Offer Bitcoin discounts to increase adoption rates. Bitcoin go to the moon!

Both services & products must go cheaper. If all the economy products are cheaper, the customers can afford purchasing more. When you're dumping the prices, you're dominating the market. Some of your competitors will want to cut your head for lowering prices.

Don't be greedy. Most remote workers are ready to have some stable payments even if that will mean doing some cheaper jobs, or some stable online jobs, but this stability rarely provided in any free-lance market. If you give everyone a stability in free-lance market, probably then there will be more people who's willing to work for cheaper rates at your freelance marketplace. Everybody sets fixed prices at the freelance markets - nobody among workers want to make a discount, because they know there's not a lots of jobs available & half of their time will be spent to search free-lance jobs, and part of that time/money will be spent to inefficient means of money transferring for their job + freelance board commission. If you would remove all of such obstacles, then there wouldn't be such problems. And that's about freelancing.

Now let's talk about products.

Yeah this sounds very abstract. But Bitcoin is all about costs. 1) Cheaper costs of running Bitcoin network; 2) Cost of producing goods (doesn't matter real or virtual); 3) Replacing the whole systems & logistics with Bitcoin oriented economical optimizing

Many businesses in the world are employing the business model 1 to 10% expenditures for raw material, 80% for management - that gives you that price tags like $100, $1000 and such product prices. There's so many things in such categories which could cost cheaper, but due to market sizes/high management costs they can't be make cheaper, even though customers wouldn't mind pay cheaper!

I mean that all operational expenses could be cut. Entrepreneurship is being keen/flexible enough to provide competitive prices. E.g. before Internet servers wasn't popular everybody thought that normal shared web-hosting will cost at least $10 per month or bigger, but once we found out that quality of computers are growing, we don't feel like to pay for shared web-hosting at all. We can get the same quality of prices for $1.

The same revolution is have to be made about everything: current herbalife protein power costs around $40, original viagra costs $20. I have some strong belief that I should be able to order both of those things in the form of generic stuff, and I think this is a wonderful thing. Imagine yourself ordering some generic Indian herbalife for $3 (delivery included). Without Bitcoin & without OpenBazaar such things seemed impossible. With Bitcoin - it is obvious.

There's nothing wrong with decreasing the prices. All of those who's saying that you have to make your time cost more money, and that's correct thought. But that doesn't mean that you're always have to increase your prices. Make product massive, dominate on low-price markets!

If at Bitcoin shops we provide cheaper prices but only for Bitcoin customers that could be decisive factor for Bitcoin adoption speed.

So don't be greedy, and start making customers loyal to your business, offer them discounts, but only if they're transacting in Bitcoin. In my opinion world can become better place if we follow this patterns. I think its time to fight monopolies. Patent monopolies, Product monopolies, Marketing/Management monopolies, Logistics monopolies - they are everywhere! And its time to take over the world. Bitcoin to the moon!

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Interesting immigration coincidence (family bitcoin article)

A year ago I wrote the article about how God helped our family in our family's U.S. immigration process.

This article continuing the story with additional events which happened recently.

Recently I went to our local classifieds in search of computer mouse. I went to buy it from a a computer dealer, and found a great friend. I've learned a lots of business skills from him recently - he is a computer technician who is very successful at reselling computers. We spoke with him a lot about Bitcoin cryptocurrency, he likes it too. Also I've found out that his mother is having an office next building from his apartment. They having a really successful Herbalife based organization (multilevel marketing :)) I like the way they achieve their goals. Since I started living in the center of the city it brought its benefits: I see so many business people now every day: and so many things to learn around. That's how few disciplined projects can make dreams come true and give more spare time, I've never experienced more freedom than I do now in the current conditions!

That's happened 1 month ago. And after 1 month of friendship I was surprised to find out that his mother is purchased our residence (da hause) in TawTeem funds from which we used to fund our family's U.S. immigration campaign  

We must feel better now, because we know where the money came from  It came from Herbalife multilevel marketing.

To be clear I've made up better picture of how God participated in our plan:
-1. God provided us the opportunity to be born 
0. God provided us with the opportunity to immigrate (chance 1 of 100 thousands)
1. God helped us to make a deal very stricted-in-time (Mom was able to sell Seebay father's residence). She did it 1000 times faster than it were supposed to happen.
2. After the whole year of waiting mom could sell the TawTeem residence which is also happened 1000 times faster than it was supposed to be
3. We submitted our documents exactly 1 day before my name could be included into visa (which haven't happened, probably because God didn't wanted me to do it)
4. Herbalife funded our campaign through the person which revealed by me this month. Now God introduced me the exact family which funded our success. I know everything about them and it is nice to meet them and see where the money are coming from.

