If you know nothing about the password, even a dictionary attack might not be enough - unless the password is weak, which might be the case since it was supposed to be a "prank".

Honestly, if this "prankster" has a minimum of honesty, you should push him/her every fucking day to pay you back. This is theft/vandalism, not a prank.
Once s/he pays you, you give him/her the encrypted file, and it's up to the person to decrypt it, not you.

That assuming the prankster has a minimum decency, of course.

OT already have its cash-only mode which is as anonymous as it gets.

The point of ZeroCoin, AFAICT, is precisely not to depend on a server and just use the blockchain to achieve the same result. (I confess I haven't read ZeroCoin's paper and I have no idea how it works)

"Bit" is pronounced like the French word "bite", which means dick.
Perhaps you should avoid asking whether your customers' mothers want to own a "bit", if you ever have francophone customers.

As DannyHamilton said. It's not a "continuous work" that gets closer from being finished with time. It's more like playing on the lottery, billions of times per second. By a simple matter of probability, eventually you'll hit the jackpot.

Yes. Once it's found, you broadcast it immediately. New transactions go to a new block.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. In the absurd event of Bitcoin being strongly banned everywhere, blocks would naturally become tiny since Bitcoin usage would become quite restrict anyway. Block sizes would be the least of our worries.

Honestly I don't know... you should ask your pool operator directly what are his motives.

If govs are ever to attack bitcoin, they'll do it the way they're used to: banning their usage in commerce.
That's much more typical of governments, easier to enforce and more effective than trying to fight bitcoin on the technical realm.

Also, let's not forget that a single honest node can already spot fraud attempts like increasing the 21M BTC limit.

Oh, and let's not forget either that SPV has a high level of security too, even considering rogue full nodes. People speak as if SPV nodes would be completely vulnerable to rogue full nodes, but that's not the case. A rogue full node could potentially omit data to its SPV peers. But that risk can be considerably mitigated by just connecting to multiple full nodes: a single honest one in the bunch, and you'll receive your data.
A rogue full node cannot fake a transaction to a SPV node because he'd also need a fake Merkle root, what implies in a fake block header, what can only be obtained through real proof-of-work. If a node is willing to waste all that hashpower just to fake a transaction, why not do a Finney attack in the first place? That's more effective and works against other full nodes too.

It costs the same, and you get double rewards.
See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

Erik, it's not just words (although words often do tell a lot... I don't view you, for instance, begging for more regulation... something tells me it would make you sick with yourself, which is a good indicator on your character)

But in Vesseness case, there's more to it. This lawsuit against MtGox... wtf? Plus this suspicious involvement with Bitcoinica, which is still owing thousands of bitcoins to many.

I'm sorry, but I still believe this Peter Vesseness is the type of guy that won't hesitate to use the state and its regulation to rule out competitors. He looks too suspicious to me. I don't trust him. I'd love to be proved wrong, but for now, that's how I see it.

My sincere condolences to you and your family. I'd suggest avoiding places like this forum for a while, and instead watch out for yourself and your loved ones.

Again, these point have nothing to do with whether a central planning is necessary to avoid market cartelization on the bitcoin network, or whether we have any technical reason to keep this damn constant there (we don't).

Dropping the hard-coded block size limit is totally orthogonal to developing off-chain transaction technologies by the way. I'm for instance very optimistic about Open Transactions. But I still want to be able to transact on the blockchain daily. One thing doesn't rule out the other.

This is totally unrelated and a sort of ad hominem.

I'm also wary of this Vesseness guy. He seems the typical ""capitalist"" that won't hesitate to use the government to rule out his competitors. I'm not very found of the bitcoin foundation either, as you can guess.

That has nothing to do with the block size limit. This damn constant should never have been created in the first place.... the day I learned about it I knew it would be a problem...

Every point presented on this subject has already being addressed. Multiple times.

I'm not sure we're talking the same thing here.
What I call "soft limit" is not a personal limit on the blocks you'll generate or relay.
What I mean would be a set of value-pairs (X,Y), where X is a limit for block acceptance, and Y is the number of block deeps a third-party block violating X needs to be in the chain for you to accept to mine on top of it.
For example, let's say, for block size soft limit you set (1Mb, 1), (5Mb, 2) and (10Mb, 3). That means that if you receive a block larger than 1Mb, you refuse to build on top of it, unless it has already another block on top of it. For >5Mb, it needs to be 2 blocks deep. For 10Mb, 3 blocks deep and so on.
I also strongly suggest soft-limits on "percentage of unknown transactions (not in memory pool)", because that's how a spammer-miner would create gigantic blocks: by filling it with transactions that he does not intend to broadcast, as that would require paying lots of fees.

AFAIK none of these are implemented, right?

Have you read about FATCA, Gabi? The choice is either disconnect yourself entirely from the banking system, or accept it. And accepting FATCA == throwing away financial privacy.
Even Switzerland and Liechtenstein have bowed. Also countries like The Bahamas - which has no personal taxes of any kind, so it doesn't have any infrastructure in place to monitor people's financial life - are adapting.

So yeah... the topic title isn't very inaccurate. US regulations to rule them all indeed.

A display of FUD and economic ignorance in a single sentence.

+1M

But if you're convinced miners would not go above the 1Mb limit, why are you afraid of replacing a hard-coded constant by voluntary/decentralized/p2p/spontaneous-order limits?

When it's time to drop the limit, soft-limits configs should be available on bitcoind. The default first entry could be precisely 1Mb, just to keep as is. Block generators would have to manually change that configuration in order to start easily accepting larger blocks... otherwise they would refuse them until they're deeper.

As you say, they'd likely not change it so easily. They'd only change if they consider the potential extra-revenues from adding more transactions more valuable than the risk of being orphaned - and that's precisely demand pushing for more supply.