Davout, I hear what you are saying and appreciate your enthusiasm. You are one of the guys who I've respected as having the right attitude from the first time I arrived at this forum ... so go for it I say. Fortune favours the brave.

That said, I wonder how much the ECB (who released their little report into bitcoin) are trying to take you (and bitcoin) "under their wing", so to speak, so that at a later stage it will be that much easier for them to regulate bitcoin into oblivion. At this point in time they have no moral (or even legal perhaps) standing to regulate bitcoin, in as much as they have no standing to regulate exotic rock mining in Angolia.

Be careful, as the old saying goes, "lie down with dogs .... ".

It's funny you bring that up, because there has been an extended conversation over the past few days on the mailing list, about exactly that.  There's some debate about the qualities of an acceptable to solution to promote as the default, and right now Bitcoin-Qt being the only "usable" full node implementation wins because we need full-nodes and that's the safest for the network.    But I do agree with you -- there should be a better experience for new users -- and maybe that discussion will yield something like: "Multibit should be default if it implements X, Y and Z and gets some more support behind it". 

But that's not the topic of this thread.  I do think that a plugin system for Bitcoin-Qt is a good idea, and I've thought about something similar for Armory.  Certainly, allowing plugins give more flexibility for non-core-devs to contribute, but at the risk of safety (rogue plugins can be a major security risk).

Uh, no, you paid half as many BTC. I remember buying an FPGA Single for > 110BTC back in the summer. I paid almost the same amount (in coins) for a SC Single, worth over twice as much!

Then what do you make of this official quote?


So they might get the chips this year. You think they just plug the chips in and that's a finished product immediately ready to ship? Admit it. There is zero chance of BFL shipping an ASIC in 2012.

I think the bitcoin-qt devs have decided that security and stability is more important than "luxury" features like this, that are supported by a variety of other programs anyway (and supported by itself, through the RPC interface).  They'd rather spend the time dealing with network security to maximize the chance that the network survives an attack, or devastating bugs.  I've heard some of the devs suggest that Bitcoin-Qt could become more of a back-end for other programs to leverage, rather than focusing on recreating what those other programs do.

Sure, they are the face of Bitcoin at the moment, and they want to supply a better feature set for its users where possible.  But they have an important job to do under-the-hood that us alt-client developers can't do -- improve the network protocol and security.  But that's why they added an "Alternative clients" section to the main page, to make people aware that  they aren't the only thing in town.

I find it odd that blockchain.info is reputed to be one of the easy clients and yet it has "Import Private Key" functionality, and Bitcoin-Qt is reputed to be the hard-to-use one and yet it doesn't have several features blockchain.info does. Have people complained that advanced features get in the way of simplicity with blockchain.info? If not, then what's the problem with bringing some more advanced features into Bitcoin-Qt?

I like the idea of plugins. ImportPrivKey could start out as a plugin included but disabled by default. Similar to how Deluge or other apps ship initially with some plugins included but not enabled.

you don't adjust chips. period.

You can add crap the the board to fix a leak or add voltage or capacitance. That's about it. If there was anything wrong with the chips whatsoever it's a respin at best, and worse a whole redo of the mask. That's 30-90 days of fail.

so everyone who gets a first gen BFL SC before whatever the real problem is fixed is getting a quick fix prototype board at best.

This is called cherry picking, and it usually means they are hiding shitloads.

1. If BFL really have chips coming, then they are not making any so-to-speak "clock buffer adjustments", either that or they don't have any chips coming and have not tape-out at all, it is also entirely possible that they have not make the MASK yet either. I guess we will find out on the week of the 11th, in this month hopefully.

Maybe I was misunderstood. BFL is probably getting around 1000 chips out of a 300mm wafer, so their order for a 100k chips would be about 100 wafers. The mask costs will be large, but ordering a couple to several hundred thousand dollars worth of wafers on top of your mask costs without doing a small run to test it just seems very risky.

Actually BFL will not be around till then either.

"... in early 2013 they will start shipping to over a thousand customers who placed advance orders."
source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush/

Ugh...  and I thought genjix's approach in spruiking the 'subversiveness' of Bitcoin to London financial types was bad,
now we're going to associate yet more heavily with the conspiracy-nutters too?

