The coin creation isn't actually regulated by the hashing, it is fixed: 50 coins per block (later decreasing) and approximately one block every ten minutes. However, rather than just having one party generate the coins (as is the case with all other digital currencies) the creation is distributed. Now the question becomes: In an anonymous network who gets to create how many coins? That's the first thing proof-of-work solves - it provides a basis for allocating new coins fairly.

The second thing proof-of-work does is it allows you to decide disputes - whichever party has done more work is presumed correct.

Pretty unbelievable.

If this is a joke, it's a bad one.

It sounds credible enough to be serious (with bitcoin address and email) for me to remove btcex from WeUseCoins until this is cleared up.

Das nächste Treffen in Zürich findet statt am 7. Mai im Oliver Twist Pub ab 16:00:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6725.0

Ihr seid alle herzlich eingeladen!

Hey everybody, I propose another informal meetup for Bitcoin users from Zurich and beyond.

When: Saturday 7th of May 2011, 16:00-19:00
Where: Oliver Twist Pub
Who: All Bitcoin users and enthusiasts welcome

Looking forward to seeing the usual suspects and some new faces!

+1

Remember this is only for the official site, anybody can start their own directory with their own criteria if they so choose. We can't control what people do with Bitcoin, but we can very much choose what we want to endorse/advertise and what we want Bitcoin to be associated with.

Just to be perfectly clear: I don't think it's a problem. If it ever becomes a problem, client developers will get together and figure out a reasonable block size limit.

There is no point in trying to preempt the problem now, because we can predict neither what the hash rate will be, nor what it needs to be.

Also note the timescales - the problem will be foreseeable well in advance because the transition from minting to fees is gradual.

Ok, let me untwirl this - I disagreed with you in the first sentence only to agree with in my next sentence: Product heterogeneity and capital requirements will ultimately produce a stable price, you are correct in saying that miners won't drive themselves out of business.

However you miss a more important point: Miners can lower fees substantially in a sustainable fashion. Why? Because other miners who are less efficient will go out of business, which lowers the hashing rate and gives the remaining ones a larger chunk of revenues. Just like competition ensures that there aren't ten bus companies servicing the same route, miners will compete until the equilibrium number of miners is reached.

That means: The invisible hand will make sure 1. all transactions get processed and 2. as cheaply as possible. But there is no intrinsic mechanism to take network security (hash rate) into account. That means the hash rate will be whatever it will be, it could be high enough or it could be too low. If it is too low a mechanism to raise it is provided via the block size limit.

Sorry, didn't mean to offend anybody. London is convenient for conventions because it's the most densely populated area in Europe (so there are usually lots of potential attendees close by), it has direct connections from/to every European airport and it's been my experience with past conventions that you get the best attendance there because of those factors.

Note that I'm in Switzerland, so London would be further for me than it is for you, but it's still pretty convenient to shuttle out of Zurich Kloten.

But that's just my experience, if it's in Europe and it has an interesting enough roster of speakers to warrant traveling, I'll attend wherever it is. Ultimately it's going to depend on where we can find somebody who has the actual time, money and energy to organize a convention.

Totally! The way I heard about it was because a fellow Bitcoiner skyped me: "Dude, they just mentioned you on the Bitcoin Show."

Thanks to Andrew for the shout out!


I think an hour is fine, but what would be cool is if there was a list of the segments with times next to the video, so if you're only looking for a specific part you can skip right to it.

Anyways, awesome show, can't wait for the next one!

Just a thought: Attach the event to DEF CON 17 or some other large event that at least some Bitcoiners will already be interested in. It's a simple way to get some extra attendants, plus Bitcoiners can go to the other event and proselytize.

I might even be possible to do a presentation at the other conference for even more exposure.

As for the location:

If it's in Europe, it should be in London.

If it's in the US, it should be anywhere with an international airport. I'd make the trip provided some of the bigger names attend and they bring the finished Bitcoin ATM prototype. Oh, and some Alpaca socks!!

I use BTC wherever practical, just because it's the least ambiguous. But yes, if I needed to use a currency symbol specifically, I'd use ฿ over any of the alternatives. The vertical line is recognizable to mean "currency" and as others have stated, currency symbols routinely refer to multiple currencies, so even with $ and others you always have to have some context that determines which exact currency you're talking about, ฿ would be no different.

How about this one: Mining fees are subject to first degree price discrimination, whereas bus fees are subject to third degree price discrimination. In plain English: When a bus driver lowers his price he lowers it for a whole group of people (standard, senior, children, etc.), so at some point the additional revenue from more passengers is less than the lost revenue from lower rates for his existing passengers. In contrast, a miner can accept transactions with lower fees without losing any revenue from transactions with higher fees.

Generally the factors acting against price discrimination are product heterogeneity, market frictions and high fixed costs. (Shamelessly copied from Wikipedia ) Product heterogeneity applies to Bitcoin (tx with higher fees get accepted faster), as do high fixed costs.

That said, price competition does not care how secure the Bitcoin network is. It will be purely a function of the factors stated above and it will lead to some price, which may or may not be high enough to make Bitcoin robust against takeovers.