And let me remind you that we missed our 1st letter from embacy, and responded on 2nd succesful letter (which probably happens not so often and they could easily abandon the whole deal)

I am purchasing stuff like computer mouses from avito the whole summer (because I'm supplying the office needs). And probability that I would meet exactly this family was 1 (one) of the 1 million (because our city is a million population city).

During the whole summer I visited around 50 avito classifieds owners because I purchased LCD's, computers, sound cards, HDDs, chairs, other 20-30 positions of other office supplies. Now the evening I met this person I had a strong feeling to explain him Bitcoin. That night we had chance to discuss the cryptocurrency in his office all night long. I really found out that his monther is a buyer of our previous house just recently after month of being friends

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Now you can install Blockchain.info on iOS without jailbreak with thiseasy hack

This manual uses a

method WITHOUT JAILBREAKING your device. Only using your data-cable is required to upload software.

Instructions

Follow the steps depicted in the image I've attached above, then in Tongbu you should press button called "TUI", it will load unofficial hacked Chinese version of App Store. This shouldn't modify or customize your phone settings, but will allow you using apps deleted from App Store.

- Then after you installed TUI through Tongbu assistant, open TUI app on your iPhone and here you can search for blockchain and install it!

If you know anyone who still don't know this, please share and let them know. Blockchain was awesome wallet, and more people has access for such apps, the bigger impact it provides for Bitcoin.

I encourage everyone to download this app, just because I don't know how long Tongbu will be alive: because I believe Apple can easily take efforts for bringing such a useful hack down. On the other hand this Chinese app if used properly could benefit Apple, because it brings more openness and convenience to the end users.

Because at least for me the news about that I can access those deleted apps means everything and it is a really heart melting news for me - that makes me kinda love Apple.

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Fresh Facts & Numbers :: Bitcoin is vulnerable for targeted double-spending attacks from large ISPs

Audio version of this article can be found here https://soundcloud.com/earl-fox-1/fresh-facts-numbers-bitcoin-is

83 Generating your own mini-version of blockchain to "fake" blockchain for selected group of users.
lenaaa_444
When it comes to fraud, everybody start thinking about hackers, fraudsters, 51% mining pools or unfair exchanges like Mt.Gox. But since I'm working in a telecommunications field I was always bothered with a question - by holding such huge networks, customer base and biggest parks of network & server equipment, Internet Service Providers could be the next threat, if the whole thing would be organized by someone who knows what does it takes to perform such attack.

Maybe huge Internet Service Provider's management won't allow anybody building some "fraud plans" against their customers, but you always have to remember about employees which can have access for the firewall settings and the hardware of ISP, which is enough for performing the types of attacks directed on selected group of ISP customers.

Recently I've opened a thread in Reddit with my own questions about whether ISPs can fake the blockchain of its customers. You can find there some long discussion about threats and in this article I'm trying to describe my conclusion concerning what to expect or whether such kind of attacks even possible.

Yes it is possible. But it will take some huge investment. If you're talking about people who can afford to invest $150,000 just for performing fraud operations, I think there's plenty candidates among those who would be interested in doing so, because those "bad guys" who posses signficant amounts of money may want more money, and $150,000 for the ability of making fake transactions could sound pretty lovely for such people. The whole investment: $150,000 is needed for purchasing the most capable miners available on the market. On the mentioned Reddit thread I've tried to count how much hashing power such a bad guy can acquire for $150,000 and I've come up with a number of 60,000 GHashes or 30 items of "Prospero X-3 (batch 1)" $4899 or 8.7 BTC", that's how much of hashing power you can purchase in July 2014 for $150,000.

Now what attacker can do if he owns 60,000 GHash miners combined? Right, he can produce his own fake Blockchain. But with such relatively weak rate he can only produce 1 block for 14 days.

 hamer2271

You may think that it is too slow, or even won't work, because waiting 14 days with $150,000 equipment is stupid, because blocks are produced every 10 minutes all around the world. But you may not remember that ISP has access for such things as:
1) Monitoring the state of computers of their users by their IPs (whether computer turned off or turned on)
2) Use firewalls on their routing equipment (such as Cisco's,etc) to block access for IP ranges / ports / types of traffic.

What I'm trying to say that combination of such things as having access to routing and having huge hashing powers could give an attacker evil powers needed to perform an attack.

