Talk on BitCoin - Today 6pm @ FC Kohli

[Anil]

Today the entire banking system revolves around there being a central bank which regulates the flow. This is the centralised system but can be have a decentralised system - where in there is no notion of central bank +  everything is peer to peer and still secure with no double spending. 

BitCoin solves all these problems and the world's first widely adopted decentralized digital currency based on peer to peer internet protocol. It is truely one of the marvels of cryptography. 

WnCC is organising a talk on BitCoin today to be given by Nivvedan.

Venue: FC Kohli

Time: 6pm

I think you will find it interesting :)

- Anil

[Anil Shanbhag]

REMINDER 

Session starts at 6:30pm 

Join in fast 

--
--
The website for the club is http://stab-iitb.org/wncc
To post to this group, send email to wncc...@googlegroups.com
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Web and Coding Club IIT Bombay" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wncc_iitb+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--

Anil Shanbhag 

Manager, WnCC

["Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)"]

For those who couldn't make it,

Prezi online - http://prezi.com/_xaslfsv-7wc/bitcoins-and-how-awesome-they-are/?auth_key=3bb1026c303793d621aeba97675718106c174f97&kw=view-_xaslfsv-7wc&rc=ref-30447273

PDF Format (Not as Pretty): attached

The presentation doesn't have too much descriptive text in the interest of presentability. For those interested, please take time to read this brilliant white paper on Bitcoins - http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to shoot an email :)

Cheers,
Nivvedan

செவ்வாய் 19 மார்ச் 2013 05:57 மாலை-ல், Anil Shanbhag எழுதினார்:

--
This email is digitally signed with 0xCC5D8741. If you don't use a PGP/MIME compatible e-mail client, the attached signature file can be used to verify the integrity of this communication

Did you know that your email provider could be snooping on you? Protect Yourself! Encrypt your communications.
Encrypt all your further emails to me with 0xCC5D8741

[Sudarshan Wadkar]

Thanks a lot Nivvedan. The prezi is pretty :)

I am sure those who attended must've found the crypto/maths fascinating.
How does one go from say, Discrete Maths for CS to understanding Nakamoto's paper? [I am not from CS]

I am quite intrigued by Satoshi's anonymity and how no one still doesn't know anything about him.

Cheers,

-Sudhi :)

[Manish Goregaokar]

Last time I looked at the paper was a few months ago, so I'm not entirely certain of this: Satoshi's paper isn't mathematical, he just assumes that you know basically what a hash/ECDSA signature does:

A hash is an unpredictable, irreversible method of taking an arbitrarily long block of text and converting it to a fixed length string/number, such that changes in the text cause unpredictable/large changes in the string. It is easy to check, hard to brute force.

A signature is a (more or less) unique string created when a party "signs" a particular message with their private key. One can easily check that the signature corresponds jointly to the message and the corresponding public key, however it is very hard to spoof (unless you have the private key, of course).

That's all you need to know. You need not know the mathematical basis of these. The only math in his paper is when he does a probability calculation for a hypothetical attacker.

-Manish Goregaokar

[Amol Mandhane]

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/03/21/canadian-bitcoin-house-for-sale/

[Prateek Chandra Jha]

http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Amol Mandhane <manam...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/03/21/canadian-bitcoin-house-for-sale/

--
--
The website for the club is http://stab-iitb.org/wncc
To post to this group, send email to wncc...@googlegroups.com
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Web and Coding Club IIT Bombay" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wncc_iitb+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--

Prateek Chandra Jha | 3rd Year Undergraduate | Aerospace Engineering | +919004076998

The feeling that ‘no one is listening to me’ make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

[rahil momin]

http://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-what-is-bitcoin-2013-3#

[Kovid Kapoor]

OK so I went through the paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, and there is one crucial piece I am still missing. Would be glad if someone could explain it here.

When a miner adds a transaction to a new block, he also ensures that the coin in the transaction has not been spent elsewhere by the sender.

How does the miner ensure that, using only the hashed string of the transaction?

For eg, if A first sends a coin to B (and this transaction is accepted by B), and then attempts to send the same coin to C, how will a miner be able to figure out that this transaction should not be included in the block? 

Kovid Kapoor | Analytics Specials | Opera Solutions, LLC | +91-81304-91776

["Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)"]

What you're referring to is called the double-spending problems. In centralised systems, it is tackled by a single party knowing all previous transactions. In the bitcoin network, it is tackled by making all transactions public.

