These discussions about being the first, remind me of http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com ...I mean, who ever made any real money selling pixel ads besides this guy? No-one as far as I know. Ironically, doood, that was precisely the venture from history I was thinking of when I wrote that last paragraph. Great minds and all that I guess  Hehe. On the other hand, noone has tried selling pixel ads for BTC yet They totally did! Saw it almost a month ago, and I haven't been able to find it again... EDIT: Did stumble upon this though.  |
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I think that most of the early adopters (including those who adopt over the next couple years) will have to be somewhat technically or economically inclined.
Not sure. It's true for now, but it might change in the next couple of years. Bitcoin has some significant advantages over other alternatives for some particular uses. For ex., I don't think that all users of silk road are technically or economically inclined, and for what I've read here, they're growing fast. Another ex. is international transferring... as soon as we have different exchanges in many countries, making international transfers with bitcoins will probably be easier and cheaper than the conventional means. That'll be particularly interesting for immigrants. My point wasn't so much that Bitcoin is too hard for the typical person to use, rather that it will be hard to market to the typical person if we operate under the assumption that everyone wants to know how it works before they use it. More convincing would be testimonials and examples of how useful Bitcoins already are - basically what you're suggesting. Unfortunately, at this point, it's a little bit too young for us to have much material to draw upon in that regard. As for the current userbase, to "technically or economically inclined", add "or members of the political fringe". |
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I think that most of the early adopters (including those who adopt over the next couple years) will have to be somewhat technically or economically inclined. The reason is that the typical technically and economically disinclined money-spender is under the spell of the "sausage factory effect" when it comes to monetary transactions and the value of currency (i.e. they like it but they don't want to know how it's made). Foisting an economic exploration of the nature of value on such a person will be met with suspicion ("they're trying to convince me this is worth something when obviously it isn't") and then discomfort and cognitive dissonance ("you mean these pieces of paper in my wallet are really just pieces of paper?"). While many here may see this process of educating the masses to be politically expedient, among the broadest scope of potential users, it will just cause them to associate Bitcoin with confusion and discomfort. I think that, before Bitcoin can have true mass adoption, we need a way to communicate to the public nor more and no less than "it just works". That being said, if the audience is the "technically and economically inclined", go right ahead and explain how it works, because that is a fascinating topic.  |
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*lightbulb goes on* I guess that is exactly what witcoin was invented for. I'd gotten into so many conversations about how to use it as a gambling site, as if the content production aspect were just incidental, that it never really dawned on me that the most powerful feature it has is the "support" button. Someone could create their own category in which to host a webcomic (or lecture series, or whatever original content) and probably do quite well for themselves financially. Of course, if a lot of people did this, the site might need a bit of a redesign to avoid clutter... </totally OT> P.S. I did the stickfigure comic in my sig. </also kinda OT> |
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The Chinese estimates are interesting. It's actually between 40 million and 80million that has been estimated to have been killed between 1949-1975. These are just estimates and could be totally wrong.
The real numbers are known by the government in Beijing, but of course they're not releasing that information. I would guess that if the real numbers were below the estimates the government might say so. It also means that there is a high chance that the numbers are much worse than the estimates as the government has made sure they stay hidden.
I think it's also interesting that the government managed to hide from the rest of the world that the worst famine in history was happening until 1980. I mean no one in the west had any idea about this.
This is an old and kind of ugly graphic I whipped up to show the discrepancy between male and female populations in China:  Vertical axis is age, horizontal axis is population (thousands), light red is males, dark red and light orange (at the top) are females. You can clearly see the effects of the Great Leap Forward on there. You'd be hard-pressed to find a 49-year-old in China today. |
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LOL, I thought this was a goofy idea, but that picture totally bought you some legitimacy. If you've got a sense for visual humour, perhaps you could run a reader-funded comic on the forum here?
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@kgn, 你是不是中国人？我自己不是，母语是英语，但我会写些中文，写的通常过得去。我也可以参加你的计划吗？
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http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2010/100409.htmThese guys get 93 gallons of ethanol from each ton of wheat straw. Hypothetically, after growing your wheat crop and fermenting the straw and distilling it, if you were to load up your Deuce and a Half with wheat along with all the fuel produced, you could take 83 bushels approximately 2200 miles and back on paved roads. Call me crazy or not adequate, but I want to believe , there are even better ways to move around. This russian scientist developed device after many years of studying insects, which allow him to fly on ... of course he died due to his experiments with unknown matter  ...  http://www.bronzovka.ru/glava05_3.html A time-warping force-field generated by the secret geometric power of chitin? You don't say! I think Time Cube sells those wholesale. |
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Awesome article! I'm proud of myself that I came up with almost all the same points in a recent conversation with a friend. This is very clearly and professionally written.  |
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I can only speak for myself, but I think "one receive address per client" is what pretty much everyone who isn't super-concerned about anonymity already does.