How does it happens technically
 svetlanka7264
Attacker which owns $150,000 equipment or 60,000GHs as I discovered above can mine 1 block during the 14 days.
1) ISP or ISP's representatives (such as sysadmins) can enable the firewall blocking all susceptible traffic from Bitcoin for chosen customers (let's say it will be IP addresses or contracts of people whom ISP already know as Bitcoin users, can be 1000 or 2000 people out of 200,000 customers)
2) Once traffic blocked, Bitcoin won't be able to communicate with external world and blocks will stop updating exactly at the time the attacker will choose. So since attacker chooses the time, he of course knows what is the current Bitcoin block is.
3) Once firewall enabled, attacker immediately starts mining the next block. The mining will be over in 14 days, because that's how much 60,000GHashes/second should work in order to achieve network performance which achieved by the whole world for 10 minutes (10 minutes vs 14 days).
4) So after 14 days attacker who also controls support tickets from the customers will know the customers which complained about their Bitcoin problems and he may not deal with their problems if he has access to behave like that in such a big ISP.
5) Once 14 days is over, attacker creates his small botnet of his Bitcoin clients, which will offer the the fake block as the next one. And also attacker can include any transactions he want into such block. And since many Bitcoin users may even not check or may not count the current blocks, they may think that any transaction occurred is valid, since Bitcoin never lies.

As bottom line, it is hard to deceive Bitcoin client, such attack requires a lots of competence & investment, but the key is that its still possible. What if such attack gonna happen if you're selling your car/house or something else? Of course many people will wait 3 or 6 blocks, but what if attacker invested 3 or 6 times more money? That will mean more chances to succeed to attacker.

On the one hand, when I talk about 3 or 6 times more money, it gets harder to imagine, who's able to spend such amounts of money: maybe someone rich and anonymous ;) 6 * $150,000 = $900,000 (almost $1 million dollars) Are you ready to spend 1 million dollars for the mining equipment if you would have such money? :) If you're ready then there's no problem generating 6 blocks during 14 days which is necessary for confirming 6 block in a row after Internet was restricted by the special person in the city's ISP.
 Swetik134444
On the other hand, if an attacker have $900,000, finding the right technician who will be ready to cooperate in any ISP company of the world won't be a big problem for such a bad guy. And that makes me sad about current level of Bitcoin's security.


Read my other Bitcoin blockchain related posts:
* Destruction of Internet Lines in Worst-Case Scenario & Bitcoin
* Fresh Facts & Numbers :: Exact prediction of Blockchain size depending on the transaction volume.
* Fiat money backed by Bitcoin
* nTimeLock may disappoint you

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Bitcoin making us one step closer to Artificial Intelligence.

In a sense that it is autonomous and decides the fates of the millions (billions in a nearest future and trillions a 1000 years from now). Do you remember such topics that with proper A.I. technologies development we will have such smart self-driving cars, which would deliver us home? Bitcoin delivers you with not less significant A.I. solution with self-sustainable money.

You may heard of strong A.I. and weak A.I. too. Strong A.I. is an A.I. which can behave like a human - it is also called a full A.I. which mean that a program can think and solve problems the same way human does.

Weak or Narrow A.I. is the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks, according to Wikipedia. So Bitcoin is almost narrow A.I., because it solves the biggest problem of humanity ever known: TRUST.

Humanity always needed a medium of exchange, and they needed that solution. But without computers and Internet it was hard to provide such solution geographically.

When I talk about Bitcoin even to people in IT, sometimes they don't understand the word "decentralized". For me "decentralized" also means "autonomous" and autonomous is a marvelous quality. The beauty of Bitcoin's architecture is in its autonomous nature: no one is required to decide what's going on with your payments. The system wonderfully grants access for those who can own inputs (inputs is your Bitcoins - a limited pieces of which recorded in a public registry called blockchain protected by the cryptography). Once system grants you such an access, you can't lose it (if you intentionally won't lose your password), and only you have the rights to reassign the ownership for somebody else.

The fact that Bitcoin is Autonomous means that it makes some decisions for us. And those decisions are always correct. Bitcoin can't make a mistake or it can't be unfair, because machines never make mistakes, especially in cryptography. Autonomous means also that you don't have to deal with people in order to solve many of the problems, software solve those problems for you automatically.

