Double that, since the standard hashing that we do is highly optimized in ways that aren't useful for hashing a tree.  But something that takes 6 minutes on a high end GPU is no longer a lightweight, or even middleweight client, since it will exclude 99.9% of all current nodes.  And you are talking about something that every node must do.


This isn't a threat to the network, this is a threat to one node.  Without the whole block chain, you can't add up the difficulty sum by tracing it all the way back to the genesis block.  What is stopping someone from making 6 chained blocks claiming to have more total difficulty than the rest of the network, but a lower current difficulty, and feeding them to you?

And a FUD PR campaign... 

Interesting, but I see a couple of things.

1.  All of the unspent transactions on the network since the beginning of time is a lot of hashing to have to do for every block.

2.  You can't really trust the blockchain unless you've verified it all yourself.  You are taking a big risk if you grab a recent block and just assume that it is good.  There are ways to mitigate this risk to some extent, but the only way to eliminate it entirely is to do all of the math yourself.

Nonsense.  The relative values of the dollar vs. gold is because of the ratio of desire to hold the two assets.  If Iran wanted to hold gold now, they could buy it with dollars.

The vote is a coinbase flag, so no.  Check Luke's recent posts, I could have sworn his post about that patch had some sort of instructions on applying and building it.

Eleuthria, do you have any plans to support OP_EVAL, P2SH or EVC?

The exact number, assuming we don't extend the unit size beyond 1E-8, will be 20,999,999.9769.

The subsidy shifts out of a 64 bit integer.  If we change to a 128 bit representation, there will be a miniscule extra amount.

Heh.  Try it then.

Also, Buy and Sell are opposite views of the same thing.  You can't have one without the other.

Ahh, ok.  I was thinking maybe the seller intentionally used a mtgox address knowing that you were going to pay from mtgox, so that he could point to the blockchain and demand that you pay him a second time.

He needs to check on that address that he told you to pay to.  If that is his deposit address at mtgox, he should see the transfer there already.  If he accidentally gave you someone else's mtgox deposit address, he needs to figure out who that someone else is, and ask them nicely if they could forward the misdirected payment back to him.

I'm thinking that mtgox won't tell you anything about the account that has that address, but if you ask them very nicely, they may be able to confirm if the account info matches the other information you know about the seller.  Or maybe they can contact the account holder for you.

That's just a matter of normalization.  You could just as well say that the money supply is 1.  And 1E-8 isn't a fundamental unit of the system, it is just the smallest increment currently accepted.  We could easily switch to 1E-30, but it would probably be more useful to use 1E-21.  See here.

I guess "followed" would be a better way to put it.  If I write a bot that follows the 10/21 EMA rule today, I'll get clobbered, because now people are following it, and their act of following it will cause the indicator to not work any more.  Just because it is an old and well known indicator in the real world isn't really the problem, but now that it is a known indicator here it will no longer work here.

You got scammed?  Or maybe they just mistakenly gave you their mtgox deposit address instead of a receiving address from their personal wallet.

Indicators stop indicating once they become known.

Bitcoin is actually pretty low traffic.  It wouldn't take much to keep an island connected.  And even if updates came at strange intervals, it could remain useful.

Mining will continue because fees will gradually increase as the subsidy decreases.  At least that is the plan.

Basically, if anyone ever finds Pn, like if you ever use it, they now have Kn, and thus they can find all Ko and Po where o>n.

Jetmine's suggestion of setting K1=SHA(K) doesn't help.  K is not special, but Kn becomes special if Pn ever becomes known.

Assuming that you intend P1 to be a private key, this scheme should be reasonably safe, since private keys aren't normally leaked to the network.  But I don't see any advantage of using this scheme over a conventional block cipher that you would use to encrypt a random file.

Also, I'm not a cryptographer.  You are strongly encourages to read Schneier's books and stick to things that he says are safe to do.  There may be other weaknesses in this scheme that aren't apparent to laymen, but may be known to professionals.

You don't need to md5sum it.  The client will verify it, and if new blocks come in as usual, it was good.

I'd be willing to mail a DVD of the current chain from the USA for actual postage cost.  Add like $3 if you want it on M*Disc.

Are you saying that you are seeing the entire network stop for 2 to 4 hours?

There are no measurements of the network speed, just estimates.  The estimates are very noisy, particularly on short time frames.

Votes are counted in the coinbase transactions that actually end up in the blockchain.  People that are mining through pools are working on blocks provided by the pool (usually), so they are working on coinbases provided by the pool.  Which means that it is the pool operators that are voting, not the pool users.

The pool operators should probably ask their users, or should tell their users which way they are voting so that pool users can change pools if needed.

If you are not actually directly submitting blocks that you generate and mine yourself, you are not really voting, and you don't need to set your node up one way or the other, since it won't matter at all.

Well...  If you validate it yourself, and can be pretty sure that your database won't get corrupted or attacked, you could toss it, maybe.  I would need to read the chaining rules again to be sure.  But I would be very reluctant to prune that aggressively, even if the blockchain growth somehow manages to severely outpace the size growth of cheap hard drives.