No-one forces you to trade while the system is "out of balance", so I don't see why you want to stop people from withdrawing their $ from MtGox.

If you're not going to trade, it doesn't make any difference to you whether or not other people have their $ in MtGox.

"Wirtland Bitcoins" would be a better name than "Wirtcoin". If you don't have "Bitcoin" in the name somewhere, it will lead to lots of confusion, and that will hinder uptake.

That's a cute piece of lateral thinking there, da2ce7 :-)

It would be a good way to settle the "inflation vs. deflation" argument once and for all. Those who think monetary inflation is good and necessary are welcome to use XCoin. Those who want sound money will be happy to do without the inflation, and can use Bitcoin.

No, I don't think so.

The block being hashed includes the 50BTC transaction awarded to the generator. So a client must decide (before looking for hashes) whether it is hashing a block that will pay itself, or a block that will pay the server. It can't find a hash first, and then decide who it is for.

So there's no risk of cheating. If the client is looking for hashes that will pay itself, it's not participating in the shared mining and won't have any low-difficulty results to send back to the server either.

I don't think that trusted groups are needed if the probabalistic scheme is used.

Each client, modified or not, knows the difficulty of the hashes it has produced and can calculate its expected long-term earnings, although of course there will be short-term fluctuations. A dishonest server will get caught out (and quite soon if several of the clients choose to share their statistics). A dishonest client doesn't get more than its real share of the earnings anyway.

PayPal does actually have a policy on this somewhere, which I have seen recently but can't remember where. There is some specific number of days between payment and delivery that is acceptable to PayPal, but I think it's quite a lot. Also, PayPal themselves sometimes hold a payment for 21 days.

And by the way, MtGox imposed the 30-day waiting period for everyone, not just on transactions that it suspects may be fraudulent.

I'm leaving this thread now, because I don't speak for PayPal or for MtGox, but I hope you won't try to pressure MtGox into reversing trades that other people carried out with you in good faith. That would be tres uncool.

It's a good question, and we all wish we knew the answer.

In the future, bitcoins are either going to be worth nothing, or else they will be worth a lot more. So if you're considering it as an investment, it's highly speculative.

The answer probably depends on human nature more than on the underlying technology.

What's your non-delivered product? I think Bitcoins are being delivered as usual.

Bitcoin is neither fair nor unfair, it just is how it is. Each person decides, based on how Bitcoin is, whether it's worthwhile for them to use it.

Having said that, better backup options in the standard client would be great, and I'm sure they'll come in time. It's an open source project, so you're free to be part of the solution.

People didn't send USD to MtGox so that they could get it back. They sent it so that they could trade. Therefore, no legitimate trade should be reversed.

Everyone knew that MtGox's USD conduit was PayPal, therefore anyone who feels aggreived because of PayPal's actions should seek recourse from PayPal.

I would have thought that a better way than a metahash to ensure honesty is to get the remote miners to send back genuine hashes at a lower level of difficulty.

Because there is a known relationship between the ease of generating hashes at different levels of difficulty, you could be sure that a remote miner submitting regular hashes at lower levels of difficulty is doing its fair share of work towards finding hashes at the official level of difficulty.

Maybe we should shift the emphasis away from buying the bitcoins.

Here are two ways of getting BTC that don't involve the use of an exchange, and are fairly intuitive for the newcomer:

1. The deal offered by bitcointo.com. Shop at amazon.com through their affiliate link, and claim back 1% of your purchase as bitcoins.

2. Sell something for BTC at biddingpond.com. The website needs some improvement (e.g. the help pages are useless) but the concept is clear enough.

There is also the BTC 0.05 that newcomers can get for free from the bitcoin faucet, and of course you can generate if you don't mind waiting a month or two for some coins (using the stock client on an "ordinary" home PC).

Abbreviations get their meaning from usage, not from approval by a committee. Don't worry about it.

And even if it got to the point where the tiniest division, down to the 8th decimal place, was too big, it would be possible to develop a smaller unit that was cryptographically linked to the remaining bitcoins, no matter how few there were.

So the loss of bitcoins is absolutely not an issue (except to the person who loses them, of course).

Now that's interesting, because there are likely to be a couple of difficulty adjustments during that 30 days.

Thank you!

mtgox, I would warn you about the following scenario:

The PayPal scammers will wait 30 days, withdraw their BTC, and only THEN will they do a chargeback through PayPal.

Therefore, you probably need to block BTC withdrawals for longer than 30 days, for BTC bought from any PayPal address that has not previously had a successful PayPal transaction.

Heh, that's the old way of thinking, David

The number of bitcoins stays the same, it's just the value of the USD that's changing (when measured in BTC).

On the FAQ at bitcoin.org, Satoshi* could have written this:

but notice how he said it this way instead:

We should stop thinking of USD as the standard measure of value.


*I presume it's Satoshi who wrote those words

Well that's what I was aiming for with this piece: "What are bitcoins?"

Look at the "Depth of Market" chart.
Only four bids? That doesn't look right.



[edit: There is something wrong. Apart from anything else, I have a bid at 0.065 which should be shown]