Suppose you buy $100,000 worth of bitcoins on a margin of $1000. The moment the value of those bitcoins drops to $99,000, the exchange sells them. The proceeds of that sale, plus your $1000, gives the exchange its $100,000 back.

Your quantum computer will have much more profitable targets than trying to find some very sparsely-distributed bitcoin keys.

There is one legitimate way to generate bitcoins without increasing your electricity bill. It only works if you are currently using resistive electric heating to heat your house.

In that case you turn off your electric heaters and start up a bank of computers generating bitcoins. The computers perform the computation, then release 100% of the electrical energy as heat, so you get exactly the same amount of electrical heating for your money, but the heat came as the waste product of computation which is then effectively free of cost.

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On the other hand, the Bedini Motor doesn't generate more energy than it uses. If it worked, don't you think energy companies would be using it to make a killing?

Margin trading is not for me, but it would have been very interesting over the past 12 hours with MtGox trades swinging repeatedly up and down, and touching $0.125 and $0.275.

Like I said, I only have $305 in my PP account at this time. But how about this deal: I will send you USD 300 by PP plus a 20 Euro banknote in the mail, in return for your GOX 344.72.

Or, if you prefer, I could send you USD 305 by PP, in return for $325 of your MtGox money.

You could appeal to the developers who plan to lock in the other chain. If it's due to a bug or other mistake, they will naturally fix the problem. However, if it's due to evil intent, see your next question.

There's not (yet) a law relating to the lock-in of chains, so I doubt the police will be interested (or even understanding).

You can report the problem here, and you could report it to the blogosphere if you like.

Anyone who shares your interest in a valid block chain will be motivated to make the effort, and those who are technically able to do so will be happy to look into your claims provided they are expressed in such a way that people are motivated to take them seriously.

It's in your interests to explain the problem clearly, and it's in other people's interests to take your report seriously (because their bitcoin balance depends on a valid block chain too).

Someone will release a version of the client software that works properly, which you and others will use. It's of no consequence to you if there are still some people who choose to use the "corrupt" version of Bitcoin, because you are free to use the version with the correct block chain.

No problem. We will welcome you back when you are ready.

Then you'll understand how it works, and you'll understand why you don't report bugs to the police, and you'll understand that sourceforge is a tool and not a central authority.

If you think sourceforge can somehow function as a central authority rather than just being a software repository, then I know that I don't share your other concerns.

I think your "possible answer number 1" is the right one, but the vulnerability being protected against isn't in the protocol. The protection is against programming errors, to limit the disruption if a bug is discovered and exploited.

Satoshi added it in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the overflow bug.

No, just for this open source project, i.e. Satoshi's Bitcoin client.

According to the MtGox "All Time, Show Volume Data" chart, volume has been generally higher since MtGox lost the use of PayPal than it was before then. And that's BTC volume; if you wanted to look at USD volume that would show even greater increases.

Of course, it would be even higher if MtGox could still do PayPal, but I don't think there's anything to worry about.

Absolutely. Without that, it's just puffery.

I think he's referring to nothing more than the way that the standard client arbitrarily "locks in" a settled part of the block chain. I think his assertion is that, without this "lock in", there is some major potential vulnerability.

Even if that's the case, one could safely run a client that didn't have this "lock in". If the promised vulnerability did emerge, one could upgrade the client (after-the-event) to a modified version that re-established a valid block chain. I don't see how the risk in this scenario goes beyond the possibility of a double-spend in recent transactions.

Sorry, I only have 305 in my PP account. But anyway, I feel that MtGox dollars aren't one-to-one equivalent to PP dollars.

I offer $305 PP USD.

As far as I can tell, this bounty does not all go to one animation. Some of the donations are conditional on features that will be met by different animations. So I'm not surprised that there are no official competition entries yet, but plenty of people have done some work towards it (including me).

Thank you grondilu for pointing me to the synfig software. I had been learning pencil (which I find very comfortable to use), but it does seem that synfig will reduce the time it takes for this kind of project.

I'm struck by the similarities between this project and the "minute memes" project being run by QuestionCopyright.org. They have a budget of $10,000 per minute, and they present some figures to show that professional animation starts at $3000 per minute.

"PayPal sucks. Bitcoin sucks less."

The linked article clearly says that "King does not advocate any of these radical plans".

So although Mervyn King is discussing the abolition of fractional reserve banking, it's only as a straw man to be knocked down.

We don't need to worry about those with commercial interests (such as the controllers of the botnets currently being used to send spam). For those people, it will always be more profitable to mine for bitcoins than to try tricks like double-spending.

And if those "bad guys" are mining bitcoins it helps protect against the other "bad guys" (those with political motives).

Yes, me too.


Personally I'm certain that satoshi is not working for the gov. Bitcoin is clearly the product of an unconstrained mind.

I think generation should always be off by default, on a fresh install.

Otherwise, people will start complaining in public "bitcoin makes your computer go really slow", "bitcoin sends your privatez across the internetz" etc, and bitcoin's reputation will go downhill.

It's much better that people, in their own good time, discover how to turn on generation and think "wow that's really cool, I'm helping the system to operate AND if I'm lucky I might get some cons".

For those who are inclined to be paranoid: how do you know that Satoshi isn't already "the government"?