What does mining mean?
It means that you verify all the transactions made since the last block in the chain and generate a new block to append to the block chain. Note that in order to create a new block, you need to hash the last block in it, so every succeeding block is dependent on the preceding block. Meaning - You acknowledge that you know about all previous transactions. For instance, at the time of writing this email, the network had 229274 blocks. If I were to mine a new block - it would be the block number 229275 and I have to attached the hash of 229274 in it, so I acknowledge that I'm aware of all previous blocks.

If you are aware of all transactions, you can very well know the balance that each address possesses and if you receive a double-spending transaction, you can easily reject it.

செவ்வாய் 02 ஏப்ரல் 2013 01:29 காலை-ல், Kovid Kapoor எழுதினார்:

OK so I went through the paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, and there is one crucial piece I am still missing. Would be glad if someone could explain it here.

When a miner adds a transaction to a new block, he also ensures that the coin in the transaction has not been spent elsewhere by the sender.

How does the miner ensure that, using only the hashed string of the transaction?

For eg, if A first sends a coin to B (and this transaction is accepted by B), and then attempts to send the same coin to C, how will a miner be able to figure out that this transaction should not be included in the block? 

 

[Kovid Kapoor]

If you are aware of all transactions, you can very well know the balance that each address possesses and if you receive a double-spending transaction, you can easily reject it.

But bitcoin users can change address at will, right? So when a miner node gets a new transaction from a new address, how does it calculate the balance associated with that address? 

Also, how can nodes efficiently find out the balance associated with an address? Going through ALL the transactions in the entire history of bitcoins seems very far-fetched (and practically impossible).

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:34 PM, "Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)" <nivv...@gmail.com> wrote:

What you're referring to is called the double-spending problems. In centralised systems, it is tackled by a single party knowing all previous transactions. In the bitcoin network, it is tackled by making all transactions public.

What does mining mean?
It means that you verify all the transactions made since the last block in the chain and generate a new block to append to the block chain. Note that in order to create a new block, you need to hash the last block in it, so every succeeding block is dependent on the preceding block. Meaning - You acknowledge that you know about all previous transactions. For instance, at the time of writing this email, the network had 229274 blocks. If I were to mine a new block - it would be the block number 229275 and I have to attached the hash of 229274 in it, so I acknowledge that I'm aware of all previous blocks.

செவ்வாய் 02 ஏப்ரல் 2013 01:29 காலை-ல், Kovid Kapoor எழுதினார்:

OK so I went through the paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, and there is one crucial piece I am still missing. Would be glad if someone could explain it here.

When a miner adds a transaction to a new block, he also ensures that the coin in the transaction has not been spent elsewhere by the sender.

How does the miner ensure that, using only the hashed string of the transaction?

For eg, if A first sends a coin to B (and this transaction is accepted by B), and then attempts to send the same coin to C, how will a miner be able to figure out that this transaction should not be included in the block? 

 

--
This email is digitally signed with 0xCC5D8741. If you don't use a PGP/MIME compatible e-mail client, the attached signature file can be used to verify the integrity of this communication

Did you know that your email provider could be snooping on you? Protect Yourself! Encrypt your communications.
Encrypt all your further emails to me with 0xCC5D8741

["Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)"]

Ah. I think I understand what you mean to ask now :)

You might have misunderstood this - A bitcoin user can use multiple addresses, yes, but all address are independent of each other.
If you have 5 BTC in address A and if you wish to spend 2 BTC from address B which has zero balance, the only way to do so is to make the transaction of  2 BTC from A->B, which distributes the balance as 3 in A and 2 in B and then spend it from B. And this transaction is publicly know to all. So, you can see how it is possible to associate a unique balance to each address.

If you make a transaction of 10 BTC to X, and none of your address have sufficient amount, the transaction is logged as:
5 from A -> X
3 from B -> X
2 from C -> X
All the three together form 1 transaction.

Your second point about computational tractability:
It is a simple linear problem. Although intuitively it feels huge, it is in fact very simple.
What's more - Every time I start my bitcoin client, it verifies my entire block chain. This is in order to calculate the balance in all of MY OWN addresses. This hardly takes 30 seconds! Compared to how hard the mining problem is, this is absolutely nothing.

