For speculation?  I don't know, but assuming governments don't ban BTC, we should have another pop or three in the next few years.  For use in buying stuff anonymously?  I think the train has not yet left the station.

Hints:  mix your coins, and for storing bitcoin probably a lightweight wallet like Multibit is preferable over a heavy wallet like Armory.  I personally would not store my bitcoin online.  As for buying and selling BTC, it depends on what country you're in.

Good luck!

I agree.   ISO would be good.  But from what I heard about ISO recently (last 10 years), they are corrupt, meaning, you pay them their fee, wine and dine them, make some minor improvements and incorporate some minor suggestions, and you get your ISO certificate.  It's a scam.  But, I agree, it would make BTC seem more legit to some, so it's good PR.

Squeaking wheel gets the grease, way to go girl. 

But in fact Bitcoin is run by a small group of people IMO, that decide things like how the blockchain works.  Of course they will claim it's a democracy but in fact it is not, nor should it be.  The people who put the hard work in coding get to call the shots as to how bitcoin will work.  Most of them post here so unofficially this is the official site.  Offtopic:  I am looking forward to making bitcoin more anonymous, possibly with 'automatic mixing' of coins along the lines suggested by darkcoin.  I think the Powers That Be are also onto this.

I am not a big fan of Coinbase but what you say about verification is no longer true for small amounts (less than $10k I think).  You do not need to do anything anymore than provide your US bank account and password, which Coinbase then uses to make a small $1 deduction from your bank account, using ACH bank transfer (once the ACH bank transfer occurs of course you can and probably should change your bank password).  Then you can buy bitcoin from them, and, like you say, it takes a week before you get your BTC.  Their fees, while a bit higher than others, are not unreasonable given that they are a US-based company, with reputable backers, and not some outfit in Romania that you will never find if they shut their doors.  You get what you pay for.  

I'm a noob.  Can you please explain to me why this is unusual?  They always seem to have a few double spends at any time, is this an excessive number?

TonyT

195 Double Spends Double spends detected in the last 500,000 transactions (10 Minute Cache)

What accusations?  I think you don't speak English as a first language, or you would see I am not accusing you of anything, just asking questions.  However, if you really want to show you are fair, why don't you post a log of recent bets, identified by user ID, and we can see the payout. As I say, and you agree, your front page shows mostly red--losses by users--yet you claim that it's because they are betting big.  Perhaps, but all of them are betting big?  No small punters?  Also you did not answer my question about big bets:  how many big betters win?  Even if they are your friends, what is the biggest bet you have paid?  Do you have a limit on bets?  Seems you are very defensive on this thread, why?

Can we publicly ridicule you now, unicorn?  LOL u r lookin for the mythical chart to describe the future of BTC.  If the BTC market is fair, then by definition there is no way to predict it, according to the EMH (Efficient Market Hypothesis).  If it's not fair, as you imply, and the whales are manipulating it, then it is predictable.  Has anybody looked at the trading volume to see if there are whales that dump shares (or buy back) during the red/green portions of the curve?  Keep in mind volume always increases when there is a price jump or fall, so you must parse the data to see if whales are trading, not just volume.  There was a whale ("BearWhale") a few weeks ago trading bitcoin but I don't see it had a big effect on price.

They already have (or had) a bitcoin site for hitmen: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/edej45fflfd/murder-3/

Oh Ok.  Sorry man.  What is your "green" sector (house bet) percentage?  That is, last I checked with craps, if you roll a snake eyes (it's been a while since I've been to Las Vegas) the house wins--what percent of the time does that happen with your dice?  (it's not craps I know).  What percent does the house win?  1 to 3% sounds (to me) fair, but I'm not in the industry like you.

Also can you check provably fair before you play, or must you play with some small amount?  As somebody said in another thread (for another dice site) it seems provably fair holds up for small bets, but the minute you make a real big bet the house seems to always win (maybe there's somebody watching the betting and manually overrides the 'fair' dice for really big bets?).  Hope that's not true at your site.  Good luck, literally!

Thanks Doug that's very interesting.  I see indeed Objective-C is used in OS X (did not know that) and it has automatic garbage collection, which I don't think C++ or Python has.  I did not notice any memory leaks in the 44 hours it took to install and initialize Armory on my PC, so you guys did a good job making the code robust (whenever I used to code in C++ years ago, in a big project there always seemed to be some memory leak or orphaned pointers, that's why I switched to C# which supports automatic garbage collection).

If you read this, I'm curious whether all the Armory developers have ever met each other face to face?  I bet not.

Yeah and based on their front page, they are making money, as I see a lot of red (losses by customers) and not too many green. 

Gambling is for losers it seems...

What is your value to this thread Holliday?  Seems you are projecting your own inadequacies on me.  I am a noob trying to get more information; what are you, a vigilante moderator?  If you are more experienced with bitcoin, let's hear your solution ("but I'm starting to wonder if the OP even cares about solutions").  It's not easy to code P2P (though I've done it, by contrast, by your own admission in another thread, you don't know much about technology), so your suggestion of "do it yourself" is just plain stupid.  What is the purpose of your several posts in this thread?