Bitcoin's autonomy is possible because every time you interact with Bitcoin, you are dealing with internal components of the Bitcoin - and every coin never leaves the systems, and system knows every coin and no coins are inserted without knowledge of the system - Bitcoin is so smart, because it knows each of its customers, and because it knows to whom it should be thankful (the miners) for its existence, for the job done to overcome another hard obstacle, to drag out of the hay another block without which the whole system would lose all of its customers, because no blocks means no movement inside the system. We trust those components and cryptography algorithms behind them, because we can see and check its code (which is 100% open source), and that means that if you're a programmer you can even feel the autonomous system inside.

That's why I can claim Bitcoin to be the most significant step to Artificial Intelligence in this century.

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Destruction of Internet Lines in Worst-Case Scenario & Bitcoin

I know almost everything about the technical side of Bitcoin protocol & economical side of it, but probably still don't understand it enough to give exact answer on the economical/technical effects if the default fork in case of the Internet segmentation would be inevitable.

Imagine for example that something terrible happened to our ocean fiber optic lines all at once (maybe some vulcanos opened everywhere, or some weird nature events, or bad will of some countries who wish to destroy the connection between the whole American and Eurasian/Europe continents).

Let's imagine that Bitcoin already got mainstream and accepted in every country of the world. And then some disaster like terrorist country invasion, and then boom, no Internet connection to the outer world.

Imagine that such thing is happened to the Australian continent as an example, or maybe to the whole U.S. continent.

1) Imagine that such thing happened. I'm curious what's gonna happen to the main bitcoin's public ledger, if the connection with the whole continent will be absent for 3 MONTHS let's say. After those 3 months of 1 country having only its own internal Internet, how blocks will be generated, and once we have let's say Australian fork which is back with its own Bitcoins, then what's economically gonna happen to Australians?

2) Is there such worst-case scenario's are potentially possible: I mean exactly what can destroy Internet's global nature, and also what's gonna happen if the whole continent's government decides to isolate the whole country from the Internet by the physical ways (by emergent cut of fiber optics communication lines)? The same thing can happen when government decides to close physical access to the Internet for outer, so the whole country can access only to internal Internet resources.

Let's say such thing happened to U.S. which was disconnected from Europe for 3 months since right now.

If were a leader from Bitcoin Foundation, a person who needs to makes choice about what recommendations to give for the users of Bitcoin protocol - what would you recommend for the community? Here's few choices:

1) The problem is that in this case we will have 2 forks - A) American Bitcoin Fork; B) European Bitcoin Fork. The same thing is gonna happen to the American Litecoin Fork & European Litecoin Fork. We will have the duplicate forks for every continent. What if World Wide Segmentation occured, and the Internet is divided on 5 segments? That doesn't sounds funny anymore - it is like having 5 bitcoin forks, 5 litecoin forks, and most importantly - 5 dogecoin forks (and 1000 of other cryptocurrencies will have their own copies of fork). And if event lasts for more than 3 months, then even if all of the Internet segments will get back together, we still gonna have separate forks.

Imagine that before segmentation (separation of networks) you've had 1000 BTC (around $600,000 or half of million dollars) and you live in the United States. After segmentation you will be able to spend your $600,000 in U.S., and since the networks are separated, then you can go to Europe and spend the same amount of money 2nd time. You can buy 2 wonderful houses for such money in two different parts of the world!

But what kind of economical effect will follow such events? If there's 2 Internet segments, or 2 Accepted Bitcoin Blockchains in 2 different countries, then it will mean that those who have their savings in Bitcoin - will be happy about that, because both forks are functional, but how about overall Bitcoin economy? Since the currency is deflationary - it will be just okay to have a copy of the savings accepted to the public.

By the way my question is - since right now - what's stopping me and my team of developers from creation a 2nd Bitcoin fork which represents the whole copy of the current Bitcoin?

Since there's too much people already who's owning millions of dollars in Bitcoin, if 2nd copy of fork will be accepted somewhere, it will means that all of those people will run to that country in order to withdraw their coins into the other assets like gold, real estate, etc - because they in this case won't be sure if 2nd blockchain will be the same acceptable as it is right now.

Part #2

2) The Internet segmentation itself will mean not a very good time for economy. That's why it should happen, and we at least should have some backup fiber optic centers all around the world dedicated as the backup lines for Bitcoin Blockchain. These fiber optics in the peaceful time should be of course be loaded with the external worldwide traffic too (so that the investment could at least have ROI on itself), but that also means that the lines must be kept in secret from general public / government / anyone else.

3) Let's say that two continents were divided by Internet segmentation described above. Europe and U.S. But we still will have a backup line for a blockchain with capability of transferring the whole blockchain within 2 days back and forth. Does such help gonna count for the whole Bitcoin network to not divide? How does it technically will sound for Bitcoin?

