As Dargo says it's going to converge to an equilibrium, where the difficulty and total hashrate are just right for each other. Very specific circumstances are required for the kind of oscillations you speak about.

Here's a model: Let's say the network total hashrate (affected by how profitable it is to mine with existing equipment, and measured in shares per second) is H = a - b*D, where D is the difficulty, assumed to be close to the equilibrium difficulty. The retargeting algorithm basically measures H and computes D based on it, so D_{n+1} = 600*H_n = 600*(a - b*D_n). This converges to equilibrium as long as b<1/600. For b to be higher than this, the cost of running equipment needs to be significant compared to the cost of buying it (which shouldn't be the case for ASIC for some time), and furthermore, to be homogeneous between all miners.

I'm biased, because the dates of 15-16 Sep are really bad for me, I don't know if I'll be able to make it then, and I wish a different date will be chosen.

But I think that if other events are standing in the way of organizing the conference properly, you should really consider trying to cancel the arrangements you've made for those dates. Choose a more realistic date and make the required preparations, better to have a delayed conference than stressing out over trying to do too much in too little time and ending up with a flop.

See this post, they apparently disabled the donation changing function, but they will set it manually.


@rager69 - reported to mod.

I have issued some more POLY.10.1 bonds and am now also offering bonds for shorting BTC, POLY.10.-2. Each of these bonds are targeted to have a total of 400 BTC outstanding face value.

UPDATE 27 Jul 2012: My GLBSE bot is acting funny, I think it may have something to do with their server migration. I'll look at it more closely next week, for now I've disabled the orders. While there are no automated bids, contact me if you want to exercise your right to sell the bonds.

I wondered the same myself and asked their customer support if there are still delays. They said wire withdrawals take 2 weeks - which is a delay if you ask me, but it seems they consider it business as usual.

Now that explains everything!
Maybe they should be renamed mtgst, "Magic: the Gathering Savings & Trust".

I support the initiative. New user experience and education is a critical area where Bitcoin is sorely lacking.

But attempts to make newbie guides have been made, and to make this one successful will require a lot of quality work.

How I envision the guide to be: Have an actual introductory text that touches very briefly on all key issues. Have the text of each point link to a page/FAQ section that explains it in more detail, so the reader can focus on what's interesting to him. It should all be in the wiki, the reader shouldn't be forced to hop between multiple sites. This also means that the quality of the rest of the wiki needs to be greatly improved.

I'd remove the link to the bitcoin.stackexchange root, 99.9% of people aren't going to ask any questions there. And answers to specific questions should preferably be ported to the wiki.

It looks like the problem is resolved now... But for the past few hours, going to the watchlist the page would be just stuck loading forever. Anything else on the forum worked fine.

Probably this one.

Is the watchlist down for everyone or just me?

The Tel Aviv Bitcoin Meetup August 2012 has been scheduled for August 7, 18:00, in Google's Tel Aviv offices, Menachem Begin 23 (Levinshtein Tower), floor 21. See http://www.meetup.com/bitcoin-il/events/60642032/ for important information.

It's like you're saying the Bittorent is not p2p because not everyone runs a tracker. Or alternatively, that it's not p2p because some files only have a few seeds.

Lightweight clients are/will be fairly smart, they are worlds apart from an eWallet, and if most people run them it's still p2p. And even a full node should still be runnable by an enthusiast, that's all you really need to get the important benefits of decentralization.

This will be possible eventually using multi-signature transactions.

Cool, thanks! You forgot the .co in bitcoil.co.il.

A sig address no doubt means different things for different people. One aspect is what I tried to convey, that it is a kind of "ID tag" that people carry around. I also have an address on my business card, along with my name, phone, URL and email. I don't expect to ever actually receive bitcoins to that address.

In addition to this, it is indeed a solicitation of sorts, but I don't see it as desperately begging. I see it as an invitation to a new world, where people express their recognition of someone's contributions in the sincerest form possible, by spending their hard-earned money, rather than empty +1's and likes. Where there's no stigma or psychological barrier to showing someone you care. And where in so doing they demonstrate the power of Bitcoin to send money to anyone in the world easily and cheaply. At least, that's what we once believed, it never really caught on.

It's not dignified for a cobbler to walk around barefoot.

You don't have to agree of course, but I just dislike these threads popping up putting to ridicule this important piece of Bitcoin culture.

If you're into Bitcoin, you need to have a Bitcoin address publicly associated with you.

The feature is there to allow people to prove that they are the owners of a specific address.

An attack would essentially require the combination of
1. A negligent service provider, C, requesting signing a random code to prove ownership.
2. A negligent customer, A, willing to sign arbitrary data.
3. An attacker, B, in a position to convince A to sign a message. The attack will allow him to usurp A.

The attack goes more or less like this:
B to C: Hi, I just sent you payment from address X, I want a pink pony.
C to B: Sure, but first you need to prove that you own address X. Please sign the following - "fkj32yf7834hfzjkh".
B to A: Can you please sign this for me? "fkj32yf7834hfzjkh"
A to B: Here you go - "xnjkxyh3789dfy2389fhk"
B to C: The signature is "xnjkxyh3789dfy2389fhk".
C to B: Thanks, pony sent!

How the attack would be thwarted:
B to C: Hi, I just sent you payment from address X, I want a pink pony.
C to B: Sure, but first you need to prove that you own address X. Please sign the following - "I want C to send me a pink pony".
B to A: Can you please sign this for me? "I want C to send me a pink pony"
A to B: Wait, what? I don't want a pink pony.

Mt. Gox doesn't buy or sell bitcoins from anyone, it matches buyers with sellers. If the owner of 488K bitcoins wants to sell them he will need to find someone to buy them. You can look at Mt. Gox's orderbook to see how much people want to buy now.

If he tries to dump it all at once he will crash the price and not get a lot of USD for it. A sounder strategy would be to put up an ask at a low price and wait for people to execute it.

You're right, I misunderstood/misremembered the method.

The last transaction isn't timelocked, but its input is the output of the first transaction, which is timelocked, so it can't be executed before the timelock expires.

Mixing transactions don't require you to trust anyone. Though that by default doesn't give you instant/scaleable transactions.