Very interesting, thanks.  Now here's another question:  when Armory loads up it always takes the same amount of time even if it has already been loaded and exited from!  That is, if you load Armory, let it do "Initialization of Database Engine", "Build Database", "Scan Transactions", then exit Armory, then one second later reload Armory, it takes the same amount of time, like 10 minutes, before it goes online.  This is a feature or bug?  It should not take so long the second time it is loaded since the data downloaded is already in place?

BTW, below is something of interest that was mentioned earlier (new version of Core):  I see that the chief scientist Gavin Andresen made his blog post Oct 6, 2014 yet it seems the "headers first" approach has in fact "won the endorsement" of the "Powers That Be" in less than three weeks--very interesting.  I'd like to know why they picked this approach, perhaps it is the easiest to code (but I see Pieter Wuille was pushing for this, and he seems to be their main man, so that's probably why)?  Regardless, how long before they come out with a stable version of Core using Headers First?  It might be several months?  Maybe a year?  Time will tell but I bet this is not a trivial change to make in Core?  

TonyT


A Scalability Roadmap
by Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist, October 6, 2014

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/10/a-scalability-roadmap/

Pieter Wuille has been hard at work on a “headers first” approach – downloading the longest chain of 80-byte block headers, which is only 25 megabytes of data. The headers are sufficient to know whether or not you have the best chain, and once your node has the headers it can “back fill” by requesting complete blocks from multiple peers in any order it wants, similar to how BitTorrent downloads chunks of a large file from many different peers at once.

You might be surprised that old blocks aren’t needed to validate new transactions. Pieter Wuille re-architected Bitcoin Core a few releases ago so that all of the data needed to validate transactions is kept in a “UTXO” (unspent transaction output) database. The amount of  historical data needed that absolutely must be stored depends on the plausible depth of a blockchain reorganization. The longest reorganization ever experienced on the main network was 24 blocks during the infamous March 11, 2013 chain fork.

I hope so!  I was about to give up on bitcoin because of this issue.

I see you are a developer, and not to get too far off topic (I also code, but not as an employee), I see Armory is: " C++ code... Python code", which makes sense, as C++ is very popular with those that like granularity and Python is supposedly good for I/O (I use C# myself for both).  What is the 'typical' Armor programmer resume?  How many years of experience doing peer-to-peer stuff do you need?  What are good books on peer-to-peer (I once built a simple p-to-p using C# using 'delegates')?  I find it's hard to find online tutorials for peer-to-peer, and just now I see I'm not the only one who thinks this way (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23738/why-is-peer-to-peer-programming-a-hard-topic-to-obtain-good-research-for )

TonyT

Well said neurotypical except for one thing:  over the last 20 years I notice cash as opposed to credit cards is being regulated out of existence.  When you deposit cash into a US bank, it triggers the Know Your Customer rules, and likewise if you try and get an excessive number of money orders at the local Western Union.

So I think bitcoin is going to slowly get a 'bear hug' from the state soon, and be 'regulated out of existence', slowly or quickly, just like cash. :-(

Looks like the Space Shuttle, or a modified version of it.

Does Armory take a long time to synch up for you when you start it?  In my system [1], it takes a minimum of five minutes of disk thrashing at 100% and sometimes up to 30 minutes (if other programs are running).  In the latter case, the system nearly freezes up and is not usable during that time.

I am thinking of either getting an SSD hard drive to help fix this problem, or maybe abandoning bitcoin altogether, except for keeping a few coins in an online wallet.  IMO the purpose of Bitcoin is to help preserve anonymity while you make purchases, which is defeated by an online wallet.

TonyT

[1]   i5 -quad core, 32 bit OS Windows 8.1, 4 GB RAM, a 3 year old WD hard drive that gets Transfer Rate Average : 112.0 MB/sec (decent for a mechanical hard drive), internet is a Ethernet land line that gets 1.5 MBps (acceptable); latest copy of Armory running Bitcoin Core (latest version)

Excellent article, thanks.  And in another article I saw how having sex with a formerly contaminated Ebola victim could in theory contaminate you for months after that person stopped being symptomatic.  Don't recall where I read that, but it was in a mainstream press article a few weeks ago.

If Ebola reaches Nigeria, all bets of containing it are off IMO.

I am referring to this thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=828255.0   and the answer.  The user had a 25 MB wallet with 16915 addresses from sending out small amounts of bitcoin.  How to prevent this?  "Sendmany" is suggested.  I have yet to send or receive a bitcoin, but this suggests to me that BTC does not really support micro-transactions.  How can you combine bitcoin in your wallet to prevent this?  Apparently, if I read the thread right, you really cannot.  You will be stuck with thousands of tiny addresses that each have tiny amounts of bitcoin in them, and you cannot combine them without losing lots of money?  Unless I read it wrong.

I am using Armory non-online wallet.

You may think this thread is useless, but isn't it called the Socratic Method: finding out the truth by asking more questions, in a never ending fashion?