Update! Freenet is now accepting donations!  
http://freenetproject.org/donate.html to address http://blockexplorer.com/address/1966U1pjj15tLxPXZ19U48c99EJDkdXeqb
Start sending coins!

Toad has updated his flog: http://amphibian.dyndns.org/flogmirror/

I was thinking about this overnight, Wikileaks has in-house cryptology and security experts; they could do an audit on the Bitcoin security and we could donate bitcon to pay for it… scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
I don’t know about the feasibility, but on the surface it sounds like it would be beneficial to both wikileaks and bitcoin.

ah yes, 14c  atm.   the simple fact that there is more intrest and investors in the market, means that there is more money in the market.
Thus with speculation, grater amounts of money are required to move the market _signifnatly_ to a different price.

Bitcoin is very young; I expect to have high variance for a while.   But in the +/- 50% range or a little more... Without the speculation, we would be seeing a trading range of many orders of magnitude larger, say at a guess ( 50x to 200x value).

For a more rigorous explanation please read the seminal work by John F. Muth: "The Ration Expectation and the Theory of Price Movements"

http://www.pe.vwl.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/rees/sps_rees_ws10-11/sps_rees_muth.pdf

Without the speculation there would be no regulated or agreed price for bitcoins, therefore trading them would have MUCH MUCH more variance eg (+/- %5000)... The prices would range from nothing to whatever somebody could be conned into paying...

With speculation, bitcoins have a relatively constant value (+/- 50%) that represents the future usefulness of the coins.

and a link to that from the software, so that people whom miss it can find it easy.

I think that the simplest (short term) solution is to have a button or a dialogue that shows the how long it will take (on average) to generate a coin on via the client… this is just a 30min code job.  This will at least stop the disillusionment of newcomers.

Separating the processes into low security net code and high security wallet code in, my opinion is a very high priority.  This is a potentially very dangerous security flaw.

In the longer term, using Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key storage would be a good idea, particularly for laptops and other mobile devices.

Yeah, thanks heaps! I just sent 50 

Yes, I completely agree that 'only speculation’ is bad (for bitcoin becoming a big economy), because speculation in the long run tends to the real value of the market, nothing.  If bitcoins are not used for trading real goods, then they will not have any value.

However, speculation is the _mechanism _ that develops the real economy, it is analogous to venture capital in upstarts, it gets the cart moving.  Without it, there would be no (hopefully soon) profitable mtgox, and generation difficulty would be still around 1500, and finally nobody would buy bitcoins for their grandmother, as that in itself would be speculation.

So in short: encourage the speculation, the more of it, the more solid the foundations of the bitcoin economy will be.  The more speculation, the stronger and more resilient the market will become once it finds its feet, (price).  The resistance values will be much stronger and reliable, therefore, creating greater certainty with trade.

A recent thread about speculation has been hijacked by a troll.  So I decided to create another one. (Thread that is, not troll)


Speculation is indeed helping bitcoin more than is firstly obvious at first glance.

Firstly, the obvious one is that it is making bitcoins liquid, now that mtgox charges a fee; there is lots of incentive to develop and produce more competitive markets for bitcoin trading.  This will lower the barriers to obtaining and trading bitcoins, increasing demand, therefore value.

Secondary, bitcoin active speculation makes the bitcoin market much harder to be taken over covertly or single players; this has the benefit of spreading out bitcoins over a larger amount of people, therefor encouraging more common use.

Thirdly, the bitcoin speculation adds current value to the bitcoins, therefor greatly increasing the incentive to mine for more bitcoins; this can be seen with the dramatic increase of difficulty.  This increase in the bitcoin generation difficulty has directly has increased the security, therefore attractiveness, of bitcoin trades.

In each way outlined, speculation has indeed helped the bitcoin in becoming a useful cryptocurrency, in reality they are backing their own horse to win…  The best investment to make.

http://developer.wolframalpha.com/widgets/gallery/view.jsp?id=76444b3132fda0e2aca778051d776f1c

Little gadget that anyone can use... Hope it helps.

How does one calculate the average block generation time at any given difficulty factor?

Thanks in advanced.

do you need to have they client generating at the same time as the open-cl miner?

A quick question, I have had the miner running, if found a "found: 339339279, 26/10/2010 06:27"  however, the coins for that block haven't been added to my bit coin wallet...  Have I missed something, or is my wallet corrupt or something?

I have had non open-cl coins generated, maybe my node isn't announcing the newly found block, It dose say 8 connections..

I agree, the irrevocability of bitcoins make them great!  However, in my opinion, is a curse also, when trying to trade with revokable currencies.

For example:
If I was a musician, I could have a site that had a donate address.  I would, of course, accept bitcoins… But I could also accept xcoins.  I could wait for them to be either marked as fraud, or valid and trading them in for bitcoins. (And either way I’ll be better off)
It works the same as MtGox, however instead of locking up the coins for 30day, shops and other places that are willing to accept the risk (eg. Donations, or goods that get delivered in a longer time that the verification time, can be traded under good will with xcoins)…
Bitcoins are great; if we all traded them, then there would be no issue… However their needs to be some sort of interface between the retractable currencies, and the non-retractable.

Also I see no problem about traders needing to check the owner, and the issuer of an xcoin with attached value.  That works in a very free market and capitalistic way, where reputations are, indeed, very important.  The thing about it is that the liability is at worst the same, as MtGox going rouge and stealing all the bitcoins for itself for the transfers within the 30 days.

