samer wrote
Nuclearcat, if you're feeling adventurous, I highly recommend the book
Mastering Bitcoin. It's also available for free (if you compile it yourself)
on github. If you're interested in computer science, game theory, economics, cryptography, you'll love learning more about how Bitcoin works.
Samer, sorry just noticed your message. I dont reject that bitcoin is complex idea, i checked cryprography part.
But not enough well mastered, as recent fork shows and protocol weaknesses exposed :)
None of businesses will base their transactions on currency that has uncertainty in processing time/cost of transaction, while other currencies, with deterministic options - exist.
Also it missed huge weakness that other coins tried to "patch up" - that computational algorithm(hash) can be weakened or offloaded to ASIC(and parallelized), in case of bitcoin it's SHA, and also it has logical deadlock - in case SHA weakened algorithmically(significantly), you need consensus of majority to change it, but at same time it means majority of miners have to abandon all their investments in mining ASICs, that wont work on new algorithm.
And important it is useless for most of cases, it is niche toy. As soon as it comes to eyes of governments as enough significant, they will compromise it by laws and hacking incidents, and it will lose it's value. In best case they will keep it low profile, as it is easily trackable. Without way to exchange it to something materialistic(exchanges) - it is useless, and no person will operate exchange, if they can face extradition and tens of years sentence, as "supposed to be" btc-e guy. New SEC ruling makes also any ICO illegal.
Last and most important - i am strictly against burning energy, most valuable human resource - for useless purposes.
I had better idea for proof of work, spacecoin, where transmitter within solar system(but quite far away from earth) sends complex signal in blocks, and instead of dumb hash collision search, people will master DSP algorithms and antenna receiving technology, which is completely equal alternative for current dumb proof of work. This one will be beneficial for humanity.