Okay concerning this issue - there's still a lots of non-fiber-optic ways to transfer data between the continents - like wireless (through satellites), or even physical file delivery (like Airplane flying from Europe to U.S. and back, periodically delivering the main blockchain file).

Decentralization. In case of delayed blockchain delivery first question arises - is there someone who can benefit / cheat, in case if he has an access to control the delivery procedure? Yes - those person who delivers that file - gonna be able to build something like mining rig, then he can start mining Bitcoins, while the whole network is waiting for the updated blockchain, and he can potentially have few blocks mined ahead of the whole network right? The whole paragraph sounds complicated and very unlikely.

Intercontinental Synchronization. Let's say that Blockchain is always get delivered between 2 networks, every 2 days. But what again stops me from double-spending in this case? See, the network separation is very severe consequence - in order to accomplish successful mining, you should have an access to permanent communication line - for comparing the mining results of 2 continents. But is it possible to provide the steady connection with enough bandwidth the way two continents will be able to mine in the same mode as before Internet segmentation?

What happens, when mining pool claims to find a solution for a difficult problem? Right, it offers the next block of the transactions to be included into the next block of transactions. Two things happen once miner found a block:

1) Miner checks whether all of the transactions included are unspent.

2) Miner includes the transactions into the next block, after he checked the validity of each transaction.

Obviously, the bigger one will win and only the transactions of the bigger one will be valid.

Not necessarily. We have the other choice. We can choice the path of re-engineering the 2 blockchains in such a disastrous moments. Why? Because the situation is too complicated, and during the disaster nobody will refuse from using mainstream Bitcoin anyways - Europe users will keep using their Bitcoin wallets the same way as U.S. will do.

Then we have the weeks of waiting. There's no Internet connection, but economy doesn't sleeps - transactions must be done. So Europe will be apologetic about their blockchain acceptance, and U.S. will be apologetic about their blockchain - it is endless debate over who's more mighty, who has more rich people, who has more merchants, who has more hashing power.

Moreover you might be talking about 2014 where nobody cares about such events as Internet segmentation for a week, while I mean full-size 2020 Bitcoin Economy, where 2 huge world continents are totally depends from Bitcoin, and the whole infrastructure built through usage of the Bitcoin.

Of course first task is not allowing this thing to happen, but when it comes for emergency - sometimes nobody's prepared even in such a huge world. If it happens, then we will end-up with our nightmare - having 42 million coins instead of 21, and that is possible reality.

Blockchain reengineering will mean pruning 2 blockchains. Pruning process is finding out the balances of each openkey (each wallet), then you combine. E.g. if Alice has balance 5 BTC in one blockchain, then in the other blockchain she transacted the 5 BTC to Bob, then it means that we gonna rely on that. But if Alice has been transacted her 5 BTC to Bob in one blockchain, then she transacted her 5 BTC to Mary in the other blockchain, then in the new blockchain both Bob & Mary should get their transactions by increasing the quantity of coins in the protocol. It is convenient - because on the one hand Mary's & Bob's transactions won't be invalidated, on the other hand economy won't find out about it - the same thing is gonna happen, which happens every day with FED.

In case if you're pruning 2 created blockchains due to usage of both, you're having a problem with trust of those members of community, who's already 2 times spent their coins (e.g. brothers Winklevosses might fly to Europe at such time in order to spend their 100000 BTC, and Satoshi could fly to America to spend his 1 million BTC even though I believe he wouldn't do that, because he's a God).

We can of course validate both double-spent transaction even though it is unfair, but this thing can happen only once. Let's say Satoshi transfered 1 million of his Bitcoins to his other wallet on the 2nd blockchain, and on the 1st blockchain he put his 1 million to the other wallet - then he got richer on 1 million, but he can't do it twice, because of such hierarchy of 2 blockchains. So during such pruning everyone who had significant amount of Bitcoins already gonna win.

Its a good thing just the private individuals wins, but the problem is that this might be easily done by a corporation, who's planned such event, and who's invaded the Bitcoin Foundation and other huge Bitcoin clients too. Such combination would be deadly to Bitcoin and will enrich those corporations, but the key here is that it will be done only once.

