I can't imagine any evidence or experience that could suggest something unbounded. Whatever experience or evidence a finite being could have could only suggest finite knowledge, finite presence, or finite power. If you want to argue that human beings can perceive or experience omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, you have to argue that humans are capable of having unbounded experiences or acquiring unbounded evidence. That seems like self-contradictory nonsense to me, but I suppose that probably doesn't bother you since you reject the very concept that something could actually be impossible.

No, it doesn't.

Generating the merkle tress, less the coinbase transaction, need only be done once per block. Adding the coinbase transaction at the tip has constant expense regardless of what else is in the tree.

The processing would be done only once anyway, unless you wanted to include newer transactions.

Once your merkle tree of transactions is build, adding a coinbase to it has constant cost regardless of the size of the tree.

I think the real reason miners are building blocks with no transactions is because they don't want to have to validate transactions and a block with an invalid transaction would be rejected. I don't think it has anything to do with generating work units.

What processing do you think the pool has to do per-miner that has anything to do with the size of the block?

I'm not talking about behavior. I'm talking about our sense of justice. We can look at a situation and see justice and injustice the same way we can look at the sky and see blue.

It works perfectly. Someone could argue that colors aren't real because the sky isn't blue at night. Colors change and people change. Trees are green in the spring but not in the fall. The colors you see when you look at something are due to a complicated combination of factors including the thing you're looking at, the way human vision works, the lighting, and so on. Changes in many things can change colors or the perception of color. The same is true of natural rights.

Let's go back a few hundred years. We didn't know the physical nature of color. But we had color vision. We could distinguish objects reliably based on their color. And we could guess that it was something about the light coming from those objects, but that was about it. In that context, it would certainly be rational to believe that colors actually exist as properties of the real world, right?

But what would count as a testable experiment to prove the existence of colors? Remember, at the time, there was nothing other than human vision that could measure them. And we had no idea what green actually was, other than that people said grass looked green to them.

The situation with natural rights is currently about the same as it was then for color. So what would have convinced you back then that colors actually exist?

If you want, you can assume that you lack color vision. Because even though you don't lack the ability to sense natural rights, you will probably stubbornly insist that you cannot sense them and the fact that almost everyone else agrees that torturing children for pleasure is wrong is just a mysterious coincidence. All I can say to that is what I would say to the person who insists a green cube and a red cube look the same -- you are either lying or you lack a sense the rest of us have.

I think you're probably right. I wonder if it would help for the client to request a few blocks at a time. Is its current logic really just to request a single block and then not even request the next block until it has committed the previous?

This can easily be done for natural rights, but first we have to agree on what constitutes a testable theory. For example, before we understood the physical natural of color, what would you consider a testable theory for the existence of color and the ability of human beings to distinguish things on the basis of color? Or would you argue that it was irrational and unscientific to argue that colors exist and that humans had color vision until we understood the physical nature of color?

I won't defend their actions in this specific case, but I will explain what's wrong with your logic -- the first thing you must do when you're not sure what's going on with a financial system you operate that handles other people's money is stop any assets from leaving your control.

Until they know for sure otherwise, someone could be trying to steal from you. Or you could be trying to steal from them. Or a whole bunch of other uncool things.

For some reason, the free association engine in my brain thought this story would teach this lesson, though I'm not sure exactly why I thought that. - http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Special-Delivery.aspx

Anything that would necessarily be able to do the impossible must necessarily *be* impossible.

That's probably because the average block starts to contain transactions that require looking at more blocks that are, on average, further back. Also, the average block contains more transactions.

To clarify, you are seeing CPU load of around 5-10% while you are getting blocks at about 50 a minute. Is that correct?

No, and if you could, that would defeat the entire purpose of mining. The whole point of mining is to pile operations on top of the block chain up to and including the mined block in such a way that the proof of work is irrevocably associated with that block and all previous blocks. If there were any way to do the work without information from the entire block chain it proves, it wouldn't be proof anymore.

A miner is trying to do computations to "lock in" a block chain. He can't lock in a block chain until he knows what block chain he's trying to lock in.

If the hashing didn't secure the transactions in the block, it would cease to serve any purpose. The whole point of mining is to pile computations on top of the transactions so that anyone who wanted to claim a different set of transactions for the block would have to do an equal amount of work as the rest of the network.

Copying != committing. Committing takes about three spins of the drive per object committed.

It's more likely the time it take to commit each block and transaction to disk and verify all the transactions in it. How many blocks per minute are you getting? What's your CPU load look like? What CPU do you have?

I don't think anyone knows the answers to those questions yet. At least, so far as I know, there's no precedent to make the answers to those questions "yes". As I understand it, you can accumulate a virtual fortune (whether in the form of stocks or items) and pay no taxes until you "cash out" into something you can physically consume. (Or something the government recognizes as hard currency, with some exceptions.)

The food, electricity, and fuel *are* cashing out. When you acquire a consumable good and then consume it, you are cashing out.

No, but that's because spending it or trading it for a good you then consume is cashing out. The question is whether you have to pay tax on *unrealized* capital gains. That is, assets you hold that have some value but that you have not put into either a hard currency or a form in which they can be consumed.

At least in the United States, Bitcoins are just like items in an MMORPG. You can acquire them, hold them, and they can go up in value tax free. If you lose them or they go down in value without you ever cashing out, no taxes are due. Until you convert them into hard currency or exchange them for a commodity you intend to consume, no taxes are due. Your tax basis in the Bitcoins would typically be deductible (I'm oversimplifying a bit here. There are some exceptions.)

That's the law in the United States. Capital gains are not taxed until realized. But read what payb.tc said, "you're supposed to declare any income earned and pay tax on it's AUD equivalent, whether you cashed out or not". I don't see how such a system could possibly work. It would mean that if you acquired any virtual asset you could sell (such as an MMORPG account with characters and items), you'd have to pay taxes on its increase in value.

Not true. All the building on top of an invalid block can't hide or change the fact that it's invalid and so would do no harm whatsoever. It would simply be wasted effort.

These botnets do increase the amount of hashing power an attacker would need to launch something like a 51% attack. They do increase the security of the network. And that's what the block reward is for. If the system is broken, it's because the transaction fee and volume aren't sufficient to justify the expense of including transactions in a block.

I wonder if we can detect these botnet nodes somehow, perhaps by the particular messages they send or don't send, and send them *invalid* blocks. It won't harm normal clients since they'll just ignore them. But the botnet nodes, lacking the block chain, will work on the wrong blocks more often than the right ones. This may do more harm than good in the long term though.

The goal is not to force any particular policy but just to avoid miners being lazy and not gathering any transactions at all. So long as they can't take the shortcut of not including any transactions at all, their self-interest will lead them to include fee-paying transactions.

So the rule could be this simple and this modest: If there are at least four transactions that are not free and have at least the standard fee that were not included in the previous block even though they could have been, discourage any block with just a coinbase transaction.

So you are never punished for not including a free transaction. And you are never punished for not getting a new work unit when you didn't have to anyway because a new block was found. But this will solve the problem of paid transactions backing up if multiple blocks are found by miners who refuse to include any transactions.

This is, IMO, the least onerous rule that would solve the problem.