Things were looking up with wordpress adoption and the work of bitpay, bitinstant, paymium etc giving a 'businesslike' impression...
infowars etc is the wrong emphasis for me, but Ah well - I guess (hope?) Bitcoin is already big enough to handle it all.

well that's the thing.  everyone thinks the banks are lending again but they're not.  they only have lent to students whose debts are guaranteed by Sallie Mae (gov't) and lent to homebuyers who qualify for Fannie/Freddie/FHA (gov't).  they never hold the loans cuz they know they're bad and only want the fees generated by the loans.

personally, i think its a very risky time to buy a house b/c interest rates are at all time lows.  if you qualify and i doubt you will if you can't get a gov't subsidized loan, make sure its fixed rate otherwise when interest rates rise you will be crushed.  the reason prices have been rising is that the banks have been keeping foreclosures off the market and any price rise will see an increased release of these foreclosures/REO's back onto the market acting as a price suppression mechanism that's built in.  also, much of the buys made the last few years have been cash buys from big investors whose goal is to flip these things when the price is right; if it ever gets there.

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=20728

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=20622

It's a feature, not a bug... Armory inherits all the security properties of Bitcoin-Qt by using it as a gateway to the Bitcoin network.  If I rewrote all that stuff myself, it'd probably be a disaster.  And in the end, since you don't ever need to touch Bitcoin-Qt, you can just minimize it and pretend it isn't there.  Armory is a bit slow to start, but the recent beta release includes insta-load so you can manage your wallets (like importing keys) while it is scanning the blockchain. 

If you're willing to go as far as creating plugins for Bitcoin-Qt to do this, you might as well just use Armory.  It basically is an add-on, and both importing and sweeping are supported.  Only sweeping is supported if you are in "Standard" usermode, with importing being available in "Advanced" and "Expert" (for reasons already described here).  It also has batch-importing/sweeping so you don't have to wait for a rescan between each one.  Not to mention all the other nice benefits of Armory: printable one-time-only-needed backups, multi-wallet interface, simple cold storage with watching-only wallets... </shameless plug>

Bad example:

The difference is like giving you a cheque that you can cash and teaching you how to forge my signature to sign one single transaction that I know about.

I know you want this functionality because of your coins and whatnot, but seriously I'd rather have sweeping private keys/wallets as a web service than within the client.
There needs to be a better way to keep bitcoins "portable" (= not under my control anymore but anyone else can redeem them to any address) than to give away private keys.

About vanity addresses, as far as I saw one can already combine a private key to such an address made up of 2 parts (so people can mine for them without knowing the private key), so that could be built in in some point of time. As you still need to have the 2nd part unique (and to your own) that doesn't solve the "physical bitcoin coin" issue though that anyone should be able to redeem.

Just look at the results of the poll so far. Why are we even debating whether people want this or now. It's clear most people want it. Hell, there have been several times where I could have used it for multiple different reasons. And a lot of those times I wouldn't need the sweep function either, I just wanted to import my private keys in a simple easy way. Is that so much to ask for christ sakes. If we are letting stupid people be the guide of bitcoins future, the future is looking dull.

My suggestion solves all the problems. It lets people know the risk of not sweeping the funds, and gives them the option of sweeping the funds, but also allows them to import the key without sweeping the funds. It's important to have both options available because they both server their own purpose and are useful under different circumstances. This isn't rocket science.

Where is collection agency that will take on stocks? Cause that is what bitcoin is, you have to take it at the current price but collection agencies don't take on those cases.

Also Prosper.com doesn't even state on there site what happens in a default situation, plus they say
Cause by the sound of this makes it sound like it is your RESPONSIBILITY

I believe on the contrary that private keys should be kept private as much as possible and never exposed to users to "redeem" or "swipe" in the first place. Importing private keys for anything else than constantly monitoring their addresses and swiping them is dangerous at best and leads to a lot of coins lost at worst.

I'd rather have people come up with a way to create signed transactions that can go to any address and trade these around than exposing private keys and thinking about how to swipe them again and who else might have seen them.