I generally dislike marketing.  I mean, seriously, to the point where I don't tolerate logos in my home.  Sometimes it's even kind of comical; I can't explain to anyone why I replace the logo-buttons on designer jackets, or file them off and buff them smooth.  I don't watch TV because that means being exposed to commercials.  It's enough to just see billboards and crap when I'm driving - that's unavoidable, so I've come to live with it.  But I need to sit down and sort of put my head together right for fifteen minutes or so after a long drive, and it's mainly because of billboards.

I can't really explain that.  It happens on some visceral, very emotional level. 

But when I think about it, the only thing I really have a good reason to hate about marketing, the only thing justified about this whole phobia/quirk/whatever of mine, is because I really, really hate lies.  And much as it's associated in my mind and probably yours, I have to admit that not all marketing is lies.

If you couldn't use a pool, would you bother to mine a coin at all? 

Utopia is not something that is achievable. The world will never be perfect.

But we've achieved so many things that used to be considered the hallmarks of an impossible Utopia.  Do you realize that less than one person out of ten thousand dies of homicide now? Less than one out of fifteen hundred of starvation?  Nearly all of our children survive to adulthood! That's incredible!  Or at least it would have been back when the word was coined. 

If you'd told Thomas Moore that we'd come this far, he'd have declared it impossible and dismissed you as a dreamer.  He'd have said it was impossible, for reasons of economics and human nature, and according to all that was known of economics and human nature at the time, there'd be no reason to say otherwise. 

Who knows what dreams may become possible -- or be achieved -- in the next few hundred years?

That ... is actually a really good idea.  If you can get the MAC interface address from Apple or somebody, that's built directly into the network hardware of the machine.  And on Macbooks, you can't change the network hardware out, because it's built straight onto the motherboard.  So if there's a macbook somewhere on the network that's using that MAC interface, then it's the one. 

Problem with that is, if it's on the network, that means it's IN USE, presumably has been for three and a half years, and the odds are whatever was on its hard drive has been cleared out to make room for somebody's porno collection.

This is about a one-in-five for finding your macbook, which is better than I'd have ever guessed you could do.  But it's still less than one-in-a-thousand for getting your bitcoins back.

I agree with you, it's really hard.  I know that it is.  But, I think a database is overkill here. 

The set of things a wallet needs to keep track of is actually fairly simple.  And the append-only Pattern is a good robust way of achieving it, and far simpler (less prone to error) than a full database.  With a database, you complicate matters immensely by indexing and putting data in the middle of other data. 

The only thing that goes beyond the bare capabilities of a filesystem here is multithreaded access.  You really don't want to lock on something as slow as file access, but you absolutely cannot let multiple threads have write access at once.   But you don't need a full-on database to solve that problem.

What you need is a 'listener' that launches threads that can talk to application threads trying to do a transaction, and reports them back to the listener.  The listener would keep track of multiple requests from multiple children, but it would have sole (serial) access to write, flush buffer, read back to make sure it happened correctly, and notify whichever child process that handed it that transaction of whether it did or not.  The listener (and its child threads) should never see the plaintext of a privkey, so the security requirements are manageable. 

True.  He's at risk from thieves and extortionists, certainly.  Probably not assassins. 

Yes, but if this man is the real Satoshi, it would still be quite simple for the real Satoshi to come out and make an anonymous statement (signed tx) that it is not him.

Who would believe?

I think that it needs a technology fix.  Especially for entities like exchanges that are supposed to have 100% reserve. 

If you're entrusting someone with your money, as opposed to paying them, then you have a right to expect that they will have that money until you ask for it back.  Well, we have a blockchain.  We ought to be able to prove how much someone has at any moment, provided they publish evidence that they control the coins.  People who entrusted money to them ought to be able to prove that the total amount entrusted to them (and not yet withdrawn or spent) matches the amount they still have. 

It's completely do-able, while maintaining financial privacy for the investors. 

Holy crap, not just for Bitcoin, either.  Think about *ALL* the insolvent banks and the funny business that was going on for years before the crash.  Imagine that those had been detected one day after they started rather than getting worse for years before discovered.

So, a quick google search later, we get....  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10680492/Has-Bitcoin-creator-Satoshi-Nakamoto-been-found.html

If Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto is in fact the man behind the original code, then he's not who I thought it was.  There is at least one other person who had the time, skills, and motivation to have done it, and I don't see any specifically crypto background for this guy.  OTOH, being both the son of a Buddhist priest and someone who's worked in the defense industry would explain certain aspects of our "Satoshi's" personality.  Karma's a bitch, as they say.

