P2SH multisig will do it.

The subsidy started at 5,000,000,000 satoshis.  Every 210,000 blocks, that subsidy gets halved.  Note that the actual "halving" operation is "right shift without carry" on an integer register holding the exact satoshi value.  The total number of potential bitcoins is simply the sum of the sequence of subsidies.  B_tot=((210000*(5e9>>0))+(210000*(5e9>>1)+...(210000*(5e9>>x)))/100000000 as x goes to infinity.

We will never reach the maximum for two reasons.  One, there is no requirement that the subsidy claimed be equal to the maximum subsidy allowed, only that it not be greater.  Two, at least two generate transactions are identical, and thus have identical hashes, and thus at least one cannot be spent.

Awesome!

To be honest, I didn't look up the old posts, and so I didn't recognize your name.  A bunch of people have posted similar things over the years, none of which seemed to be aware of the work you'd already done.  Very happy to see that this is from you, and not from yet another noob that was unwilling to search.

It doesn't matter a whole lot.  You will want to avoid ports that people might be using for other things.  Most things based on the bitcoin source use two sequential ports, so you may want to go up by at least 2, and change both.

The server mentioned is the RPC server that lets you interact with the daemon.

9031 is just the default port.  You can change it, and probably should.  The rpcport option in the config file or on the command line will override your default port either way.

Either 40 or 41 will give an initial character of H.

As long as the maintainers are responding in reasonable times, I'd keep things private.  The full disclosure movement arose because certain vendors were collecting private flaw reports, but then not fixing them.  Going to full public release was a way to force their hand and make them fix things promptly.

Other people see things differently, of course, but if it were me, I'd stick with private communication until that stops working.

Heh.  When pasting things with superscripts, it is very helpful to fix them.  Counting to 2192 is trivial.  Counting to 2¹⁹² is not.

Saving gives it value, not transacting.  This is true of all money, despite the nonsense that you hear about oil propping up dollars.

Bitcoin has value because people want to hold it.

Consider a random guy that hears about bitcoin, doesn't know anything about it, but decides to accept them as payment at his store.  He picks a service that accepts bitcoins for him and converts them into dollars to be deposited into his normal bank account.  This guy isn't directly propping up the value of bitcoins, because he isn't holding them.  The bitcoins that come to him are ferried off to an exchange, where they are sold to someone that wants to be holding bitcoins at that moment.  That guy with dollars (or whatever) on the exchange is directly propping up the value, because he is putting his actual wealth on the line to hold bitcoins.

Now, the guy with the store is helping indirectly, because the guy holding bitcoins is holding them because he expects that people transacting with them will be around in the future, and every vendor that accepts them increases the expectation of future value.

The exact same thing is true about the dollar.  FOREX markets are huge, liquid, and efficient, at least for big players.  No one is holding a currency against their will.  No one is holding dollars because they "need them to buy oil".  When they need to buy oil, it takes a couple of milliseconds to purchase the dollars they need, and has essentially zero transaction cost.  And the seller isn't stuck holding dollars either, because they can dump them in less time than it takes for your monitor to refresh.

Currency value comes from, and only from, the desire to hold that currency relative to other assets.

If you are interested in how it works, I encourage you to find a library that does that multiplication in your language and look through it.  There are also tutorials on the internet for EC math.  Keep in mind that a decent library will use an optimized implementation and be incomprehensible, at first.

When I started learning about this stuff, I read through some tutorials and did some examples, then I looked under the covers of the library I was using, and nothing made any sense.  It took a while to figure out how the thing worked, and to really understand that it was doing the same thing.

My point was that you can use the stuff without a complete understanding of what happens under the covers.

Every 256 bit number is a private key.  The ones outside the range you mentioned are weak and should not be used, but they are still valid.  You can use any process at all to create your private key.  Random numbers are the safest.

The equation for the public key is simply this  P = G * k

The catch is that * in that equation is elliptic curve multiply, and not the normal real number multiply you learned in school.  Unless you have a pretty solid background in either programming or discrete math, that * is going to be a black box to you.

Most people aren't aware that elliptic curve algorithms, in general, require about twice as many bits of keyspace as their security level.    The wikipedia article on key size provides a half-decent introduction to the topic.

