#Whoosh!

I have found the function, and I claim my 10 BTC.
13NyUj5StfFDLCT1xrwDWShp51H9Ve9xMW

Unfortunately it won't make you happy, because the function simply maps its inputs to its output, resulting in a very large hash (but you said that's OK).

That's not always the case. Sometimes the customer will have a balance at the website. The operator of the website will certainly want to know if a past transactions becomes invalid and disappears.

Noagendamarket, are you actually receiving emails that people send through your "Contact" form on bitcointo.com? I've used the form twice and haven't heard back.

Actually, no. The home page of bitcoin.org contains these words, which are old enough that I think they were probably written by Satoshi: "Transactions are practically free..." (emphasis mine).

Transaction fees have been part of the design of Bitcoin since the beginning. Even so, regular everyday transactions are likely to remain practically free.

The Bitcoin logo on top of the monitor now looks like the Ritcoin logo.

Not long ago someone posted that they had sent some BTC to their girlfriend's computer, but her computer hadn't finished downloading the block chain yet. She may be the first female user of Bitcoin.

This kind of thing is trivially taken care of by property prices. The sawmill will buy the land next to the asphalt plant, because no-one wants to live there. The land by the school will cost a little more, and people will choose to use it for living rather than for a sawmill that doesn't gain any advantage from being near a school.

There may be some problems to be solved by voluntarists, but land use planning is not one of them.

That would be nice. It will protect me from when the cat sits on the keyboard and accidentally sends all of my BTC. Or from when I think I'm connected to the test network and I'm really connected to the main network.

I'm not in for a new genesis block. It risks harming Bitcoin. If the alternative block chain is commercially successful, someone will add a currency to the alternate chain and it will overtake Bitcoin.

Anyway, don't think that Satoshi has killed the idea of Domain Names in the block chain. Here's what the latest changes mean:

1. If you register a domain name, you must connect to a miner that supports it (because standard clients won't relay your request). No problem. You will need to be using a modified client anyway (to give you a way to specify the domain name, the IP addresses and the fee) and the client can be designed to connect to known performant miners (which will probably be most of them).

2. The standard Bitcoin clients will accept the blocks generated by the performant miners, but won't see the Domain Name transactions.

So what's the problem? What's not to like?

I say we should continue to develop the ideas, then try them out on the test network.

DomainChain wiki is here:
http://domainchain.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

There's not much there, but I will work on it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, some interesting further ideas on integrating with the Bitcoin block chain have been added to the Theymos/Nanotube wiki.

The typo I'm worried about is when I omit the dot and send 1234 coins instead of the 12.34 that I meant to send.

It's not that simple. If an alternative chain provides, say, timestamping services, then there is obviously value to the users of the service. But what is the value to the generators? They earn coins, but may not themselves have any need for a timestamping service. So the proof-of-work coins that they earn are only valuable to them if they can use them more generally, like coins.

So we come to the next part of your comment:


Again, if the alternative coins have a low value, they're not much use to the person who generated them. And if they have a high value, they might replace bitcoin as the general currency. It doesn't work very well either way.

Bump currently works on iPhone or on Android, but not on the N900. Anyway, it's a centralised proprietary solution and I think we can do better.

It's not necessary to change to a 128-bit integer. Not all of the 64 bits are used, so one of the spare bits can be used as a flag that "shifts" the decimal point.

I would contribute some venture capital for the "right" business.

Coinguy, how many coins can a die strike before it is worn out?

Well yes, time based expiry is better for the customer, but the motivation for block-based expiry in the theymos/nanotube design seems to be that the transaction records are vulnerable to block chain compaction, which might happen after a specific number of blocks.

Of course, there is nothing that forces the providers of domain name servers to compact their copy of the chains, but then a new entrant into the business can't get all the data unless they can lay their hands on one of these uncompacted block chains.

I think we should dispense with the complexity associated with paying various servers. We should also dispense with the concept of paying more if we want better visibility for our domain names.

No-one wants a system where some people can reach some.domain and some people can't, depending on which servers are getting their share of the payment. Or a system where a new server can come to prominence and put pressure on people to pay again for the domains they already paid for.

Let's cut it down to the simplest business model that can work.

Suppose there are some generators who will include domain name registrations into blocks that they generate, because they want to earn the transaction fees. Those generators will operate public-facing domain name servers.

Why? They need to do this, to make the domain name service credible so that people will use DomainChain for their domain registrations. For the generators, it's an overhead, but a necessary one. Kind of like how most restaurants provide toilets without charging separately for them.

You could argue that there will also be some operators who would generate, and who would collect the transaction fees for domain name registrations, but who would not operate a server. After all, why incur the overhead if the other generators will operate the servers?

But the market will take care of this. The generators who do operate servers are not going to accept the blocks generated by those who sell domain names without providing domain name servers.

Additionally, a market like this is likely to have two other kinds of players.

There will be a few organizations who are willing to operate a server for free, perhaps for ideological reasons. Those servers will probably be overloaded and slow (like the free Usenet servers), but they act as a backstop which forces the commercial operators to provide something better.

There will also be a few commercial operators who provide enhanced super-fast servers without being generators. They will do this either because they have paying customers who want the best domain name service that is possible, or they will do it for their own business reasons (as Google does with their free-to-access domain name servers).

Here are the advantages of this simpler system:

• For the domain name owner, the registration is convenient, secure, and lasts forever,
• For the internet user, the same set of domains is served to everyone,
• For the generators, it's a worthwhile extra source of income, and
• For the Bitcoin system, it's an easy way to get extra strength into the block chain with minimal extra data

I've struggled really hard to think of a way to do this too. If the work done in the alternate chain is to be paid in bitcoins, that payment must be made "outside the chain" with all the attendant bookkeeping, "old-school billing", and chasing-up that this entails.

The alternative is for the payment to be made in coins from the alternate system. Here there are two possibilities.

Either these coins won't be perceived as valuable, in which case they won't be of much use for payments. Or else, those alternate coins will gain value, and will be used for payment. In this case the risk to Bitcoin is that the alternate coins have enough added utility that they eclipse Bitcoin and become used as a general purpose digital currency.

Bitcoin is not yet entrenched enough as "first mover" to be immune from being displaced by a more economically-useful digital currency.

The final possibility seems to be to dispense with payments altogether. Everyone communally pays for the system through their generation activity, and there are no transaction fees. This might actually work for some applications that depend more on generation than on transfers.