Bitcoins are a digital currency that, supposedly, is impossible to hack or forge. Since Nuyen seem to be very hard to replicate too - seemingly anathematic for a digital currecny - maybe this could be a good explanation? Of course, Nuyen are not open source - their generation is up to the ICC, and arguably nuyen 'wallet files" (seeds?) are handed out on their whim, so there goes all the ideology with it. Perfectly possible if the generating algorithms are a secret. But the currency as such seems relatively sound.

Hm... i thought Bitcoins are guaranteed to be craftable... just needs computing power. And with that: In a world were every algorythm can be crackend in virtually no time and computing power cost NOTHING, i would guess no.

Not to be negative... but electronic money just doesn't really make that much sense in shadowrun. (In form of transfer). The only possibility is checking and crosschecking with yourbank.... but the answer and question to and from that bank can still be faked. It is just a HORRIBLY insecure world.

Okay, taking the SR4 Matrix rules (which are undoubtedly crap) as a given, you're right.

No the interesting thing about bitcoins is that they are virtually uncrackable if you read into how they work. Even then it is not so much cracking as well lying. The coins get verified basically by consensus. The manufactured part is just a way of making sure each is unique and someone can't devalue the currency by printing off as much as they like. A coin is made when a very hard random number problem is randomly solved. The solver announces to everyone one else their success which is easy to prove. An answer is only hard to come up with not to test. Everyone else sees you solved it, and your anonymous signature becomes a part of the coin. Everyone agrees your wallet has the coin including you, and so you do. You can not forge it anymore than you can forge being the man who invented the telephone.

It is a little complicated but as I understand it the verification is the interesting bit and what would apply to newyen. Bitcoin is anonymous peer to peer currency. A transaction is confirmed by consensus. A transaction with no consensus effectively did not happen. Over time more and more people confirm a transaction between two people, until eventually everyone agrees. Long before everyone agrees the transaction is effectively confirmed.

Here is where the part about faking this currency is not so much hacking as lying. If you somehow got vast botnets of nodes to say some transaction happened you might get someone else to take your bitcoins that have a large number of confirmations (but only confirmed by your botnet). I am mostly sure that does not actually work and you would only need to wait and a larger consensus of nodes would show the currency as false. The people that made bitcoin really knew their cryptography and set out with the sole purpose of making currency that is un-fake-able and is not controlled by any government.

Newyen on the other hand you want to be immune to counterfeiting but able to be pumped out willy-nilly by the government or corp that made it. It is up to them not to devalue their own currency. Complex cryptography and a series of checks with mostly trusted sources is likely used. In the end the exact method does not really matter to us.

Something like bitcoins would be an interesting addition to shadowrun though. I could imagine hackers in matrix 2.0 shuffling digital currency back and forth between each other as payment for favors. No need to get off shore bank accounts just don't loose your wallet. Unlike real currency when a bitcoin is lost when a wallet file is corrupted, deleted, or the password is lost, the coin is gone forever. There is no chance it will work its way back into circulation like a dropped cred-stick can.

Oh and one more thing bitcoin has it worked in that it will become harder and harder to make a coin as time goes on until eventually virtually all coins that can be made are made. So even in 2070 they are not easy to make. How hard the problem is for the next coin is based on how many should be made for that week. It self adjusts, making the problem harder and harder to slow down production if need be. No matter how good your computer you can make your computer try to solve a problem that will take it on average 2 years to solve. Oh and the it that is in this case is the bit coin program. It does not matter if you write your own version of the bitcoin program (it is open source). A version that writes more and easier to write coins will make currency not recognized by anyone else because the coins are not solutions to problems anyone else is trying to solve.

I thought about Shadowrun when I read about bitcoins too. Since they are anonymous and therefore the transaction is untraceable, they fit the shadow world perfectly. And before you say that everything can be traced - yes, it can. In bitcoins it's even more - information about every transaction needs to be received and accepted by most if not all of the millions of nodes. The point is it's anonymous. You have a receiving address that looks like a string of 50 or so random letters and digits, and you can generate as many addresses as you wish - one time uses. So you can track the transation, but the receiver is a one time use random string of letters, never used before and never to be used again. So what's the use of such information?

And about security they are talking about this extensively on their page. Basically yeah, it can be done by anybody, it's just that you have to overpower the current 'mining' network of users in terms of pure computing power. And since everybody and their uncle are 'mining' bitcoins nowdays (some using a few 4+ GPU systems) plus some real companies with real hardware appeared as well, it has been estimated some time in the past that you would have to command quite a share of the top500 most powerfull computers on earth to even try to compete with the network. And the bitcoin network gets more powerfull each day, so better hurry. If it still exists by 2072, you won't be able to hack it.

The point about unlimited computing power is that everybody has it, not just you. If you compete against millions of users of the network, and each of them has the unlimited computing power, you still are pretty much screwed, unless you can take over a few AAA+ nexi, and if you can really do that, you probably have more important things on your mind than using them over the course of weeks for generating fake currency.

