Yes, tags would be pre-approved by admins. In fact, current list of boards may be just fine. If an article is published that deals mostly with Bitcoin mining, I can start a discussion with tags 'press' and 'mining'. The way things are now, we end up with cross-posting mess, or even worse: multiple threads dealing with same story in multiple boards.

The only situation where actual price of bitcoin plays a role for me is if price was so low (and total value of Bitcoin economy so tiny) that individual transactions move the market. Fortunately, we are moving away from this extreme, despite the inflation which is there by design and will gradually disappear over the next few decades.

Other than that, I don't care if it's $10 or $2000 per coin. There is plenty of room in eight decimal places. I spend and buy them according to their current value. Even if I'm speculating, I still don't care about the absolute value, but about relative change over time, and whether I can predict this trend (I can't).

The only thing that bothers me is volatility, but that'll get better with time, and even now in many cases the problem can be circumvented with real-time conversion through paysius or bit-pay.

They shouldn't rely on secrecy, but should be discussed on a need-to-know basis between service providers, or between customers and providers. I think that's common sense. Anyhow, it wouldn't hurt to have the board. Everyone can decide if and how much they would be sharing there.

It wouldn't be a big change at all - just like now you go to Speculation or Meta to see what's new in these topics, you'd go to Speculation or Meta to see what's new in these topics. The only difference is that threads could be labeled with multiple labels, which right now we can't do.

I agree, but my intention here was not to discuss security practices for exchanges. I was trying to discuss the fact that hackers steal coins, and what it tells us about Bitcoin.

Most threads naturally belong to several topics. With the proliferation of available subfora the problem gets bigger, and information is harder to find. Being able to attach multiple labels (or tags, or whatever you call them) makes more sense than insisting on the choice of one particular subforum.

Labels work great for blogs, email, photos - would they work for a forum? Simply turning current subfora into the list of pre-approved labels for users to choose from would do it. Mods would still be able to add/remove labels as needed.

A personal security sub makes sense. Unfortunately, lots of useful information is already scattered around the forum.
As for the "enterprise" level discussion, perhaps it's better if they keep it between themselves?

Which only proves that bitcoins are valuable and useful. Exchanges and users will eventually get their act together and start treating Bitcoin with respect.

I was hoping to discuss specific points I made in OP. Electricmucus and lethos can do it, can't you? If you feel like discussing psychotherapy and chain saws, kindly go to off-topic per forum rules.

I'm very glad this didn't end up terribly. Hope the exchange will recover and move on. Kudos to all involved with prevention and cleanup.

I understand that victims feel bitter about it, and they should - but let's try to cool off for a moment and take a disinterested and objective view at what thefts mean for Bitcoin.  Here are my observations:

- Hacking an exchange, preparing a long con job, running a Ponzi scheme - these are not trivial tasks. They require time, hard work, and sometime single-use tricks, which could all have been spent on other things and targets, unrelated to Bitcoin.

- Thefts indicate that bitcoins are already valuable, and can be easily and efficiently moved around the world and exchanged for goods, services, and other currencies.  These facts may be something members of this forum all too easily take for granted, but general public may still need to be convinced.

- Thefts indicate that at this moment Bitcoin offers significant level of anonymity.

- Absolutely all hacks/thefts/scams to date were based on social engineering, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other mainstream technologies. Absolutely none of the hacks involved Bitcoin protocol itself in any way.

Hey, lessons learned...

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQQdSwFgSec

You are most welcome. I hope this simple analysis convinces people that eight decimal places are enough. Even in an unlikely event that Bitcoin completely replaces gold in the arenas of store of value and speculation, there is plenty of room even for microtransactions.

I assume you meant "just," not "jest." Before making a statement, you could actually do the math and some thinking to come up with a sensible statement. Here, I'll do it for you. There will be a total of 21 million coins. With eight decimals on top of it, we have a total of 2.1E15 indivisible units of account. This is a big number, you know. To put it in perspective, the total of all gold ever mined in the history of humankind is about 150,000 tonnes, or 1.5E11 grams, or 1.5E14 mg of gold. Ever mined. There are fourteen times more bitcoin units than milligrams of gold ever mined. In current prices, one mg of gold is worth about four US cents.
I hope you'll agree that "just 8 places" is not a sensible comment.
Also, wondering how "easy" it would be to change the algorithm implies once again that you have already decided to be negative about something without doing proper research.

It's more interesting than this. While it's just a matter of time before a house is destroyed by an asteroid, it's not just a matter of time before a given cryptological function is broken. Like with other human endeavors, it's also a matter of limited resources, motivation, and luck. It's a matter of time, available personnel, money, luck, health, management, unpredictable resorce-shifting events, etc. You'll notice that, for entropic reasons, most of these factors are likely to prolong, not shorten the time required to break, build, or invent something.

So, it's not just a matter of time in this case.

I'm an almost-average Windows user. I've lost zero coins over the past two years. In the same period, I've lost $20.

I did intentionally destroy some coins when I reformatted a HD back in 2010, and didn't care to back up the wallet. I don't consider this a problem, on the contrary: burning government-issued cash in most jurisdictions is a crime. With bitcoins I'm free to do whatever I want, including destroying them.

My coins are reasonably safe in multiple copies of paper wallets, and some of them on bitcoinspinner for everyday use.

I disagree. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find correlation between changes in price and media reports. It seems to me that the price is currently driven by a few speculators in conjunction with the herd mentality of small players (like myself). Add to it a pinch of random fluctuations, and you'll get a realistic picture.

I like your answer.

I gradually quit caring, just like I'm gradually paying off some credit-card debt that has piled up during student years. The goal is to be debt-free. Even this paying-off can be thought off as a form of investment - the ROI being decrease in monthly interest payments.
Not sure if I'll ever make it to owning a home, but since I didn't grow up in the US, I'm not that obsessed with home ownership as a measure of success or happiness. Renting has some advantages, and I pay for these. I am free to move as I please, and I have more time and less worries than someone tied up in mortgages, property taxes, maintenance, insurance, and other aspects of home ownership.
I can save for a car cash-down when I need one, but living in a city I'm totally fine walking, biking, using public transit, and renting a car for weekend getaways and such. Again, more time and less worries.
Finally, I try to live in countries with universal health care.

All in all, I don't need to borrow money at interest, and it's hard to imagine a scenario where I would need to.

Interesting comparison, but I don't think it's meaningful. ATMs are only a tiny technical part of government-issued fiat economy. Combined electrical power of all payment processing centres is likely orders of magnitude higher, but then again this economy is orders of magnitude higher than current Bitcoin economy. 56x in this conext is irrelevant, might as well be 0.1x or 560x.

There have been threads and Wiki entries discussing overall efficiency and scaling of Bitcoin network, comparing it to Visa or similar processors. My impression is that, overall, Bitcoin can be efficient.

How did you come up with this number? My calculation above gives 9 MW, and that's an overestimate.