I don't believe that he did, it's kind of crazy when you think about it. It undermines the purpose and motivations of creating Bitcoin. If you don't actually care about decentralized cryptocurrency, why are you doing anything with Bitcoin in the first place? ... Because it's profitable, but that were so obvious it would have been created long before Satoshi did.

With a little more foresight, Satoshi could have both foreseen pooled mining and possibility of using the same consensus algorithm to decenteralize pooled mining (e.g. P2Pool) and perhaps the symmetry would have been broken differently, large centralized pools might not have arisen, and the world might be a very different place now. Alas.

See: "POW which involves queries against the UTXO set"

A whole bunch of variations are possible, but the general idea is to use the state you're mining against to make a deterministic random selection in a normative UTXO set, and then hash the result and thats your POW.  So your mining hardware would be boards of ultra fast flash memory coupled with sha256 fpgas or something instead of SHA256 chips.  It's a kind of memory hard POW.

blockchain.info has been sort of offline, for over 5 hrs already.

Moreover blockexplorer.com has also been stopped - somewhere yesterday.

bitnode says less than 200,000 nodes are in the world. This is the most depressing thing I have heard in a long time.

I expected several million active nodes at least.

Bump
Heading east on 12th Sept
Be good to have a meetup before

I have a couple of spare hats, t-shirts and keyrings I'll bring along if anyone would like to purchase

NO. International bank transfers with Gox are generally slow. Very slow.

But if you want to sell bitcoins and can wait, then Gox is a very good alternative. Plan two months.

Withdarawl no more than 999 in your auxiliary currency. Never make parallel withdrawals. Don't contact the support.

I use SEPA for a year without problems. My last withdrawal is from the 24 July. I expect it at the end of this month on my savings account. I charged this way a lot from Gox.  I therefore never contact the Gox support. The money is guaranteed. But it takes. You have to wait.

If you are dependent on the money, it is of course a real problem. But for me Bitcoin is only an experiment. I expect nothing and I'm pleased if something positiv happens.

Do not be infected by the impatience and greed of all the idiots here. They have also sold three weeks ago with a reduction on Bitstamp. And look where the course is now!

All these alarmists simply have no idea. They just burn money and blame other people for their own stupidity. Sell on Gox and wait.

As promised (but a few days late):




Downtrend in new members continues (we had some spikes, yes... But nothing really changed)
Nuber of posts is stabelizing, downttrend seems to be slowing down.

edit: all the charts are here availible: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232865.0

why would the spikes grow slower?
growth should be exponential, no?

which would mean the bubble will get closer and closer together,  pretty soon a bubble pop will be immediately followed by another bubble!
  

Couldn't happen to soon.  Being the worlds super-power with troop garrisoned all over the world is provoking a lot of corruption or our original principles as a nation.  After the legacy of death squads, 'signature' drone strikes, Abu Ghriab, etc, a person would have to be a complete imbecile to buy the BS about our 'spreading freedom' or whatever.

It can be legitimately argued that our empire provides 1/4 of the world resources to 'us', but the spoils of war are increasingly mal-distributed so more and more it's the trailer trash that does the dying and the Wall street types that do the wealth accumulation.

As a nation we've got great resources and infrastructure within our borders, and lack a lot of the problems that the Chinese have (especially overpopulation.)  We have the potential to provide a decent quality of life for all of our citizens, or those who will do the bare minimum to participate at least, so I don't fear a fall from our lofty current situation.  There will certainly be an internal struggle to see what class shoulders what percentage of the reduction in inputs (hence ballooning police state apparatus) which is my main concern.

I have pretty close to zero concern about some Chinese guy showing up on the coast and making me suck his dick.  Some honky from Washington DC doing so is a vastly bigger threat to me.

Bankers are not going to sit there and let themselves be obsolete any more than solar power will make Exxon Mobil and Big Oil obsolete.  They aren't doing down without a fight and they have VERY deep pockets for their war chest.

blah cheap and secure method..

1.) truecrypt with a long pass phrase.   http://www.truecrypt.org/
2.) cheap usb stick create a secure container and drop the wallet.dat file in there and keep in a secure place in your house offline.
3.) create a gmail account with 2 factor id and upload the secure container file to the cloud (in case something happens to the usb stick) .
4.) be happy

when you need to transfer coins download or use the usb stick unencrypte the container and copy /paste the wallet.dat into bitcoin.qt (or what ever you use) do the transaction and then delete the wallet.dat when done.