When I try to list the balance in my accounts, I get the following output:


Why do I have a negative balance in one of my accounts?

How can I get rid of the negative balance? I think I ended up with it because I made a payment from an address to the same address.

Yes, that was my one cent.

I already did that. Now I have to give them ACH access to my bank account in order to load US dollars. I wonder how long that would take.

I am in the process of opening a Paxum account. What is the overhead of funding my MtGox USD with Paxum as compared to sending a certified check to one of the official exchangers?

So the Bitcoin economy is already valued at several million dollars, and yet we can't find a person to write a Windows GUI?

Interestingly most of the google queries actually come from Russia, where the trading volume in bitcoins is relatively small.

So for legal purposes, will you consider bitcoin as a "virtual currency" rather than "virtual commodity"? From my limited understanding, the latter definition is more convenient because it avoids having to deal with money laundering regulations.

So if all miners were to suddenly stop mining all at once, how would this affect the bitcoin network? Will payments still go through?

I just tried to test on the Mac (commenting out the GUI building part of the code), and I get the following error:

But what determines the speed of the confirmations? Is it the number of miners that is too low?

What will happen as the difficulty increases, and there is less and less incentive for miners to operate? Will that mean that confirmations will become even slower?

Would it be difficult to add a Firefox add-on that lets you log in supported websites using private/public key authentication? So, instead of having to create a separate password for each website, one would just give them his/her public key.

The current bottleneck in the bitcoin infrastructure is the speed of confirmation of transactions. I've had to wait for up to half an hour in order to get a confirmation of a transaction that I made. Why is it taking so long to get confirmations? Are there any plans to speed up the process?

What are the reasons for this scarcity in bitcoins for the past couple of days? If one looks at the orderbook for Mt. Gox http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html, it appears that there are very few bitcoins available for sale. Only a couple of days ago the market was full of bitcoins.

This sudden spike in prices is just completely irrational. What specific even was the trigger for such a dramatic increase in demand?  Did some oil producing country start selling its oil in bitcoins suddenly?

The current p2p implementation of Bitcoin makes its users easily identifiable, as they broadcast their IP addresses to all peers on the network, including nodes set up with the intent to monitor the network and persecute its users.

With this in mind, one may want to disable connections to untrusted third parties, and allow connections only to a few trusted friends. This is the concept of a friend-to-friend (F2F) network (vs a P2P network), and it is described on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend in great detail. It has been already implemented in various file sharing programs such as http://anomos.info/wp/, http://www.turtle4privacy.org/new/, etc

In such a setup the edges of graph of the Bitcoin network will actually represent physical relationships between the participants in the real world, and the network overall will be much harder to disrupt by  brute-force attacks. Even if a malicious third party takes over 51% of the computing power, their blockchain will be rejected by the trust-based f2f network. However, the drawback of this approach is that it would be much harder to build the network initially as more work is required to identify and add friends, whereas with the p2p approach the user just installs the program and is ready to go.

For a stronger bitcoin infrastructure it will be beneficial to keep both the P2P protocol because of its ease of use, and add an F2F protocol because of its resilience. To that end, it is important to decouple the core of bitcoin from the implementation details of the communication protocol.

If problems arise with the p2p approach, one should be able to easily switch to the f2f backend, and connect only to a trusted circle of friends. In case of an emergency law allowing  the government to turn off the entire internet completely (like in Egypt right now), then an offline communcation protocol should be put in place, where the user should be able to do off-line transport by transferring packets on flash drives between computers, or via the mail. Although significantly slower, the bitcoin network will still continue to function.

So, are there any plans to decouple the communication protocol from the implementation of bitcoin? Maybe different communication protocols should be handled as plugins that one could easily install or disable depending on his anonymity needs?

I may be willing to do that. PM me if interested.

Is there any information on what is new in this release? Any compelling reason to upgrade once the new version is released?

Given that bitcoin just hit the front page of digg, I would actually expect the value to increase further at least in the short-term as there will be an influx of curious new users.

Or one could just create a separate device running a highly secure OS with a simple bitcoin client, and with wireless enabled so that it could connect to the internet. With such a secured device viruses and other types of attacks on the wallet would be highly unlikely, as there would be no third party applications, and installation of additional software would be disabled.

Then the safety of the wallet would simply require one to be able to physically secure the actual device.

You are forgetting a third major risk - a major bug in the bitcoin software that may be exploited in the future as bitcoin becomes more popular. The existence of such a bug will become increasingly less likely as bitcoin is used by more people and scrutinized more, but so far no security audit has been performed on the bitcoin client by any reliably third party, there exists no clear specification of the protocol used, and there are no alternative implementations of it. The bitcoin infrastructure rests completely on a a single client, and that may very well be its Achilles heel.

It is very important right now to write down a rock solid protocol definition for the bitcoin network, and add multiple independent implementations of it. That will insure that a single security bug in one of the implementations will not bring down the entire network.

Dugg.