The blockchain is just a chain of blocks.  A block is created when someone solves the math problem at the target (difficulty) level.  The target is set so that given the recent history of computing power (hashes/second) the miners have had that a block will be found approximately every 10 minutes.  Due to the random nature of trying to find these solutions via brute force sometimes that time is less and sometimes more.  Whatever miner finds that solution is granted the current block reward (because we all agree to it) plus any transaction fees that come with any pending transactions he/she chooses to include in that block.  This is how transactions are stored in the blockchain.

There is no agency or central authority here.  That miner gets that reward because we all agree to it.  The reward is essentially just a transaction in the block the miner found that rewards themselves with that amount of bitcoins.

What might be confusing you is that most people now mine on a pool.  This is software that basically splits the work up among everyone who participates in that pool.  When someone finds a block then the owner of that pool creates the block and gains the reward.  Then the software takes that reward and splits it up in some fashion based on the amount of work each person did.

As for private keys, your wallet creates addresses for you.  Each address has a private and a public key.  The public key is obviously the one you give out to someone so that they can send you bitcoins.  You should protect your private keys and never give them out because anyone that has those can spend any bitcoins stored on that address.  The amount of bitcoins stored on an address is all the bitcoins that address has received minus any that address has sent.  The amount of bitcoins in your wallet is the sum of the bitcoins stored in all the addresses in that wallet.

We all agree to a set of rules basically.  These rules are enforced by the software we use.  If we try to change our software to use different rules then everyone else on the network would ignore our changes and thus we'd not be part of the bitcoin network anymore but rather our little worthless fork.

The rule in question here is that the reward for creating a block is halved every 210,000 blocks found.  Unless something is changed (and we all agree on it) then eventually the reward will go down to 0 (since bitwise shifts are used to do the halving).  I put this blurb together to illustrate it for myself http://nandbit.com/bitcoin/reward

After the block reward goes to 0 (~120+ years from now) then people will still need to mine in order for transactions to be processed.  The only gain from doing so will be the transaction fees people pay when they send bitcoins.  Miners could simply choose not to include transactions with too low of fee if needed in order to justify mining at that point.

Your images show forbidden error when I try to view them.

It's a nice watch.  I was just in the market for a nice watch last week.  Good luck on the sale.

No, it would have to be finished skeins.  If you get some, I'd possibly be interested.

My wife knits things.  She says she usually uses about 80 yards which is generally around 3-5 oz (depending on the weight of the yarn) for a scarf.  I don't really know anything about it all but what would it cost to get something equivalent to that?

rf1aK981CZGGoro64uQtopNWqgauwrfLSk

Do you have pictures of the silver?

I'll take them if they are in decent condition and shipping isn't crazy to US48.
I'm calculating 5% below spot as 5.301 + shipping at the moment.

As has been mentioned, buying all the coins would be impossible since not every coin is up for sale somewhere.  You could buy up all the coins currently listed with an ask price at mtgox but obviously you aren't going very many at all for what most refer to as the current price (last or avg). 

Right now there are about 10,793,875 total bitcoins in existance.  Of those there are about ~84,000 currently for sale on mtgox.  To buy up those 84,000 it would currently cost $16,224,019,674,361.37 USD.  That's over 16 trillion dollars to buy 0.7% of the current available bitcoins.  Not to mention the number of bitcoins yet to be created.

Really, all any attempt to buy up that many coins would just end up making us all rich as the price would sky rocket.

I don't believe anyone has coupons yet.  The only mention of a discount was for those people that preordered early and they would arrive in the box when you receive one.  When those start arriving and people receive them I imagine most would want to use them for their next purchase.  If they are transferable I imagine there'd be a market for buying them (I know I'd buy one).

As for difficulty, it's probably going to raise more than just 10 times although I won't try and pinpoint a number on how high.  There are threads about this subject.

Just reporting in here..  I sent some btc and someone703 sent me some silver coins.  Packaging was good, shipping was fast, coins are great.  Thanks.

Got wireless up.. it's not too bad.  I had not started the wicd service is why I could not get wicd-curses to work.

Just a brief setup steps for the Edimax adapter.

modprobe 8192cu
pacman -S wireless_tools (unsure if needed?)
pacman -S wicd
reboot
ifconfig wlan0
systemctl start wicd
systemctl enable wicd.service
wicd-curses

At this point it's just a text-based gui to set up your wireless that is pretty dummy proof.

The current caveat is that you'll need a wired connection to install the extra packages now.  Might be possible to just have  it where the user just needs to type wicd-curses on first boot to set it up.  That'd require it start off wired or to have a keyboard/screen but I don't see a way around that for wireless.

I just donated a coin too for all the work you've put into this.  If this leads to stable ASIC mining off an rpi then it'll be worth more than that.

For the wireless, I did the modprobe then installed wireless_tools and wicd.  I attempted to use the wicd-curses but something broke on that so I'm possibly missing some other package there.  I'll look up using wicd-cli.

Follow it through to checkout.. the tax goes away for me once you do.
I think it's just an issue with their cart.

Well the dhcp all seemed to start working last night.  I have no idea what was going on.  At this point I assume something was funky on my end.  Sorry for the trouble.

On a tangent point, it looks like in Arch that drivers need to be downloaded/compiled to get the commonly used (for rpi) Edimax wireless adapter working.  What would be the odds of getting that included in a future release?   Here's a link to the process http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1129&hilit=edimax&sid=56a38bc88efd3a15275a1d6d29742ecf

I have sent you a message.

I burned a fresh raspian image and had the same issue on both rpi.  If I manually set an ip it works fine though.  It's odd cause every other device on my network is dhcp and I know I've used one of those rpi with dhcp before but it might have been an older release.  I ran out of time playing last night but I'll try setting a manual ip in your release tonight.  I'm assuming there's an interfaces file somewhere in arch.

Ahh well I just unboxed and booted up so maybe it's the firmware.  I'll do that then try.

I'm having trouble getting dhcp to pick up automatically.

I'm pretty familiar with Linux but I've never used Arch before and I'm trying to debug off a little 7" screen I have for the rpi.  I generally ssh into the box but with the network not up I obviously can't do that.  I actually got the network to come up once after rebooting a few times but then after rebooting again it was not working anymore and I've not been able to get it to come up again.

The /var/log/errors.log file shows "failed to start dhcpcd on eth0" over and over.

I did some searches and ran across a few threads which lead to this https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31093
which seems to be the most likely culprit. 

I've had this same thing happen on 2 different sd cards on 2 different rpi.

Hey, I just made a small order and hoping shipping is as quick as the above posts state.

Do you plan to stock more foreign 1oz silver coins such as the philharmonic, libertad, britannia, panda, etc?

This looks promising

Seriously, thanks for doing the work here.  If this stabilizes the usb issues it will be great for miners.