Why would the issuer be defrauded?  They have your bitcoins, and they can claw back anything they pay to a vendor.  I'm surprised it took this long for someone to see that.

This seems silly to me.  As a credit card user, I absolutely love credit cards.  They are super convenient, and totally free (if you don't carry a balance and don't have an annual fee).  Having a credit (debit) card that converts from bitcoin on the fly is super awesome.

As a vendor, however, credit cards blow ass.  They have insane fees, they are slow, and they have chargebacks.

I'll be happy to pay bitcoin to any vendor that accepts bitcoin, but I'll be just as happy to use a credit card with any vendor that doesn't.  Their problems, not mine.

In general, people have very predictable preferences.

1 - They are in control.
2 - They aren't in control, but someone is.
3 - No one is in control, shit just happens.

People can obviously see that #1 isn't true for most things, so they go with #2 because they like it better than #3.  This is why insane conspiracy theories are so common and popular.

wtf?

Namecoin is not pooled.

If you are running a local namecoind instance, your namecoin earnings, if any, go straight into that wallet.  Namecoin difficulty is currently at about a million, so don't expect a whole lot if you are a smaller operation.  I think my moderately sized p2pool setup is picking up a namecoin block every other month, on average.

4.5 BTC

The stock client isn't really intended for that.  If you want a safe offline wallet, use Armory or just generate keys with vanitygen and use blockexplorer to track the balances.

The defaults for scrypt are N=2¹⁴, r=8, p=1.  (From the original presentation in 2009).  I wouldn't go any lower unless you are pretty sure that these need to be usable on devices with less than 16 MB RAM available.

In my opinion, the salt should be random and stored in the output.  If you base the salt on the output, then you need the encrypted key and the public key both to recover the private key.  This isn't an overwhelming requirement, but still seems silly.

Nope.  Electrons are held in orbit by exchanging photons with the nucleus.  There is no mystery about it.  The photons involved are not part of the zero point field, they are (by definition) the excess photons above and beyond zero point levels.  QED calculations on this match experimental data to as many decimal places as we are capable of calculating and measuring, which is quite a few.

I'm about as sympathetic a person as you'll ever find towards alternate physics and free energy investigation.  But the current physics is not the result of a conspiracy or a mistake.  It is correct in every way that we know how to look at it, and has resisted our every attempt to poke holes in it.  So far.

Which would be a huge bummer if he ever needed, for some ungodly reason, to accumulate all of the payout before making it.

Erm.  These questions have been answered.  Like 50 years ago.

In order, they are the electric force, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (or the Pauli Exclusion Principle, if you prefer a different german) and the electric force.

Classical mechanics lost.  I was unhappy about it too, just like I imagine you are going to be some day.  But unless Puthoff and company can some up with a testable prediction that goes in favor of SED, the winner is going to remain QED.

This is POP packaging.  Part on Part.  It takes two normal chips, fully encased as usual, and stacks them, usually using something like BGA.  They are different dies, built at different times, and probably in different fabs, then assembled later.

3D chips are different.  A typical flat chip is made up of dozens of layers of depositation and etching.  You start with a bare wafer, and etch part of it away, then deposit a thin layer on top of that, then etch part of that away, then deposit another layer, and etch, etc, etc.  You end up with a flat 2D structure of 3D objects, made all at once.

A real 3D chip has layers of groups of layers, creating a 3D structure of 3D objects.

Right now, we have problems moving heat out of the chips we have, and not so much problems with a lack of transistors available on a die.  But that's how progress works, the best we can do is the product of a whole pile of limitations, and people are busy fighting back all of them.  In time, 3D chips will become just "chips", just like color TVs all became just "TVs".

Same in CentOS 5.8.  Yum does not know a package named glibc-static, rpmfind.net only knows it for CentOS 6 with version 2.12 compared to version 2.5 of regular glibc installed on 5.8.

There really isn't any way to tell.  The system doesn't know what fees will be needed until it makes an attempt at the knapsack problem of selecting the transactions to redeem.

And yeah, there should maybe be a special case for emptying a wallet, but there isn't.

This looks good to me.  Most of the objections that I had while reading it were dealt with later on.

The KDF is still an issue though.  Best practice would be to just use PBKDF2 and embed the salt for that in the output.  64 bits of salt doesn't fatally lengthen the encrypted key.

If using PBKDF2 with salt as the KDF, AES is overkill.  At that point, considering the random plaintext, XOR would be just as much security.  But AES is cheap in this context, so might as well.

Correction is the root of all evil.

There are three people standing in a line.  Would you weigh them and then use a table to give the "corrected value" of the number of people?  Or would you count them?  Counting is easy, the FLOP count for bitcoin is still zero.  Zero FLOPS, zero FLOPD, zero FLOPY.

If you still insist on "correcting" the value, explain your correction scheme, and justify why you picked it instead of the other options available to you.*  Do you convert by considering how many integer operations it would take to emulate the corresponding floating point operation in the same chip?  Do you look at the idle FPU and calculate how much work it could be doing if it was doing work?

Do you take work distribution and networking into account?  Why or why not?  "Official" FLOPS scores are found by using a brutal test suite that requires an extensive amount of coordination and control, while bitcoin is looking for a magic needle with an army of needle factories, each of which is allowed to run with almost zero coordination.  The bitcoin network is simply not suitable for LINPACK.

Bitcoin is an amazing system, and viewed as a whole, the network uses a staggering amount of computing power.  But all of that power is being applied to a problem that was chosen very carefully to allow the network to exist and function.  We are awesome at what we do, the best in the world by leaps and bounds, and not even the largest HPC clusters can match what we do.  But we can't match what they do either.

* Yes, I am fully aware that no one in this thread is doing the correction.  My point is that the correction is unphysical, even when your source is trying really hard to do it well.

What I'm getting at is that there are two ways to consider the word "solved".  Addition was solved in the sense that it could be used in the real world thousands of years ago.  But it wasn't solved in the academic sense until Cantor, Peano, et al. proved that it really did what everyone already knew it did, and that wasn't that much more than a hundred years ago.

Most of bitcoin is architecture and engineering, not science.  People study buildings to understand what works and what doesn't, but a building doesn't "solve" or "prove" anything in the way that you could stick Q.E.D. at the end of it.

I don't think that bitcoin is going to be very useful, academically speaking.  It really isn't for that.

Bitcoin is more like a "good enough" system, one intended to be used in the real world.  It produces approximations to perfection, but never is perfect.

For example, bitcoin doesn't prove, or even attempt to fully prove that a block is final, but as more blocks pile up, we can become increasingly confident that it won't be overruled.  But never totally sure, because every block back to the last checkpoint in theory could be replaced if a better chain is found tomorrow.

By the way, "good enough" isn't a bad thing.  Engineering is the art of understanding tolerances, and of understanding that nothing is absolute, to make things that are "good enough" for the real world.  Bitcoin is an outstanding example of engineering in that sense.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.

Verification doesn't mean what you think it means.  Miners don't approve transactions, they check to make sure that they are valid, cryptographically.  If a miner creates a block with an invalid transaction, the rest of the network will reject that block.  Even if the attacker has 51% or 100% of the hashing power in the network.

A slightly less simple version is that you spend a transaction by proving that you possess the private key that corresponds to the public key embedded in that transaction's output.  You don't prove it to your local miner, you prove it to everyone in the entire universe at the same time.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.  Getting 51% of the network lets you prevent or reorder spends.  Not make fake coins.