This probably goes without saying, but it could be an easy thing for someone to miss and get concerned about.  The unreliability of Mt. Gox at the present time appears to have caused the trade and depth data to get way out of sync on bitcoincharts.com.  (bitcoinmonitor.com seems comparatively reliable for trade data.)  Also, when Mt. Gox does load, it ought to show your correct balance, but it may fail to display your open orders (an AJAX issue).  So just a PSA not to panic if you don't see what you expect.

Amen.  Freedom to criticize someone isn't freedom to hobble them however you see fit.  DDoS is more akin to corporate espionage than free speech.

Sirius, eh?  Just assumed it was Gavin who took over from Satoshi...  My bad.

But until there are major forks of the software, there will still be "official" head developers, and they're inevitably going to be forced into the role of spokespeople for Bitcoin until they pull a Satoshi and vanish.  For the time being, officialness of some sort is unavoidable.  When bitcoin.org becomes just a "fansite" and is owned by someone who isn't involved in the development of Bitcoin, then we'll be on our way toward decentralization of representation.

Gotcha, thanks for the link.  In keeping with the meta discussion theme, I saw all those threads but never read any of them... I just assumed that the debate was still ongoing.  

There was a decision?

Should we ban meta meta discussions in meta discussions?  

I agree that having an official forum is a liability.  I don't know whether the wiki should be official, but I think, if there's an official anything, there ought to be at least some sort of official support system.  (Closest there is right now other than the forum, I would guess, is reporting a bug on the sourceforge project page.)

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ has your prediction looking very plausible.  Kudos for putting math to good use!   

If you just got back from vacation, you missed Paypal accounts getting taken down, a DDoS, a boycott, and all sorts of fun times in Bitcoinland!  

Correct.

+1 ploum, let's give the guy practical advice rather than ideological and idealistic advice.  This isn't worth creating some major dissent in his family, and if he doesn't play it carefully, he might not have the opportunity to get involved with Bitcoin at all.

Bitcoin had its second major price crash just after I started following it (first was Feb. 18, second was Apr. 4).  Since, unlike the first one, this didn't come during an obvious adjustment phase, it seemed like a lot of people were concerned that the end was near, the bubble had burst, and this would prove that Bitcoin couldn't sustain itself.  After a couple weeks, things strongly rebounded (leading into this current rally), and I suspect that another crash of the same magnitude is unlikely, now that Bitcoin has proven it is not as fragile as was feared.

"Raping the electric bill" is of course an issue, but besides the relatively small investment of electricity, if you're not investing your savings into Bitcoin, you don't stand to lose anything by experimenting with it.  People are paranoid about pyramid schemes because there have been so many stories of people losing their life savings to them.  Bitcoin's implicit disclaimer is that anyone who sells legal tender to buy bitcoins is crazy... but perhaps crazy like a fox.  

Certainly not in the strict sense.  In the broad sense of "early adopters reap the rewards of later adopters' stupidity", only in the worst case scenario.

Put much more generally then, avoiding buzzwords like "pyramid scheme", the more active the Bitcoin economy becomes, the more Bitcoins are a "conventional" and "safe" investment.  The stability of a pure metacurrency is extremely hard to predict, because the demand is based on psychological whims that are entirely detached from the needs or wants of consumers (which are comparatively easy to predict).  Even if Bitcoin only gets a strong black-market economy, that would be enough.

Also, if you were going to accuse Bitcoin of being a "scheme", it would make more sense to call it a pyramid scheme than a Ponzi scheme.  A Ponzi scheme, as Ulysses says, promises to pay dividends on an investment.  A pyramid scheme makes an investment that can only be profitable to a few people seem like it can be profitable to many people - not guaranteeing a payout, but making an enormous risk seem quite small.

Both are based on the idea of an economic cycle as follows:
1) Put money in.
2)
3) Get more money out.

All investing looks like this, but with a Ponzi/pyramid scheme, there is absolutely nothing in the "" slot (while usually, for example, some product would be produced).  So if it were never possible to do anything with bitcoins except buy other currencies, it would start to resemble a pyramid scheme a bit.  Fortunately, this is not the case, even if there's not much you can do with it yet.

If you contribute to a distributed computing project like SETI@home or Folding@home, most of your donated CPU cycles will be "wasted" anyway - distributed computing projects like this are useful for computations that require a lot of brute force, and brute force approaches are always inefficient.  Only once in a blue moon will a contributor find a data point that is actually useful.  The choice is between doing a computation inefficiently, or not doing it at all.

So yes, if you mine, most of your cycles "go to waste", but the result of the computation as a whole is that Bitcoin is extremely secure.  The more people who mine, the more secure it is.

No thanks.  People can debate the ergonomics of mathematical notation till they're blue in the face, but I wish they'd stop pushing their pet dissents on people who spend their time doing actual math.

Woke up this morning and checked the markets.  "Oh", thought I, "it's still around $2.85.  Nice to know it's stabilized a bit."

And then I saw the 3.

This is just getting silly.

And now the Kuwaiti dinar is the last target.