Nivvedan

செவ்வாய் 02 ஏப்ரல் 2013 02:43 மாலை-ல், Kovid Kapoor எழுதினார்:

--
--
The website for the club is http://stab-iitb.org/wncc
To post to this group, send email to wncc...@googlegroups.com
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Web and Coding Club IIT Bombay" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wncc_iitb+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Dilawar Singh]

Confused about Bitcoin :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/bitcoin-currency-bubble-crash-not-rocking-financial-markets

[Anil]

Unrelated note : 

One day before the talk price of bitcoins was around 80USD

Today it just touched 142USD !! 

If only I had invested in bitcoins :P

[Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)]

And in December 2012, it was a mere 11 USD. There was a guy who was willing to sell for Rs. 700 and I thought it was too pricey :P

We can actually coin a term for this - I propose Information Deflation

2013/4/4 Anil <anilas...@gmail.com>

--

Nivvedan

Did you know that your email provider could be snooping on you? Protect Yourself! Encrypt your communications.

Encrypt all your further emails to me with CC5D8741

[Kovid Kapoor]

Haha.

Anyone here actually uses Bitcoins? Any sources on where to buy it, for real?

[Kovid Kapoor]

I check mtgox.com and other bitcoin exchanges, but they seem to be for US/European account holders only.

[Sudarshan Wadkar]

Just generate one for yourself. I am sure there code isn't tested for proxy, firewalls and netmons :D

If nothing else, somebody might patch it to add proxy/firewall support

-S

["Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)"]

Sudhi,

There used to be a time when that was possible :)

But, sadly, not anymore. Bitcoin mining is a serious business - One cannot get anywhere with amateur hardware like a laptop's CPU or GPU. I joined a mining pool and ran the risk of roasting my laptop for an entire night (I even had to leave my laptop inverted for the who time becuse of the heat) and I managed to mine just 10 milli bitcoins :-/

The best way right now is to buy them or rent out hardware with a mining contract.

வியாழன் 04 ஏப்ரல் 2013 05:58 மாலை-ல், Sudarshan Wadkar எழுதினார்:

[Kovid Kapoor]

Buying is what I was talking about. Would be interesting to play around with them. You know somewhere I could buy bitcoins?

[Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)]

There are some sites that allow purchase on wire transfer. Dunno how safe they're though.

Some individuals would accept PayPal payments in the #bitcoin IRC channel on freenode. You could try there too.

Anyway, Always use an escrow service - Check out btcrow.com

[Manish Goregaokar]

@Dilawar

Meh. Comparing Bitcoin to a meme is a bit much because it has been steadily gaining popularity for a long period of time. Besides, it's used extensively in the DarkNet, so it won't peter out completely. 

Forget that, there are tons of holes in her post, for a taste see http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22471128. (the Internet is great, usually someone has already said what you want to say :P)

I've seen a lot of "Bitcoins suck" posts from various people. (For example, http://qr.ae/TeUDp, though that's from 2011.). Most of these stem from the writers not understanding (or choosing not to understand) the intricacies of how bitcoins work, or the economics behind it ("money is anything that is liquid"). You can see this in the comments on that post as well. Many of the comments come from similar misconceptions. For example, http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22472906 fails to realize that our current monetary system is based on "conjuring value out of thin air" (currency by fiat).

I generally ignore such posts after I read a line like this one:

A network of tech-savvy programmers – okay, call them hackers – work on secret algorithms to create and release Bitcoins at their own discretion. 

She evidently doesn't know what she's talking about.

-Manish Goregaokar

[Kovid Kapoor]

It would be cool for some event like online treasure hunt to hand out bitcoins as the prize. (Just saying. Techfest junta, anyone? :P )

[Manish Goregaokar]

Not sure if everyone would like that, bitcoins are still pretty unknown amongst tech junta in India. (also, there are hassles in cashing out). But yeah, it would be cool :)

-Manish Goregaokar

[Dilawar Singh]

In a world, which has seen so many 'too big to fail' things sinking, it is not unreasonable for normal people to have some reservation about them even if they don't answer the question for being considered timid or stupid by 'we-know-it-all' economists. Remember the Tulip Mania of 1630's. Or AOL, Lehmon Brothers, derivatives, Chit-funds, Hedge-funds and god knows what else.

I don't know much about the principles or market (even if it has some sort of science), but I have some respect for the principle of reality : how normal people behave and perceive things in a normal world.

--
Dilawar
EE, IITB
Rest you can post on the guardian thread by yourself.

--
Dilawar

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Manish Goregaokar <manis...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Manish Goregaokar]

Reservations against it, I understand. Using media power to slander it (bit extreme way of putting it, but this seems to be happening more and more often) without understanding how it works is what I'm against.

