This may hasten the day that a govt adopts bitcoin as a national currency. Bring it on!

If the govt gains power because people give them the power to control their money, then good for them. But then we will have a lot of people who may decide to jump the fence and run for it. Good for them too.

More people using bitcoins = progress. And at whatever cost.

I have been thinking it would be great to have an alt-coin designed around creating easy to set up currencies for small countries. It would include automatic taxation, inflation, and redistributionist rules. It would be able to contact a central government server so that taxes could automatically be passed to the separate bureaucracies of government. No need for a treasury, this will automatically be passed down the pipeline. Toss in merged mining and miners all around the world will have a little of that country's money, and will help with exports.

Basically you can have "smart" money that will behave according to publicly known rulesets, and with absolute transparency. The country could mint their own bills (or ahem printcoins and they could be deposited in your digital wallet by scanning them (no bank needed). Counterfeiting would be quickly detected, no one would need to control the production of money, and the government can add in whatever nasty little controls that they like.

The perfect stage for a compromise between liberty and authoritarian self-empowerment.

It doesn't really sound as smooth. I consider bitcoins money, so using the word money seems to work fine.


The more people post stuff, the more it will matter that they pay. The "newest" list is the only place unfunded stuff shows, and it will only show the newest 100 posts. If people spam the heck out of it, they will all just fall off the stream.

I consider newest to be just a holding ground for things that need funding.

Enjoy the drugs, and thank you for giving suggestions. I enjoy improving this site.

BTW, there is now a twitter feed:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61930.0

I set it up so the current top post of the day (as long as it is not the same as the previous day) on http://coinsmack.com will be posted to twitter at @CoinSmack:
https://twitter.com/CoinSmack

So if you would like to follow that feed, it will be fairly light as far as post counts (at most once a day), but should have interesting things.

If you aren't into twitter, you can add the feed to your RSS reader with this url:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=coinsmack

Or those who don't like all this new-fangled web junk, you can use this:
http://www.feedmyinbox.com/
and paste in the rss feed url in to receive it at your email inbox.

Just post something and down vote it. Anything with negative BTC will appear there.

The amount of energy consumed grows to match the price of bitcoins. Energy is basically the margin cost of mining, and bitcoins is the revenue. Miners will start buying more cards to mine more when the payout is higher, eventually pushing them to an equilibrium where everyone starts complaining that it is not profitable any more.

If the revenue were to drop to 1BTC per block, miners would start unplugging their machines to cut costs, and the difficulty would drop to match this change. Once you win a block, the cost to add a transaction is nearly nil, and to ignore low value transactions will mean that the next miner will be able to take them and pocket them.

Keep in mind that more's law also applies to miners, and 2 years from now all that mining equipment will be obsolete, so unless miners keep buying equipment, they will be replace by a new set of miners who will get twice the hash rate at half the cost (energy consumption probably won't drop).

Unless some miners get 50% of the hashing power (or some cartel forms), market laws will apply, and the cost to add a transaction will be the limit to the actual required fee. All that power consumption and fancy graphics cards will end up being sunk cost at the point of transaction recording, and thus be irrelevant.

I am afraid I don't understand what is being suggested.

Anyone want to explain it in sudocode.

dollars cost 9c to make and last 2 yrs.

I think he is aiming more for the collector items rather than pocket change. If you are looking for small potatoes, I have a 0.50 bill, and if the price gets up to $10 I will probably be making smaller denomination bills (I have them planned all the way down to 0.01 BTC).

Mike makes an excellent product and as such it costs him a lot to produce it.

For those who feel that this locks up bitcoins, keep in mind that whatever isn't get locked in the coin is part of a free market exchange for labor and materials (in this case gold) and thus stimulates the bitcoin economy. I also imagine that many of his smaller value coins are used as gifts and thus spreads the idea of bitcoin beyond the tech savvy community.

When someone sees this gold coin on some well-to-do's person office wall, they will know that this bitcoin thing is serious and maybe they should get in on the action.

0.6% isn't so bad. You can always get your BTC the old fashioned way. You can earn them. I have never bought any bitcoins through an exchange, and only bought a couple bitcoins off of a miner in person when I started. Everything else was from selling something.

Speculators have their role, but in any health currency they should constitute only about 5% (number pulled from...) of the transactions.

If you have anything you can sell, or can make and sell, or a service that people actually want, then sell them in bitcoins. You don't even need a website. Just use the marketplace. It could use something other than someone selling.

There is now a section in the site called "hated" which is all things that have negative BTC values.

We will see. After seeing a bunch of requests for this, I am going with the flow. There are now down-votes on the site. Down-votes count twice as much as up-votes.

I'll add the hated section tomorrow.

Spike is now up on the site.

Ok, sorry for being defensive. I misperceived your intent.

Very clever, I like it. It will require a little block parsing, but it would make for a great weighting system.

Friendly reminder:

Don't forget to actually send me the image url, link url, and alt text for your ads.

I did not make any gain off of this, so calling it a scam (and me a scammer) is very poor wording.

If anything, this is a breach of contract. I am willing to accept a reasonable penalty, and offered up $5.5 of the $30 that was his bid. He has not rejected that, and I am optimistic that this can be settled fairly.

I have made two attempts to work out a reasonable solution, and you should at least let him respond before tossing in your troll like messages.

Bite me.

Posting is free, but will only show up under "newest" listing. For something to be "hot" on the front page, it needs to receive btc.

You are right. I made a mistake and should have put in some type of reserve. I had no idea that the bid was going to be anything nearly as low as it turned out.

It sucks for you because you expected to get what you were entitled to as the winner.

Would a bitcoin be fair as a way to make it up to you?

For those that are interested, I added RSS feeds to all lists on the site.

So you can have your rss reader track the newest, hotest, or top items in any category.

There really isn't a whole lot of maliciousness that can be done on the site. The db works on an insert only basis, so nothing is every overwritten, and there is no sensitive data on the machine (no passwords, private keys, etc).

Mostly users can only do some front end funkyness, and I think this is the only place I didn't sanitize what was entered (I built the select element directly from stuff from the db like a fool).