In the news we will see it this way: "During the 3rd world Internet segmentation, the Bitcoin Economy suffered the most due to its architecture - we had 1 month of isolation of two continents, and after restoring the world after those disastrous effects done by the authorities of both unions, we've came to conclusion that we have to prune both blockchains. After premature analysis of both blockchain after all those events we've found out double-spent transactions on the amount of 12,000,000 bitcoins. We can't just simply cut of this amount of transactions, they're already done, coins are already in circulation in both jurisdictions, we've done all measures which we could by isolating targeted users from sending transactions internationally on the 2nd blockchain before pruning, but there was too many rich people who knew and was prepared to benefit on a disasters occurred. So Bitcoin Foundation come up with the proposal of including those 12,000,000 double-spent bitcoins into main blockchain, by increasing already set limit for 21,000,000 thus setting new limit of 33,000,000 bitcoins. New pruned fork is available for downloading since today, on bitcoin.org, MultiBit.org and the other major bitcoin client web-sites"

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Fresh Facts & Numbers :: Exact prediction of Blockchain size depending on the transaction volume.

It's true that Bitcoin will become more centralized over time. The capital costs of mining will grow. But not necessarily because of this issue. 100 terabytes today costs around $6000, and the price of that will fall over five years. Mining is not a huge a concern, though, because miners don't have to hold the entire blockchain. Other parts of the network will become more centralized. ~Benjamin Dees, http://www.reddit.com/user/benjamindees in the Reddit topic called Still don't understand how we gonna be able to handle Bitcoin if its Blockchain size will be over 100TB 

Mr.Dees came to this conclusion perhaps because there's widely distributed opinion about not being able to handle blockchain.

I write this post, to help Bitcoin users quit worrying about huge size of a Blockchain (Main Distributed Public Ledger of any cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin - it is the file where all of the transactions stored since the Bitcoin creation).

We can know exact amount of transactions in Bitcoin network (since its creation in 2009), today (Jun 2014) the rough number of total transactions of Bitcoin is 40 millions (check this link to see updated numbers).

In order to find out how much Blockchain will be in size in few years from now, let's begin with transaction industry leaders facts:

• Global non-cash payment transactions already grew 8.8% to reach 307 billion transactions in 2011 - Global non-cash payments volumes are expected to top 333 billion transactions in 2012 after transactions grew by 8.8 percent in 2011, according to the latest available data from the World Payments Report 20131 published by Capgemini and RBS.

If 7 billion people on Earth would use non-cash payments, this report would mean that 1 person performs around 50 transactions a year. But perhaps not every of 7 billion people on our planet right now are using non-cash payments, that's why it wouldn't be correct to hope that we will overcome this average number of transactions (333 billions, maybe few hundred billions more). So I'll use this number of transactions globally as basis to technical analysis for estimating Bitcoin's Blockchain size in future.

If you'll consider that Bitcoin will totally takeover that "non-cash" market it will means that the yearly volume of transactions (quantity of transactions) will be around 333 billions.

What it will mean for the Blockchain?

In order to calculate, how much megabytes of information every transaction will take in a blockchain, in case if transaction volume will start growing exponentially and will achieve the numbers around 333 billions which we already have in "non-cash" payments, I've examined how much data each transaction usually adds up to the Blockchain.

Approximately each 1 transaction for Bitcoin means around 575 bytes added to the size of Blockchain (Note that for Litecoin we have different average numbers - in Litecoin 1 transaction averagely takes around 1257 bytes - which is almost 1KB - so Litecoin's Blockchain theoretically should grow 2 times faster than Bitcoin's due to its scrypt architecture and its frequency of the blocks confirmed into the Blockchain).

Let's just imagine that next year all of the "non-cash" transactions become Bitcoin transaction, and here we have it: THE 333 BILLION TRANSACTIONS PER YEAR in BITCOINS!

So, it basically means: 27,75 billions transactions per month TRANSFERRED IN BITCOINS!

To compare with current amount of transactions in Bitcoin, it is: 40 million transactions! Tiny amount, in comparison with current global non-cash transactions quantity.

And I will remind you with 40 million transactions, our blockchain size is 23 GIGABYTES (up to Jun 2014)

Still you don't think that blockchain size isn't a problem for Bitcoin? Then, you just have to make some basic math: Average transaction size as I mentioned before is 575 bytes - that is about half of a kilobyte - that's how much disk space takes 1 transaction.

Now it should be easy for you to find out that roughly 27 billions per month (or 333blns/year) will take 27000000000 * 575 = 15525000000000 (or 15 terrabytes, 525 gigabytes).

I'll repeat.

Still you don't think that blockchain size isn't a problem for Bitcoin?

If my calculations is correct, then maybe you might just don't believe in such exponential growth for Bitcoin.

