It really doesn't matter if the hosting plan is shared or dedicated. The economies of scale work the same in both cases. Its just that with the shared plan the economy of scale is more obvious. In case of the dedicated hosting it becomes more of an issue of potential bandwidth/protocol abuse after incorrect modification.

Take for example the PDO layer. It was originally written in PHP with a dependency on PCRE. PHP web developers couldn't restrain themselves and were making modifications that completely destroyed one of the original reasons of developing PDO: prepared SQL statements. Finally the PHP engine developers wrapped the PDO in a black box and prevented the average PHP website programmers from sticking their fingers deep into the gearbox.

The same problem could occur with Bitcoin protocol. By putting up a higher barrier for tinkerers the libbitcoin engine developers are hoping to maintain overall consistency and safety of the Bitcoin network that depends on the correct operation of majority of the peers.

Look, PHP is not a language for tinkerers. It is a bumper car designed to have quick, innocent and safe fun. If you are into tinkering then you aren't a target PHP audience. Switch to Perl,Python,Ruby,Java,C# or whatever else. PHP is the leaning tree that any goat can climb on.

I think you are communicating very clearly. Maybe its a problem of my dialectic. I use "you" not to mean "you personally" but "you and other primarily-PHP developers that I could envision as working on such a project".

And don't think that I'm trying to slander PHP and its users. Almost everything what I said above will be true if you substitute ASP for PHP. Except that in the case of ASP Microsoft had enough forethought to develop DAO and ADO abstraction layers from the very beginning.

Nobody's going to allow you to modify the bitcoin code on a shared hosting plan. You'll get a nice high-performance interface (FCGI/shared memory), a private wallet.dat equivalent and a shared block-chain storage and networking peer. If the libbitcoin guys won't screw up the wallet.dat will have an option of being receive only with no storage of the private keys. It will allow only receiving payments as a security measure for the shared hosting.

This is how all the PHP engines evolved: you'll get a thin wrapper and an immense choice of under-the-hood modules that are written in C/C++ and not really modifiable in any way from the level of PHP. This is both the strength and the weakness of PHP. Just scroll all the way down on your phpinfo(); read it again and you'll understand what I'm saying.

Chodpaba, I'll make one more post. From the picture above I can't figure out whether you are controlling the gnumeric or the gnumeric is controlling you. I see a lot of "tea leaves" on that picture, but some significant digits too. I noticed that you are most likely using Linux, so I have the following one-liner for you to run:
I hope you'll recognize which digits are significant and which are "tea leaves".

I don't know why you wrote this thread and what is the purpose of your computation. All I can suggest is to get some better tools: (1) http://www.r-project.org/ (2) go to CRAN (3) download the main release (4) also from CRAN get the package "Zelig: Everyone's Statistical Software" (5) from the Zelig's website download its introduction: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/z.pdf .

Zelig will be as objective as it takes, and the knowledge you'll gain will be yours for the rest of your life.

Because of the shared hosting plans. Hosting with access only to PHP on the back end are by far the cheapest and most popular. This wouldn't require a total implementation in PHP. The alternative is that libbitcoin will become a reality and will start getting configured into the PHP engines by the various hosting providers.

I don't have a beef in this discussion, but I really wanted to comment on the way you present the results of your statistics. You are doing this in a really dilettantish way. What skyhigh was proposing was something like:

1.84mil (give or take 0.03)

Skyhigh is actually even more clever, since he talks about only two significant digits.

Your constant talk about quartiles and other advanced stuff combined with your unwillingness to share a model puts you in one of two classes: (1) you either deliberately lying or (2) you completely misunderstand what the statistics is all about and doing an arithmetical equivalent of making predictions from the tea leaves left in a cup.

Statistical theory is one thing, presenting it properly is the other. And I wrote here because I want to care about your results.

The MacOS version of bitcoin has only the GUI version. There's no bitcoind for MacOSX in the official builds.

If you see my post then this isn't true. I just logged in directly through Tor and I'm about to hit Post.

It doesn't have to fit into an existing concept. But it does have to fit into an existing legal system(s). Otherwise it will be just another contraband dealt by those on the margins of the society. The lextechnologiae link above is very interesting.

Not the "only" priority. There are three passes over the wallet (as shown above). So there's a degree of priority given to the age of the coins, but in a very non-linear way.

Thank God you aren't a judge. You aren't even a moderator. Hopefully real moderators will keep this board accessible to both the proponents and the opponents.

The "weight" of the coin is its value, unless the coin doesn't meet the selection criteria, in which case it is presumed non-existent.

The whole knapsack algorithm is somewhat inverted from the textbook. In the textbook one minimizes empty space in knapsack. In bitcoin one minimizes change required. The goal is the same, except that in a textbook you approach it from below and in bitcoin from above.

"stochastic approximation" means an approximate solution to an one-dimensional knapsack problem. Wikipedia has a good intro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem

It actually does 3 stochastic passes:
The important numeric arguments are [mine] & [theirs] and represent minimum age of the coins. Coins are marked [mine] if their were sent from another account in the same wallet (shown as "Payment to self" in the transaction list)

Why you call them trolls? There's a need to bring in people willing to take the other (stupid) side of the trades on the exchange.

Well, it really depends on the miners. Check out the https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Free_transaction_relay_policy .

Some people run tests with modified clients. It may be worthwhile for you to connect to the node(s) described in the above article.

It is a completely linear score:
where dPriority is measured in value-in-satoshis times age-in-blocks divided by transaction-size-in-bytes.

This is all in main.{h,cpp} for the curious.

How about baseball trading cards? It checks all 4 points in your message and yet isn't considered a security or a stock share/certificate. Who's right?

How about you start with balancing the parentheses correctly in your formulas? Each and every one of them is missing at least one parenthesis.