Aye.  Totally agreed there.


Bitcoin was never designed to replace any currency.  It's not designed to allow me to buy a bottle of water at 7/11 for $0.50.  However, it is an excellent way to store and send / receive wealth.  That's what it was designed for, and it does that perfectly IMO.  It's the same as pulling my monthly salary out.  Most people have their salaries deposited into their bank accounts, whereas I just pull mine out from my Bitcoin wallet.  That's what it was intended for, and it does its job remarkably well.

http://synala.com/

I trust it with my personal funds at least, and in over 2 years of being paid solely in BTC, never a dollar stolen.

Wouldn't say that too quickly.  I'm quite confident there's tons of people in Greece who currently wish their savings were in Bitcoin right now, versus in the banks.  This is a systemic problem, and will only grow over time.  Just wait until Portugal and/or Spain goes.

What are the tx sizes?  How many inputs are being included in any given transaction?

Are you getting a ton of 0.01 incoming deposits, then bundling that up into a 3 BTC transaction with a 0.0001 fee attached?  Personally, I just stay on the safe side, and put in 0.0001 for every input that gets included.  5 inputs = 0.0005 fee, and so on.  Works fine.

I don't know, but I haven't had an issue.  The network itself works beautifully, and transactions hit almost instantly across the network.  Now whether or not the merchant wants to wait for X confirmations is up to them, and I agree, it can get a little annoying at times.  Not annoying enough to steer me away from bitcoin though.

http://synala.com/

There you go.  Open sourced, on Github, contains both login & registration -- full online demo available.

You can send the 0.01 BTC to a charity of your choosing.

Little late for them now, considering they can only withdraw 60 Euro/day.

How many products?  If just a few, http://synala.com/ is all you need.

I would vote for LocalBitcoin myself.  I never buy BTC, but do sell a couple times a month to cover living expenses.

See:  IPv6

Just to make sure, you do know all the material they'll be teaching in the course is available free of charge on the internet, right?

We're nowhere close:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

I think everyone agrees a solution needs to be found, but we're not in "panic mode" right now, which is what some people seem to assume for some reason, and others are trying to take advantage of that assumption.

Oh, definitely.  I'm more than in support of stress tests themselves, as they're an integral part of any network.  Basically, I'm just questioning the motive of these recent "stress tests" due to the timing.  I'm assuming it's just Gavin and Mike trying to say, "see, bitcoin is broken, move over to XT", although I could be wrong.

These "stress tests" are a little dumb, and nothing more than a propaganda stunt.  We all know what the limits of bitcoin are, and the core devs definitely do.

It's like me putting a pot of water on the stove at 150C, and saying, "see, it boils!  the stress test proved itself!".

It defeats the purpose.  Those conducting these tests know exactly what the limits of the network are, so obviously if you push a test over those limits it's going to fail.  Same as if I said I'm going to "stress test" aluminum, put it under a temperature of more than 660C, then say, "see, it melted, hence failed the test!".  Well, I knew from the onset that was going to be the result.

Yeah, that bill is beyond ridiculous.  Everyone has been complaining about the Patriot Act for over a decade, but Bill C51 puts that to shame.  I'm Canadian myself, and it's not fun to see your home country take that route.

On the flip side, Harper's government may have just ensured their loss in the next federal election thanks to that bill.  For example, Alberta was previously under a Conservative government for 44 years, but in the election that happened recently, NDP won by a landslide including majority govt.  There's a chance something similar may happen in the next federal election, and if a party like NDP gets control, you can expect Bill C51 to be thrown into the fiery pits of hell where it belongs.

Time will tell.  For example, for all I know they've accrued $500 million in funding, which they're going to use to convince folks like Bitpay, Coinbase, blockchain.info, LBC, and so on to switch over to XT, at which point Bitcoin is in serious trouble.

I love Bitcoin, but under no circumstances will I switch over to XT.  If I need to hand over control of my finances to a regulatory body, I would much prefer that be someone such as the government of Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.  Under no circumstances would I ever relinquish that control to Mike Hearn and his cohorts.

The biggest con to Bitcoin XT is the fact that Mike Hearn apparently wants to consolidate power over the blockchain via miners, and get the ability to freeze / blacklist bitcoins, as he mentions here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5979.0

I've been basically 100% Bitcoin for over 2 years now, but if that little proposal becomes reality, I'll be switching back to fiat immediately.

What he said.  I think it's pretty common knowledge -- don't store your passwords online with a 3rd party.  That's a bad idea.

KeepassX works great.

To be honest, I'm a little concerned of Bitcoin's future at the moment, thanks to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andersen's potential hard fork over into Bitcoin XT, as I believe if they're successful, a) it would completely backfire on them within 6 months, and b) it would destroy all trust / confidence in Bitcoin, rendering both Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Core useless.

What's especially disheartening is when I hear things from the likes of Mike Hearn who basically says he wants to consolidate power via mining farms, then give himself and his cohorts the ability to freeze coins at a whim via a blacklist they will create.  If something like that ever comes to fruitition, I'm switching back to fiat immediately.  If my finances have to live under external regulation, I'd much prefer that regulation be governed by the Canadian government versus Mike Hearn and his buddies.

Great, so a centralized bank / authority.  Sorry, but that defeats the entire purpose of Bitcoin.

Ok, so who's determine the regulations as to which coins are considered "tainted" and which aren't?  Are we going off the laws of a certain country?  If so, which country?  Or is the Bitcoin community going to write its own law book, and hire it's own police force to govern such laws at to who can and can not own Bitcoin?  If so, who's the regulating body to this group to ensure they don't get out of control, and what measures does the regulating body have to stop any corruption?