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The coin generation is just a clever (in my opinion) way to limit the supply; the rate at which they're created. It lets everyone feel like they can get a piece but it still makes it so you can't just mint a billion of them overnight.
It is not about consuming energy or resources - it's meant to be used on computers that the users already have. I understand that some people may turn their computers off at night and leaving it on for bitcoins indirectly consumes energy but that's not the point of it; it's like folding@home and such, using resources that are already 'wasted' if you consider potential CPU usage a resource.
If you plan to set up a datacenter full of computers to generate more coins then you would be investing dedicated resources into it and that's your own business decision with its own set of risks.. but it is not necessary to do that in order to trade bitcoins.
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It says there are only 4 bitcoins for sale when I try to buy some.
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I'm not sure if it's correct to assign cost to bitcoin 'production' in that way.. Your rate of production will decrease over time by design anyway and the whole thing with proof-of-work being required is just to limit the supply. If bitcoins continue to grow in popularity it will not really be feasible to generate coins on a regular personal computer and trading for them will be the best way to acquire them.
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BitTorrent clients can do hundreds of connections easily - this is why they end up killing those little embedded routers. It should be no problem for a regular IP router but the little embedded things are doing NAT so they're tracking state on all those connections and run out of memory.. also they're very slow SoC style computers so everything going through them suffers.
Torrent clients generally have options for configuring a global maximum number of connections, maximum inbound and maximum outbound connections.
I think it would be good to allow configuration of unlimited inbound/outbound connections for those who have the capability to do it, and provide a conservative default for those who are using NAT, tor, proxies, etc.
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I would recommend using a self signed certificate over a third party one.. anyone can pay verisign or thawte for a buybitcoins.com certificate so it means nothing.
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All that stuff is run by the CIA (like tor exit nodes).. you just need to get your own VPS - pay for it with some kind of prepaid payment card, use a bogus name obviously.. and just run your own proxy. Don't use things like youtube, google, yahoo, wikipedia etc.. because regardless of proxies and javascript and whatever, they're in the business of tracking usage and controlling your thoughts through control of what you read.
The VPS thing isn't perfect but there are uses for a VPS besides anonymous proxying.. services that are advertised as anonymous proxies will obviously attract people who want to be anonymous so they're probably 'up to no good' and are worth spying on.
I guess I'm just reiterating the original point that you can't trust someone else's proxy unless you trust that person. I have a few friends who use my proxies but I know them in person so they know and trust me. I wouldn't use someone else's proxy unless I knew them well enough to trust them.. I especially wouldn't use a paid service that is specifically aimed at someone looking for anonymity.
The image I get in my head is some spook sitting around nailing up signs that lead to a bank you can rob.. and his buddies are waiting inside behind the door grinning.
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I'm not much of a marketing guy or anything but it makes sense to me to refer to software like this by the version in source control, like Bitcoin r82 or whatever.. maybe that's too geeky for some people.
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Well, I'm not sure what the perfect system is but majority/democracy is certainly not it.. Look at what's happened in the United States, everything is illegal. Smoking is being outlawed in phases because the majority doesn't smoke so nobody cares that it infringes on the rights of the smokers. In California they make a law against anything that bothers someone.. imagine something comes to vote: "Let's outlaw X because it's annoying" then the idiot majority goes "Hmm yea X is annoying and *I* don't do X anyway so whatever.."
Sooner or later something that you do comes around for vote and you can't do anything about it because you're not the majority.
Basically democratically deciding things is a sure fire way to infringe on absolutely everyone's rights because the majority is not one group but rather a complex overlapping structure. You might be included in one majority but you're the minority in 100 other ones.
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I'm not sure why but I noticed that as well - my Win32 build was a lot slower than the linux/mac builds I did. I used MinGW and all that but maybe I made a mistake somewhere.. I probably used a different version of Berkeley DB than Satoshi too so that's why the logs weren't binary compatible.
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I don't think you can realistically make a program control the CPU temperature - it's just too indirect and you'd just create a weird oscillation at best, at worst it just wouldn't work at all. The fan speed, duty cycle and target temp are options that can be set in the BIOS of enthusiast level motherboards usually, not in regular OEM computers though. Most motherboards, even OEM stuff, have some support for 'smart' fan control where they spin it up faster when the temp rises.. you could try to disable that so it's always 100% but if it's still not reaching the target temperature then the only thing you can do is install a better cooler and improve the air flow in the case.
Intel CPUs made since the Pentium 4 have the ability to stop the clock in response to overheat conditions. Pentium 3 had a similar ability but it just locked up hard and never restarted. The current Intel CPUs oscillate the clock so what ends up happening is your CPU is about as fast as 486 from 15 years ago but it doesn't melt. This 'feature' ends up being used on pretty much any laptop because they have such poor cooling.
If the thermal protection is kicking in, it's only to save the CPU from melting and it means that the CPU can't work so you're losing a TON of performance in your bitcoin generation. On Linux there is a kernel compile option to monitor these interrupts and print a message, so you can tell if it's happening.. but in general if your CPU is getting over 70C you probably have this problem.
I personally would not recommend using a laptop for bitcoin or anything like that..
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Oh so with all that being said, you guys are all welcome to IRC on irc.lfnet.org. It is a small network that me and a couple of guys run.. we don't have services or k-lines or anything like that.
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Whether it's right or wrong, when people who know what IRC is hear that IRC is involved in something, they immediately think malice.. This is not without foundation as a lot of antisocial behavior takes places on IRC channels. The other thought is botnets which use IRC to bootstrap, control or communicate. A program which connects to IRC is by definition called a 'bot' and to IRC people that means something bad, especially if it's not an IRC bot program specifically.
What Satoshi did here is use IRC simply as a matchmaking service but I could see how someone could draw the wrong conclusion when they see a channel with hundreds of randomly named bots idling in it. Perhaps you could put these people's minds at ease if there was some pop up asking them if it's ok to bootstrap from IRC.. because if they just write it off as a trojan or botnet they may never bother to find out how it really works.
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The current user interface doesn't support smaller than 0.01 increments but it is possible to support it in a future revision.
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They are lost for good. Think of it like someone losing their wallet in the ocean. It seems like it would be a problem but it's really not that significant. People lose their gold jewelry all the time but it doesn't make much of a difference to the value of gold.
I wonder though, is there a point where the difficulty of generating a new coinbase is so high that it would make more sense to try to recover keys for lost coins or steal other people's coins instead? The difficulty of that is really high so for now it makes a lot more sense to generate but I just wonder what the real figures are.. would that ever become more productive? Maybe Satoshi can address this..
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It will always benefit you to have the fastest computer, or have more computers than anyone else. The hits per day you get will go down statistically over time as the difficulty rises, but you will still get a larger share than everyone else if you control the biggest pool of resources.
This is all based on the theory that statistics mean something though.. The guy with the 1Ghz computer could 'get lucky' and generate a thousand a day while the guy with the compute cluster gets none. I think this 'get lucky' theory is what gambling is based on.
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Cool, I just hope you don't take it the wrong way when guys like me and Gavin are trying to shoot holes in it.. I think we're all here to see this thing develop and turn into something bigger but we're also interested in finding ways to break it (so it can be fixed). It seems like you have done a great job covering the bases so far because you've been able to add features without breaking compatibility.
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How long have you been working on this design Satoshi? It seems very well thought out, not the kind of thing you just sit down and code up without doing a lot of brainstorming and discussion on it first. Everyone has the obvious questions looking for holes in it but it is holding up well  |
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32 bit linux? Yea I can do that.
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