Bcrypt isn't magic.  It just does the difficulty adjustment internally.

Can you clarify this?  I don't follow your reasoning at all.

This is how.

Be sure to read Working Paper 2007-052B from the St. Louis Fed's research division.

The fed mostly deals in short duration debt, which does not pay interest in the usual sense.  T-bills are sold at a discount to the primary dealers (who are not the fed), and then they are resold on the secondary market.  The FOMC operates to adjust liquidity and interest rates, but they don't really care about the interest they earn by doing so, only what their actions have on interest rates overall.

Read The Hyperinflation Survival guide (warning, PDF).

It is about conducting business in a hyperinflationary country, mostly using lessons learned from Argentina that were very fresh at the time it was written.

Decoupling.

Back in 2008, hedge funds and investment banks were selling whatever they could get their hands on so that they could meet redemption requests.  Of course, these redemption requests were for dollars, so the cost of the dollar went up and the price of everything else went down, which was strange to people that thought this was the collapse of the dollar system that they had been waiting for.

But, there were some oddities.  Funds sold a lot of their holdings of paper metals, like GLD.  Now GLD and gold are linked through a complicated relationship (which is the entire point of GLD), so as GLD was dumped, the price of gold went down with it.  Except that if you wanted to get your hands on actual physical shiny yellow metal, you had to pay a ridiculous premium for it.  At several times, the premium was so high that it actually cost more to buy physical gold than it had cost before the spot price tanked.

At the time, I was watching silver much more closely than I was watching gold.  One day when spot silver was under $10/oz, I remember the local coin store wouldn't part with a round for less than $20, and if you wanted Eagles, they were at least $22 each.  I called around, and other dealers were demanding pretty similar prices.  I don't think the gold premium was anywhere near 100%, but it was still pretty steep, maybe 30%-50%.

The price of actual physical metals had very much decoupled from their paper prices.  Over time, they converged again, mostly by waiting for the paper prices to rise up to meet the physical prices.  The funny part is that I've never ever seen historic data on premiums, so it is easy to forget that it happens, or even to never know about it in the first place.

So, the next time there is a panic (now?) and funds need to dump stuff to buy dollars, the paper price of physical metals will certainly drop, like you say.  But that doesn't mean that those prices will have any bearing on the actual transaction prices in the real world.

I'm of the opinion that the situation back in 2008-2009 was very unusual.  I wouldn't be willing to bet that the next event of this sort will actually cause the markets to decouple to the same extent, but there are quite a few gold and silver pundits that would be.

mtgox fees are in whatever currency you are getting.  Buying BTC?  Fee is BTC.  Buying dollars (aka, selling BTC)?  Fee is dollars.

Also, MagicalTux has stated at least a few times that they don't ever buy or sell BTC because people would assume they are abusing their position.  Instead, they save their BTC to use on things like bailing out bitomat.

This sounds like a great plan.

I can top that.  ~$6 for three square dowels (5/8" by 36") and some wood screws I had floating around.  Only running 3 cards right now, but it is drilled for 4 double width cards.

Don't screw around.  Use insurance.

And anyone that bothers to read your address on the packages is going to assume that you are shipping chocolate anyway.

Awesome.  I'm not just wrong, I have cognitive dissonance!  Holy shit, I should try that technique!  It seems much easier than actually supporting a position with like data and logic and stuff.

Here is a post showing a couple of examples from some diverse categories of goods, compared from 1984 to 2004.  Combine that with some historic gold data.  Virtually everything doubled in cost when measured in dollars, but only increased by 50% when priced in gold.

I know that one comparison from 1984 to 2004 isn't the whole picture.  Then again, you haven't presented any data at all.  So far all you've done is toss around some pointless insults and assert your position a couple of times.

I will concede one thing though.  I didn't notice any other prices change yesterday when gold dropped by $60/oz.  So, if you are willing to consider a short enough time frame, and ignore the money illusion, then the dollar can certainly appear to be quite stable.

I suppose I could also point out that when gold coins are used as currency, prices of everything in terms of those coins are extraordinarily stable.  Right up until someone decides to debase the coins.  See, for example, the fall of the Roman Empire.

Is there actually a browser that will remember a certificate and complain if that cert is replaced with a different valid CA-signed cert?

I don't buy his story at all, at least not the version I heard.  Here's why.  Nodes forward valid blocks.  This is obviously true in the window between accepting the block and having it overturned, but it is also true after a new longest chain has been accepted.  Hell, it is even true if the blocks are stale at the time they are received, if I recall correctly from reading the code a while back.

