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Comment Re:Inflation at the speed of Moore's Law (Score 5, Informative) 491

I've been involved with the Bitcoin project for a while, and there are steps in place to prevent this. Essentially, the network tries to maintain block generation at a rate of six blocks per hour (one every 10 minutes) by checking every 2856 blocks (nominally 2 weeks) if the rate was too high or too low. At that point, all nodes adjust their hash target such that it gets more or less difficult to generate blocks. The net result is that more nodes or faster nodes can only really influence the market for 2856 blocks. There is discussion about reducing this number to lower that time, as well. If you'd like to discuss this with some Bitcoin participants, drop by the IRC channel: #bitcoin-dev on Freenode. I'm Lachesis on IRC.
Encryption

Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3 491

Teppy writes "How's this for a disruptive technology? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, network-based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network. Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government." Here are the FAQ, a paper describing Bitcoin in more technical detail (PDF), and the Wikipedia article. Note: a commercial service called BitCoin Ltd., in pre-alpha at bitcoin.com, bears no relation to the open source digital currency.
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