Heh.  

Satoshi doesn't need his coins.  :-)  

Nah, he bowed out for very good reasons, and he's got very good reasons for not touching his million-coin stash (actually a million and a half if I'm doing the math right) for at least another six years.  There are people watching, and a move on his part would have consequences.  But he's provided for himself quite well by other means; he's under no pressure and doesn't need to make any rash moves.  Stalemate.

Honestly, those coins are more likely to be spent by his heirs than by him.  And if I'm right, he's absolutely fine with that; I think that's what he wanted to do with them anyway.

The large holdings in bitcoin from the early days of mining are mostly American.

Naturally the supply curve looks different in the US, and they have a lower price.  But it seeks a global equilibrium as money flows across borders. 

It interests me that Chinese money is flowing into America at an increasing rate right now in order to buy bitcoins.  Probably good for the American Economy, but not a very noticeable effect until/unless Bitcoin picks up another order of magnitude in price.

I wrote this about a week ago, and I still expect it's probably true.

The current bubble takes it to about $1000, then it crashes back down to about $500 and starts rising again.

But there is absolutely no justification for any prediction on the matter; I'm pulling that opinion out of my ass and I know it.  So I'm gonna hang on, ride out the expected crash, and ride the also-expected rise that comes after.

Then again, I may sell one coin to recoup (several times) my initial investment....

You could build some interesting functionality into a new altcoin, but the idea of preventing law enforcement from spending seized coins by something like a blacklist is mad.

The problem is that if the blacklist mechanism exists, law enforcement will use it against you. They will blacklist coins that you have (because you bought them from an undercover agent or whatever) and hoist you for having the 'illegal' assets.

Some other ideas that have been mentioned here (like putting coins in escrow for certain merchants etc) could help with the seizure problem but are perfectly do-able with bitcoin or whatever.

The idea that coins auto-transfer after a while is an interesting one, but that just leads the police to demand the address to which they are about to transfer, the same way they demanded the address they're about to transfer from (warrant, subpeona, whatever).

You have to remember that you don't get to play by any different rules than the governments/police with respect to the protocol; the protocol does not care who is whom, so they can do anything you can.  The fact that they have warrant/subpeona/writ authority is strictly in addition to what the protocol allows everyone to do.

I don't think it's the most groundbreaking thing we'll witness in a lifetime, but... that's because we live in some  particularly interesting times.    I expect to see human-scale AI and permanent off-earth colonies before another 20 or 40  years go by.

I believe in Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.  It is faster, cheaper, safer, and less hassle to send a payment with bitcoin than it is to send a payment virtually any other way.  

Therefore, it solves a multi-trillion dollar problem for the world and I believe in its future.

I don't think it's going to replace "currency" except for in a few places where currency is particularly plagued with problems (Argentine currency crises, Cypriot 'bail ins', Brazilian 'Economic warfare countermeasures' etc).  People will flee to it when their governments betray them, but contrary to what some suppose, governments aren't 100% betrayal 100% of the time.  Some of them even do a better job of regulating their currency supply than Bitcoin's rather rigid rules will allow.  A bitcoin economy will boom and crash on fairly short cycles, consistent with an absolutely fixed money supply -- better than a completely idiotic financial policy which booms much longer, crashes much deeper, and occasionally melts down completely and has to issue a new currency and start over, but not as good as a well-considered monetary policy which doesn't boom and crash much at all.  

In the extreme case bitcoin may become a 'reserve currency' for financial institutions, but more traditional reserves (such as gold) have properties that are just as good for that purpose so it has to be considered as a diversification rather than a primary strategy.

Your problem is that you care so much about this that you think his opinion matters. 

Seriously; he's who he is and you're who you are and the two of you aren't going to have a discussion that either of you can enjoy. 

So life is too short to waste time and sweat on this sort of thing. 

I will go reread the patch; If you're right, then I misunderstood it.

I thought its effect was that a block could hold only one transaction per address.  If an address were reused then additional uses would have to be in separate blocks rather than the same block. And I'd consider that to be a 'reasonable' restriction given less than 90% adoption. (so that *all* reuses could clear occasionally, just after a somewhat unpredictable delay...  )

If you're right, then its effect is much much milder than that.   If it only rejects reuses of addresses until it has as many non-reused addresses as it can find, and then fills them in on a space-available basis, then it's actually nothing but a prioritization mechanism;  Since block space is rarely an issue, this has almost no effect at all on reused addresses; the effect of prioritizing tx with only non-reused addresses, even with 100% adoption is a very small change in the reliability and timeliness of transactions, hardly noticeable in the larger scheme, and has as many winners (people getting tx confirmed earlier) as losers (people having to wait an extra block time for a confirmation).

