Bitcoin isn't run by people, who can be corrupted, bribed etc - it's run by math.

[urlhttps://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm]poclbm[/url] is a good opencl miner, open source and written in Python which is fairly easy to understand. Perusing its source will probably teach you much more than a thread here will.

FPGAs are essentially programmable ASICs, the only meaningful difference is size and price point. FPGAs tend to be larger than ASICs and cost much more per chip. ASICs tend to be smaller and cheaper than FPGAs but you can't purchase just one, minimum order size tends to be massive because the manufacturing process has huge initial costs - once those initial costs are outlaid, however, they become quite cheap to re-manufacture new batches of. The only reason ASICs are just starting to hit the Bitcoin market is because it's taken this long for someone to amass and be willing to front that initial cost.

In short, if you can do it with an ASIC you can probably do it with an FPGA (some slight limitations/differences, but none that important). Scrypt, and therefore Litecoin, is highly resistant to GPU, FPGA and ASIC acceleration because of its high memory requirements. See this StackExchange question for more details: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/1305/22

My understanding of the protocol is that any private key whose corresponding public key hashes to a given address may spend the coins at that address. There is a potential collision attack here since the address is only 160 bits while the keys themselves are somewhat longer - there are possibly many keys which correspond to a given address. If someone who knows the gritty details can tell me whether the complete pubkey is actually checked or just the address I'd appreciate it, but my understanding is that only the address is checked. Unfortunately it's computationally unfeasible to generate two keypairs with the same address for testing purposes

Good god why do I keep clicking on these...

Lobby your government to not levvy such a steep tax. Anything BFL can do to prevent a lawfully enforced tax would probably be considered fraud in your country of origin.

Supposedly entering production early next year at the $10-$25 mark. I can't imagine too many people here who wouldn't buy one at that price point...

Those things don't really change though, so it should be easy to count those and subtract them from the total. In any case, it should be easy enough to implement.

Seems like you could just yank the HTML of the wiki page and count <li> tags, keep historical records and whip up some charts. I have zero time, but any old PHP wizard should be capable of that, right?

I'll add another runner (maybe 2 if my wife isn't busy) to the Vegas network if you ever get it running.

You're basically correct in your summary of the entropy argument. Assuming you're using a published method for generating your private key from your passphrase (sha256 is particularly popular) then the question boils down to "how hard is it to guess your passphrase."

Here's the basic math: A Bitcoin private key is 256 bits, but realistically we're not interested in finding your exact private key, merely finding some private key for which the RIPEMD160 hash of the public key matches your address - yes, it is possible for more than one private key to map to the same address... This means that in order for us to not lose any entropy, any passphrase or key we select should contain at least 160 bits of entropy itself. If we're talking about natural English text such as you'd find from a book or poem, each word only represents about 1.5 bits of entropy. log2(1.5^274) results in 160.280... bits of entropy so we'd need a whopping 274 words of natural English text to make a suitable passphrase.

Now on the other hand, if we choose the xkcd method and build our passphrase using completely random words from a set of the 4,096 most common words then each word represents a whopping 12 bits and our privkey can be constructed with 14 words since log2(4096^14)=168.

Still, if you have a memory like I do, 14 random words is still a bit much, so I've come up with another method. I had two identical sets of dog tags printed up. Each dog tag can hold something like 15 characters per line, but I only used about 10. Each line is numbered 0-9 (I used two tags) and each line contains 8 characters of random Base32 text. Base32 was chosen because it is case-insensitive and most dog tag embossers can only do uppercase letters. Each line of text represents log2(32^8)=40 bits of entropy, so any 4 lines combined creates exactly the 160 bits needed for a private key. I memorize a PIN and my dog tags do the rest. My memorized PIN is useless without the physical artifact that is always on my person (a backup copy of which is in a safe place) and the artifact is useless without the memorized PIN. Better still, multiple PINs means multiple accounts, so I don't have to re-memorize a huge amount of data. Sure, if someone stole my tags and knew how to use them it wouldn't be hard to generate all 10,000 possible private keys and sweep away all funds in every account, but I'm still safeguarded against everything but a physical theft perpetrated by someone who knows EXACTLY what they're after. If I need more security than that, I'll generate a one-time true-random paper wallet and store it in a fire safe or something.