But if with non-cash payments - we understand, that the most population on the Earth use non-cash, just because they need to receive their salary, then do some few purchases/transfers which is possible only through non-cash transactions. And the common numbers showed us that average amount of transactions on each person on the earth is 50. But what if the rest of the Earth will get more active? Double this number, and you will get 100 transactions per each world's citizen, and that will mean double growth for the blockchain size each month - not 333 billions per year, but 666 per year, and not 15 terrabytes per month, but 30 terrabytes per month instead.

What if total Bitcoin will replace the paper cash? (and again that's adds up a lot more transactions to the so-called "non-cash" transactions worldwide).

What is the solutions?

Solution #1. Prune the blockchain, or introduce the new version of blockchain every month.

I think this is a great solution, because it is very easy to check whether old version blockchain balances corresponds to the balances transferred into a new version of blockchain. But in this case we will get another central point of failure: software managing company like "Bitcoin Foundation" which will presumably play role in introducing those versions of blockchain will have the authority to stop doing that in case if the regulators will find the ways to approach the offices of the Bitcoin Foundation / or arrest the owners of the software company.

Probably the whole process of switching from one version of blockchain to another could be decentralized by software solution, but I think that's sounds like another experiment which could even break the world's economy if some failure will happen during the experiment (Imagine that the whole system is broken at the volume of 333 billions of transactions)

So in this case my solution is pruning Blockchain each time it achieves 30 terrabytes or some other reasonable quantity of data. We can link those blockchains into the other structure - the global blockchain of blockchains :) Sounds funny, but as I understand this might be the case if the quantity of transactions will grow crazily.

Solution #2. The other solutions.

• Each country creates its own cryptocurrency. Takes some marketing and cryptographic initiative from governments/corporations
• The blockchain gonna become segmented and used only for large transactions while locally all the other transactions will be transacted through the third parties / other decentralized entities. I'm not studied this way deeply enough. 

So we will definitely have fun by creating those solutions

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Still don't understand how we gonna handle Bitcoin if its size will be over 100TB

I believe we can achieve such size within 5 years, and I'm not pretty sure that Moore's law actually will work in the case if transaction volume will exponentially grow. I've made some calculations in the charts of my blog for two cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin & Litecoin): http://www.earlfox.com/2014/06/does-blockchain-size-depends-from-how.html And my calculations shows that each transaction approximately takes up to 1MB depending from the multiple parameters of currency. 2) Actually why the Litecoin's transactions are heavier? My calculations shows me that each Bitcoins transaction averagely takes only 500 kilobytes (0.5MB) in a blockchain, while averagely Litecoin transactions eats up over 1MB out of blockchain(!) - you can see it in chart mentioned above in my blog. So could somebody explain me again: what's gonna happen if such times (just hypothetically with all possible odds) will come faster than we expect the Moore's law to take effect: - What's gonna actually happen if the whole Bitcoin blockchain will have to be sustained on 20 HDDs? Does that means total end for miners decentralization? Does that gonna mean that only people who's will have 20 HDDs will be able to mine? Or if small sized HDDs also can mine, what is a problem with miners with a "Short Version of BlockChain?" I'm interested mostly in viable things only - where inconvenience buried? 3) I've heard that one of the solutions is a pruning the whole blockchain (for the convenience of miners). But if Bitcoin Foundation at some point will have to prune the blockchain and start it from scratch by leaving only last balances, then does the whole point of decentralization is going to be missed? Probably correct pruning won't cause any community effect of forking - in case if the whole transactions were transferred correctly onto a new blockchain - but what if TOO MANY OF USERS will want to fork in favor of holding 20 HDDs? The same question is boggling me about what's gonna happen if forks will be created naturally due to Global Internet Segmentation (what's gonna happen if Internet is splitted in half?)

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Total Number of transactions for Litecoin (chart)

Since Litecoin haven't reached yet its essential point of popularity, at the current day (June 17, 2014) its really hard to find out even how much transactions has been made since the Litecoin creation.

So here's some numbers:

2,179,203: total number of transactions between genesis and last checkpoint (was at the block 456000

There is a convenient chart for the total Bitcoin transaction volume available at http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total but not for Litecoin unfortunately up to date.

But the good news is that at least now you know almost exact numbers for the quantity of transactions.

You can see which passphrases I've used in order to finally find out how much there is a total transaction quantity for Litecoin and Bitcoin:

bitcoin total transaction volume of today

litecoin total transaction volume of today

bitcoin total transaction volume

litecoin total transaction volume

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transactions quantity litecoin in total

transactions quantity litecoin total

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how much transactions bitcoin totally has?

how many transactions litecoin totally?

how many transactions litecoin has?

how much transactions litecoin totally has?

