He ran into trouble with the bitcoin limit question.  Someone needs to give him the primer on how the limit really works.

Just in case he googles himself and finds this page, I'll give the very short version:  The limit is enforced by everyone.  Coins are created by the mining process, and any attempt to create coins beyond the limits accepted by the network will be rejected as invalid.

Or maybe he just got lucky.

I suffered through a couple of his books.  I can assure you that this was indeed the smartest thing he ever said.

People that have never seen a bubble up close can really learn a lot by reading first hand accounts.

That said, the real question is this:  Are we in a bubble, or an adoption curve, or both?

Personally, I think both.  I think that the current exchange rates have a good chance of falling rapidly in the near-ish future, making this month a bubble of sorts.

On the other hand, it is getting harder and harder to imagine bitcoin not taking off and becoming the main settlement system of the world.  We are all over the damn newspapers, we are on TV, everyone is hearing about it now.  I'm nobody, and yet I've been contacted by a couple of reporters.

The dot com bubble was indeed a crazy time.  But it is easy to overlook that before it happened, no one knew what the internet was.  After it was all over, no one didn't know what it was.

Force?  Freedom?

You are looking at the product of real freedom.  No one can force you to change your node's rules against your will.  That is freedom, but it goes both ways.  You likewise can't force anyone else to change their rules, and neither can anyone else.

Virtually everyone involved in bitcoin actually likes the current rules.  If we didn't, we wouldn't be here.  We don't believe that different rules will be any better, and no one can force us to follow rules that we don't like.  A couple billion dollars isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is still a couple billion more than the closest competing ruleset, and the spread is increasing by leaps and bounds daily.

I hope they do.  That would be absolutely the best possible thing to happen to bitcoin.  Let's all hope that the central bankers aren't familiar with the adventures of Br'er Rabbit.

These incidents were what caused me to get serious about using different random passwords for every site.  Bitcoin has no undo button, and there is no one that you can go to for help if you get screwed.  Secure password management practices were always a good idea, but in the bitcoin world, they are absolutely necessary.

There still is no concept of a from: address in the bitcoin system.  People show up here nearly every day hoping to pretend that there is, but there isn't.  A quick search should reveal dozens, if not hundreds, of threads on that subject.

What is so hard about asking the user for an address that they know that they can use for signing?  Surely you already have to collect some information from the user, what is wrong with also collecting a bit of text at the same time?

Absolutely do not ever use inkjets for anything that you want to last  The only exception is when you can provide stable storage at a cost greater than the value of the printout.

Long term wallets should always be laser printed.  Laser printers work by melting tiny plastic beads onto the surface of the paper.  Laser printed documents can survive water, provided they are not pulped by excessive time or motion.  They can also survive fire, if protected by an ablative fire safe.  Pretty much any normal modern office paper should survive well beyond your lifetime without any heroic measures.

 
Let me stop you right there.  Around these forums, you can hardly swing a cat without someone arguing their own personal definitions.  It doesn't help that money is a strange and complicated subject, where no definitions seem to actually fit reality.

Currency is "that which circulates".  A commodity is a fungible thing.  An investment is something that you have a rational basis for thinking that will increase in value or provide a productive return.

Bitcoin is all of those things.  The only way to claim that bitcoin is NOT a currency is to get into a quibble about fractions.  I have a jar of pennies.  They don't circulate.  I haven't seen figures, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most pennies are similarly in jars instead of pockets.  Is a penny not currency because not enough of them move?

The truth is that there are no fixed values.  There is no frame of reference.  The world is a sea of floating relative values.  This includes all forms of money.  The dollar is stable because the dollar market is friggin huge.  The bitcoin market is volatile because it is small.  Volatility isn't a weakness of bitcoin, it is the natural consequence of smallness.

There is no From: address in bitcoin.  Never has been, never will be.  Have them get an address from their wallet, submit it on the order form.  In your database, attach their chosen address to a payment address that you create.  Once the payment comes in, ignore where it came from.

After that, the challenge/response using bitcoin signatures scheme on a random cookie is very secure.  You just need to get the signing address out of band.

Basically, no.  The only reason to change away from the current ECDSA math would be if there was a dramatic cryptographic break, which is very unlikely to happen.  And if it did, the response would most likely be to add a new signature type, not to invalidate the old ones.

The difficulty adjustment system is symmetrical, and this is for a reason.  Any asymmetry introduced would become a tool to manipulate difficulty.

Seriously guys, you need to take a deep breath and try really hard not to panic about everything.  Bitcoin is still small, it still has several problems related to smallness.  They will work themselves out over time as we grow.  Don't go off half cocked, proposing permanent bad ideas to counter temporary threats.  Losing a big chunk of hashing power is possible today, but won't be tomorrow.

The atomicity of the satoshi is an accident of history, it comes from the current precision of the network.  It is not a constant fixed for all time, but bitcoin is.  When (or if) we switch to 128 bits, there will be a new atomic unit, but the bitcoin won't change.

The timestamp is created before the block is hashed, and only needs to fit within a broad window to be valid.  The timestamps are not required to increase from one block to the next.

P.S.  Please search next time.  There is no prize for starting the 1,000th thread on a common topic.

Stable values are expensive.  Come back with a trillion dollars or so, run the price up, and it will be stable.

Typically, very few of those are actually confirmable.

What makes you think that this procedure returns the current difficulty?  The page says pretty clearly that it returns the average number of hashes required to solve a block.

Or are you just forgetting to divide by 2³² to convert hashes to difficulty?

~21 million BTC
~300 million citizens

Sure...

pywallet