My prediction is that the ratio of the network hash rate to the size of the Bitcoin economy will lower quite a bit each time the minting rate lowers. Once minting ends it will be at a level dramatically below where it is now. That alone does not mean however that it will be so low that block chain takeovers become viable. That depends on way, way too many factors to predict decades in advance. We don't know what the overall size of the Bitcoin economy will be, how large the biggest transactions will be, whether large transactions will use new, additional methods of confirmation, what the incentives of taking over the block chain will be, whether there will be terrorists/governments with enough resources to shut down Bitcoin for purely ideological reasons, etc, etc. It is downright ridiculous to speculate on whether the hash rate 50 years into the future will be sufficient imho.

However, what we can predict is that the block chain size limit provides a mechanism for future generations of Bitcoin users to intervene if the security is deemed too low. There will likely be different clients and their developers will likely disagree on the exact security/fee tradeoff (lower block size limit => higher security, but also higher fees), but they will have a very strong incentive to find a compromise. Otherwise whatever client doesn't agree to the consensus will end up running on a separate block chain.

TLDR; Either it won't be a problem, or if it does become a problem, it will be solvable.

Cool stuff!

Are there any patents covering the extraction of the pubkey from the signature? I'm reminded of ECDSA point compression which would make the public keys half size, but I believe the reason Bitcoin doesn't use it is that it's covered by patents. (As well as being additional load on the CPU.)

The CPU cost seems to be mostly in step 1.6.1.: two ECPoint scalar multiplications. I believe the step is executed 1-4 times (outer loop j from 0 to 1, inner loop k from 1 to 2) depending on which candidate key matches. The verification step 1.6.2. in our case would be a SHA256+RIPEMD160 to compare it to the pubkey hash? So if I'm right, pubkey recovery would be 1-4 times as expensive as a signature verification (which is also mostly two ECPoint scalar multiplications.)

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, somebody with some actual skill please confirm. )

Carrot spotted at www.weusecoins.com ... 

We were also in talks with a designer bunny about making a video, but he ate our initial funding.

Don't want to take too much of everyone's time, just need to make some announcements:

Firstly, the funding page is now up: http://www.weusecoins.com/fund.php - Every time the marketing fund spends money I'll update that page so you can see what we're doing. I put in the first video at a fixed amount of 2000 BTC as promised. For future expenses we'll do the accounting individually if possible, e.g. if the voice over costs 500$, we'll put it as a single entry with the corresponding amount of coins at whatever exchange rate we were able to get.

Also, I've added a link to the materials page in the footer: http://www.weusecoins.com/materials.php

The mining guide is launched for now, I've made it even clearer that normal users don't need to mine, I hope it's ok for now. I do still think that it wouldn't hurt if more people understood how mining is done, even if they don't mine themselves. Also the page has lots of links to the wiki and it's a great place to start diving deeper into Bitcoin imho.

I also darkened the font color - somebody suggested that, but I can't find the post anymore. So whoever you are, thanks, good suggestion!

Finally, I felt that the Bitcoin Roadtrip is an awesome project for some Bitcoin publicity and so the fund made its first donation: 50 BTC to PLATO for the Bitcoin Roadtrip. Go PLATO!! Wheee!

And that's all for now. I've been quite busy on my other Bitcoin project which I should finally be able to launch by next weekend. Meanwhile, please keep sharing your thoughts in the 2nd video thread. We have a full 7002 BTC in the marketing fund and I need ideas on how to spend it.

In terms of politics - if somebody does a Bitcoin video representing a specific political viewpoint, it should not be financed from a pool everyone contributed to. Bitcoin obviously appeals to people from across the spectrum and if we took sides it would only serve to be divisive and counterproductive. If somebody has a liberal or conservative or libertarian or green or whatever platform and wants to do a video, great, but I feel duty-bound to stay neutral, simply because Bitcoin itself is neutral.

I haven't heard back from [mike] yet, but even if he's not available/interested we might still be able to organize something that's akin to a lecture or lecture series. Would that be preferable to a shorter more graphic video? Or do a lot of you agree with Gavin that we should focus on non-technical questions?

Note that instead of checking only the outputs, you have to check the source address balances *and* the target address balances. (To see if the new target address balance equals the old balance plus the money transferred.)


The size of transactions is one of the main bottlenecks in practice, since they have to be replicated over the network to every node and stored in the block chain.

A slightly more complex database is a very good tradeoff for faster tx validation and smaller transactions.

Another advantage of the current design is that it allows for complex transaction types (even though that's currently disabled in the official client), see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

Thanks! The logo is just based on the name and the name was a nickname I randomly picked when I was 11 years old or so. Hope you're not disappointed at the total lack of a deeper meaning.

I think bringing politics into it is very dangerous indeed. One of the things that most fascinates me about Bitcoin is that it speaks to people from across the spectrum, so I feel like making a video that takes a certain viewpoint would only serve to divide the community and put Bitcoin in a corner unnecessarily.

That said, I also agree with what [mike] and theymos say about videos being the wrong medium for technical information. At least generally speaking. I actually went into the discussion with the graphical designer having something very close to what [mike] described in mind. (i.e. about an hour long, mostly lecture/talk, with some animated illustrations.) He (our designer) argued that you could make a more laymen friendly video if you keep it shorter and you could also use the individual segments to put them on the corresponding wiki pages, so they serve as more of an introduction to the text which is more in-depth. Right now I'm still totally open for any format - I think we have to be a bit opportunistic as well.

[mike]: Would you consider working with us such that you hold the talk and we do some animations for intro, outro and to illustrate some of the trickier bits?