We don't control that website, and thus don't control that metric.  Fudders are gonna fud.  It's what they do.

And the membership of this forum crossed 10K months ago, but there is no chance that the ownership of this forum is going to start counting IP addresses.  That wouldn't be any more relevant a metric anyway.  Not only do not all members run their own client, much less one full time; there are many more people who use bitcoin who don't have memberships.  Again, the growth or decline of the number of listening-but-not-mining clients is irrelevent to the function or resilence of the bitcoin network whether they are on the open Internet or some PVN.  Beyond some minimum number required to support the bandwidth of the network as a whole, that is.  The very fact that we can't know how many (or where are) all the network's nodes happen to exist is, itself, a contribution to it's resiliance.  An attacker can DOS the pools or exchanges, because he can find out it's IP address and a government agent can steal a server because he can find the farm that holds it; but these things cannot stop the bitcoin network for no other reason that you cannot kill what you cannot catch.  At worst, these kinds of events simply disrupt the network temporaroly and force more users towards Tor and I2P.

There is no incentive for the end user to keep their bitcoind running 24/7 because there is no gain for the network, either.  A non-mining node that is just on the network listening and relaying adds nothing, so long as there exists somewhere one running with the entire blockchain.  It only takes one, and the mining pools' clients count.  Bitcoin does gain a little in the 'many-copies-keeps-data-safe' area, but that's just as true regarding a client that doesn't normally listen or one that just connects every few days to update it's blockchain.  This amounts to the greatest of non-issues for bitcoin.


Again, not relevent.  The very fact that the numbers quoted here can't be trusted should be proof enough that this issue isn't and issue.

A better question is this...

Can you, without asking for special permission nor paying anyone for the privilege, set up a 'peer' to Wells' machines?  It's the ability to peer, not the reality, that makes bitcoin different from Wells Fargo.

I'm begining to suspect that you do not understand how bitcoin actually works, what decentralization means in the context of economic science, nor what it means to be a 'peer'.

Forget about moonbounce, just bounce it off of the F2 ionosphere with a near-vertical incident skywave (NVIS) single-sideband ham transciever connected to a standard stereo soundcard.

You pretty much described how coin mixers work in your OP.

If you truly feel that way, I'll be the adult an offer to relieve you of your entire burden of unspent bitcoins for $2 apeice.  Which, according to your theory, is $1.99 more than their true worth.

In the meantime, the rest of us are going to keep doing what were doing, okay?

More and more personal nodes also are "quiet" nodes as well, whether or not they are listening hosts.  Basicly this means that they don't announce their IP address in any fashion, and may also primarily use a VPN, Tor or I2P.  Which means that they might accept incoming connections, but the incoming node must first be aware of the IP address of the quiet node.  This could be because those two nodes have connected in the past, or the IP address of the quiet node was revealled to the other node over the bitcon network itself.  Certainly not all nodes can be quiet, but any node can switch from quiet to normal to offline and back whenever the user wishes.  My own node is fairly quiet when I have it on, and does accept incoming connections from nodes that it recognizes, but isn't online at all most of the time.

+1 TangibleCryptography

As for myself, most of my 'early adopter' wages have already been spent.  I did profit well in the several years since I bought my first 1000 BTC, but I can profit little more now.  I now have less than 100 BTC left from that original set.  My son asked me not so long ago, "If the price has increased so much Dad, do you regret spending what you had for less?"  My reponse was, "No, because I did well by speculating early and gained much of what I wanted to buy when I sold them; much more (speaking in the context of value to my son) than the original bitcoins cost me.  I literally couldn't lose now if the value of a bitcoin dropped to zero tomorrow."

I've bought video game licenses, handmade jewlry off of Etsy for my daughter, pretty rocks for both of them, server rentals, clothing, cell service on several occasions, food of several sorts (mostly candy) and recently baklava; among other things that shall remain unmentioned.  The key to selling stuff for bitcoins, and thus seperating early adopters from their bitcoins, is to offer an advantage with bitcoin versus other (more established) alternatives.  You could offer a small discount compared to credit cards/paypal, or a more private or more convient alternative than standard methods.  Silk Road depends upon this, and can charge a premium because their method of handling bitcoins are a huge advantage concerning the limitation of legal risk for buyers as well as sellers.

