A tax on consumption (sales tax) is quite interesting in theory at least especially in our resource limited world... and there is a good argument that it is unjust to force people to move.

But perhaps property tax encourages optimal use of land.  For example, if you commute an hour+ to a city, think of all the neighborhoods you are passing and all the retired people, etc living in them (I can't say I really know the stats).  But if they moved away you'd be able to move closer in for less $.  Across the nation this would translate into a large efficiency improvement.  So some encouragement to take those savings and move to where the living is cheaper is not a bad thing...

Why do you imagine ASICs are so exclusive... sure the first run will be quite expensive but prices generally come down rapidly as volume goes up.  At that point anybody will be able to buy one and mine at about the same cost/MH as the pros, if connected via USB to a netbook or something that sips power.

The fact that you have to have a particular GPU to mine profitably (and really you want to pack as many as possible into a single machine to avoid electricity overhead) already puts mining in the hands of the pros.

The best argument for general ASIC availability is probably for the security of bitcoin...if the market moves to the fastest/most efficient solution around, it will make it much harder for a large entity to grab 51%... with the intent of shutting down the network by not allowing anyone's txns for example.

Even switching to an algorithm that favors CPUs over GPUs is a bit dangerous, due to the existence of special-purpose massively cored CPUs.  For example this one's got 100 cores: http://www.tilera.com/

Is the velocity of money a cause or effect of a healthy economy?  There is no isolated econ lab to prove it one way or another (someone should make a MMORPG...).  If it is an effect, then artificially increasing monetary velocity will not make a difference. 

If there are 2 producers of 2 essential products, both buying from each other then the money circles.  A perfect economy.  Now let's double the velocity -- to do so it would mean that everybody works twice as hard and gets twice as much stuff.  But now each person has double what he/she wants/needs... so a lot of stuff is wasted and the people are exhausted leading miserable lives.  Is that better?  Now let's drop back to the baseline but instead introduce a new item costing 10% of the original that dramatically improves quality of life.  So everybody works 110% to purchase the original products and the new one (and we see a velocity increase).  That is arguably better, depending on how much you value your time.

Obviously in the original contrived example of doubling consumption people see the waste and stop working so hard.  How do you end up in this situation IRL?  Perhaps through purchases of high-markup, fast depreciation luxury/name-brand goods, often by loan...

the buyer tail is stretching pretty thin now... resistance at 6

you can pick good dates & you can pick bad ones.  This is a well known trick and its hard to figure out how to make a fair assessment.  One common method is to assume that you invest the same amount of USD per day into the security/commodity/item.  I wonder what the june 11 run-up would have done to someone spending (say) $5 a day on BTC.  Of course this assumes that the investor makes no price based decisions...

Another methods would be to imagine that a different person bought (say 1000 USD of BTC) every day and sold exactly 1 year later.  Would the aggregate have made or lost money?

Seems to be an issue "entering into trade".  There's basically an issue around that whole thing which is that in one trade I managed to do the whole thing over PM and never got the chance to "enter into a trade" and therefore leave a review (I assume).

In the other txn I get a button but when I click through the "yes I agree" screen I get this 404:

The page you were looking for doesn't exist.

You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved.


Also a way to remove trades would be nice! :-)  But anyway, great site!

how does the site make $?  Is there a fee?

Sounds to me like this "bakcoin" thing IS bitcoin in its current common use, with fiat currency playing the role of your exchange currencies.

Hmm... that website doesn't really seem anti-bitcoin.  And if you're gonna write all that code you must be at least a little interested.  I was simply thinking someone here might know the owner and ask nicely. :-)


of course, but one can guess-estimate the number of non-forum members; just like radio stations estimate listeners from request phone calls... and is really the derivative that matters not the value anyway.


I'm not worried about technical disruption of bitcoin but social -- after all there still aren't many merchants accepting it.  BTC could just fade away... statistics showing a growing user base would convince merchants to offer it as a payment mechanism.  You are right, the inability to fully count/control the members is a great strength which is why I said "approximate numbers".  Hard numbers would be great, but if those are not available, it would still be useful to have the same kind of partly-fabricated numbers that businesses have used since the beginning of... well the beginning of VCs probably... to justify their business model.

To get back on topic; its unfortunate that the approximate number of bitcoin "users"  (full or lightweight hosts) in the last 24h or so can no longer be easily determined because at 3k and declining that stat can be used to predict the failure of bitcoin by its detractors.  Like any network technology, a lack of users discourages new users.  So if it is inaccurate, perhaps it should be removed (or relabeled) so as to not spread misinformation.  

And perhaps we should look for some other metric (or even proxy metric, such as # of IP address that read these forums) that would be more accurate so that if it is increasing we can use it to encourage new users.

Someone who has connections in Greece should attempt to introduce it to the media there... lots of $ withdrawn from the greek banks and currency uncertainty ought to spell opportunity for BTC.

Nice to see that the BTC price has barely twitched.  But has it been too stable over the past few months?  Does it signify some large investor with an open buy order at 5 USD?

Its funny, if they had marketed the paper as "bitcoin 0-confirm is safe for brick-and-mortar -- just wait 10 seconds" we'd all be thanking them.  Because one of the biggest concerns with the idea of deploying bitcoin massively as cell-phone based cash for small transactions is the 10 minute confirm time.  But I don't care about the "spin" the result is what's most important so thanks guys for doing this research!

How does that work?  Maybe if you run out of numbers in the nonce you get a new time?

Thx!
thezerg

Its an interesting question.  The firewalled subset would not necessarily be the smaller blockchain if it used bitcoins heavily would it?  What I'm trying to say is that the side that everybody thinks should "win" (due to other criteria like being the "majority" of the world) might not actually be the bitcoin "winner".

Also, what about a malicious attempt to increase blockchain length?  I guess "they" could only double spend known coins so a malicious country would have to prepare by remembering every coin that passes through its system...

I need to read the papers and code I guess...

@DeathAndTaxes:  Its good to know that non double spent are separable from suspect coins...

what do you mean by: All coinbase tx will be orphaned.  There is a 120 block limit on spending but a split of >120 blocks would mean any subsequent tx will be invalid.

thx!

Hi, please whitelist me; I'm an engineer and would like to contribute to this discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76351.0

I think the real interesting question is what would happen in the case of a netsplit (used to be common in IRC) -- today one would probably be caused by a totalitarian regime implementing a countrywide firewall (google "great firewall of china").  First question is how well bitcoin could route around it? 

The second question comes from the observation that clearly after a few weeks passed we'd then have 2 independent perfectly consistent blockchains.  After a few weeks, months, or years, when the great firewall finally goes down, how does the bitcoin network rejoin?  In theory it would be possible to rejoin perfectly.  In practice, I think that anyone with a communications pathway (possibly even paper) could double-spend their coins on either side of the firewall, causing major chaos.

Like the mining hashes/sec can?

This is only a little worse then state-sponsored lotteries.  I just realized that not only do they pay out less then they take in but the ON TOP OF THAT the winners are TAXED at an extremely high %.  So the organizer's actual take is a lot higher then advertised.

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