Only two minor concerns with Gokhan's "b'at" symbol:
- Because the @ symbol already has many uses, we must make sure our symbol is sufficiently visually distinctive.  The @ in @37.50, for example, already denotes the concept of "unit price".  However, I think might not be a problem, as nobody complains that $ is not visually distinctive from S.
- Since the circle shape is very "fat" compared to most currency symbols, we'd want to be sure to design it in such a way that the typographic layout would be appealing when it is written with digits next to it.  (IMO @37.50 does not look as "good" and "money-like" as $37.50, 37.50 ฿, etc.)

Other than that, I think the symbol is unique, eye-catching, and very good at communicating "bitcoin".

Open thread to discuss unusual or confusing transactions observed on http://blockexplorer.com , and possible explanations for them.

To start things off... does anyone know what's going on with this block? http://blockexplorer.com/b/115060

There are more than 70 transactions of over 1000 BTC in a single block!  Each transaction appears to feed into the next one, which is why they all appear in descending order of value.

As for using a symbol other than BTC, there's this discussion: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=369.0

I doubt anything other than BTC would catch on for a long time, but it would be cool to come to a consensus on an official symbol at some point, inasmuch as something so decentralized can have an official anything.

OT: Is it possible to fork the chain in such a way that, even though the official bitcoin chain doesn't recognize post-fork transactions in the secondary chain, both the official and secondary chains continue growing and continue recognizing pre-fork transactions?  What would that even look like?  If the secondary chain became longer, would it "become" the official chain?

While this is most likely something we can rely upon, it seems unwise to build an economy that will not be usable at all in the future without the existence of technology which has not been developed yet.  It's kind of the hacker way to not rush into developing software which is incompatible with older or smaller-scale hardware... in the case of something like Linux, that's prudent caution; in the case of an entire economic system, it seems like imperative wisdom.

(Is it possible to move this conversation to a different category?  I'm not sure if it belongs in Technical Support anymore...)

But does it normally send immediately if you initiate a transaction while the client is already up and running?

Thanks for your input, [mike], I suspect if anyone would have a good answer to this question, you would.

...However, I have no idea what you just said.

Here are my two concerns:
1) Over time, will a client continue to require more and more local storage (or CPU, or any particular resource) in order to operate?  If so, is there any reason why this doesn't pose a problem?
2) Since we know that miners will require more data to be stored as time goes on, will this disincentivize ordinary users from contributing processing power to the network, and cause it to become less decentralized with time?  Mining pools are already necessary for mining to be worthwhile to most ordinary users; is it possible to create a mining pool that would somehow alleviate this problem, making it so that the storage requirements for contributors would not increase with time?

Huh, no way!  I just assumed it'd do all of its sending right away when it started, and then in intervals of several minutes thereafter.  Is there a reason for this behaviour?

Devil's advocate here, but I think the one thing that might motivate people to move their currency to an inflationary currency would be if the "inflationary" fact somehow gave them more confidence in the currency being useful and capable of supporting a flourishing economy.  The economic future of Bitcoin is still unclear, in no small part because it is treading new economic ground.  Though I'm not pessimistic personally, most people will stick with systems like the ones they know until they understand enough such that making the change is something they can do with confidence.

I think the question they want to ask is "Would you support moving to a system with constant inflation?"

(Not constant as a fraction of the money supply, though.)

It'd be worthwhile at least discussing how the economic future of Bitcoin would look different if the mining bounty were to remain at 50 BTC forever...

I've experimentally made a couple posts on http://witcoin.com now, and I've found that, not only is it a challenge to get people to upvote / comment on your posts, but it's a challenge to get them to even view your posts.  Right now the most views any of my posts have is 3, and the posts by other people that I've commented on or upvoted aren't faring much better.  (By comparison, it seems that posts on this forum tend to get a couple dozen views in the first few minutes after posting.)

Is the key to getting a post noticed in having a catchy title, then?  Building a reputation?  Linking to it on other sites?

What works for you?

That would make sense, except my transaction was processed almost immediately once it showed up in the "unconfirmed" list on BitcoinCharts.  I doubt the lack of a transaction fee delayed my transaction being "unconfirmed".

And I saw your article.   
http://bitcoin.witcoin.com/p/668/Bitcoin-and-Chinese-Adoption#r-1057

Is it possible to pipe the transactions through https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ ?  Would that help?

Considering there seem to be quite a few Chinese users here, and I speak some Chinese and have experience teaching English in China, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some English language services.

I am willing to:
- conduct informal English lessons and English conversations over Skype or QQ
- review English essays, point out mistakes, and teach you how to avoid those mistakes
- help users to write forum posts with native-level English

I'll set prices if anyone shows an interest.

Well, I'm hunkering down and not getting my hopes up that the transaction will be confirmed in the next 24 hours.  The hour delay was for it to even show up as unconfirmed!

It's possible it didn't get sent at first, but it'd be odd, because I restarted the client twice with that theory, but it still didn't show up in the list for probably 20 minutes after my second restart.  My client shows that the money was sent at 7:08 UTC, while Bitcoin Charts reports the transaction at 8:16 UTC.

Edit:  Speak of the devil, it got its first confirmation while I was writing that.  However, it still shows up as 0/unconfirmed in my client.  Hrm.

Edit:  Now the confirmations show up in the client too.  Guess I'm just impatient.

Okay, it just showed up in the unconfirmed transactions list.  Is the ~one-hour delay expected behaviour?

I've attempted my first "send" transaction, of 0.10 BTC to witcoin.  It's just sitting there with 0/unconfirmed status, which sounds like a common problem for small transactions (I've waited just shy of an hour so far).  The thing that alarms me is that, searching for the sending and receiving addresses, I cannot find my transaction in this list: http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/

Is that a bad sign?

Sending addresses: 1P1qHQihBHB1... and 1KARXJGMUJIB...
Receiving address:  1Hrh8Y8ejWAp...

Contemplated a very similar scenario in the first paragraph here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4898.0

Simply put, nothing distinguishes a lost coin from a coin which is not in circulation for anyone in the economy except the owner.  (A large cache of unspent coins could affect the economy, though, if the economy was made aware of the "threat" of them being injected into circulation.)

Ah, okay, that makes sense, but when I was talking about savings, I was talking about the case in which a person's wallet is just sitting on their computer, unused.  As the challenges of bitcoin banking have already been expounded here, I imagine the infrastructure of the bitcoin economy would have to undergo quite an overhaul before investment could become a common vehicle for saving.