And in that way everything has a chance of failing. Nobody thought that Lehman Brothers would fail (except for a small percentage, and you find that in any new venture) when it was started. 

-Manish Goregaokar

[Guna Prasaad]

Some more insights...
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future

[Twishmay Shankar]

A little late to the party... but this stuff is amazing! :-O

Thanks for sharing. 

Best Regards, 

Twishmay Shankar

Mobile: +91 97697 47393

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Guna Prasaad <guna...@gmail.com> wrote:

Some more insights...
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future

[Dilawar Singh]

How about using media power to promote it and hiding information? Whether paper-currency or bitcoion, their survival depends on trust. Paper-currency, plastic cards have developed this trust over the time. You deposit 100, it remained at least 100 in the bank. Not everyone wants to live an adventurous financial life. There are other areas too.

Those who make living by speculating on other's fortune, they have reason to feel uncomfortable about these doubts. Ordinary people do have the right to use media power to ask question and raise doubts and have their propaganda so that others can make an informed decision. Such doubts and debates may not be in the interest of few.

If Bitcoin can develop such a trust, it can surely build a long-lasting relation with humanity. Otherwise, the propaganda in its support can only intoxicate some in a generation. As far as it is used for experimentation and recreation, rock on!

--
Dilawar 

[Mayank Singhal]

> You deposit 100, it remained at least 100 in the bank
Yes, 100 remains 100, but the purchasing power keeps on decreasing in most parts of the world.

> Using media power to slander it
As opposed to media about weak Rupee or weak Yen? There is a clear issue with bitcoin that doesn't for normal currency - normal currency is backed by a government. When you invest in a currency, you are actually trusting that the government will not fail at keeping it stable. And just so that everyone is on the same page, bitcoins don't have intrinsic value. 

> it was a mere 11 USD
And it also fell 30USD when mtgox was down :)

> More secure than online banking (from slides)

Well... there are caveats. In case you don't want to trust third parties you will be keeping everything locally things are as secure as your own machine. And that is pretty insecure. Alternative is that someone else does transactions on your behalf, but then that is only as secure as online banking.

> Trust in humanity, not governments

Aah well, there is many issues here, even if you don't trust your government you have to at least fear it. It all depends on how bitcoin is treated. If it is treated as a investment (like gold, land, etc) then you have to pay tax on capital gains on it. If you don't, well then it is very likely that you are the breaking law of nation you live in. If you treat it as a currency, you can't - not in India at least. Now IANAL but AFAIR, RBI has some pretty strict rules against trading in foreign currency (or barter).

Mayank Singhal

[Manish Goregaokar]

@using media power: That is already happening :) Unfortunately, paper money is familiar and not too complicated. Bitcoin is very complicated; not that easy to present in a digestible yet clear manner.

@Ordinary people: Except that the Guardian article is by a reporter. It's a reporter's job to know the facts. They need not put forward an unbiased view (though we'd like them to), but messing up the facts is inexcusable. It's fine if an ordinary person does this. Not fine if a reporter does this on a major newspaper.

@trust: It slowly is creeping forward in terms of trust. It's still in that unstable/unpredictable zone, but it's no longer in danger of imminent failure. The DeepWeb now is extremely reliant on Bitcoin (one of the reasons it will never fail, it may just become a currency used only by the DeepWeb). A lot of small website owners find Bitcoin better than PayPal as well. For me, setting up a PayPal account is a hassle. On the other hand, I have around 20 bitcoin addresses (most of them are transaction addresses, I played around with it a lot). I can just keep one up there (or generate a new one), and let it collect money (donations, whatever) -- I can encash it later if I have to. It would be great if AdSense supported bitcoin as well (don't think that's happening in the near future though).

Still, currently it's no longer in the experimentation zone. Bitcoin mining is a big business, and there are lots of entities which use bitcoins these days. :)

-Manish Goregaokar

[Manish Goregaokar]

Again, I don't mind informed media slander. Stuff about the rupee and the yen -- they come from experienced economists who know what they're talking about. Bitcoin requires more than economic understanding to analyse.

The issues with govt backed money: Firstly, the major economic decisions of the government (a single entity) have a side effect of messing with the value of your money (as opposed to bitcoins, where it's much harder for a single entity to gain power since BTC transactions cannot be regulated by any entity. Still, companies lik MtGox have a fair amount of power to affect BTC).

