Wow, you're full of information aren't you?  Most of it wrong.  You just quoted an ambient temp for a nearly perfect vacuum, which is something that has no meaning.  The surface temp of any object that does not produce it's own heat is a balance point of radiation received and radiation emitted.  Outside of Earth's atmosphere and in direct sunlight, that surface temp is closer to 92 Degree Celsius.   To get anywhere near the number you quoted an object would either have to be so far away from the Sun that it was barely larger a star than any other, or permanently in the shadow of a major object that did not emit infrared heat from it's dark side.  The only reason that space could be considered 'cold' anywhere near Earth's own solar orbit, or anywhere on our side Mars, would be because the boiling point of water is below it's own freezing point, evaporating off your skin instantly and taking heat with it for as long as it lasts.  That would be the least of your worries, though.  And it has zero to do with how to regulate the temp of a space born mining rig.

Yes, but there are no GUI wallet programs that support it yet.

There are rules to the minimum fee structure and miners and nodes are free to enforce whatever fees that they want.

Ah, I see.  A bitcoin card can't be a  passive RFID.  It has to be an active id by it's nature.  Good luck cloning those.

Demurrage can't work in a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency without breaking something.  I've looked pretty deep into this before, and wish I were proven wrong.  So far, it just adds too much complexity or it fails to encourage the desirable activities such as deliberate consolidation of inputs.  One thing that could be done is to add a new rule to the minimum fee structure that adds a relative increase in the minimum fee after a year or so, in such a way that long term savings accounts end up paying for their past security eventually; but that's not really demurrage and doesn't contribute much to consolidation of the blockchain nor does in contribute anything to the running security.

What is a proxmark?

<sigh>

Do some research on the matter.


Unless you intend to carry a second phone to actually make calls, texts or use the Internet while mobile; you're going to turn that mode off eventually.  I'm not concerned about a live hacker taking my money, I'm concerned about a worm or virus that steals android wallets.  That only takes a few seconds.

Smartphones are just computers that are always accessible to the Internet.  Android can be, and has been, hacked.  No thanks.  I have an android phone and won't keep more than petty cash on it.  I want a device that is inherently more secure than an operating system with continuous Internet access that can still transact in a relatively conveint fashion.  I can have a perfectly secure savings account printed onto archival paper & in my safe that I can send money to all day, but I can't readily use that on a normal basis though.

No it's not.  You're just not understanding.

To varying degrees, many are and have in the past.  I'm talking about a computer program implimenting a standard speculation stragedgy.


A billionare doesn't need to colude with anyone in order to defend the peg in a $40million market.  By definition, his resources are already unlimited within the trading range of $5+-.10.  The only way the market maker stands to lose in this scenario is if the natural price shoots towards zero and he ends up owning all of it.  After which there is no more market to make.

It's not theft buck, it's how currency markets are supposed to work.  There are a dozen small nations in South America that openly & deliberately 'peg' their local currencies to the US $, and this is exactly how they do it.



the scammers are undermining confidence in the market.  no one wants to play in a market they know will rob them.   we will regain some market confidence when the scammers are caught and exposed


[/quote]

You assume that this invovles some kind of fruad.  I'm telling you that it doesn't require that.  All it requires is one person with the resources to buy the entire market and the apparent willingess to actually risk that occurring.  He can defend the price floor until the last bitcoin is his.  What he cant do forever is defend the high end forever.


That's a different subject altogether.

It's when a barrel is so hot, that it bakes a cheap primer into firing.  I've literally never seen anything like this actually happen, and I've fired an M60 until the barrel glowed red and each new round produced a white hot dot on the barrel that zipped down and out.  Throwing them into a fire will blow them, but it's the caged force of being inside of a chamber that is dangerous.

Not that throwing ammo into a fire is actually safe.

