The issue I illuded to is that these things may take resources away from considering core network and scaling issues and implementing solutions to them.

So, I reinterate my point.



I would actually prefer avoiding buying new machines every year just to donate support to the Bitcoin project.  Currently I am able to support Bitcoin with a network connection that I already have, and with a spare machine which was modern about a decade ago (and uses just a few watts of power.)  I like that.

The question is how long it will be before people who have a minor interest in supporting the system will no longer to be able to practically do so.  To some extent it depends on the growth in use of the system, but to another huge extent, it depends on the focus that the development team puts into the scaling issues that are going to be popping up.

I feel that we could already be well beyond the point of implosion had Satoshi not carefully considered some of these issues, and had not the current development team continued to consider them.  I have a lot of respect for both for this reason.  I only suggest that the current (and future) teams not lose touch with this aspect of the development of the system.

I ran across some comment somewhere that there will be some 'optimization' on start-up.  Probably it is this, and it would be easier to implement than an optimization thread so that seems likely.

I very rarely re-start bitcoind.  My goal with this (and many other things) is to re-start a process maybe yearly unless I want to compile a newer binary or something.

I broke down and logged into my machine and looked just now.  I have 4G in .bitcoin/databases/* but they are apparently log files which are, presumably, dispensable on a dedicated appliance.

.bitcoin/blk0001.dat is about 750M and blkindex.dat is about 300M.  I agree that this is remarkably good, but I also feel that the economy is .0001% of what it coulda/shoulda been and hopefully will be.

The reason for my imploring of the development team to keep some measure of focus on remaining vigilant about efficiency is that I have seen far to many development efforts forget about scaling issues in a mad dash toward some other more immediate goal (like wallet encryption or some pretty GUI fr'instance.)

I've never run anything but bitcoind and I in fact run it on my firewall/router.

You did not read the entire thread.  My request of the developers is that they put some focus on addressing such things as disk space utilization before they become an issue.  I'll add to that the hope that the CPU and memory requirements remain as light as practical.

I am building tiny appliances which are inexpensive to buy and operate and hope that they remain effective as full bitcoin clients.  (In fact, my end goal is to put some FPGA mining cards in them, but it is unlikely that I will get to that point.)

Ya, so what?  If BTC not a commodity, who cares what the value is?  If the value is to lower, just use more for transactions (which is, in my opinion, the only thing a 'currency' is good for.)  I'm all for using BTC as a currency and will do so whenever it makes economic sense to do so.

I actually potentially dis-agree.  If a worthwhile system needs merely a couple thousand generous benefactors, it is entirely likely that they will be reliable (given the size of the worlds population.)  I suspect that this will be a more reliable construct than relying on people trying to make a profit since they will vanish as soon as the motive is gone, or as soon as they are offered a bigger profit for actively damaging the system.

Again, I request that the developers put some focus on making it practical and desirable for folks like myself to attempt to provide resource support.

Can you (or anyone) provide the best evidence available about Satoshi's feelings about how the invention should and should not be used?

I hear a lot of people declaring one viewpoint or another, but rarely with anything authoritative backing them up.

I run one because it is the only worthwhile contribution to the network that I can easily make at this time (other than trying to soak up some of the currency inflation.)

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BTW, I am making a bunch of very low power machines (several watts) which I hope to be viable full nodes, and could reasonably remain operational on solar/battery for a long time, and potentially on long distance wifi.

I bought some 6G microdrives to serve as the data storage for these hosts.  Just recently I looked at the node I run on my router and was alarmed to see the data size much bigger than I expected (at around 4G iirc...I'll do more analysis later, but my initial impression was that the block chain would be less size at this time.)  I do hope that the development team puts some focus on keeping things tight and efficient so that it is realistic to help support the network with minimal hardware.

I'm hopeful that you and other exchanges will be able to operate profitably under this regime...or simply willing to do so.

It would be hard for me to believe that you could have gotten an exchange service operating without having first recognized the kernel of truth enunciated by MysteryMiner in the preceding discussion entry.

Like I've said on several occasions, though, an exchange could probably make a temporary killing by gathering BTC/Funds from people who will end up being unwilling to incur the risk of coming back for them.  Nebulous and/or non-published terms of service seem to be the norm for Bitcoin related enterprises, so you could probably get away with stating that uncollected assets will be liquidated after arbitrary periods of time.

