Every app user is also a potential miner, even if it's in the form of distributed mining for the little guy. Bringing more economic value to mining is not a bad thing.

Fair enough, although 24 hours after I posted the price I saw the MtGox price continuing to slide and was wondering whether I had made a foolish offer!

You don't really get any extra reward. Either you are collecting generation fees + transaction fees from the Bitcoin side, plus some profits from the Domain Name side. Or, everything is in the Bitcoin block and you earn the same total profits, but all from the Bitcoin side (due to the additional Domain Name transaction fees on the Bitcoin side).

It's likely that the continuing increases in storage capacity and drop in price per gigabyte will mean that it gets easier, not harder, to run Bitcoin on normal home computers. There is also the potential for block chain compaction which will reduce the storage requirements for a fully-functional home computer Bitcoin.

Kiba, I wrote this response before Satoshi posted above. I'll need some time to understand Satoshi's post.


Don't be anxious. I already said I thought it would take 2 weeks to agree design directions before coding.

There has been excellent development over the past 24 hours. It has become clear that Gavin's changes to handling of non-standard transactions don't rule out domain registration integrated with Bitcoin.

It is also becoming clearer that there is less distance between my DomainChains ideas and the theymos/nanotube design. Their design does not have the tangled ties with domain name server operators, that I previously thought it did.

Hang in there! Two weeks will seem like nothing in the long term outcome.

Of likely interest:

"Gov't crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS"
http://www.itworld.com/legal/129947/net-censorship-dns-alternative

Newcomers might find the MtGox charts interesting:
https://mtgox.com/trade/history

Bitcoin's distributed nature is its strength, not its weakness.

As bitcoin grows, there will be generators who operate large server farms that have no trouble with the network and storage requirements. And there will also be people who use Bitcoin through various cut-down solutions.

Good. Now I still don't understand the need for the "Fee adjust" transaction.

DNS Records can contain arbitrary text records, but that has never been a problem. Interestingly, the same kinds of arguments are heard against using the TXT records for unofficial purposes, but the DNS system hasn't yet collapsed.

On this forum we regularly contemplate putting Bitcoin addresses into DNS TXT records. How ironic that there is resistance to putting DNS data into Bitcoin!

There would be no incentive for a miner to process free domain name registration transactions.

Broadening the use of the Bitcoin chain strengthens it. If 55% of currency users generate maliciously, they can corrupt the chain. But if there are also domain name registrars generating, you would have to corrupt 55% of them too, and different interest groups aren't corruptible in the same way.

Satoshi has created a wonderful bird, but if his early adopters don't allow it to soar it will never achieve its potential.

A hash does not need to return a fixed-size bit string (although in software applications it usually does). Show me a definition that says it must be fixed-size. A hash function "number of vowels in the input" is an example of a hash function with no upper size limit. The Wikipedia article says "one can use the datum itself as the hashed value".

You wanted assurance that the balance had not changed "from a reference". Since you can easily calculate the balance of the output of my hash function and compare it to the reference balance, it meets your challenge. :-)

But I will let you off the 10 BTC payment.

My DomainChain proposal most definitely only addresses Domain Name Registration, although I expect that one or more generators would run DNS servers to validate the concept.

The theymos/nanotube proposal makes several references to servers, but they would need to clarify what they have in mind.

If you build something better, people will eventually use it. But I don't think there will be a landrush.

In addition, there's a personal satisfaction from providing for the world a better way to do something.

It's important to understand a distinction here. They are making a distributed Domain Name Service, but are planning to depend on a centralized Domain Name Registration Service.

Bitcoin provides a great way to do a decentralized Domain Name Registration Service which would be a great match for their distributed DNS.

Well if that really is the biggest obstacle that Bitcoin needs to deal with, its success is assured.

If you try to redesign everything, you will end up successfully redesigning nothing.

The way for a small group to achieve success is to design a drop-in-replacement that's significantly better in one important way.


Not so. The latest version won't include transactions with extra text in blocks that it generates itself, but it accepts blocks generated by others that contain transactions with extra text.

On Fedora 12, the standard pyopencl installation doesn't work properly. I got it to work by following the instructions here:
http://wiki.tiker.net/PyOpenCL/Installation/Linux
but I had to use the second (longer) procedure in section 3, with locations specified explicitly.

Also, in step 2 of that document, I couldn't get Numpy to install using that method. But it installed properly when I used the GUI rpm installer ("System | Administration | Add/Remove Software").

And the expected cost of that collision is, I think, the average value of one bitcoin transaction. Multiply the cost by the likelihood, and Bitcoin would need many more than 8 places after the decimal point to record the tiny economic risk.

So was this not what you were seeking? Or was the price uninteresting? Or were you looking for enough takers on both sides (buy/sell) that you could profit from arbitrage?