Decentralization of exchanges will make it effectively impossible to prevent exchange into anything…no bank accounts even necessary.  But, government could declare it illegal to exchange it for good or services, fiat included.  That would mean that only people and businesses willing to ignore such a law would continue to deal with Bitcoin.  But such a move would would ultimately weaken government.  Hence I doubt outright banning of Bitcoin is the path they will take.  They will try to marginalize it or even co-opt it through various means (regulations, four horsemen, embrace and extend, etc).

I also believe that Bitcoin is protected by the free speech provisions in the US constitution's 1st amendment.  So, while laws could be passed, the US government's own constitution makes such laws invalid.  And, regardless of any law or constitution on this planet, no person has any right to deem Bitcoin, or the use of it in trade, illegal or to persecute those that voluntarily choose to use it.

The problem above was fixed in the bitpay plugin.  In fact, the lines of code involved in the error have since changed.  The problem you describe could be many things.  Do you have any other details about the problem?  Log messages or anything?

I believe the only extra work required by miners is that they broadcast blocks that meet the minor block difficulty requirement.  The announced minor blocks only need to build on the last major block (they don't need to build on each other).  Not all of the network will care about minor blocks, but people that want to get a good indicator of the risk associated with accepting a block after a few seconds will care.  The key to this working will be that virtually all miners on the network support it.  If only 10% of the miners support it, then a minor block is not a very good indicator of whether the overall mining network will ultimately validate a given transaction.  This will very likely be a good revenue source for miners…they could charge a fee for notifications of these minor block when they're found.  Other services could aggregate these notifications, charging subscriber fees and passing a portion along to the miners.  The aggregators would provide a single source for these minor block notifications for people that needed a good, fast, reliable transaction risk assessment.  The aggregators would advertise that they represent 87.45% of the bitcoin mining network or some such.  Miners would certainly take advantage as it's an additional revenue opportunity for them.

This is a great idea.  When I think about it, I'm reminded of approaches that mitigate the risk of a 0 confirmation transaction…they basically listen to their peers and if a high degree of peers are reporting that a transaction is valid, then you assume that the risk associated with that transaction is lower…however, that solution treats every node as equal regardless of how much or little mining power might be behind it.  As Casascius points out, p2pool works very much like this…it would be great to continue this line of thinking and get miners (and the pools) to start announcing such "minor blocks" …these don't have to be retained by anyone after a few major blocks have been found…and not every node needs to listen for them or propagate them, but it's a great solution for accepting low value transactions after a few seconds.  *If* the overwhelming majority of mining power on the network supported this, then you would have a much better indicator after just a few seconds regarding the risk of accepting a transaction.  More analysis would be needed, but I'd say it's very likely that the economics are such that for transactions of as much as $100, you could be very safe accepting a transaction after 10 seconds…and for $1000 to $10000, a minute or two would probably push the risk into the realm of insignificance (particularly if it's a transaction between parties that have just a small amount of trust or recourse).

The bitcoin URI specifies the following query parameters:

  label: Label for that address (e.g. name of receiver)
  address: bitcoin address
  message: message that shown to the user after scanning the QR code
  size: amount of base bitcoin units (see below)
  send: used to send bitcoin, rather than to request them

It would be nice to add another parameter called singleUse (or something shorter) to indicate to the wallet that the bitcoin address should not be retained for future use.  At bitpay we see a few cases where people accidentally send coins to an old address…it would be nice if the addresses we present aren't retained in the senders wallet to prevent this from occurring.  It would also be nice if wallets didn't automatically remember any address unless explicitly requested.

You don't have to reproduce motions precisely to yield a consistent input…think of it like typing letters on a keyboard…you don't have to hit them squarely in the middle every time to produce the desired letter.  You then take the input, hash it with some other data (provided by the software or website) to yield a password of sorts (like passwordmaker.org).  Of course, it could also be used to decrypt a private key and sign a transaction. 

I just think it would be cool to be able to wave your hands in the air in a certain, repeatable pattern to sign a transaction. 

Thought this would be of interest to people here…
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133067-unbreakable-crypto-store-a-30-character-password-in-your-brains-subconscious-memory

there are probably many other kinds of patterns that the brain would be good at learning…these 3d gesture input devices come to mind (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428350/the-most-important-new-technology-since-the-smart/) …I can imagine an disconnected device that reads your gesture input, hashes it with a domain name and userid and yields a long password for use in authenticating… the software or website could communicate the the domain/username to the device and the device could communicate the secure, generated password back to the site…that would be the only communication the device was capable of once initialized.

