The problem is your not sure the person who sent you the money actually controls the address in question. It could be an address from a shared wallet (like MyBitcoin or MtGox...)

By stable I mean the value doesn't swing strongly in a short period of time, not that the value will not change at all. Of course it will change, but as long as it could be more or less predictable how much it should change, it should be manageable.

Ah ok, but then it's how you say, you're just pre-calculating the transaction size and multiplying by a user preference. It has nothing to do with how miners will treat your transaction.

Consider the currency valuation in your contracts?

Of course it's not easy to do it right now with bitcoins, but that's because the bitcoin economy is very small and thus very instable... but once it gets more stable, this shouldn't be a problem.

Exactly, the user should guess the good fee for every transaction.
And it's miners who have fee policies, not "clients", as in general purpose clients.


The only way I can think of doing a "fee prediction" is by looking at the block chain and seeing the cheapest fees that managed to get included within the delay you accept to wait for. For example, if you accept to wait up to 100 blocks before your first confirmation, check which were the cheapest fee per kb transaction that managed to get included in the last 100 blocks. There could be an automation of such process, but I don't think it's up to the reference implementation to provide such service.
And still, this is a prediction, there's no guarantee that it'll work.

The thing that the reference implementation should have, IMHO, is the ability to resend a transaction with higher fees.

I disagree. There's no way to "pre-calculate" fees as miners are free to set the fee policy they want. This standard policy that's being followed by most miners is a set of arbitrary rules that were coded into the standard client, but these are not carved on stone or anything. Miners are free to come up with their own policies.

Actually, I don't even think the standard client should have this fee policy or even a miner. It should limit itself in defining what is a valid block and what is not.

Competition should be welcomed.

And there's no such a thing as natural monopoly.
There's no reason for water supply, for example, to be provided only by a monopoly. Home owners associations could own the neighborhood pipes and then hire the company they want as "backbones". This could work pretty much the same for all network services, like streets, electricity, sewage and so on.
Like in a building... every proprietary of an apartment is partially proprietary of the networks that run through the building.... with free neighborhoods it could work pretty much the same way, each neighborhood being like a condo.

And, of course, as said by FreeMoney, there are always other solutions that eventually may be more interesting than a physical network infrastructure. For sewage, for instance, I wonder if those big holes people used to have underneath their homes for accumulating sewage and then emptying it once in a few years with a proper truck aren't more cost effective than a big net of pipes. Only free market competition could answer which is more convenient to people, actually.

It's not the first time I read this... for this to work, wouldn't the attacker need to be working together with all ISPs and backbones that route these circuits? If not, how would the attacker track such stream of packets?

I didn't follow... how did the block reorganization created a block with double-spending?

This is really cool.
How well did you think the politicians of Gibraltar received the idea of bitcoin? Do you think Gibraltar might eventually apply for what is said here? If online gambling is the country main industry, I suppose they have interest in it... but I wonder how strong can international "diplomacy" be over these tiny countries...

It's not very clear to me how independent Gilbraltar is from UK, though. Actually before you saying they have a prime-minister, I thought they were technically just like a UK city overseas.
Does financial laws from UK apply in Gibraltar?

Miners choose the way they want (meaning, the way they coded their software to choose), as long as all transactions they add are valid.

You mean your transaction is not here?

If it's not there after days, it means something's wrong. Either the transaction is invalid, or your client is not managing to broadcast it for some reason...

+1

I've PMed Gavin about it.

By the way, either the faucet is getting very popular, or some scumbag found a way to cheat and get all its money. Too many transactions...

The faucet?

Wow, I was not aware of that! This is cool, I find wuala better than dropbox. Actually, it's the best remote backup provider I'm aware of. (if anyone has better suggestions, I'm accepting them )

Of course, as with any scarce resource.


The same thing could theoretically be happening to food and everything else, right now....

OMG, we'll all starve!!!
 

Competition solves the "issue". What doesn't help are regulations, barriers of entry, disrespect over people's property rights and so on...

Not sure. It's true for now, but it might change in the next couple of years. Bitcoin has some significant advantages over other alternatives for some particular uses. For ex., I don't think that all users of silk road are technically or economically inclined, and for what I've read here, they're growing fast. Another ex. is international transferring... as soon as we have different exchanges in many countries, making international transfers with bitcoins will probably be easier and cheaper than the conventional means. That'll be particularly interesting for immigrants.

Not if they're affecting the complainers properties. (well, I mean they don't have the right to, not that they "can't")
If a polluter is polluting your piece of a river, your lake, the water from your well etc, than you have the right to stop him.