I'm sorry. Unlike Alex, I still have clear mud in my eyes. Is it a new client using bitcoins or the same client using a new block chain? Actually there are four permutations there:

new client USES old bitcoin block chain (what we want)
new client USES new block chain (forked everything)
old client USES old bitcoin block chain (rebranding?)
old client USES new block chain (forked chain)

As Mike Hearn mentioned earlier, Webcoin does share the db/client decoupling goals. So, I look forward to hearing more as you tackle the merkel tree pruning challenge that Satoshi wrote about (pg4). What kind of bandwidth does basic p2p network/node negotiation require? I have the impression (from my own passive monitoring) that it's not trivial.

I don't believe it has to be so complicated and certainly not stateful. I only need a server (or a decoupling locally) to actively keep the up to date with respect to the block chain, should i wish not to store the block chain locally.

I know my addresses. If I want to know my balance I can query the server for the balance of each address (I can do this today with blockexplorer.com without it knowing anything about me). If I want to send, I just sign the transaction locally and send it to the network (either to my server or to other nodes).

I must trust the server not to lie to me about the block chain. We already trust dozens of bitcoin services and their 'notion' of the longest block chain.

Incidentally, exact what I'm talking about has already been proposed to decouple the backend from the UI. I just want to move the backend to a remote location.

Are we discussing an abstract symbol (glyph) or logo? If it is decided (against my lone protests) the abstract symbol is a B with two slashes, then I think your logo is lovely. It has clean lines, no cramping, I agree you accomplished your goals. But are you also suggesting a modification to the abstraction? That other logos imply three vertical lines whereas you propose only two (something like a 3 with || rather than a B with ||). These seems a question of penmanship or font rather than glyph. Am I mistaken (I'm willing to bow to your typographic superiority on this one)?


I am not much concerned with the logo. I appreciate the need for a logo and am happy to see consensus come up with one without me. If B with slashes is final, then your logo is as fine as any I've seen. But in common writing we will use ASCII. I don't expect a Unicode addition in this decade, nor do I think using an arcane greek, diacritic, or any other clever appropriation from the basic multilingual plane will help bitcoin's adoption. When it becomes as common as gold, I hope the glyph question will have already been answered by a billion humans. In the meantime, I think it will be more important to handle SI prefixes: millebtc, microbtc, nanobtc, and hopefully picobtc. I don't expect pico฿ gaining much traction, ever.

Because NutraSweet, which has a patent on a carcinogen lobbied to schedule stevia, a naturally occurring sweetener 100x sweeter than sugar, fewer calories, and marketable by anyone. Did I get that right?

Well, I wouldn't say "days". That would be pure hazard, fit for drunken gamblers, not nuanced gentlemen and ladies like ourselves. I think what we should be aiming for is a price spread that 'predicts' the future market. You must give a sufficient advantage (I say time^2) to early bids, but ideally you should allow for a market to approach the limit of 100% certainty (while rapidly approaching 0% gain).

That is a good point and I agree. I strongly discourage the Baht symbol. It just present ignorance or apathy and Thailand is a country where bitcoin could really take off.



That may be true. I do loath it. I don't know if you like it (certainly you've invested time in it), but why follow the herd? You're clearly talented. TiagoTiago proposed a brilliant idea. Maybe if you grok its innovation, you can give it some of your typographic expertise.

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/a/ad/Bat.png



Is that your proposal? I don't recall seeing the double slash any other way. I present http://bitcoin.org/



That was not immediately apparent to me, but I do like the idea of a hash symbol, which has very significant meaning to bitcoin value/stability/security. Perhaps if you are committed to the double slashed B that you emphasize the hash symbolism.



Please excuse me. It is only that anything discussed frequently with intensity that results in little change tends to remind me of wanking off. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

As the lucky, late, and optimistic moron at $16.5 I'd like to thank Dacoinminster for an entertaining run and in particular, I thank all the losers who took the time and cost to pay the boss. Since I would have been the only one to have benefited from the price above $16 and Mr. 16eg1Q to have benefited from a price below, I can only conclude that we have a market manipulator among us! I can assure you, I have done everything I could since I bought coins months ago, to keep the price as high as possible. I am therefore happy the market agrees with (albeit much lower than) my greatest expectations.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. With my winnings I shall take my girlfriend and two other ladies out for a luxurious coffee (Mr. 16eg1Q if you'd like to join us up where the sun don't set, we'd love to share a cup under the midnight sun). I owe my warm caffeinated happiness to all of you. Thank you.

Dacoinminster, I'd like to propose, should you administer a similar bet again, that you set a closing time on wagers followed by perhaps an hour during which a volume weighted average is calculated, rather than a discreet closing price. I expect a VWAP would be impractical or too costly to manipulate. I think (as long as you are dividing by the total pool rather than the loosing bids) there will always be a variable period after which betting will be unprofitable. So, setting a close time well before the VWAP period would have no negative consequence on the game.

