Ah, yeah. He seems like a good guy. I think that may still be a bad move though.

I did a search on the text and nothing turned up so I assumed google hadn't indexed it yet

Is that Peter Todd? I consider him the most dangerous man to Bitcoin's future but that might not be a bad idea. If it didn't come from him and Theymos wasn't holding the keys to the gateways to Bitcoin information.

Possibly they are just enforcing the rpcallowip option if they haven't before. Though localhost might be enabled by default and it may indeed be a bug *shrug*

Edit: Hmm, looks like rpcallowip is only for unauthenticated RPC connections? Oh well, I'm sure they'll sort it out before release. Quite possibly they're doing something clever like encrypting the rpcpassword.

I did notice they're letting the useragent comment be specified by an option which could make things interesting.

Bitcoin user: I want to spend BTCx and am willing to spend BTCy to do so.

Miner: I will gladly accept your BTCy to include your transaction for BTCx on the blockchain should I be fortunate enough to solve the next block.

Core-dev: No!

Ah, p2p cash...

If by "rabbit" you mean "semantic sophistry to hide a de-facto max-block-size increase to 2MB while adding a good deal of complexity to the code" and if by "pulled" you mean "talked about" rather than "implemented" then sure, I can go with that.

Only where the banking system is completely backward (i.e. the US) Much of Europe has near-instantaneous inter-bank transfers. And that's for small amounts too such as $30 for topping up a phone.

The scenario you present has the problem that it is absolutely dependent on lots of high-value transactions that can't be fulfilled elsewhere. A free market allows for other options, even at the same time. If your scenario is not the success story for Bitcoin, you have left no other option.

The block size limit is effectively a price control and such centralized decision making has never had a good history.

It would explain why I couldn't find any release notes

I'll give that a try. Thanks.

Hmm. I just did a git clone. I thought it would be the latest stable release (I'm not that familiar with git).

Heh, yeah. I wasn't thinking about the back-end for that... . I think instead of the halvening, we might want to call it Cryptogeddon

As for 51% attacks, that would only be good for destroying a currency you deployed it against so I doubt many miners would even consider that. (They could do it easily enough already, after all)

Unfortunately, Doge is Scrypt so not much chance of killing that one off.

So, slightly offtopic but...

*If* the halving leads to many miners being unprofitable and assuming they do not just switch off and go on holiday for 10+ days, what is the #2 sha256 altcoin they will switch to?

I haven't had chance to check yet but I believe it may be the rpcallowip option. I didn't need this in the version I was running previously but I suspect I do now.

Yes^4

This.

The next difficulty adjustment after the halvening is 10 days away at 1 block per 10 minutes. Longer the more the hash-rate drops. Maybe core will get their shit together and add in a difficulty adjustment closer to the halvening though.

Total transaction fees per block=average transaction fee*number of transactions. So you either increase the fee or you increase the number of transactions or your security goes down.

We probably are over-secure right now. But by how much? And if fees increase because the number of transactions can't go up, there is a limit to what people will pay, especially for a service which is seen as having damaged usability (i.e. submit a transaction with a fair fee and still have long confirmation times). So you end up in a situation with low block reward due to halving an low fees due to low number of transactions * perceived value for performing transactions.

So how much would people be willing to pay for a Bitcoin blockchain transaction? Well, there should be some data from the recent stress test where blocks did fill up and there is likely to be some more data coming soon as transactions continue to rise. My guess is 2-10c.

I also suspect that we are over-secured by at least 400% currently. Though that's for the market to decide.

As to the road map? Want to like it but it just seems like more stalling to me. We shall see.

LOL. Double that at least. And in the meantime, we will have the halvening which will slow down block production significantly, exacerbating the problem.

I think it's fairly likely at this late stage that we'll see increasing backlogs until the price tanks and miners switch to BIP101 as an emergency measure. Even then, we have at least a 750 block wait. For the first time in 3 years, I'm reconsidering my strong HODL position. Though I might just put some $ on standby.

If worse comes to worse, it's possible to just use the BDB tools to dump the database as a text file and pull the private keys from that.

For sure. Bitcoin may fluctuate but at least you have to use money to move the market and the results are often unpredictable.

Sorry, yes. 0.12.0