Security is measured in effective key length, which really boils down to "how many operations are needed to break this?".  It is the key size of an ideal system that can only be brute forced, but provides the same level of security.

Most symmetric systems have effective key sizes equal to (or nearly equal to) their actual key size.  For example, AES uses 128 bit keys, and provides 128 bits of effective key size.*

Public key systems, however, suck in that regard.  Algorithms based on prime factors require keys at least 16 times as large for the same security level.  Think 2048 bits of keyspace for 128 bits of security.  ECDSA looks a lot better by comparison, only needing twice as many key bits.

*  Two interesting things to note.  First, 2¹²⁸ is WAY beyond our ability to break, and will remain that way for a long time.  Second, AES was designed with quantum attacks in mind.  You should be using the 256 bit extension of AES if you think that someone might actually figure out how to build a machine that can run Grover's algorithm and a reversible single circuit version of the AES transform.  This is because Grover's reduces the effective key size by half, which is the same thing as taking the square root of the key space.

What "fundamentals" do you mean?  Bitcoin is either an interesting, but forgettable experiment (value ~=0) or the future of all settlement (value ~=millions or more).  Expanding option 2 from settlement to payment could very easily kick the value up to billions.

People saving their coins are making a bet on the higher future value.  In doing so, they are both stabilizing and increasing the present value.  They are working towards the goal you say you want, and they are putting their own personal wealth at great risk to do so.

Just out of curiosity, is your scheme better, or at least different, from the several other schemes that have been posted over the years to "solve" this "problem" ?

I was about halfway through your post when I realized that you weren't actually saying anything.  Safe to say that "philosopher" under your name is an actual academic thing, and not just a self assessment?

Heh.  I should report this to Language Log.  I doubt that they've seen this particular false etymology before.  Current is "that which circulates".  The exact same word also applies to rivers, circuits, etc.  It has nothing to do with time.

The truth is that nothing is fixed or reliable.  Not the dollar, not the euro, not gold, not silver, nothing.

I've seen this stability nonsense pop up a lot lately.  Surely there aren't that many people in the world that think that the dollar is a fundamental constant of the universe?

The simple concept that seems to escape people is that when the exchange rate is higher, each dollar (or whatever) has a smaller effect on the market than the same dollar (or whatever) when the rate is lower.

At an exchange rate of $1000 to 1 BTC, bitcoin will be 100 times harder to push around than it was at $10.  Stability comes from size.  Size comes from adoption.

You can wish for stability without size, but your unicorn will show up sooner.  If you really want stability, you should be trying to find ways to increase adoption, which will lead to bigger swings in the short term while the price rises to a level capable of supporting more users.

Wow, what an incredibly stupid question.  The only thing dumber than that question is the collection of answers given.

All money's value derives solely from the belief that others will want to use it for trade.  That's kinda what money is.  In historic times, there was regression, where unlimited demand for something made that something useful as money because of a belief that it could be dumped into a waiting buyer in exchange for something else of value.

But we've gone way past that now.  Our money is nonsense.  There is no entity (or group) willing to accept it in unlimited quantities in exchange for something of value, there is just a great mob where each person uses it because everyone else uses it.  That is the essence of our modern money system.  It is, therefore it is.  And it works.  It isn't "backed" by anything, and yet, anyone can use it to obtain anything.

Bitcoin is exactly the same thing.  It is nonsense, shared by a crowd.  It works because it works, and for no other reason.

The dollar's value fluctuates over time, and yet people dont stop using it.  Hell, the value has declined by like 99% over the last century or so, and we still use it.

The value of everything fluctuates, all the time.  Bigger markets, like the dollar, tend to fluctuate more slowly, because they are big, not because they are magic.  Smaller markets, like bitcoin, tend to fluctuate more quickly, because they are small (and thus easier to move), not because they are flawed in some way.

All you can do is hope that a miner takes pity on your transaction and includes it.  Or, you can offline your wallet, delete the transaction, wait until the rest of the network has forgotten it, then pop back up and use the rawtransaction API to redeem that input (with some others) back to your wallet.

That was generated by searching for ASCII strings in the block files a while back.

Embedding text in transactions and coinbases is possible, but not easy, not easy to view, not cheap and not encouraged.

Can't have one without the other.