I can't claim that it isn't him, but I sure as heck wouldn't take it at face value that he is, either.  

The good news is that our Satoshi hasn't done anything overtly asshole with his money or power, and he's stayed out of the public eye, so the odds of a random assassin going after this Satoshi are actually fairly slim.  

Did I  miss a news story?  Whom are we talking about here?

Wow.  I remember asking the very same thing about Satoshi himself.

Just sayin, if you can get people to wonder about that you're in illustrious company.

Oh, good.  I hadn't seen the db utilities. 

I had been thinking that what I build from source wouldn't be able to use my existing wallet, and downloading the prebuilt binaries instead for that reason.

Thank you for pointing that one out. 

But, trivial conversions or not, it's still only what's available this month.  Or this year. 

And the next version and the next, and the next.  It's just bad practice to rely on an external utility whose save format changes unpredictably when we're talking about taking care that people's money remains available to them.

I don't like places where people are shooting at each other a lot.  I've lived there.  I have had to draw and fire weapons in order to defend myself and I didn't like it one bit.  I am entirely happy to hire others to help me with my self-defense, and even if I don't completely abdicate the job, I appreciate *NOT* having to carry one of my guns everywhere I go anymore.  That's what the cops are for, and seriously, I would not choose to again live in a heavily populated place without them.

Seriously, the US has a sweet deal going; legal to own and carry, and virtually nobody does.  That's the most awesome combination in the world.  Without a strong presence of mostly non-corrupt police, it's pretty much impossible.  

eh.  It's a build requirement that's getting hard to satisfy.  I thought I'd point it out.

Berkeley Database 4.8 isn't even available any more from "current" sources (package managers, etc).  It's been obsoleted and replaced.  Debian is even moving away from bdb all together and will soon cease to have *any* bdb package.

Yet Bitcoind relies on it for a format for a portable wallet.

This wallet is only "portable" for as long as bdb4.8 is available; it's already impossible to build a client that takes a standard wallet without hunting through archives for dusty old code.

We can migrate to the new version (5.3) - I can build that, easily.  But I probably won't be able to build it two years from now.

Or we can have the bitcoin source take charge of its own wallet format and nail it down to eliminate a dependency.

It's very easy to prove the amount of the transaction if Alice uses a check.  Not only is the amount visible in her statement from the bank but there's also a record of which account holder cashed or deposited it.

It breaks the hell out of the anonymous transactions idea,but that was a given the minute you wanted a fiat transaction with any serious guarantee.

What you get in fiat is game theory for anonymous transactions and law,courts, etc for anything stronger than that.

There is one idea we haven't talked about yet.   Registered mail through the postal service.  When Alice sends her money to Bob,she sends it via registered mail. Bob has to sign for it or he doesn't get it.  And if he signs for it that makes him obligated to carry out his end of the deal or Alice can take him to court.

The thing about dealing in fiat is that in that part of the deal, recourse means recourse to the court and justice system.  Cash doesn't have protocol and executable semantics behind it. That makes it impossible to get a fool proof transaction with it.  People do okay most of the time and when they try to screw each other over,that's why the law is and has to be part of the system that includes cash.

You can't make a deal involving cash without recourse to the legal system. The best you can do is to make sure there is evidence to take there.

Conversely if Alice tries to blackmail Bob, the protocol can make sure that there is evidence of that too.

The law works given a chance. Just make sure it has something to work with and soured transactions will be at least as scarce as they are in traditional business, for the same reasons.

The only fundamental change required would be adding one scripting language instruction that loads the block height as of the time of the spend onto the stack.

Nope.  People are generally okay, but they aren't sufficiently confident in the benevolence of others to extend the necessary degree of cooperation with others in a situation where the other may do damage or make their own contribution worthless.  I wantcommitments from people if I'm going to trust them to cooperate, and without some way to get and enforce long term commitments,  there's not much point in putting any real resources into the public good.  That may not always mean government. But government is what we have now.   A good replacement for it will still require public planning and law enforcement.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are new. We've committed to a set of rules about what are legitimate transactions and allowed technology to enforce those rules on ourselves.  But we can still get Goxed, even with everybody following those rules.

We need at least some rules that we can't commit to using just technology. We have to hire some kind of guardian just to enforce the rule about most people being uncoerced most of the time.  And the hell of that is the job can only be done BY coercion of those who would otherwise freely choose to point guns at someone and demand sexual favors on pain of death for refusing. T

Dunno 'bout y'all, but that is exactly why I (or we collectively) hired those employees. 

We don't have a problem until they forget who they're working for.