bitcoins

does /prog/ have any bitcoins yet?

i was never really interested until i saw the implications for anonymity, now with these torred off black market shops popping up... anyone has any experience with these? i can see the risk of getting ripped off, but i'm wondering about the risk of getting caught.

how secure is tor really? i hear some spooky people are running exit nodes, but the way i understand it... that doesn't really matter to hidden services, right?

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3984.0

http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/

http://silkroadmarket.org/

http://www.maxvendor.biz/

>>18
Cash is relatively hard to forge via counter fitting, so its circulation can be controlled by the central mint. It's difficult to do well and it is also illegal. The prevention of counter fitting gives the central mint the ability to control the number of unique bills at a given time. Keeping the bills scarce will prevent inflation.
 
To ensure scarcity, the amount of coins must be bounded. Also, transactions need to be fair and logical. If you give someone else x coins, you must give up x coins. With cash, scarcity is controlled by the mint and counter fitting laws, while the conservation of sum money in a transaction is maintained by there being only one physical manifestation of the bill. Therefore it can only be possessed by a single unique owner.

With a digital currency, scarcity can be regulated by only allowing a finite number of coins. The hard part is enforcing that coins are conserved in transactions. At any given time, every coin must have a single unique owner. I guess the easiest way to resolve this problem is to publish your ownership of the coin publicly. If someone else disputes your claim by claiming that they own the same coin, then the earliest claim has precedence. In order to keep the currency anonymous, it must be infeasible to associate the coin ownership statement to the actual owner of the coin. 

But there could be other methods as well. Like if the transaction system is closed source and assumed to be impossible to reverse engineer, then the system itself could be required in transactions and it could enforce that the transaction conserves coins. But all technology can be reverse engineered with enough resources, so if the coin system becomes sufficiently popular, it will eventually be reverse engineered.