Bingo! I've been following this thread and others thinking to myself "why the money obsession?". Even those that argue on different economic philosophies compare to money, use money, use the lack of money, money, money, money...

I compare Bitcoins to beans... when we played cards as kids we used beans as measure of wins / losses. We didn't trade it for money, we didn't play for "make believe money", we played for beans. It worked because we all agreed that beans where the game measure, and because there was a limited supply of them (in our game table, that is).

If we had some special engineered beans instead of Bitcoins, that took a full hour to produce a batch and for some quantic weirdness could only be produced one batch at a time in the whole universe, but anyone could try and grow them, we could use those instead of BTCs, with the obvious caveat of not being virtual, of course... They wouldn't be money, they would pretty much not have any value except for what you and your peers agree it had. It's the same. If I think you whispering 545 decimals from pi to my ear is worth me giving you a deed to my house, does that make pi, or it's value, a currency?

I've never been to Sweden or Canada, but I can tell you that we pay a lot for our "free" health care, in form of mandatory taxes. Of course, the ones who can afford just pay those taxes *and* the private health care. It is certainly better for those of the lower income spheres, as they at least get the basic health care for free, but the invoice is still paid up by everyone.

On a related note, I have been to Paris a couple of time and didn't get any 3-way action. It's just like minting bitcoins, I guess, you just have to be lucky


Well, I don't think that is accurate, really. I may be more on the inside, as I have worked with / for US people most of my professional life, and have good friends scattered along most of the states, but we do know about the rivalries between 'neighborhoods', which you call states or parts thereof. Even the TV shows depict that all the time, and at least in Portugal we have every American show, and then some. The truth is that while that is changing slightly, we have always worshiped the States and everything that comes from that side of the pond, to the point where it's just nonsense. I love the States, and if it wasn't for immigration rules (I'm too proud to let my life be investigated just so I can live there, although I have nothing to hide) I'd probably be living there. I already pretty much work there!

I don't know what your relation with Europe is, but believe me there is a world of a difference between the American States and the European Countries. Lets just say that Americans have a tendency of uniting against any external foe (an action I usually dislike, based on the way this is done, but the heart is certainly in the right place). We, Europe Countries, are each other foes for better or worst, and the fact that every one of us is taught how amazing we were in 'the times of our kings' and history is measured in thousands of years around these parts, the 'cultural bias' we tend to hold very dear for some reason makes us very unlikely to see our fellow Europeans as the same as us. It's sad, really.

And again I get as off-topic as I can, just like on almost every other thread I comment on! I'll get myself banned eventually :p

I'm game, for sure.

Why not?

Oh, wait:

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But I'm sure your original document had mentions to some form of these... oh, wait...

From my own experience, a change commited will always make some happier than other, but in the end everyone will get used to it, whereas reverting a change that is already in and doing one more change to copy with the reason why the reverted change was initially submitted will just make everyone confused. Proof of that is the phrase I just wrote down!

While at the same time North American governments try very hard to teach their citizens to obey without questioning, and succeed at doing so by surrounding them with notions that outside America every country is lagging behind someway or another.

Heh, sorry, I had to put some fuel in the fire, but I suck as a troll. Seriously though, our federal government? Europe, as a community, is a total failure. Each one of us, big or small, is so much convinced we have to best solution/society/enterprise/tax system/"add your own here" that the only thing we agree on is that we should all be granted subsidies... the exact distribution of them is obviously something we will never agree on for the reasons stated. So I really fail to see where you are getting your kicks from

But then you need to do so for all your addresses, and these get added on every transaction outbound... back to backing up wallet.dat, I guess, and that is exactly what the average user (heck, even the more technically inclined) will fail to do. I see the solution I proposed (or anything else, it's just an example) as something that could be done so it's a backup once and forget about it, although obviously for a limited time span, but this could be then supported in an automated way by a backup provider for a nominal fee, which I'd be glad to pay so I keep my bitcoins safe *and* still control the client, so I'm sure it's not all in some other server like mybitcoin. An alternative would be for mybitcoin to provide the private keys to the wallet so I could import them on my local client, basically using a single mybitcoin address as the 'savings account' and if in the future their server goes down in a big ball of fire I still have access to my bitcoins.
Backing up would thus be transfering coins to that account. Granted, not backing up, but keeping bitcoins safe, with minimal user knowledge needed for the process.