In that case, this is probably the mildest incentive I can imagine going up and I'm amazed that anyone is having a problem with it.  It's not so much the effect that people are debating here as the intent, I guess.  It shows an *intent* to deprecate reuse of addresses that people want to discuss.  But it doesn't present any noticeable obstacle to it; reusing addresses will see either zero or one additional block-time before confirmation.  And more likely zero than one.  Meanwhile, non-reuse will become slightly more reliable and timely, making the average wait exactly the same. 

This also means the miners aren't in the position of foregoing any tx fees.  If they can still fill up their blocks, they can still collect a whole block's worth of fees.  So there's no disincentive for the miners to deploy the patch, as I was afraid there might be given my earlier understanding of it.

So, yes, this is a very subtle effect.  I'd have even guessed possibly too subtle to be effective, except that people do seem to be paying attention to it here.

Agreed.  The restriction should be effective on inbound and outbound connections alike.  And that is a fairly easy patch to write.

Now that we're over 10000, there are no more locomotives. 

But there are still cabooses. 

Still, cabooses are more of a rarity these days.  We probably won't see nearly as many.

Another note, to those who've been claiming that the current patch creates infinite delays in payment processing on addresses that take more than one payment per ten minutes;

With 100% adoption of this patch that would be true, but nobody is now looking at 100% deployment even as a remote possibility.

With 90% adoption of this patch, you'd get one transaction per block on 9/10 of blocks, and then all the transactions that had been delayed, all going through at once, on 10% of the blocks.  So, if for silly reasons you're taking one payment per ten seconds on a given bitcoin address, your expected time to first confirmation for a given transaction would be slightly less than 90 minutes instead of 10 minutes, but without 100% adoption, would not be spiraling to infinity.

Even if every pool adopted this patch you'd still get all your transactions through any time a solo miner who had not adopted the patch solved a single block.

If I'd been writing the patch I'd have hit it in transaction fees instead of delay;  ie, I'd have written a bitcoind/bitcoin-qt patch that made repeat-using a bitcoin address be a nonstandard transaction unless accompanied by an additional transaction fee.  But that would be a much less 'measured and predictable' effect than the patch we're looking at now; it would be more likely to cause chaotic unpredictable failure of such tx that depend on things far more random than this one.  This is more elegant and gentle than what I'd have written, because it is more subtle.

Just a note, but.... 

All those in favor of "open transactions" and "transparency" can achieve it in the post BIP32 world by making their master addresses public. 

IOW, if a charity wants everybody to be able to see all the payments it's recieved and made on a particular issue, wants anybody to be able to donate on a particular issue, etc, they just publish the master address that all those bitcoin addresses are to be derived from, the same way they'd publish the bitcoin address itself now.  You can use the master address to identify payment addresses derived from it. In the "normal" case the master address is a secret between the payer and the payee, but if it's not secret, it doesn't create secrecy.

And if a sandwich shop in bratislavia wants to put a public QR code for making sandwich payments on the menu, it just needs to put the QR code of a master address on the menu; customers can scan it, create a payment address, and pay for their sandwiches.  Now, those customers could also see how much money other customers are spending to that master address so they could tell how much sales in bitcoin are being made at the shop, but if the shop doesn't mind, then they don't mind.   

It isn't a problem as long as the software isn't so braindead that everyone with the same "master" address creates the same payment address.  Right? 

This is not the case.  My privacy is not an incentive for someone who wants to pay me coin, nor for someone whom I want to pay coin to.  It is only an incentive for me, and I need the cooperation of these other parties to make it work.  In the absence of some further incentive that works for all the parties involved, privacy simply has not happened and evidently will not happen.

It's nice to think it's "coming" in these newer clients, but my privacy is more secure, AFAICT, if when it does so people have some substantial reason to *USE* and *PREFER* these features of the newer clients. Otherwise I wind up out on the short end of the stick dealing with people who don't want the new client for some reason and who aren't sufficiently inconvenienced by my lack of privacy to care.

Hmm, well, this year I brought the hostess some firewood for the fireplace and my sweetie brought a plate of mini-quiches for the potluck table.  Both of which were the product of our own personal labor, so I guess that's all the way back to "barter", the pre-currency standard.