I'm seriously looking for the right opportunity.

If your bank chooses to provide you with a "no-notice account", the bank had better be prepared to give you your money on demand.

With bitcoin, you can spend your entire balance at any time. Why would your bank not be expected to provide an equally good service?

These bank transfers are only free within the Eurozone, not within the whole EU, and the UK is outside the Eurozone. My bank would charge £25 to transfer funds to Bitcoin Exchange; I'm not sure how much in the other direction.

I will. I've sent you a PM.

I think it's worth keeping the default interface as simple as possible for new users. If people want to set a price in the "send coins" dialog, this field should be enabled by a configuration option, not presented to new users.

I would attend a UK meetup if there were two other people interested in going.

"What are Bitcoins?"
http://quezi.com/13527


I wrote that piece. It is a multi-author blog with some degree of editorial oversight and 50,000 hits per month. Not fantastically notable, but more so that Joe Average's "What I ate for dinner" blog.

Yes, that would be enough for me, and additionally I would want the same number for each of my family members.

It's not "pushing", it's just "first exposure".

Also, 99.9% of the listeners won't look into bitcoin until they've heard about it a dozen or more times.

Indeed, how can a cow be expected to vote between two farmers?

(Oh sorry, was I supposed to work a snake analogy in there somewhere?)

For what it's worth, on Fedora the makefile puts setup.h in /usr/local/lib, not in /usr/local/include:

Effectively you're just using your server to implement a payment cache. It accumulates the micro-transactions, then every time they reach (say) one bitcoin for a user, that transaction gets flushed out to the real bitcoin network. The same thing going the other way, a bitcoin comes in to the payment cache, and that coin gets nibbled away at until it's gone.

Of course this is just another way of thinking about an "account" system. But it shows that you're not "turning" the bitcoin system into anything.

Hey kiba, don't forget to add the 10 BTC that I sent! (2 x 5 BTC)

An open bank is a fabulous idea, but banking is so heavily regulated that I can't see how it could be done. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

For now it's still an inflationary currency. That is, unless people are losing more than 50 BTC every 10 minutes.

Only for a given size of transistor. Every time they find a way to make the transistors smaller again, a further clock speed increment becomes possible.

True, but Moore's Law (if it holds) does set a lower bound on the growth of computer power.

If you can increase the number of transistors, you can do more things in parallel. Any other improvements (such as increases in clock speed) will increase computer power beyond the growth in the number of transistors.

Thanks for working that out. It sounds like a plan!

No, actually, I wouldn't have the guts to borrow $300,000 to speculate. I'll stick to hoarding a few thousand BTC, and spending any others I get.

For sure this will happen by 2015. Even then, I think Bitcoin will still be too hard to use for many people (i.e. those who type Google into the search box when they want to go to google.com). So it will languish for a few years before finally crashing or soaring. My guess is 2020.

Ideas take time to mature. Even Google, with its megabuck funding, only became used by grandmothers 10 years after it was conceived.

An interesting piece of maths. I had already realised that the GPU card I bought will never pay back its cost. Of course if I had bought it a few weeks earlier, the story would have been different.

The main shaky assumption is that difficulty will continue to rise exponentially at the current rate. Those who have been checking Bitcoin Watch since the last difficulty increase will have noticed that the "Average blocks per hour over the past 24 hours" figure has been quite low. It's now 7.46, but I even saw it at 4.96 for a time, so the next difficulty increase will be fairly small.

As the difficulty rises, some generators will "switch off", which will reduce the next difficulty rise. Also when the next Northern Hemisphere summer comes, I think lots of generators will switch off.