I have created a new thread, because (I think) I have stumbled across an elegant solution to one of the main issues with the bitcoin community, Visa, MasterCard, and other fraud.
The solution is xcoins:  the ultimate, untrusted currency.

Ok I have had a brainwave, Please bear with me. I’ll try and explain it neatly.

Ok, in my previous posts: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1467.0 I outlined my first idea of xcoins, the inverse version of bitcoins.
Simply put, they are the inverse, inflationary analogue to bitcoins. Please read the first two posts for background.

Since xcoins are inflationary, their value, if kept, (or deemed invalid), will always tend towards zero.
This property makes them useful for holding temporary value.

What I propose is that a one use xcoins as a way to hold the value of promised bitcions, until the transaction is deemed valid.
When a promised bitcoin transfer is made, instead of transferring the promised bitcoins, a value of xcoins is marked with the record of the promised bitcoins, and transferred to the 2rd party.  This second party can continue to sell and trade with other shops and services that accept the liability of xcoins marked by the promisor.  This allows the network to check that the bitcoins (promised) cannot be traded or double promised.
In the case that the promised transfer is found to be valid, the marked xcoins, (or the sub divisions of them), can be returned to the promisor to be traded for the bitcoins promised, (or the share of the bitcions promised).
However, in the case that the promised transfer is deemed invalid, the xcoins are marked in the network as invalid, and no bitcoins are awarded on their return.  This is the liability of accepting xcoins marked with bitcoin value.
If a seller has high confidence of the transaction, it can issue xcoins worth the same amount to the bitcoins promised, this allows 3rd partys to see the confidence the seller has…  While, the seller, is still able to retract the transaction if indeed invalid.

This system is dependent on the good name and reputation of the promisor.

There is no risk of giving away bitcoins that will be forever stolen.

What do you think? Would such a system work, would such a system even be moral?

EDIT: Changed a few things, now works better.

Transaction frees and the so-called XCoin's would be complimentary, transaction fees take a small proportion of the transfer, and give it to the next included block.  This gives incentives to anyone who supports the network, providing the network is being used.  However they are one off and cannot be independently traded…

On the other hand, since an infinite amount of work will be done, coupled with that work recently done is more important that work done in the past, (question: is this correct?)  People who support the network will generate xcoin also, that will be available for trade (the transaction fees also for xcoin, directly proportional to the rate of xcoin generation), enables a mature market to put a (inflationary, on purpose), value on the work done.

So I think that both will be good, transaction fees, certainly serve a purpose and have a baseline incentive, however xcoins can make a market out of it.
For example, banks will be able to claim their support of the market, by showing how many xcoin’s they have… this is much harder to do with just won block count or transaction fees.

Question, what do you think? Is such a system superfluous, or could it hold a real purpose?

Ok, I’m going to bite the bullet and explain what I have been thinking… To address, what I foresee as, a long-term weakness of the current bitcoin system.
Let me make this clear:
 “Monetary systems SHOULD be deflationary if the economy is growing.”
Now that is out of the way.  

I want to introduce a new coin.  I’ll call it an XCoin (or whatever), unlike bitcoins there is an infinite number of XCoins.  XCoin is the inverse brother to BitCoin.  For every block that is discovered, a XCoin is discovered.  Every time the rate of Bitcoins generated is halved, the number of XCoins generated per block is doubled. XCoins are very inflationary.
In 40 to 50 years the generation of bitcoins is going to become so slow, that compared to the entire worth of the currency, it is no longer going to be worth working hard for any coins.  Instead there needs to be other reasons to work for the next block... say, keeping the system alive and secure.  Currently there is no way to trade work done for the system (itself), this is what the XCoin dose, it allows people to both trade bitcoins, (that are deflationary) and xcoins (that are inflationary).  Because xcoins are inflationary, there is always going to be a preferred way of getting them… that is to generate more of them.
BitBanks, and investors, and everyone else can trade bitcoins can use xcoins to tell that who supports the bitcoin network.  This gives a value to keeping the network alive… and people can reward fairly based upon the work that is done.

This is no replacement to bitcoins, rather a useful currency that can be used to claim the ownership of work done to support the bitcoin network, a currency that always needs to be generated.
So in the future, you’ll have banks that will say, “To transfer X amount of bitcoins you must transfer Y amount of xcoins”

EDIT: Extra, I've explained it in relationship to transaction fees in post #4

EDIT2: I have had an idea extending the xcoin concept, to support untrusted transfers. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1469.0

AMD Phenon II 920 = 4mHash/sec
AMD Phenon II 955 = 6mHash/sec

thrashaholic, that sounds very good!
Well I think that once you have released it... you have earn't a 200BTC reward!

Looking forward to the system... Make my other bitcoins worth more!

I think that there would be many times that a short address would become much in handy...  Say print media, or business cards. - But the main thing is that it gets the ball rolling for a bitcoin DNS system, where we can have addresses like donation.bitcoin.org as a address...

atm you can use any url shorter: say http://goo.gl/oVa2 that is my bitcoin address*... down to 4 character... (if you remember goo.gl).

However the site could have instructions, a link to download the bitcoin app... a link to send with an online bitcoin wallet, a link to auto-buy and send mtgox etc...

In the long term, auto generated addresses with DNS could work heaps like the paypal payment system...

There is a whole host of different ways to make this idea profitable.

but that is just my 2cents (well really 200BTC) lol

EDIT: *well except that goo.gl makes it all lowercase...