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(Concern over "will there be enough miners?" is pretty irrelevant, except for the matter of security, since I don't believe the number of miners can have any positive or negative impact on the actual transaction processing rate. Correct?)
The number of miners do not affect the block rate in the long term, because the system adjusts to changes in the network's total hashing power every 2016 blocks, or about two weeks. However, within that two week window, it is expected that increasing transaction fees during peak periods will eventually create an "elastic" processing rate by drawing in miners who are marginal with just the block reward. The idea being that during the high transaction periods, the accumulation of fees that are seen unprocessed on the network will trigger automatic generation to try to process those fee paying transactions, and the average time between blocks will drop. The flipside being that on the weekends, and the off periods of the major Bitcoin trading areas, will end up having an average time between blocks longer than 10 minutes to compensate. In short, "will there be enough miners?" is not an irrelevant question, even outside of the context of security. However, the answer is always "yes" because the ebb and flow of the transactions and their average fees will create a fast moving market that will adapt to the conditions consistently. IMHO that's brilliant. Thanks for explaining! |
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I've seen this question answered before, but I can't recall where. What is the maximum number of transactions per block?
It's not limited by number of transactions, but by individual and collective size in kilobytes. I can't remember the exact details, but I'm pretty sure that the total free transactions are limited to 25 KB and then fee paying transactions increase the minimum required fee to a maximum hard blocksize limit of one Mb. Somehow, this block has 43 KB of free transactions: http://blockexplorer.com/b/118089Is a limit on free transactions set in the mining client, or is it a condition of a block being valid? Just some rough math to answer my own question, a 1MB block would contain roughly 3000 typical transactions. Thus there's an upper limit on the transaction processing rate for the entire economy - I reckon that means that once the transaction rate rises over an average of 18k/hr., there will be a minimum fee for your transaction to even have a chance of being processed, and market forces will drive the minimum fee up with time. (Concern over "will there be enough miners?" is pretty irrelevant, except for the matter of security, since I don't believe the number of miners can have any positive or negative impact on the actual transaction processing rate. Correct?) |
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Is there any mechanism then to at least make it unlikely that a transaction will "fall through the cracks" and never get processed? Or is the idea that that's simply a risk you're taking if you skimp on transaction fees?
You'll keep resending it forever until it gets in a block. "You" = the default client? It needs to be resent? Does that imply it expires after a certain amount of time? |
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Is there a maximum amount of time any given transaction will stay unprocessed? No. Is there any mechanism then to at least make it unlikely that a transaction will "fall through the cracks" and never get processed? Or is the idea that that's simply a risk you're taking if you skimp on transaction fees? |
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I've seen this question answered before, but I can't recall where. What is the maximum number of transactions per block?
Will/can the average number of transactions per block increase with time? (Right now it seems to be about 10 or 15.) If so, what mechanism will cause miners to start including more transactions in their blocks?
Is there a maximum amount of time any given transaction will stay unprocessed? If so, what mechanism is responsible for that?
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I can't claim to have any sophistication in my musical taste, but sonata.mp3 sounded like it'd make some pretty awesome background music for a Japanese-style RPG.  |
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Discovered via Bitcoin Monitor: Block found at 2011-04-11 18:52:57 http://blockexplorer.com/a/2EnJ1VL8KxBitcoin Charts reports the following trade on MtGox: Apr 11, 2011, 18:53:44 | 0.75618 | 50.00 Looks like some miner's got a bot to sell off block bounties. This is the first time I've seen this particular pattern. |
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Like this??
Take the natural log of root i
(This is strange, but I swear I don't lie)
Ask Euler if you doubt -
From his grave he will shout:
"That's i times one quarter of π!"
Are you asking me to explain my limerick? My statement above is best explained by this: Guys, you need to work harder on the translation, the jokes dont make sense.
But that's the best part!! :DD Your joke is funny to me because I have absolutely no idea what it means. |
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:)Great minds think alike！
Do you want to know more?
Perhaps you have already know a lot of jokes in China.But if you want to know more i will do my best to tell you.
Most English jokes are based on irony or sarcasm. |
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My thought is that too many people are hoarding coins. As more money is generated, but not spent, it's value decreases, that's inflation. The answer obviously is to spend some of your coins. It's exactly the opposite. Hoarding is where all of the demand for bitcoins comes from. The more people hoard bitcoins, the fewer there are in circulation and the more valued they become. Assuming some constant source of demand. But the fewer people who spend bitcoins, the fewer people who know / care about them, thus the lower the demand (and value). |
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