Nonesense, all he needs is enough funds to be able to buy out the entire market, which would be exceedingly easy to do for any billionare willing to do it.  If the bot is set up to buy (with resources at least as large as the whole market, which is effectively limitless for this tiny market) at $4.90 with a delay of several hours, he can accumulate bitcoins for $4.90 or sometimes less without dramaticly affecting the volume adjusted price.  By selling at $5.10 (again, with a delay) he sells them at $5.10 or more.  The delay exists to 1) let smaller players soak up the price movements in order to stretch out his funds and 2) to obscure the presence of a "wall".  The only way for said player to lose money in the near term is if 1) everything goes sour in a hurry and he ends up buying all the bitcoins in existance at that price level (as in a major security hole is found in the protocol that cant be fixed, unlikley at this point) so that volume goes to zero because he already has them all and there are no buyers or 2) the price movement that wants to trend lower overwhelms his funds.  If the top end of the bot is ever overwhelmed then the investor still makes money in the process of defending the top end of his target trading range.  Not as much as he could have if he let the top end seek it's market price, granted, but he can't lose money by buying at $4.90 and selling at $5.10 even if he doesn't have the resources to defend the peg.  Perhaps the top and bottom aren't rigid price points, but percentages.  There are major market makers in the commodities markets that do things on the stock market this way to prevent (or profit from) 'buy the rumor, sell the news' type panic movements.  The goal of such a bot isn't primarily to profit from price movements, although it generally does except in extreme conditions.  It's primary goal is to suppress voltility for a time to permit the market to mature as well as develop a 'safe' reputation; and the profit taking occurs in the long run.  It's speculation taken to a long view.


That is functionally what the bot does.  Perhaps the bot is  set up to set aside 5% of the coins it buys on dips, so tht if the high end of the bot is ever overwhelmed (selling 95% of all teh coins it's accumulted) then the bot owner still has the las 5% to take full profits from once the market price has found it's new home.  Set the bot up again with a new trading range, rinse repeat.  Again, the only way the investor stands to lose under this scenario is after the whole bitcoin market grows bigger than he is.  Any investor knows how big he wants to be, few are going to get caught off guard in this sense.


This is true, and exactly what I said the long term goal would have to be.  Did you bother to read it?


So?


It only takes one big market maker to do the job.  If others come along later a see that some bigwig has already set up his system, maybe they do look for another market, but so what?  Again, this is a long view speculation, the speculation being that the bigwig is betting on the long term success of bitcoin.  Isn't that what we all are doing?  The suppression of voltility imply mimics a larger & mroe mature currency market, which is what small businesses want to see before diving in. By encouraging these small businesses to dive in, the invetor wills his prediction to become reality as the market really does mature under his watch and voltility really does stableize just as the bigwig is ready to withdraw his deliberate support and start to take his profits.  Notice it's not in his best interest to take all his prifits in any particular time frame.


We actually don't want that.

I think that I can explain it.  The Price stickiness at just under $5 (i.e. price drops to just below $5 per btc, and then recovers) imlies that there is a hidden buy order at around $4.90. (or more likely a bot) There is no way for us to know how big this buy order actually is, but assuming that it's actually just one major player iwth the buyorder, the past several months have already shown that it's someone well heeled & with a tolerance for risk.  It could be just about anyone with a couple million dollars in their petty spending account, but there is one particular billionare that comes to mind for me.  If correct, it means that someone is quietly both supporting bitcoin & intentionally damping voltility; perhaps with a /exchangecompanion sell order at $5.10 or so, thus range bounding the price.  Obviously if true, both the buy and sell orders are delayed execution type orders which would be likely if the intent is to suppress voltility and not invest per se, because it gives other speculators a chance to soak up the price movements before the bigwig's bot kicks in.  This makes sense for any major player with the funds to be able to dominate this little market, because it would not only allow said bigwig to quietly build up a substantioal amount of bitcoin wealth over time, without sending the price to the moon; it also allows the bigwig to profit later because suppressing voltility is what helps the (more risk adverse) small business type economy to mature.  Eventually, it then becomes in the bigwig's own interest to remove the top limit and leak the info that said bigwig has been investing in bitcoin; thus permitting the btc price to double or triple on that news alone.