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total litecoin transactions

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total in bitcoin transactions

Links that were used in research:

• http://bitinfocharts.com/
• http://ltc.block-explorer.com/charts
• http://www.coindesk.com/data/litecoin-daily-transactions/
• http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total
• http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/28dq7x/how_much_litecoin_transactions_there_is_in_total/

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Conversation with Bitcoin girl ;)

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Does the blockchain size depends from how often blocks confirmed?

Seems like Litecoin is 4 times faster accepting blocks, but isn't this means that Litecoin's blockchain grows 4 times faster?

I've analyzed the quantities of transactions for 2 cryptocurrencies:
1) Bitcoin http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total
2) Litecoin http://www.earlfox.com/2014/06/total-number-of-transactions-for.html

So let's compare:



Tips&Hints

• If you have enemies, controlling their geolocation and other useful meta-information is easy - just find some reason to ask them to send you an email (asking is easier if you're still friends): and most likely it will reveal their real IP addresses and that will give you a real clue about in which city they are located.

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Just realized, that Winklevosses can create their own decentralizedversion of Facebook based on purchased Facebook which they've lost toZuckerberg at first

If everyone will follow that pattern, then everybody who raised capital on decentralized payments network, will automatically be those richest guys who will create new decentralized era. And I believe those who got rich out of Bitcoin will pay back to decentralized software by creating giant applications of the same significance as Bitcoin itself

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Bitcoin Reddit Idea #0: Bitcoin Accepting Agent

Imagine some marketplace, where most sellers aren't accepting any credit cards. Everywhere around the world, especially in poorest countries, there's still so many places, where your debit or credit card won't get accepted, just because there's no such device.

Why owners missing such great opportunity? Why in 21st century every business owner can't afford simple POS terminal which expands customer base and flexibility and convenient service? (no change, electronic payments)
Because it is expensive to setup usual POS terminal. How much time and money does it takes to setup Bitcoin terminal - almost nothing - all you need is a simplest smartphone, Internet connection and Bitcoin application.

Now this opportunity. As Bitcoin community or entrepreneurs, we can find the ways, to improve our offline presence, just by offering local entrepreneurs who have their sales locations without any terminals.

You don't need to create your own iPhone/Android application to start helping everybody to accept Bitcoins, all you need is to persuade a business owner to purchase a smartphone and an Internet connection.
If you'll search good enough, then there's no doubt that cheapest new Android smartphone can be found locally just for ~$30 or $45 without contract. This is very good device to start accepting Bitcoins, and most owners need just that opportunity (and maybe some help with setting up an Internet connection, help in educating their cashiers on how to use the gadget to accept Bitcoin, also some web-site creation skills could be required so that you can create some place to redirect any users in your local Bitcoin community). Find such place which offers the cheapest phones, and now you know what you can recommend to the owner which is too greedy about investing into technology which can improve the quantity & quality of sales. And as an entrepreneur, you have the opportunity start providing network of convenient payments, and that's a great privilege - to be a pioneer in introducing new payment technology even if its only on your local markets.

Both of those things doesn't requires your investment, and requires minimal knowledge.
In order to provide customers for such businesses - you can just create some simple web-site or catalog of shops, where you gather together as much sellers as possible which is ready to accept Bitcoin for their purchases.

Also very good idea would be creating some service which helps to transfer funds to such sellers to whom you plan your visit - like purchasing used things, but, I already discussed it in the other articles.

Go back to original Reddit link post, and comment your thoughts on this idea: tell me more about yourself:

• Where are you from?
• How many markets (like groceries, stuff, etc) you have around you.
• Did you saw any stores which doesn't offer any credit cards as a payment option?
• What is the biggest obstacle which stops you from helping those people starting to accept Bitcoin?
• What is the best option to monetize this idea?
• What else obstacles can you predict which may occur during accepting payments?

Other articles:

• I love Bitcoin, because it is Economy Automation Software

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Bitcoin is like realty ownership of which you can divide and share/transfer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-3haBibXWc
Whole system works only to make possible payments matrix exist. When you purchase a Bitcoin, you purchase part of that matrix (right now there's 11 million those matrix parts we call 11 million of bitcoins). Right now 1 Bitcoin is like owning $140 in cash, but when demand will be higher, you surely will appreciate each bitcoin way more because each bitcoin which you posses is a treasure which everyone will want to posses.

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