It's really not so much a bounce back as it is one guy deciding to jump off a cliff and nobody following.

Just one problem…it depends on being able to gin up panic in a short amount of time and inducing people to act on it…the risk is that you end up taking out a lot of the buy side of the over book, but the asks don't fill in behind you…and if you're one of the lucky ones that happened to buy right as the selling was abating for a $1 discount, you'll find it rather easy to flip that into a $1 profit because people still need to buy bitcoins.  Same dynamic works in the opposite direction as well.

Whoever it was that was selling was probably just doing it for the lulz rather than to actually make money.

Uhhh…isn't that exactly what happened last night???  It appears to me like there were right around 100k coins dumped in the span of a few minutes.

A few days ago someone entered the market with some strong buying…maybe it's the same person that was selling…they could have been trying to get the market running in order to profit from some weak buyers paying up for coins.

I don't think you realize just how non-anonymous the current bitcoin client really is.  Most people would prefer that the amount of coins under their control not be so easily discerned from the block chain.  Do you walk around wearing a shirt that announces your net worth to everyone?  It has nothing to do with people engaged in what some may consider bad behavior.

Great idea…I like the train of thought.


I think you could mitigate this risk by simply altering some rules in the client regarding connection diversity and churning connections to ensure you're never connected to a single node for an excessive amount of time.  Also, I don't think the proposal was to broadcast these mix requests (like a normal transaction is relayed)…I think the proposal suggests to announce such requests to peers and in most cases they either act on it or not, but wouldn't relay the request.  In some cases they would relay requests to improve privacy.

Why would you think that people are only interested in what Bitcoin is worth compared to USD?  Nobody is really interested in that except as a convenient way of conceptualizing the purchasing power of Bitcoin.

I don't see how Bitcoinica would have any effect one way or the other except in short time spans.  And I don't see how it would be biased in either the up or down direction.  Bitcoin just made leveraged trading in either direction easy.  If you think the price is too high right now…sell some bitcoins!  You don't need Bitcoinica to short Bitcoin.

I couldn't agree more and I'm glad you're posting this to the forum.  I've been reluctant to talk about the advantages of your pricing model simply because I know it's a big advantage you have over other exchanges and I didn't think you'd appreciate it if others copied what you're doing in that area.

Over a sufficiently long time period, the right price for bitcoin will be discovered, but in shorter time frames, I think you're exactly right.  Charging fees for both the provider and taker puts an upward bias in the market and could spark speculative run ups.  I personally think there are other and better explanations for the current run up, but it's a good point none the less.  The liquidity rebate also provides incentives for people to add to the order book if they don't need to execute a trade immediately and that helps the overall liquidity and stability of the market.

I'm not sure if this has been reported before, but I'm unable to connect to the bitfloor feed using Safari on a Mac.  However, it works fine with Chrome.  The mtgox data works just fine on Safari.

I think the moral issues don't stem from the practice of lending money itself.  I don't see any issue with that (and there are good arguments already in this thread of why it's in fact essential to an economy).  The moral issues are related to what you allow as collateral for a debt and what happens in the event someone is unable to repay a debt.  For example, I'd argue that it's immoral to allow a person to be enslaved when they cannot repay a debt.  Few people would probably disagree…however, the question of what constitutes enslavement is not so straightforward.  Lenders will just have to factor into their risk model that they cannot turn someone into a slave in the event they don't repay their debt.

I think I'm most excited about the $150 jalapeño.  There's been a lot of concern that GPUs changed mining from being something anyone can easily do, to something only for people willing to spend a lot of time and money.  While the jalapeño doesn't fully restore the accessibility of CPU mining, an efficient plug and play device for $150 comes about as close as you can get.  Anyone that has an interest in bitcoin and would like to help secure the network will soon have an option with a very low barrier to entry.

Ironically, some miners were commenting that they had to buy back some of the bitcoins they'd only recently sold to place their BFL orders.

LOL…I think people underestimate how important this will prove to be in Bitcoin's success.  As Bitcoin's price grinds higher, it's going to become very difficult for people to ignore.