Yep. And when the pre-ordered ASICs come on-stream, then the DOE would be <1% and lucky to hash 1 block a day.

From the late 1970s to early 1990s the Irish Republican Army used to place bombs inside trash cans (rubbish bins) to kill civilians and damage buildings. They often phoned in a coded warning to the UK govt which meant the area could be cleared first. Unlike 21st century Islamic Jihadists, the IRA terrorists (always called criminals by the UK govt - which is where Bush Jr went horribly wrong in 2001) were often after scare tactics, not always outright slaughter.

All the trash cans disappeared from the streets, but since Blair brokered a peace deal the cans have slowly reappeared. One can usually be found if you want to spend an hour looking!

Like this week? Worst news in 3 years, flaw in protocol (default max db locks was insufficent).

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5zigHourlyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

= price down $1 after 3 days
Is that interesting enough?

Could consecutive empty blocks be a new ASIC miner configuring their setup before starting off properly?

Absolutely, but xe.com respect the ISO currency convention.

Which is why the Bitcoin community needs to push for XBT as a quasi-official code so that SIX standards are forced to accept it because the mainstream banking system has adopted it.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=148229.0

BTC is fine for unofficial use. There is a majority which accepts the need for an X-code:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149150.0

This week was an interesting test of that. $2M $3M was cashed out during the worst technical hitch for years, and the market just shrugged it off...

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5zig30-minztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

May I translate?  You were too late for the train and are hoping for a dip to $1 so that you can load up and make 50x your money in a decade (a retirement fund perhaps?).

You should read proudhon's posts because it seems he was on the train and got off and is hoping for the same scenario. One day you might meet up and can sit on a verandah watching the sunset repeating the words "If only...." over and over again....

Superficially, you are right. Based upon inspection of wall charts it would seem that the price is more likely to drop than increase.
For every buyer there is a seller at the same price, so for every dollar which buys bitcoin another dollar flees it. What drives prices is sentiment. The sentiment for Bitcoin has been unrelentingly bullish since 2011. Yes, there are dips when the market gets ahead of itself, or when there is a bad news event (this week), but the main trend is intact. The wall at $20 looked formidable, but it was cut like a blowtorch through butter.

Fair enough. Then, what is the path to get smoothly to that future?

There is no proper fees market for block access at present because fees average <5% of the block reward. A 1MB block accommodates about 2400 transactions (ignoring many inputs/outputs possible). With the block reward about $1150 it means an average fee of $0.48 is required to match the reward in value. Is there a consensus on a "reasonable" fee for a vanilla Bitcoin transaction? Is it closer to 5c than 0.5c or 50c? Probably. So the fees market for block space becomes viable when 10MB blocks are common. This is a while off. Until that time SD (and anything with a similar business model) can flood the network, unless these apps are throttled at the discretion of their owners.

I agree. SD's business model best runs without internalizing transactions, unlike Coinbase or Mt. Gox, who do internalize. The problem is that SD's model is scalable much faster than the Bitcoin network's capability. SD usage could scale 10x while the network capability might only double in that time.

SD brings in a lot of fees, and is "stress-testing" Bitcoin, and highlights the risk of a flooding attack. All these are beneficial to have or know. I did suggest blocking SD yesterday and got criticism for it. I accept that and withdraw that idea. My earlier suggestion stands: which is for fees to somehow rise exponentially for flooding sources on a per block basis. It seems possible to do this, but perhaps it isn't.

Bit City has a privately run train system. Its shareholder's capital is being pumped into it at a regular pace until passenger volumes increase to make it self-funding and then profitable. In order to encourage passenger numbers Bit City Trains (BCT) are offering family tickets at a rock-bottom rate, hoping to attract groups instead of just individual commuters, some of whom pay well for a seat already, yet overall commuter revenue is not high.

Bit City has a bus company called Efficient Coach Interchange (ECI) owned by Mr Dihsotas, which has some ticket revenue, but, by itself is not profitable. Lo and behold there is an opportunity.  BCT has a network which goes to all suburbs and even neighboring towns. If the ECI buses went to all those places he would make a good profit on all the customers which would flock in.

Mr Dihsotas decides to park his buses at all the stations and sells tickets to all destinations. The clever part is that every passenger who buys a bus ticket automatically gets adopted into Mr Dihsotas' family, so they get to use the train network during their bus journey for a low price. This is so popular that soon there are thousands of passengers crowding BCT's trains, forcing extra rolling stock to be used. The trains are often full, but BCT shareholders are not making a profit yet, even though family tickets are making more money than all the commuter tickets combined. There is also a steady stream of complaints from regular commuters about lack of seating, long queues, platforms too short for the extra carriages, it goes on.

Bit City Trains has the illusion of success but something is just not right. The share price is high, but for how long? At the AGM one of the shareholders heckles the board saying that Mr Dihsotas should not get the family discount tickets anymore....

It is a small fraction of the total revenue, swamped by the block reward, Collectively revenue is doing very handsomely at the moment anyway:
https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-revenue
does Bitcoin need to be forced to have high fees at this time?

The problem is that the SD volume is essentially unbounded and is stress-testing Bitcoin quickly towards a known limit (the 1Mb block size) but now also finding a previously latent limit (default number of db locks) along the way.

I posted this only a few hours before the chain fork situation arose because I was worried about SD accelerating Bitcoin to the 1MB limit.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150493.msg1612165#msg1612165

My suggestion was to slowly push back flooding ("dead puppy") volume with higher fees targeted at that source.
Ultimately SD is under the control of the Bitcoin community. But what it is doing could be replicated in an attack by a malicious group.

Good news. It seems that more people on v0.7 at the moment the better!

Criticizing 0.8 for not emulating an unknown bug (let alone that it was in 3rd-party software) is itself FUD.
It appears 60% of the network would have recognized the problem block. If more people were prepared to upgrade in a timely manner then it might have been closer to 90% and a minor issue arguably leaving a better situation than exists now.


Yes. I agree with that because of where the situation is now.

We are only in this situation because ONE source application is flooding the network with low fee transactions. That source application is abusing the Bitcoin network as a messaging system because it helps their business model run just slightly more conveniently for them.



Some of this profit can be fairly spent RIGHT NOW on improvements to internalize transaction flow, or it should be blocked until it does. This is the real choice.

This is becoming very serious.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=30589099

The thrust of the OP is addressing the most urgent issue affecting Bitcoin right now.

That's why I said "not quite right" rather than flatly refute. There are a lot of perspectives to the argument.
Of course I reject forced changes of software as you (and whitenight) describe.

Over 80% of new blocks are now Version 2. Once this hits 95% any version 1 block you mine will be rejected by the network.
An upgrade to 0.7 is necessary (or 0.8.1 when available).
Yesterday, core dev and btc guild rescued miners on an old version, but it won't happen for version 1 miners when they are churning out orphans with unspendable rewards.

Don't be among the last few heading for the exit on version 1 getting guaranteed down-time.

The percentage at the bottom of this screen is moving centre-stage in the Bitcoin show now:
http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

That's not quite right D&T because we already have a forced upgrade situation imminent!

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

When the percentage at the bottom of that screen goes from 78% to 95% then 5% of the hashing power is forced to upgrade or cast adrift.
However, IMHO, this is the only way Bitcoin can progress from a crypto-experiment to a world-beating currency and payments system.

+1