Speaking on behalf of the whole western europe, just because I happen to be the 4th most important individual here from a personal viewpoint, I'd just like to state that while I don't care for the tone of the thread comment asking, or rather, telling us to use the comma for 1000 separator, my decision that we should not care so much about the thousand separator as we must about the decimal separator is pretty set.

So, because I've been working with computers since I can remember, and been bitten by the comma/point confusion often times, I declare all Western Europeans will use the dot as a decimal separator for bitcoins, and refrain from using that same dot in the thousands separator at all costs. Use commas, spaces, thin or thick, or even a pretty picture of yourself, just not dots.

Unless you don't want to.

There, I think that settles things.

So, in theory, I could parse all the blocks, extract all the addresses and then make a tree of txins and txouts. With a little (a lot of?) effort, I could then try and split the txins from a txout into payment / change, effectively knowing which addresses belong to a single user. For those users that have a public address, this would be an unexpected disclosure.

I know the 'splitting the payment / change' is somewhat of a flawed argument, there is no way of being 100% sure all the time, but some rules might apply more often than not:
- Is there a txin for change = 0? This one is obviously from the sender
- On transactions of high value, chances are the highest part is the change (the 8999 lost coins thread being one such example)
- Future transactions from the change address will always carry the exact change amount + new txins, whereas the transfer receipient may very well already have a balance on the provided address.

I'm sure that all the statistical inclined fellow bitcoiners, being presented with a large enough annotated sample of the transactions to date could come up with a hihg accuracy model.

I know that when I transfer out, I generate 3 transactions, one for all in adress, one for new personal address with change and one to outgoing address with transfer amount.

Now, if I generate one single address (or a batch of them) on a wallet, and encrypt and store that wallet somewhere/everywhere I can, will I be able to use it as the "savings account" by transfering to that adress(es) without ever needing to run a client with that wallet?

With that and a 'backup' script that simply transfers all of my wallet except for some 'pocket money' to a fixed address, I can produce a safe backup of my bitcoins. This only gets somewhat more complicated when trying to take money out, but if we could have a way to import a keyset to the 'pocket money' client, we can then in theory be in possession of the whole balance for a specific address in the savings account, transfer what we want to keep there to the next address in the batch and the pocket money client would keep the change...

Should be pretty simple to implement in a way even noobs can use safely (maybe even provide an encrypted wallet.dat safekeeping service?) if only we could do:
- generate a batch of addresses
- encrypt and store the wallet holding these addresses
- keep these addresses in a format we can later import individually into the everyday bitcoin client
- allow for listing these addresses from the bitcoin client (so users can just say bitcoind transfertosavings XXX)

I think all of this is pretty simple to implement, although I haven't looked into the code yet. Sorry if I got a bit off-topic, I just realized that

Because what the world needs is more entropy... and I'm not even joking!

Right now, it may actually increase Maemo's reach!

I think you misunderstood my point, kiba. I didn't mean agorists and market anarchists are all old, much the opposite. What I meant is everyone in my generation and the one before seems to assume taxes, mandatory disclosure of all transactions and overall giving up privacy for "everyone's gain" is obviously correct, and in fact the only way to go. Actually trading goods for goods, or otherwise having community controlled markets (which bitcoin and any other non centrally controlled currency, given enough critical mass, can facilitate) is something we, as a group of people, frown upon, just because we were taught that's how the drug lords rule the streets / kills investment in public schools / hospitals / security / roads, take your pick. We don't see just how expensive these things end up getting when the governments to them for us, I guess. Can't put a price on freedom.

