Re:Bitcoin trojan caught in the wild
by ghshephard on Thursday June 16, 2011 @09:41PM
(#2663990)
Every bitcoin in existence has its history tracked back to it's origin on every single bitcoin node.
There is an optimization for some clients to to pare down that history, but, in general, when you start up a bitcoin node, you have the history of every bitcoin ever created and all of it's transactions that occurred after it.
This history, in fact, is how you can be confident that the bitcoin is authentic - unless you have greater than 50% of the computing power of the network, you can't substitute an alternative history which would result in the coin landing in your hands.
That seems like a highly non-scalable solution.
Re:Bitcoin trojan caught in the wild
by weavejester on Friday June 17, 2011 @07:22AM
(#2665097)
It's not as bad as it seems. VISA only averages 2000 transactions per second, for instance, which isn't actually that much in terms of data.
A safe online currency can be done, but if you champion this, the United States government are going to find you, and squish you like the insignificant bug you are. You would be circumventing the primary income stream of the united states with a global standardized currency.