I've seen lots of speculation on price but none of it takes into account that no one can move their BTC right now from the spam attack. Well, they can move it but you will either have to wait 10h or pay a fee that would make it not worth dumping it for.
The real cause is that the unconfirmed transactions in the mempoool are sitting around ~220k (and growing) and the transactions per second of the mempool is staying the same.
Theres about 70% of all transactions taking > 12 hours which means theres around $1Billion in BTC locked up for the next 12 hours. Lower supply means price goes up.
So basically everyone is holding wether they like it or not.
That being said I'm not calling for a short or anything. Just pointing out what I think the real cause of the price increase is.
In my opinion Bitcoin will fail. Can you trust a currency that is reliant on vulnerable technology?? With the creation of a number of new competing cryptocurrencies being developed and eventually diluting the market. If a cyber attack occurred would your Bitcoin be safe. Would you intrust thousands of dollars to the system? How long before Government infiltrate this technology and causes it to fail? Why would Government do that? Because central banks will not tolerate a currency that they do not have complete control over, thats why. If they cause a failure in the system, then people will lose confidence in them, unless of course the federal government comes to the rescue and offers to insure the currency FDICA baby. Look what they did to Precious metals. The feds found a way to manipulate it and fix it. The banks simply print and sell enough paper contracts to dilute the market. Some say that there are up to 200 hundred paper contracts per ounce of gold. The silver and gold markets are easily moved by the simple push of a computer key. They must regulate it in order to keep the value of the dollar intact. The same is true with cryto. If they let the market run, paper currencies would diminish in value. Is it possible that the cryptocurrency was ordained by the central banks as a trail to see if people would buy into this type of monetary system? But for now enjoy the wealth it has created, just don't think they will let the party continue.
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Its my belief that the blockchain technology is resistant to cyberattacks, in that the computing power required to falsify or edit a written block on the chain, is unattainable. Bitcoin is the most secure chain because of the amount of distribution (participation; nodes) it enjoys. Government can have a limited effect on its use, by suppressing it or banning it, but similar to torrents and Mary Jane, that will only have a limited effect. Some countries will support it, and like States that pass the legalization laws for cannabis, they will grow their economy, and those that have a ban will eventually get on board or suffer the lost taxes. A country that can grow its economy without bankers syphoning profit for doing literally nothing, will expand quicker giving it an advantage in production costs etc.
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These are words of Konstantinos Karagiannis
CTO, Security Consulting, Americas, BT.
But is it safe?
My RSA 2017 talk, “Hacking Blockchain”, includes a fair amount of time explaining historic and current attacks faced by all implementations of the technology. A lot of these attacks are old school, focusing on supporting technology and not on the blockchain itself.
Consider attacks against credentials used at an online cryptocurrency exchange. Such exchanges act as hot wallets, or storage of funds available for transacting online at any time. Traditional authentication hacking of these sites can lead to illegal transactions. Some attacks are even more creative, such as the ability to force a cold or offline wallet to become hot and therefore a target for fraudulent transactions.
The major issue I cover, though, is the inherent flaw on page one of Satoshi’s paper. That elegant if pesky line about “computationally impractical to reverse” transactions. You see, the crypto behind cryptocurrency is actually public key. We are likely less than three years away from this being completely hackable by a quantum computer.
Facing reality.
Fantasy? Hardly. Labs around the world have already proven that quantum computers can run Shor’s Algorithm and almost instantly find the private key of a public key pair even 4,096 bits long. Because of how public key works in most blockchain implementations, including Bitcoin, this would mean any time a transaction occurs, a quantum computer has everything it needs to obtain a user’s private key. Spend a single cryptocoin, and any entity with a quantum computer can download that currency’s blockchain, see your transaction, and in a few moments spend the rest of your funds.
The threat seems even worse if you consider blockchains designed to prove ownership of land or other critical identity-related transactions. A private key attack here can lead to an irreversible type of identity theft, at least within that blockchain ecosystem.
The NSA has already warned against the use of non-quantum-safe encryption. Its’ time to realise we may be rushing towards putting everything on a digital house of cards rather than an unbreakable chain. Let’s fix blockchain’s inherent flaws now, before it’s too late.
If you want to see our Blockchain demo in person, why not visit Innovation 2017, our technology and innovation exhibition taking place in June.
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I found your response most interesting, as I had not heard about the progress being made in cracking the keys. I wonder how a wallet like DASH Evolution would effect the cracking, as the 'public keys' are never actually made public, only a user name for which only the wallet knows the keys.
The hacking of Bitcoin would be like the enigma machine, you would have a powerful tool but never be able to use it. The moment word got out that it was possible, anything you steal would be worthless. No one would be willing to trade fiat for the broken crypto.
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Very interesting food for thought. This makes me rethink some things while simultaneously inspiring me to think of ways to prevent these type of attacks before they're really relevant.
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I believe trades can be made within exchanges though, or at least the ones that aren't having problems. So this mostly affects people moving BTC to/from wallets?
Do you know if LTC is moving fast?
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Check out this website... for timing data. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-confirmationtime.html and this page for average fee required to get written onto the next block.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-ltc-dash.html#3m
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So glad I invested into alternative coins, not a fan of an instantaneous crises. but good luck to everyone holding Bitcoin. Hope it goes well even though you are FORCED but hey bright side, people are forced all the time into doing things they don't want to.. gosh who am I kidding.
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i disagree, if you read the contract section in bitcoin wiki and understand it you will realize that every single thing that these alt coins do can be built on bitcoin very easy in the future, and then you will understand that bitcoin is and always will be #1.
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Thats true I agree with you, but it's in the future the problems are present.. without a fix we will only get recurring issues.
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idk all of this long transaction stuff, i buy from atms and its always really quick confirmations
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I tried to sell at the ATM and it 'timed out' after 1h30min. It took 10h to do the transaction. had to contact the company to give me back the bitcoin. scary stuff.
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wow that does sound scary. Sorry about your luck. Here in the north-east they have been around now that ive been using them for almost 2 yrs and the only problem ive had is when it says out of bitcoins.
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