So in conclusion, if you don't have an absolutely stellar memory you're going to need a paper backup - if you can memorize it, chances are it doesn't contain enough entropy.

BTW, shameless plug I know, but I did write a Bitcoin Address Tool for Android. It's 100% compatible with Casascius' Bitcoin Address Utility, generates QR codes for both the privkey and address, stores no data, is open source and when combined with airplane mode makes brain wallets on-the-go somewhat easier.  

I can't speak for adoption rates but I can speak to whether ASICs can be used on alternate chains.

Any ASIC built to mine on the Bitcoin network can also mine any altcoin for which the algorithm(s) have not been changed. Since Namecoin uses the same algorithms as Bitcoin, Bitcoin ASICs should be able to mine Namecoins - the vast majority of the altcoins didn't change algorithms, actually, so the same is true for them. There are a handful of altcoins, Litecoin and Tenebrix included, which moved to scrypt() as a replacement of sha256() for one step in the process. ASICs won't work for scrypt-based altcoins, nor is it likely that ASICs can or will be built for them: the entire point of scrypt and bcrypt was to make a difficult-to-accelerate algorithm, and by design the amount of die space an scrypt ASIC would take makes it prohibitively expensive even beyond normal ASIC manufacturing costs.

Pretty sure he meant "we" as in "torwallet" specifically, not Bitcoin in general 

But yeah, last year's Bitcoin article in Forbes was pretty nice as I recall.

So, wait, the argument is that because ASICs are a single-use device they can't be profitable? This argument kind of falls apart when you realize that for 99% of the people buying them, FPGAs are also single-use devices. Sure, you could do other things with them, but the majority of miners don't have the knowledge, skill or any kind of application to throw their FPGAs at anything but mining.

Holy hell, I hadn't read the comments. +1000 to "prime" for fighting the good fight but damn these people ignant...

Thank God. Not many between you and me so maybe I'll finally get my one single soon. 

The terms "cashless society people" and "Bitcoiners" are not equivalent. There are definitely people who want to take society cashless in non-Bitcoin ways and in some circles, traceable (and therefore legally actionable) transactions are considered preferable. I think Forbes is mixing us in with a larger group and failing to grasp that while opinions vary in the larger group, we Bitcoiners tend to be at least a little more homogeneous.

Just got a PM that new checks are being sent, so I'm guessing OP found a quick fix for the issue (either that or the misprinted samples I got were old and the problem was already fixed).

Updates will come as soon as I've got 'em!

Two ways to look at this...

1) It's highly unlikely that anyone still using AOL will be competent enough to even understand Bitcoin at the point, letalone use it.

or

2) If we've come so far that even AOLers are aware of us, we've come pretty damn far.

Not sure which I'm sticking with just yet...

Got the misprinted samples today and I can definitely say you might want to put a matching set of holographic stickers on the back, or perhaps print some kind of random pixels over that area in the back. I put the check on top of my phone's flash and at the lowest brightness setting I could almost make out the privkey. Cranked all the way up, I could read it clearly. Since this tends to be a "pics or it didn't happen" sort of crowd....


This is at the lowest setting.


This is at the highest setting


Here I've flipped the above image for those of you who can't read backwards


And just in case anyone couldn't read the portion of the key visible in the pic, I've crappily traced the visible characters in red.


Here I've copied the entire privkey down via the method above just to generate an address and make sure it matches what's on the check. The only character not easily discerned via the above method was the lowercase j, because it was on the border of the two stickers. Still, it didn't take but a few tries to guess that character right (two, actually, since the only other thing it looked like at all was an i)

Also keep in mind that this was just the two little surface mount LEDs. I can get a flashlight at 7-11 for $5 that has several times as many. It could also be feasible (though I don't have the equipment to test) to use a flatbed scanner with a lid-light (the kind used for scanning slides, transparencies and negatives) and a little photoshop magic to make this a 3-second process instead of sitting hunched over with a flashlight reading the key off one character at a time for several minutes.

Other than that, these are pretty fantastic little checks and thus far I've not found any other problems.

Peer review FTW