But yes, IMO overall government money is still better than bitcoin at this point in time. We trust our countries to keep us safe (more important than money), we probably should trust them with our money as well. However, bitcoin seems like a good way of hedging against government failure. And, if it survives a few years (in the mainstream, not the DeepWeb), then it may even be at par with everyday government money. 

Regarding taxes -- you forget that Bitcoin can be very efficiently hid away from the government (especially with Tor). It's like hiding black money in the form of gold under a mattress, except that it's a million times more foolproof.

-Manish Goregaokar

[Tanuj Bhojwani]

Taking the discussion back a little,

but here's an article about malware using your pc to mine bitcoins for someone else.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/skype-bitcoin-malware/

Regards,

Tanuj Bhojwani
+91 98671 04169

[Twishmay Shankar]

And there are quite a few of those for MACs. 

Best Regards, 

Twishmay Shankar

Mobile: +91 97697 47393

[Manish Goregaokar]

Yep. A lot of botnets seem to be doing this these days.

There's also the other problem -- people with significant access to computers installing miners on whole networks (corporate, school, etc). I think there are firewall modifications to get rid of this, however.

Another trick is to run it via Flash or Java -- this is inefficient, but if you have a popularish website that uses Flash/Java, you can spawn a thread to crack hashes. Folks who are viewing the page at that time will unwittingly contribute to your "pool". Something like http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate but surreptitious. 

-Manish Goregaokar

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Tanuj Bhojwani <tanuj.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Dilawar Singh]

How one American economist sees it :

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/krugman-the-antisocial-network.html?src=mv

["Nivvedan (நிவேதன்)"]

I read a lot of Krugman's columns in the Hindu but this one in particular is a low for for.
Firstly, he seems to have a very popular-science idea of what a bitcoin is.

    Unlike credit card transactions, which leave a digital trail, bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous and untraceable.

Nope. Most transactions are not anonymous.

In the rest of the piece, he just sounds like an inertial old piece of ass. My country is printing brilliant green paper; why would anyone want anything else?

[Prateek Chandra Jha]

article link ?

--

Prateek Chandra Jha | 3rd Year Undergraduate | Aerospace Engineering | +919004076998

The feeling that ‘no one is listening to me’ make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

[Twishmay Shankar]

Mr Krugman hasn't been very good at predictions.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html

Best Regards, 

Twishmay Shankar

Mobile: +91 97697 47393

--

[Sudarshan Wadkar]

On Apr 16, 2013 1:18 PM, "Prateek Chandra Jha" <prateekc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> article link ?

In the post before Nivvedan's:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/krugman-the-antisocial-network.html?src=mv
-S
(Pardon the typos if any)

[Dilawar Singh]

It's not just Mr. Kahn, it is the case with all economists who give into the temptation of predicting the long-term future. After all, economics is a subject which is founded on so many 'two-hands theories' : (on one hand this, on the other that). It is rare to find two economists agreeing on anything. They also treat individuals as if they are particles : behaving in the same way all the time, all the places.

But this is not to deny the contribution they have made to the understanding to the economic side of social life.

--
Dilawar
EE, IITB

[Sudarshan Wadkar]

Speaking of predictions - I must recommend reading the excellent Fooled by randomness and the next in the Antifragile series, Black swan by Nassim Taleb on the interesting take on the whys behind such failures in guessing the future.

-S
(Pardon the typos if any)

[Dilawar Singh]

Since we are all on Bitcoin, The Winklevoss twins mentioned in Krugman's column made it to 'The Guardian's Pass Notes' this week.

The Winklevoss twins and why you need to know about them

Meet the clean-cut, square-jawed, all-American Bitcoin millionaires

Age: 31.

Appearance: Clean-cut, square-jawed, all-American, identical.

AKA: Cameron and Tyler; the Winklevii.

Occupation: Olympic rowers, social media entrepreneurs, chronic litigators.

Something to do with Facebook, right? Yes! Would you care to elaborate on that? No.

Go on, please … OK, way back in 2003 the Winklevii, along with a Harvard classmate, developed a university-based social network called HarvardConnection, then claimed that fellow student Mark Zuckerburg appropriated both their idea and their source code to create Facebook.

And then they sued him. Exactly. After four years of legal wrangling, they finally reached a $65m settlement.

And then the Winklevoss twins lived happily ever after. No, then they sued Facebook again, claiming the stock portion of the settlement had been undervalued. This second effort was not successful.

If they can't make a living suing people, how will the Winklevoss twins survive? On Bitcoin.