Last week, I spent almost $400 worth of bitcoins to buy exactly $400 worth of prepaid cell phone top-up card numbers.  I got a discount from face value of 4% compared to the precise exchange rate at the time.  I did it, in part, because I knew that Virgin Mobile USA was just about to alter their resalers' terms in such a way that future discounts were unlikely.  Since my monthly service rate is $25 per month, I'm sitting on 16 months worth of cell service that I know that I will use.  Yes, I was just as likely to gain as much or more over the next 16 months by holding the bitcoins and paying as I go, but that's a risk.  I still have bitcoins to do that with, and still plan on buying more, but the phone card numbers are a solid win so long as Virgin Mobile USA doesn't go bankrupt in the next 16 months and I don't lose those numbers before I can use them.

Basicly, I'm hedging against a fall in the bitcoin exchange rate.  I believe that bitcoins are going to stay pretty much the same for most of that time, and I neither believe a drop nor a rally is likely, but I don't know. 

Oh, I use Amazon all the time.  I wish I had seen this one last week, I spent over $200 in a single sitting, and that wasn't even my only order that day.  Would this also work for kindle e-books?

Doesn't matter as long as pruning is enabled.

I'm pretty sure that Electrum uses a similar method for desktop machines, but I'm not sure about how ready that client is.  The last I heard it was still beta.

Why a geosat?  Those are much more expensive for a number of reasons, and a geosat can't cover the entire earth, we would need at least three of them. 

There would be no practical method of determining which transactions originated from any particular nation, even if that were a desirable goal.

I don't know why it would need to be hashing.  A node with a full blockchain would be good though, with some method of communicating with it.  An Amsat would work for that.

A 'light client' is one of a couple of slightly different hacks, all that are intended to allow the user to have a local wallet.dat while not requiring the full blockchain.  The two big ways this works are 1) blockchain headers only client and 2) split wallet.dat client.  #1) Doesn't really save much bandwidth yet, because the network doesn't (yet) support partial block downloads so right now they have to download the whole block before discarding the parts it does not need, which is all of the transactions that do not include inputs or outputs that use any of it's own addresses.  However, #2 does work at present, and one wonderful such example is BitcoinSpinner for the Android smartphone OS.  How it works is that the phone keeps the addresses & their associated private keys encrypted on the phone, while the rest of what is kept in the normal wallet.dat file is kept on an account with the BitcoinSpinner server.  The server knows your (very few) addresses, and tracks your balances for you.  When you need to send money, your phone will inform the server to whom you need to send a transaction and for how much.  The server then creates the transaction based upon it's local blockchain & what part of the wallet.dat that it possesses, and then sends that to your phone which then uses the private keys to sign the transaction, and sends it back to the server, which then sends it to the network.  Method #1 was described in the original white paper by Satoshi, but method #2 seems to be the more practical method at this time.

Bitcoin isn't perfectly anonymous, this is correct.  Additional measures need to be taken in one wishes to remain anonymous with those whom he actually is involved in business with.  Bitcoin is fairly good at keeping third parties out of your private business, however.  It is true that any person with whom you have already sent funds to can forever associate you with those addresses, unless you use a 'tumbler' service to hide your own addresses; however that only applies to those exact addresses and does not necessarily mean that your other addresses can be associated with them.  That's not impossible either, but takes some professional level mapping of the blockchain to do so and is something that can be completely avoided with some care.


Tor only hides the IP address of the machine from which you are doing business, but the second part of that statement above is incorrect.  You do not have only one address to send from, you have as many addresses to send from as you have used to receive previously.  Funds are not bundled together unless 1) you deliberately do so by combining your funds under a single address sent to yourself or 2) you create a large send transaction that requires that the client use the funds from multiple addresses in order to meet the amount required.  In either case, the association of those addresses can be assumed after the transaction is sent to the network, but not before; and your client will not attempt to reuse those same addresses unless someone sends more funds to those addresses at a later date.

It's a different ball game.  The largest part of bootstrapping the blockchain, either on first boot or a catchup, involves verifying each block before proceeding to the next one.  This is both a compuationally & disk access intensive process.  There are ways that future clients could improve significantly on this, but right now the focus is on primary function & security, not performance.

This is something that developers have considered.  You need to use a light client, not a full node.