

 You Can Now Donate Bitcoins to the EFF - kiba
https://www.eff.org/helpout

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hfinney
Bitcoin is really two ideas: an unforgeable digital datum based on "proof of
work" or "hash collision" ideas; and a global, decentralized, distributed
database to keep track of which data tokens have been "spent". The tokens
don't yet have any true monetary value, but due to the design of the system,
only a finite number of tokens will ever exist, so they would be candidates
for being the basis of a monetary system. IOW they might be worth something
someday.

The interesting part is making the global DB immune to attack or takeover.
Bitcoin relies on the long tail effect. The total compute power of the great
number of honest users must outweigh that of a well-funded attacker. So long
as this is true, token forgery is impossible.

~~~
iwr
Even if an attacker can muster the computing power to overwhelm the current
bitcoin network, these efforts would be very visible and traceable to a few
sources. You could thus tell people are giving out fake coins.

However, given the lack of inherent value (or backing) in a coin hash,
bitcoins can't be used as money, only as money-substitutes (IOUs with an
indeterminate recepient). The Dollar itself is "backed" by the US government
requiring taxes be paid in it.

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kiba
The effort to convince the EFF to put up a bitcoin donation address is a
culmination of writing and revising a letter over and over again, collecting
donation as well picking escrow, and a whole lot of patience. Just about when
everybody in the bitcoin community is going to give up, the EFF suddenly put a
link to a bitcoin address for anybody who wishes to donate.

<http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0>

What is bitcoin? It's a Neal Stephenson plot device! <http://bitcoin.org>

------
iwr
For comparison purposes: using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz and the official bitcoin
binary, it would take around 45 days before there's a 90% chance to get a
block (50 coins).

~~~
hfinney
Apparently graphics-card bitcoin generators are much faster than CPU based
ones so that is where the bulk of the blocks are being created.