Come again? Surely you've heard of Bitcoin, the digital virtual currency beloved of speculators and online drug dealers that suddenly climbed to a rate of $260 per bitcoin last week before crashing again, and then rallying again?

Yes, of course. But how do Tyler and Cameron figure? Are they claiming to have invented Bitcoin? No, they just have a lot of them.

How many? About 1% of all the bitcoins in circulation, so in the neighbourhood of 108,000.

And how much is that worth? Hard to say. $11m is a conservative estimate, but the price of a Bitcoin now fluctuates so wildly that trading was suspended last week. The Winklevii could potentially be billionaires today, and paupers tomorrow. "We could be totally wrong, " said Tyler, "but we are curious to see this play out a lot more."

If they are wrong, what will become of them?

They'll be OK. Their Facebook shares – the ones that they said were undervalued, remember – are now worth $200m.

Do say: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Don't say: "If all else fails, you could always sue each other."

PS : You can use feedly to subscribe to feeds. It looks like a good alternative of google-reader.

[Dilawar]

So, about four weeks ago I took my £4,000 profit, added another £11,000 from my savings and set about buying and building Bitcoin and Litecoin mining hardware in my spare time. For Bitcoins, I invested in pre-orders of new, specialised mining hardware called ASICs. For Litecoin mining rigs, I bought lots of Graphics cards and built computers out of them in plastic crates. I also regarded this as a home R&D project for my main business, Memset. We're a hosting/data centres company and I've been keen for us to experiment with GPU-based cloud computing so I was reassured that even if it came to nothing, I could likely find a use for what I learned.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jul/01/bitcoin-virtual-fortune-crypto-currency


On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 3:52:26 PM UTC+5:30, Anil wrote:

Today the entire banking system revolves around there being a central bank which regulates the flow. This is the centralised system but can be have a decentralised system - where in there is no notion of central bank +  everything is peer to peer and still secure with no double spending. 

BitCoin solves all these problems and the world's first widely adopted decentralized digital currency based on peer to peer internet protocol. It is truely one of the marvels of cryptography. 

WnCC is organising a talk on BitCoin today to be given by Nivvedan.

Venue: FC Kohli

Time: 6pm

I think you will find it interesting :)

- Anil

[Manish Goregaokar]

It may not be a good idea to preorder ASICs, it's going to take a *lot* of time for you to get it (currently only a select few have them) and by then they won't be so special (they'll be the norm).

Then again, if you use FPGAs you'll only be able to mine efficiently for half a year before ASICs flood the market.

If I had the cash, I'd have preordered ASICs immediately when the slots opened. Now it's best to stay out of the mining scene and wait for the dust on ASICs to settle.

But Litecoin mining is currently stable iirc.

-Manish Goregaokar

--

[Dilawar Singh]

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

In this paper we answer for the first time a variety of interesting questions about the typical behavior of users, how they acquire andhow they spend their bitcoins, the balance of bitcoins they keep in theiraccounts, and how they move bitcoins between their various accounts inorder to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated all the largetransactions in the system, and discovered that almost all of them areclosely related to a single large transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the transaction graph.

....

Finally, we noted that the subgraphwhich contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a su ciently persistent way. 


Dilawar
EE, IITB

[Dilawar]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/opinion/all-that-glitters-online.html?ref=opinion

Proponents of digital currencies like bitcoins say these currencies provide greater security, lower costs and more stability than traditional forms of money like dollars and euros. But in the real world, bitcoins seem mostly to serve people engaged in illegal activities or speculation....

There are about 12 million bitcoins in existence now, and only 21 million units can ever be created. The limit is designed by the bitcoin creator or creators (known only by the name Satoshi Nakamoto) to ensure that there would never be a glut of coins that would depress their value. ... that virtual currencies are not illegal.

--
Dilawar

[Dilawar]

http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/rbi-warns-against-bitcoin-use-in-india/article5497653.ece

A number of India-based trading platforms and exchanges have sprung up over the last six months, catering to Indian users by allowing them to purchase Bitcoin in rupees. The RBI, however, points out that no regulatory approval has been obtained by for carrying out such activities.

“There have been several media reports on the usage of Bitcoins for illicit and illegal activities. The absence of information of counterparties could subject users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering,” the central bank said.

Etc. etc.

- Dilawar

[Sushant Hiray]

Here is an interesting take on the possible theory behind the collapse of Mt.Gox

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497289.0

Although it might be a speculative tale, sounds quite convincing!

Sushant Hiray,

Manager, Web & Coding Club,

IIT Bombay

--