If his node had been fed blocks that were later overturned, his node would have shared those, and they would have spread across the entire network, meaning that we'd all have copies of them.  Certain people that have a keen interest in the block chain, like Theymos, would have noticed proof of a spend redirection attack in the wild and would have announced it widely.  I gave up on reading the crap sloshing around in the mybitcoin threads, so I might have missed it, but I'm pretty sure that I would have come across it eventually if it had been announced.

I don't necessarily think that he stole the coins, but I'm pretty sure the attack did not come through the bitcoin side of things, even if he really did count deposits after a single confirmation.


Thanks, I appreciate that.  But I don't think the community is quite that bad.  It is certainly true that a lot of knowledgeable people have given up on the forums and moved on, but there are still a bunch around.

On this particular issue, the philosophical issue is this:  Should the bitcoin client be an accounting platform?  My gut says no.  Accounting is not a monolithic thing, it is a collection of different practices and procedures, with many, many differences from place to place.  Even if proper accounting was a function that was appropriate for the client, there is no possible way for it to do everything that everyone would need it to do.  So, accounting should be in a different layer, in different software that talks to the client.

I would even take the next step and say that the client does too much stuff, already.

I've had this exact same debate on these forums already.  2112 is right about the keys.

We are, ahem, sure that ECDSA has no weaknesses against private key reuse.  But it is also a bad idea to reuse private keys, just because.  It is just a tiny little bit bad of an idea.  It is incredibly unlikely to ever be a problem.  But throughout history, cryptographic system breaches in the real world have always been facilitated by key reuse.

People should be free to do whatever they want, but they should understand that reusing keys results in a slight decrease in overall security.  The decrease might be infinitesimal, and it probably is, but it is still a decrease.

I only found one useful article that mentions that EVSSL may have been included in the breach.

http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=11500

I'm assuming that you and MagicalTux checked the IPs used on your account.  Anything strange there?

And that tells you what, exactly?  Think carefully.  Does it tell you something about gold?  Or does it tell you something about fiat currencies as a group?  Both?  Neither?

It doesn't take two months to learn that.  I don't think it even took me 2 hours from the first time I heard about bitcoin to understand how and why chain reorgs happen.

At any rate, you are right that chain reorgs need better handling in the stock client.  It has been a frequent topic here on the forums, and on the dev list.  What isn't at all clear is what to change, or how.

Outside of the billions incident a while back, I don't think there has ever been a reorg involving more than a few blocks.  And we sorta think that no one has the ability to actually redirect a transaction right now, or even will have the ability in the near future.  Also, while we are pretty sure that we, as humans, can tell a benign reorg (every few days) from a hostile one (never, so far), writing an algorithm to do it for us isn't so easy.

This is a pretty big subject, with lots of technical and philosophical issues, and this isn't the right thread to discuss it in.  You can find a lot of it in the development and technical discussion area.  Or, if you want to make a new thread on the subject, I can try to fill in the details for you.

Ahh, you are using chargeback as accounting jargon, and not in the sense that the other 99.99% of English speakers use in normal conversation.  I'm no accountant, so I'll take your word for it.  I'll even apologize:  my bad.

Now that we have the basic definitions straight, we can continue.

What exactly is it that you imagine Gavin to be dancing around?  Even better, how did you make it two months on this forum without learning about this?

The block chain, as a whole, represents a consensus agreement about the global state of transactions.  It can exist in different versions in different places and times.  The "correct" version is, by protocol, the version that would require the most work (statistically) to replace.  The protocol was designed to minimize the amount of trust that any one party needs to have for any other party, so the "correct" version of the block chain is still correct, even if it isn't the version that you saw first.

This is explained in the FAQ, and the Weaknesses page of the wiki, and in many, many threads here on the forums.

If an accountant (or author of accounting software) doesn't understand this, the fault lies with the accountant for improper recording, not with the software for doing exactly what it says it is going to do.

Well, I guess it was my fault for expecting a somewhat serious level of discussion.  If you want to be childish, I guess I'll just call you a poopy head and leave it at that.

For everyone else reading this thread, or if you someone that can explain things to you, maybe a younger brother, or a pet rock or something, I'll just mention one more thing.  In a fully floating system like we have now, it is impossible to measure the volatility of any one thing without measuring the volatility of every other thing at the same time.  If you look at just one pairing, say gold vs. dollars, or gold vs. silver, the best you can do is make a remark about the relative volatility of the pair.

That is, if you say that gold is volatile because the dollar value of an ounce varies a lot, the reverse claim is equally true.  Thus, the dollar is volatile, because the gold value of one dollar varies a lot.  It also means that statements at a remove are doubly worthless, so talking about silver vs. gold doesn't tell you anything at all about gold, or about silver, and it tells you even less than nothing about gold vs. dollars.

Where the hell did silver come from?  I thought we were talking about gold.