Think about it, if the news came out today that some semi-famous investment billionare was buying bitcoins; say perhaps one that has a history of picking major tech/Internet winners while young, who had a well known and strong libertarian streak, who was highly tolerant towards risks (a venture capitalist, perhaps), a history in the online currency/money markets and a well-known connection to the cutting edge of the Interent; then the 'hangers on' that follow investors like that one would flood into bitcoin in short order, thus sending the exchange price back towards it's record in short order.  Said billionare then sells half his accummulation of bitcoins at four or five times the price he bought them for, restablelizes the price at a higher price point, makes a killing and still has a fortune left in bitcoin.  And bitcoin also gains withthe suddenly public knowledge that bitcoin has the very kind of backing that detractors claim that it does not because that isn't explicit.

That would just mean that you should buy them in pairs, like deuling sets.

Such as?

Webcam hack?

A false fact.  Only bullets designed to pierce body armor in handgun calibers are considered 'armor piercing' under US law, as a standard velocity deer rifle in full metal jacket can defeat all but the best of body armor that is available.  One such example would be the FN Five-Seven series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_5.7%C3%9728mm) because the weapons were designed for the bullet, and the bullet was designed specifically to be used by military users who often needed more penentration because other militaries use light body armor.  As such, the standard velocity bullets for these weapons require a special import license, and a reduced velocity round is sold in the US.  Because of this handicapped nature in the US market, the Five-Seven handguns don't have the "stopping power" that they do for European police users (and irony like I have never seen) so the current police choice is the 10mm and will remain so because the 10mm & 9mm are cheaper.

Any super-sonic high power rifle round is 'armor piercing' since the usual definition of that term is that it can defeat a class II body armor vest, but it's meaningless these days since most police are issued a class III vest and the military uses Class IV 'dragonskin' vests.  Only the class IV vests stand any chance of stoping a 30-06 standard velocity hunting round, but even if it succeeded, the wearer would likely have life threatening internal injuries due to the kick in the chest he just got.  Whether or not they are marketable in the US has less to do with the reality of their armor piercing ability and everything to do with their construction.  Generally, green dotted ammo is military surplus stuff, full metal jacketed, and thus is just fine for sale, but I don't recommend you sale it unless you know for sure.  I have caseloads of green dotted rounds for an old pre-soviet Russian rifle.  It just a color-coding that generally means standard rifle velocity.

I can't disprove you, and didn't intend to.  I was just asking what your price point was, should the community prove both willing and able to hit that price point.  I consider compatition a good thing, but it's still replication of work and if it can reasonablely be avoided, benefits all concerned.  Replication of work can't always be reasonablely be avoided.  I'm personally not interested in a fpga solution, even though I would consider it technically superior.  I'm personally interested in an asic solution, because I can use the waste heat to warm my home in winter, so I believe that basement mining operations will always be a factor, because professional mining operations not only have to deal with the overhead of dumping heat, they also have to outperform the basement miners to such a degree to overcome the economic advantages of co-generation.

Thereortically yes, but here's the problem with that...

1) would shove many marginal banks into insolvency.  The federal reserve exists to prevent this, they are not really going to ever do this to any degree that would really matter.

2) would do pretty much the same thing as above, so again, not going to do it to any effective degree and

3) would, for many reasons, increase the effective interest rate that the government pays to it's own banks for rollover debt financing.  Which would bankrupt the government which holds a monopoly on force within the same nation that said banks reside.  I can't really see that one happening either.



Well, there is a sweet spot, it's just always moving and we don't know what it is.  And we can't know what it is except in hindsight.  That's the 'fatal conceit' that Hayak talked about.



Close enough.


There are actually better 'catastrophy' investments than bitcoin.  Silver is one, to a point.  So are bullets for coo=mmon calibers even if you don't own a gun, because of the varoius commodites used in the product as well as teh practical usefullness of the item in teh worst of conditions.  Obviously this should come after a well stocked pantry & a couple of cans of kerosene.  “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.” Proverbs 21:20

Interesting.  A capsule RV.