I don't want to troll here, but why are you wasting your time on the internets instead of giving your time and effort to the starving communities around the world. Even that may not be a great enough good if you think of the food you'll be eating for the little change you'll do in the world...

I mean, better to be "wasting" cycles on something that may very well become an alternative economy system, or at least put a little leverage into forcing the governmental controlled currencies be managed more fairly, than folding proteins for the big pharma, although I'm sure the drugs they'll patent and sell with your help will be a greater good to the world, as a whole.

I've often heard these lines of reasoning when I was working for the OLPC initiative... Why waste time and resources trying to create a tool of education, i.e. a computer with a very connected nature, targeting communities that have very little or nothing of their own? Isn't, you know, food more important? Keep feeding them and that will certainly solve all the problems in the world quickly, I'm sure.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, I've done seti, folding@home and a few more, but bitcoin? bitcoin is not about philanthropic egos or greater goods of scales we aren't really equipped to grasp. It's all about the fairness and privacy of community markets, something all of us below the age of, what, 120 don't really understand and have been taught to loath.

Hehe, thought about it, and I actually have a 32bit PIC dev board with which I could do something like that, but at around 40Mhz I doubt I could squeeze too much out of it, even if I was doing it in assembly (which I won't, that much is certain )

On the other hand, I've been waiting for a good excuse to dig into FPGAs...

I've got one of these http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en021940 PICDEM-FS USB boards I bought 2 years ago, with plans to do lots and lots of things out of it.

I ended up connecting it once to the computer and burning a single test program, thus I'm selling it if anyone's interested. The S&H alone will be around 130 BTC for Europe or 180 for other places, thus I'll be accepting offers starting there.

My Core2Quad (Q6600) slowed down 50%, my i5 improved ~200%, thus I don't think what you state is accurate. Maybe starting at some specific Core2?

This should cover all the problems in low value transactions, I guess. If I'm to sell my $1500 for 20.000BTC, I, the seller, may not have that much in BTC, so that's where I, again, would depend on either trusting the other party or some human escrow.

Not at all, satoshi. I do a lot of business in the local auctions and I'm all for paying up front, but only when the feedback mechanism provides me with some insight on the previous trades for the buyer / seller. Failing that, I sell and buy using COD, which is  almost like an escrow, except there's no way of asserting the goods are what was previously agreed upon before paying. But I do get the option of putting forward a complaint with witnesses (the post office clerk) which helps somehow.

So, this escrow as I've put it would be someone trusted in the community, effectively removing 75% of the fraud opportunities
a) Say I'll pay but don't
b) Say I'll send but don't and collect money
c) Send some bogus item and collect money
d) Say I've not receive (money / goods) but did

So d) is the one place where the human escrow will need to dig into the trade and assert who's saying the truth. All other are (more or less) easy to prove. The automated escrow service as you describe it would end up in burning money on all 4 situations.

Again, if you are to trust the other party, then cash up front works very well. If you are working under anonymous aliases and there's no previous trade trace, well, I personally prefer to not buy at all, if there's a chance I'll loose both money and goods.

Regardless of what the technical options are, I think that an escrow will always need to be, by definition, a trusted entity. I can see the automated workflow being easy enough when things go well:

  - Buyer sends btc to escrow, stating the recipient address
  - Seller sees btc in escrow, marked to send to his address
  - Buyer can release funds to seller
  - Escrow will automatically do so after x days
  - Both parties can open a complaint

And that's all I would automate. When things go bad, both parties should have a fee to pay to the escrow (that fee may be paid in advance to open account there?) so everyone looses something. Then the escrow will just have to mediate.

Because there's a fee *and* a human intermediary, the chances of successful fraud will probably not be economically interesting in the long run. Someone already trusted would make the ideal person for this, and maybe for a small fee some of us 'common guys' could help assert allegations from either side, if we are local to them.

But the money burning solution, while great at preventing economically viable fraud, does nothing to prevent revenge and actually makes everyone loose if one side is dishonest. I would certainly not endorse that.