And I specified "nowhere".


Unemployment = labor laws fault, particularly if they make it illegal to decrease wages.

Minimal GDP growth = don't know enough about the case, but remember that GDP measures consumption not production (monetary stability stimulates savings, not consumption, and that's good). And, well, if the amount of money is stable, the GDP, measured in this money, would not increase much either. People would keep spending the same amount of money, it would just be worth more. Not sure GDP statisticians really take that into account when announcing growth numbers.

Increased government deficits = that's because they couldn't finance themselves with inflation. It's pretty much what happened to Japan. The central bank was kind of responsible (well, less irresponsible than others) for quite a long time, but the executive branch of the government was very "Keynesian", spending like crazy, accumulating a huge debt. Anyway, that's government's fault, obviously, not monetary stability's fault.

??
Inflation == creating new money != price fluctuations.

Inflation is not at all necessary, anywhere. Which is your country? Japan?

Regarding fragmentation, I don't know the details since I haven't browsed the code that much, but from what I can grasp from all I've read and what's available on the block explorer, what really counts is the number of addresses.

If you receive 0,05 in an address A and then 0,95 in another address B, and then you transfer 1 to address X, your transaction would contain:
Address A as input with 0,05 BTC
Address B as input with 0,95 BTC
Address X as output with 1 BTC.

If the owner of X transfer all at once to Y, the transaction will only have:
Address X as input with 1 BTC
Address Y as output with 1 BTC.

Regarding the block chain split, the transactions may be the same, with the exception of the reward transaction to the miner. But they may be different too, it doesn't actually matter. The sender of a transaction that doesn't get in will keep trying until it gets into a block.
Problems would arise if the miner uses his coins before the split gets merged, but the 120 blocks maturity limit makes this very unlikely.

And finally, the block chain is backward compatible, you don't need to use the same version.

I think it's too early for that.
There's not only this "dead-bider risk", as traditional courts probably won't recognize bitcoin debts, but also there's the high volatility in bitcoins value. It's extremely risky to make serious lending in bitcoins since you have no idea what will be their value one year from now.

Don't be ridiculous. It seems you don't really "get that" actually.

There's also a chance that humanity is entirely wiped out by a super meteor falling on earth today. Do you pretend to add "checks" against that, or pass the rest of your life in a meteor-proof bunk?

Free money? Sounds like "free beer"...

The video already helped a non-libertarian-nor-geek close to me to better understand what was this bitcoin thing I've been publishing stuff about on facebook.

Very well said. Good post!

Means not yet spent. While in this status, the entire public key of the address is not available.

By the way, provide us the synchronized subtitles so we can translate it to other languages.

Just watched the video. Really cool!

I don't know if it has already been slow down, but I've managed to understand everything. The subtitles might have helped. I'm not a native English speaker either.
Maybe it's a good idea to make it fast since people think twice before starting to watch long videos.

Good job.

Nice banner!

"Decentralized P2P" is kind of a pleonasm though. Why not just "Decentralized currency" or maybe "P2P cryptographic currency" or even "Decentralized sound money"?

Maybe making the T variable specified by the transaction itself, not a constant.

Also, block that includes a transaction which should have been expired could be considered an invalid block by the network.
This is backward incompatible though, and maybe theymos suggestion of resending the same transaction to self after the expiration would be a good idea - it would be a good idea to send this second transaction with a higher fee, too.

But anyway, reclaiming and resending with a higher fee should be even simpler to implement, shouldn't it? And it's a more generic use case.

Finally!! Someone else understands it!

 

Thank you for the numbers.

Raulo, you seem to claim that somebody could "easily destroy" bitcoins in its current stage...

First, to me saying that double-spending by one super-attacker "destroys" bitcoin is way exaggerated. That super-attacker would just become a dangerous criminal, able to "counterfeit" transactions with every unfortunate person which happens to transact with him. That's serious, but it's not a "destruction" of the currency. Such criminal wouldn't manage to go too far, I believe, before being spotted.

And by the way, how easy is that? I mean, how much $$$ would it be necessary to double-spend? Do yo really think that it's a profitable crime? I don't know, but I think the costs largely outcome the potential benefits.

You're saying that the bitcoin miners altogether already beat the strongest supercomputer of the world? Last time I read about it here it was told that the difficulty should be above 100.000 for that to happen.

If that's truly the case, a few blog posts on it could cause some buzz, maybe even earns us another /.

This is not an acceptable hypothesis.

By the way, the bitcoin network computing power is already comparable (~50%) to the strongest supercomputer on Earth, according to what I've read in these forums.

Even that sounds too much... I mean, why can't you spend part of an output today an another part of it tomorrow?
This would be a way of stop using this change thing (which I never really understood the reason to exist), and minimizing transaction sizes...

Yeah, you could sell lemonade for bitcoins. Just watch out not to get busted: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/bizarre&id=7596434