do an in person deal you both bring computers and go somewhere with wifi. The risk is that potentially you could get robbed of your computer and your 'hoard' at the same time though!

IdahoCopper wrote:I think bitcoins will ultimately be worth zero, due to government intervention

And again, my concern is less the BitCoins than the BitCoin mining operation. The BitCoin mining software uses a LOT of computer power for what we are told is a simple peer-to-peer cash system. Peer-to-peer file sharing does not require that kind of raw compute power. Neither does the level of digital signing the peer-to-peer cash system claims to use. There is a huge amount of computer power being expended on other unknown tasks. Some articles on just how BitCoins are awarded speak of "solving blocks", and therein lies my concern. As a part of the mining for BitCoins, a huge amount of computer power is being spent on cryptographic processing of these blocks, and nobody really knows for certain what is inside those blocks.

I am concerned that the BitCoin miner, along with passing BitCoins hither and yon, is actually a vast distributed code key-breaker. With enough raw computer power chained together in a few million BitCoin users, brute-force breaking of the keys of asymmetric encryption becomes achievable, even convenient. Great if the perps are reading Iran's government communications or congressional "Sexting" messages, but not so great if the target is banks, SSH transactions, https, utilities, your corporate server, and secured emails.

And just as BitCoin mining becomes widespread, all of a sudden, we are seeing hacking attacks against Sony, IMF, and other previously untouchable secure systems.

I do not think this is just coincidence