BTW, does this thread not belong in the economics -> trading discussions bin?

While it is not right to say someone is an idiot for being the victim of a crime, it is, unfortunately, more often the case than not that they were a victim because they are an idiot.  Or more charitably, made some mistakes which in hindsight (and foresight to some) were fairly obviously mistakes.

I've got nothing to report.  As far as I'm concerned, having enough BTC stolen to worry about it means one is borderline retarded from the standpoint of understanding computers and financial matters, or it means that one is just lazy.  But most people are borderline retarded in some combination of these areas which is why I don't think that most people should mess around with Bitcoin at this time.

On the other hand, a lot of the thefts are probably pretty easy to solve with appropriate forensics.  A thief would have to be both a computer and financial genius to get away with things (and cash out) if anyone were paying attention.  What I think would be fantastic would be if sometime before the statute of limitations is up, it becomes a really big deal to steal Bitcoin and very significant punishment is dished out.  It would be very satisfying to me if 'Tom Williams' found himself in one of Canada's most unpleasant prisons because he got a little greedy and hurried trying to cash out to early.  And after having gone through a period of thinking he got away with it.

No it wouldn't.  Someone who was smart enough to be in the game (rather than just sitting on the sidelines spewing nonsense) would become $1M richer.

Stand aside sprouts...the big kids are playing.

Bigger'n shit!

Anyone who thinks that the price is going down some more and wants to bail might be advised to hammer on it while it's there.

I'm in the 'big looser' camp having doubled down on several big dives and never having sold a single BTC.  At the end of the day, however, I made up my mind from a fundamental foundation that I wanted secret keys which represent a positive value in the Satoshi block chain and see nothing (yet) to change the reasons for desiring this.  So the fall in value has been a real benefit to me.

I've got nothing but admiration for people who have been clever enough to have made money on the way down...and nothing but distain for people who falsely claim to have done so knowing that nobody can cross-check.   I suspect that a majority of the loud mouths here are in the latter category.

It would not surprise me greatly if regulators decided to try to group Bitcoin with other non-state-sponsored 'chips'.  Probably with some hope of eventually being able to manage it in some manner, and that might be vaguely practical if/when an 'internet passport' is required to legally send and receive TCP/IP packets.  At least having some legacy of demanding authority over the Bitcoin system would be more helpful than not.

Of more immediate interest is, if Bitcoin is deemed to be under quasi-legal status, whether the various thefts would be subject to more active official investigation and whether the thieves will be at all protected by ex-post-facto principles if so.

Seems to me that a fair amount of value from these thefts has probably passed through the exchanges which seem to be rapidly adapting to the standards of the financial world.  And most likely an even bigger value (or at least BTC count) probably reside under control of these exchanges.  I'll look forward with morbid fascination to how all of this evolves.

Just a heads-up/reminder for anyone interested in arbitrage.

Good (and unusual) opportunities to move funds the easy way with Tradehill holding notably above Mt. Gox for reasonable periods of time of late.  Probably only a handful of relatively smaller players could do it though such is the depth at Tradehill.

If he is the mythical 'manipulator', all I've got for him is a big 'thank you' for making BTC more available to more people after those who are interested have had more time to get set up to obtain them.

Da'man has made some awfully good calls, I will give him that.  It will be difficult to ignore his prognostications going forward.  Or will for me at least.

I've no idea, and doubt that more than a few people really do.  I'm planning to double down one more time if we get deep into the 1.xx range and have the ammo on-line to do so.  So I kinda hope that we do but will live either way.  I would feel much better about a rally if we do get well below the bottom at $2.04 from a month ago (even though I have little interest in or knowledge of technical analysis.)

I wonder what happens if you have sell orders in place.  Do you suppose that they leave the orders on the books and if/when the sales happen just pocket the money?

Mt. Gox, at least, seems to have both the ability to trace blocks of coin from one theft or another, and takes some interest in doing something about it.

I am guessing that the exchanges could do much better than 1% by extorting the criminals in the community, and it's arguable from both a legal and moral perspective whether there is much wrong with that.  Or it is to me at least.  This is a truly interesting eco-system we've got evolving here.