The background music is way too loud.  The Director may have spent a lot of time researching it, but the final production sets the quality.

The OP didn't mention if this documentary is aimed at us, or the unconverted?

i have had trouble trying to get a node up and running as it is.

Yes 8 Mb is the max size and blocks won't always be that big, but in general we will start to see many blocks greater than the current 1 Mb size.

It will start to take node hosting out of the realm of the average punter lending his spare disk space and CPU cycles "for the good of the network"

I haven't figured where I stand on this yet: support or reject the increase the blocksize increase, support buying lattes with altcoins (this is not an altogether stupid idea), the whole thing is doing my head in.

The Visa or Paypal network transfers a huge number of transactions per minute.  If Bitcoin went that viral are node hosters going to store that magnitude of transactions on their home PC? Home PCs using ADSL are not quite the type of infrastructure that could handle anything like that, not to mention the inefficiencies that decentralization brings.

This is a serious problem that poses philosophical as well as technical questions.  Not even Andresen has presented a convincing argument on this topic.

I believe the final solution to this problem has not yet been formulated.

Nicely put.  and sig ads don't pay much I agree.

For many of us who contribute useful information back into the community here I think getting paid a few satoshi is a nice reward.  compare it to youtube videos that people create and put up and get a portion of the banner ad revenue.  Ad sig payments ideally should be aligned with the quality of the content and the value of it to the forum community, but that of course is very subjective.

I don't think being rewarded for useful quality content is a 'cancer'.

FUTURE: if you want a noun

DISRUPTIVE: if you want an adjective

that was my sneaky way of getting two words in

very interesting reading.  thanks for sharing.

unless you have factual evidence you should at least phrase this as a question.  More like, why are they stalling?  Are they stalling?

Promoting robust debate is good, however promoting conspiracy theories as fact is not.

As mentioned above, I think red-tape would be the primary reason.

I don't think we need a PoS hybrid solution to encourage an army of nodes.  Mining pools only need one full node each, if the pools were somehow incentivized to be smaller there would be an abundance of smaller mining pool nodes.

This is a very positive themed post that paints the upside well.  I agree with the principles and agree this is the future direction.

Some important caveats however, technology and algorithms need to be opened to public scrutiny in order to crowd-source detection for weaknesses.  Blockchain technology is being subject to intense scrutiny by researchers and hackers alike, which will only lead to a more robust system.  Hash algorithms are regularly analyzed and deprecated once weaknesses are publicized.

We have all heard about the buggy trading algorithms which have led to 'flash crashes'.

the point is we need to make sure the systems superseding us are safe and working as intended.  In response to your 3 topics:
"People are slow" - systems can be made slow by malicious actors if not well designed (think DDOS)
"People make mistakes" - and so do systems if quality control is not up to par
"People lie" - and systems can be made to lie too if they are compromised by malicious actors.

blockchain technology certainly holds the promise of being a system that will not be threatened by the above 3 issues, lets hope it continues to evolve and stand-up to intense scrutiny, and eventually become more prevalent in society.

No I don't think Gavin knows who Satoshi is. However I am sure he has his suspects.  Based on the circumstantial evidence he probably also suspects Nick Szabo.

the key is not to keep your eggs in the one basket, to reduce risk.  lend tiny amounts to many people that you evaluate as low risk.

agreed.  the best way to promote is to ask to pay in bitcoin every time you buy in a store or online (email the sales support).  Even though we know they will say no, it is highlighting the demand to the merchant.

t-shirts go out of shape too easily, if it had a collar like a nice quality polo shirt you could have a market...

currently there is no standard ascii or unicode character for bitcoin, so it is not recognized by any system.  bitcointalk.org has added the code as a custom workaround for us to use.  see here for the background if you are interested:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_symbol

no workaround currently, except for using a closely matching symbol such as capital B, or the Thai Baht symbol.

Normally it is not required to wait for the confirmation if you are using a service such as bitpay.  Firstly it is not possible to cancel a legitimate btc transaction.  So the payment processor can analyze the propagation of the transaction through the network, if the transaction is not being rejected by nodes and is propagating at an expected rate then it is expected to be confirmed.  So the payment processor can 'approve' a payment in seconds.

In effect the payment processor is using nodes as a transaction validator, the transaction would be rejected by nodes if there was an issue.  The transaction will remain at the nodes to be queued to be added to a block.  The merchant will need to wait until transaction is confirmed before being able to spend the amount.

if the merchant was doing a wallet to wallet transaction with a customer then yes they might wait for confirmation as you pointed out, but in reality merchants are using payment processors - which provide other services including dynamic pricing, instant conversion etc...

I know this is an old topic, but in case anyone is having problems with the Bitfinex API:

In the documentation it shows all authenticated actions as using verb POST.  This is NOT correct as you can see by the above code.  Use GET.  Using POST will give you a 400 error.

I wasted a couple of hours on this problem, hope it saves someone else some time.

In theory a merchant could perform a wallet to wallet transaction with their customer, but in that case the merchant might require the customer to wait in the store for 1 confirmation (~10 minutes) - not very user friendly.

As mentioned above, it is not possible to cancel a legitimate btc transaction.  The payment processor can analyze the propagation of the transaction through the network, if the transaction is not being rejected by nodes and is propagating at an expected rate then it is expected to be confirmed.  So the payment processor can 'approve' a payment in seconds.

In addition the payment processor can provide dynamic btc price based on btc/fiat rate, and convert the received btc to fiat immediately.  Unfortunately most merchants still work primarily in a fiat ecosystem so they need to receive fiat.

So in answer to your question, in theory merchants can transact in btc without using a payment processor, however they would miss out on the value added services that the processor provides.

Random does not imply dynamic, in your case the block size does not ramp up immediately to confirm transactions in a timely manner.  For your idea it would be better to implement a deterministic variation, a large block every n blocks, so that low fee transactions can expect to wait n * 10 minutes instead of a random wait time.

Fixed block sizes of different sizes and probabilities do not inherently overcome any fundamental problem a single block size has.  If we calculate a weighted average of your block sizes and implement that as a new block size then the blockchain will process the same number of tx per given period, therefore the transaction in your example would also eventually be confirmed.

BTW I am not advocating fixed or dynamic block size, the debate is still in the hands of better informed minds than mine.

yes that is correct to quite a large number of significant digits.

Or someone posted some US quarter coins to store in their Dropbox account.

If someone does manage to send a transaction from the bitcoin blockchain across the ether to the litecoin blockchain I wonder what exchange rate they would get 

In all seriousness though it is difficult to counter such nonsensical rumors without more specific information or a link to the OP.

which version is your card? I assume it is the faster 3GB RAM, DDR5, 384bit bus version?

Thanks for the info, after reviewing a pull request to fix the bug I modified the calc_addrs.cl directly.  I also updated the device driver. All this got me a bit further but i am getting a CL_BUILD_PROGRAM_FAILURE error.  From reviewing the online information it seems unlikely I will get the program working on this Intel GPU, although I would like to hear from anyone who has managed to do it.