I continue to recommend a compromise to the parimutuel. Perhaps the winnings pool is composed of 100% of the loosing bids and some percentage (50% ?) of the winning bids. And/or weighting by the square (or ^1.5) of the time. I expect these changes would secure early bidders with a great advantage (encouraging early bids) while minimally discouraging later bids, thus increasing the volume throughout the betting period. And more profits for graceless jerks like me and Mr. Market Manipulator 16eg1Q.

EDIT: Because there will be a period of lost winning bets, a closing time before determination and payout will not be necessary. I think it is safe to start the VWAP period before the final close of the market. For example, all bets must be in by 24:00 UTC, where the VWAP is calculated 23:00-24:00 UTC. Betters will likely loose if they wager before 23:00 and I suspect will loose with wagers much earlier still.

No, I want my private keys. Sure, one of the servers could know my "sends" but not necessarily my "receives" and I could use multiple servers. And I would like to see onion wrapping like TOR or nym/cipherpunk remailing.

I think it depends are how much teeth the ban has. I think the general users will continue to use it. After all, what will they do with their coins? Burn/deflate them? The extant mining pools, exchanges, and public services could be shut down. But this would not have the desired effect, it really would become a black market/laundering currency. Though many governments have the tendency to do just that - scare the legitimate users and legitimate the abusers.

I think this, and the plethora of earlier discussions like it, is as fascinating as wanking off, and just as entertaining. But like always, premature, and in the end not as intellectually, emotionally, or physically satisfying as the real thing. But to save time and expedite climax:

Don't use the Thai Baht symbol.

Don't use extant symbols that have meaning in specific contexts, cultures, languages.

Don't base it on double slashes, just like the major fiat currencies we are turning our backs toward - both dollars and euros have double slashes through a character S or E respectively. Why double slashes through a B?

Why do we need a symbol anyway? Is anyone writing digital values down on paper? Is a decentralized currency going to incant symbols by committee?

Don't you expect, hope, or prepare for SI units such as mega, kilo, milli, micro, nano, pico? Wouldn't ASCII characters be most convenient in the digital age? That is what we're after, isn't it?

As you can see, I like to masturbate too. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_symbol

EDIT: OK, nice PDF, I like the presentation. I disagree with the slash-premise, but applaud your initiative!

No you bloody bastard. I have been curious about encryption and decentralized currencies most of my post-pubescent life. I heard about Satoshi's paper over a year ago and found it intellectually interesting, but didn't sink my teeth in it until recently. I like to think I am technically adept or economically savvy, but really I am only a follower. I am jealous. I am kicking myself for not exercising my passion, for not having the insight, for not being true to my own values earlier. You represent everything that I admire and my hatred of myself is targeted at you. I have always been last to be picked for the team and I have come to expect that someone will pity me and take me along. I want someone to help me make me feel a part of something greater than myself, for I know I am really nothing because I take no responsibility for my own welfare. But the world owes me just as you owe me. I have been bashing bitcoins ever since but don't want to be left behind. The only reason I am in this at all is because I hope others will be jealous of me one day, of my one bitcoin, because I am too chicken shit to invest time into mining, risk more of my paper money, or to produce something others might be willing to buy from me with bitcoins.

Agreed. This all needs to be easier/simpler before my Mom will come near it.


What does 99% secure mean? Is that like a water damn or parachute with a 1% hole in it? Or a computer with only one port out of a hundred compromised? Or one malicious out of hundred users? 99% secure is 100% insecure.

Most computers are not secure. This does not mean that their users will die or loose their all of their data, but it means that they are not the only ones in control of their hardware. When there are bitcoins on the machine, that is more of a concern than if the most private things you have a family photos and a tax return.

You have to think of this like a biological virus. A successful virus 'wants' to survive not kill or rather if a virus kills its host it will reduce its chance of replication. A successful virus 'wants' to infect in such a way that the host will continue unaware of infection unless (such as ebola) the host acts in a ways that it increases dissemination (like wandering into markets or going to the hospital and exploding blood upon a large number of vulnerable patients in close proximity).

An attacker does not want its host to know it has been compromised. It does not want to produce concern. It wants to act with surgical precision and maximal effect. We should thank Lulz and other joy riding young crackers for making us aware of our vulnerabilities, for making us conscious and secure.

I look forward to regulation - if you mean outlawing or general noise in parliament/congress. But if it's a scalpel attack (like funding sophisticated crackers, adding fear) then I think there is trouble on the horizon.