It even has already been pointed out in several places that bitcoins are disturbingly well fitted for criminal activity since the government can't trace those. That criminal activity may be having tax free income, or getting paid for wetwork...

Wonder how long it will take for states and banks to cry HAX! and to forbid it . .

I've always thought it was kind of odd, that SR assumed computer security is gone because contemporary mathematical problems have all been solved - but that no new problems have been discovered!

We had a topic on this just a few weeks ago.

Meh, bitcoins are decentralized. Nuyen is highly centralized via the Corporate Court.

The Nuyen is like the US dollar of today, if control of the fed was handed off to the IMF.

The paper trail existed before the advent of computers, and i see no reason for it not to exist afterwards.

the "security" is not in the encryption, it is in the multiple of systems agreeing on the same "fact".

Hell, this is pretty much what bitcoin do right now, is that every transaction is verified by a random selection of nodes in the network.

Yeah I guess that is the other thing. If you have overwhelming amounts of computing power why do something illegal when you could just legitimately make real bitcoins. For anyone reading this who does not know, anyone can make bitcoins. It is not important who makes the currency, so long as there is not a glut of currency causing inflation, and that is what the difficult random number problem takes care of. If I had a fairlight excalibur today, I could make a lot of bitcoins . In 2070, not so much.

Because the rate at which you can randomly generate the bitcoins is based on the amount of computing power currently being used to generate bitcoins, and how many bitcoins are left to be generated. The more computing power that is being used, the more it takes to generate a coin. The fewer coins remaining to be generated, the more power required to generate a coin.

The problem is that in order to generate coins at any kind of reasonable rate, you'd need entire server farms generating coins, and you'd be spending nearly as much on electricity for the servers as you would make on the coins, not to mention if you had a giant server farm, you could make way more selling it out for webspace or something similar.

May be something wrong with my computer not going as fast on the generation as it should, but using the calculator, it indicated several years to generate once (Which gives you 50 coins). By that time I'd have spent far more in simple wear on running my computer at high speed for so long, not to mention electricity costs.

The basic theory is that bitcoins are stable as long as the participating PCs have more computing power than an attacker. The longer they run, the safer they are. While there might very well be a happy equilibrium (for the creators), where opt-in computation power is larger than any attackers power, an attack might still be feasible. The true problem will surface once participation is less worthy than exploitation. Participation payoff is shrinking while the actual RL worth of the currency increases.

That there is a set number of coins to be had makes it quasi-fiat, imo.

Still, better then simply increasing the total with the stroke of a pen i guess (tho it worked somewhat for the Romans, but then they did it by senate agreement rather then a central bank boss accepting the loans of commercial banks).

Note that if over 50% of the total seed pool is controlled by a single source, the currency is effectively compromised - and in Shadowrun's cutthroat world of business politics, I doubt that bitcoins would survive for so long. Perhaps an evolved version of btc would be the idea or basis behind nuyen, but not btc as they are now.

IMO of course.

The other thing is that while bitcoins can be divided into very small fractions of a coin the coins are effectively limited and the coins probably get lost at some rate greater than the rate at which they eventual will be made. People are careless, passwords get lost, computers die, people die, or just misplace the coins. Right now the rate of loss is probably a lot greater for new users anyway. In the future the rate of lose will probably be less but it will still probably mean bitcoins will eventually become a shrinking currency. Fine for the hundred year range but not a good for all time sort of thing.

It is hard to hold any currency to that sort of standard but people have to because people speculate and the value changes with that speculation. It might crash at some point, but then again it still might be worth putting some money into bitcoins now.

But then again money is just a means to an end. Money is of course for bartering for goods and services, not just hording.

I know an artist that only accepts payment for her digital art work with bitcoins. It seems a pleasant alternative to PayPal. No one really likes PayPal.

You'd be spending much more. As a thought experiment I had a server-farm-running friend of mine put together a system that could crank out 50 bitcoins in about three months (which was the creation rate as of about three weeks ago, IIRC) provided this was a novahot system.

It ended up being a blade server that ran about ten grand. A bitcoin is just under eight dollars right now.

As creation slows, then the price will improve. Bitcoins can also be broken down into portions, so I could buy a Predator with .2 bitcoins, or a Crown Vic for 6.8.

The trouble with the bitcoin that I have is that the ones with the money are the ones that can own the presses, and a decentralized currency ends up being centralized once again with the people who can mint them reliably.

Except you can't mint bitcoins. There is an arbitrary limit of something like 23 million bit coins, and there will never be more, and indeed there will be less thanks to please loosing their wallets and such.

Hence why the time it takes to create one is a function of how many are as-of-yet uncreated.

I know that, my point though was that you can't mint them.

there may be a problem with some people hording them to drive up the price and then dumping them while the going price is still high.