Who said the face value of the loan was 5,000 bitcoins? I said the loan was *worth* 5,000 bitcoins (because a disinterested party paid 5,000 bitcoins for it in an open market). The value of a loan includes the risk.

The money supply is not fixed. Think about dollars for a minute. Bitcoins are like dollars but the Federal reserve can't print any more of them. So what? What percentage of US dollars are in the form of physical currency?

For the original loan to take place, the IOU would have to be worth 2 BTC. That may mean its face value is substantially more than 2 BTC. That may mean it's insured.

The IOU might have a different risk/reward profile than bitcoins. But the risk/reward profile of currency is very hard to adjust. Meanwhile, those who craft IOUs can carefully tune their risk/reward profiles by choosing the face value, interest rate, and using partial or complete insurance. So it's quite likely that at least some people will prefer the IOU. And if you don't, you just have to sell it to someone who does. If, for example, the IOU's interest rate scales with inflation, it can actually have *less* risk than holding currency.

The effective quantity of Bitcoins is not limited to 21 million. Loans increase the effective quantity of Bitcoins. Alternative blockchains increase the effective quantity of Bitcoins. It won't be a problem -- unless you imagine a powerful government that prohibits all business practices the increase the effective monetary supply, the effective monetary supply will grow as the economy does.

For example, imagine we're in a bitcoin-based economy. I want to buy a car that costs 5,000 bitcoins, but I don't have 5,000 bitcoins. I borrow 5,000 bitcoins and in exchange give an IOU worth about 5,000 bitcoins. The 5,000 bitcoins I borrowed are still in the economy, being spent by the guy I got the car from. But the IOU is also in the economy, and it effectively adds an additional 5,000 bitcoins because it is interchangeable in the marketplace with 5,000 bitcoins.

I'll try to find time to work on it in the next few days. It's hard to refuse a request from someone with perfect hair.

Several people have been using it for two weeks or more, and I haven't received any issue reports yet.

Well, you can use quick hacks to solve these specific issues. Remove the definition of 'pthread_t' from the header file and remove the test of the return value of 'CreateThread'.

I don't believe you can compile the Windows GUI version under MinGW. You should be able to compile the daemon version -- just don't tell it that it's compiling under Windows -- use the standard UNIX makefile. Some tweaks might be needed.

Is this why I keep forgetting what naked women look like?

Probably true, but this is a meaningless number. In the United States, a big part of the value of health insurance is holding down the amount you have to spend on health care through taking advantage of tax incentives, negotiated prices, and so on.

If you hire a consultant to decide what product to buy, how to pay for it, and who to buy it from, you'll pay more than if you bought that same product from that same persona at that same price without hiring the consultant. It does not follow that you wasted money by hiring the consultant. Without the consultant, you may have paid more for an inferior product.

In the United States, health insurance does much more than just pay for your health care.

Unfortunately, it's worse than that. That's what the purpose of a health insurance mandate would be if it were not broken. But the Obamacare mandate is too broken to even do that.

He could game the timestamps so his difficulty stays at 1 the whole time and easily produce a longer chain. He'd face several major obstacles. The biggest one is this -- we sometimes say the "longer" hash chain wins because that is true for situations where a difficulty change is not spanned. But for reorganizations that span a difficulty chain, the "stronger" hash chain wins. (That is, the one that we would expect to have taken the most hashes to create.)

The gap could perhaps be covered by health status insurance.
http://reason.com/archives/2009/03/03/the-health-status-insurance-so.

The short version of the way this insurance works is this: You pay a reasonably low premium. The policy pays out only if you are diagnosed with a new, long-term medical condition. The policy pays out the net present value of the difference between your expected medical costs without the condition and your expected medical costs with the condition over the rest of your life. The payout goes into an interest-bearing trust that can only be used to pay your medical bills or medical insurance premiums.

Essentially, this protects you from getting priced out of the market for catastrophic health care insurance and it protects you from getting into a situation where you can't reasonably afford your non-catastrophic health costs.

That's not true, at least for the health care system in the United States today. It should be true in theory, as the insurance companies have to make a profit, but it's not true in practice for two reasons:

1) Tax policy heavily favors medical insurance. Employers can pay their employees in the form of medical insurance and the employer does not pay payroll tax and the employee does not pay income tax or social security tax on the amounts.

2) Insurance companies have negotiated low rates with health care providers while the rates paid by people paying for their own care are kept artificially high by a variety of factors. Essentially, it is not practical for an individual to negotiate for the cost of his health care because you don't know what care is needed soon enough, while it is worth the cost for insurance companies to negotiate the price of each item.

Both of these factors could easily be fixed if there was the political will to do it. In that case, your argument would be correct. Then it would be rational to only purchase health insurance for catastrophic health care or for long-term health status changes. You still need insurance in case you need dialysis for the rest of your life or a heart valve replacement, but there's no reason your insurance company should get a cut of your $40 checkup. (Much as we do with every other form of insurance such as auto, home, and so on.)

Just be careful that you only use funds that *you* are certain have sufficient confirmations to fund such transactions. If you use 'fresh' funds to fund a green transaction, and then a block chain re-orgranization invalidates those funds, *you* will be breaking your green address commitment.

PCMCIA cannot be adapted to PCI Express. Only a purely generic bus or something that is basically already PCI can be adapted to PCI Express.

And if a green address provider ever cheats, the victim will have incontrovertible proof.

That's a great idea. So if a transaction includes any funds that come from a green address, the transaction should be considered green. That allows providers to keep only very small amounts of money in the green address and still provides the same level of assurance.

It does require a slight semantic change -- a green address provider must be considered to have breached its promise if a transaction including at least one valid input from a green address that is signed correctly by the green address is ever conflicted or fails to make it into the block chain. This applies even if the other signatures in the transaction are invalid or if another transaction that claims any of the inputs this transaction claims ever surfaces.

That is, if a transaction has a valid signature from a green address, it must always either be valid for inclusion in the block chain or already included in the block chain. Any other outcome constitutes a breach of the provider's promise.

The USB port on the adapter is not usable to connect the graphics card. It only connects the adapter. (Much like the USB ports on many televisions.)

It's wall time, but I made sure all the files were hot in the cache. At least on my machine, if no data is hot in the cache, disk I/O is about 12% of startup time.

How do you connect a graphics card to a USB port?!

The volatility makes it less useful as a medium of exchange. If you accept 100 bitcoins in exchange for some hardware and the next day those 100 bitcoins are worth 15% less, you may wind up taking a loss on the transaction. This matters because you typically can't pay your employees, pay your utility bills, pay your rent, or pay your suppliers in bitcoins.

Otherwise, the price of a bitcoin measures a whole bunch of things mixed together. One of the things it measures is the collective opinion of the long-term viability of bitcoins as a medium of exchange. But that's mixed in with so many other factors that you really draw too many conclusions.

I think a lot of people just assume that a high price is good and a low price is bad without really thinking too much about it. They confuse the price of a bitcoin with things like the price of a company's stock.