In the United States, I understand internet sales are generally already tax free. If for example, Europe made a lot of noise about tax evasion, that would get a lot of Americans curious. Since countries don't harmonize policy, later countries will take a trade advantage other earlier bans. Thomas Friedman was right about at least one thing. Countries are competing in a race to the bottom.

I think the single greatest threat is the ease with which a wallet can be stolen. I am already moving the majority of my bitcoins offline, will not put bitcoins on my phone, nor can recommend this to family and friends (no in fact I would now discourage most). That's hardly liquid. But by the time all bitcoins are mined (if even 2/3 are ever mined) then by that time all these problems would have been ironed out (or we wouldn't have gotten there). If bitcoins are still trading above $15 two years from now then why not for hundreds or thousands time more?

The best book I've read on the subject was given to me by a bi-polar friend of mine. I respect her opinion because she has actually experienced 'god' first hand and can not deny the experience, even though she is able to rationally discuss her condition, etc (as an example, I accompanied her to report a 'vision' to the arch bishop of the Vatican in Jerusalem).

The Spiritual Brain
A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul
By Mario Beauregard, Denyse O'Leary

It starts with the fascinating thesis that "a brain is an organ which connects a mind to the rest of the universe". The research evidence was unconvincing and ultimately the author started to get annoying in his boxing these and those 'types of thinkers'.

Agnostics are wishy washy. They do not know what they believe or are afraid to admit it. Atheists are willing to take Pascals wager and stand firm with reason or laugh at its absurdity. As I once wrote on a 'social/bootie' site, trying to appeal to 'spiritual types' (aka women):

I do not doubt powers in the universe beyond human comprehension. I actively seek states beyond the every day. I appreciate, enjoy discussing, and engaging with the world's various cultures, religions, mythologies, traditions, and believes. But let me be clear. I am not agnostic. I do not believe in a sentient, judgmental theos separate from myself, nor do I believe such beliefs in a theos have a benefit to society that could not be better served by modern evolving mythologies, and I hope for humanity that we find a balanced, loving, all encompassing world view.

I'm all for a light weight block chain, but really, do we want our mobile devices negotiating the block chain at all? I'd be willing to pay .1 a year to subscribe (or 0.001 per inquiry) to a secured 'server', not as a bank, just as a block chain repository that I may query (and inject transactional sends). Perhaps I'd subscribe to multiple.

All I would want my mobile device doing is requesting the status/confirmations/balance of a small set of addresses (only when I open my applet, make a transaction, or explicitly ask for any new receives) and let me send. Nothing more.

Uhm. NO

Try, for just one example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol


Dude. Stevia may be your thing. But don't put it on the same controversy level as bitcoins (my thing). Of course NutraSweet convinced the FDA to ban it as a sweetener in the United States. Do you think this is the only product to have fallen to the evils of competitive lobbying? Don't get me wrong, stevia is cool, and that it's not in the general market is unfortunate, but one of three top controversies it is not.

I'd put marijuana or drug legalization in general up in the top three. As well as state sponsored terrorism/freedom fighting, cyber-warefare, white vs black hat hacking, debt-based fractional reserve banking, prison labour, torture, genocide, wars in general, starvation, restrictive markets, free speech, global warming, freedom of religion, women's empowerment, demasculinization, voting fraud, two party winner-takes-all system, reduced sperm count, increased cancer rate, obesity and diabetes (which stevia admittedly might counter).

And somewhere much lower is bitcoins.

And much much further below on the controversy scale is stevia (below birth control, hormone and gene therapy, embryonic stem cell research, disease control, HFCS, lack of public transport/rail in the US, aid and trade restrictions in the developing world, to name a few of the top of my head).

I agreed it was massive earlier, but come now. It's fine now, even on my palmtop.

I agree.


I disagree. The 34-some string requires a checksum because it is so darn long. A 1+4 or 5 character (of size 34 domain) does not need a checksum (like a phone number). I expect we'll have a MIME type so that firstbits.com/1xxxx resolves a very well defined string (perhaps a meta tag). I've seen discussion of a bitcoin:123456789012345678901234567890+payment format. But the key advantage of firstbits is not verbosity, but brevity.

As for UX, if the user comes in through a URL, I see no reason to present much more than the fully resolved address. But if the user uses the form/input, then more likely than not, he's playing with his own address. I'd highly recommend you explain what the user is seeing. It has not tiny-url-ed the address (as many like me initially assumed). Even now that I know how it works, I'm still manually typing in 1+8 characters and cutting one then another until I find the minimum. Its a trivial, but strange, procedure (partly because the client doesn't yet let me 'copy-paste' from the transaction history).

I would expect the interface to dynamically inform me of the number of collisions (always showing me the 'firstbit') as I type, cuz I'm probably typing with the full string at my side, otherwise, I would have used a link.