Apart from saying "backslash" when she meant "forward slash", but we can live with that!

The "free market" really is about freedom. The market may indicate a price where supply meets demand, but each individual is free to trade at whatever price they like.

People often trade away from the "market price". In my city, there is a product which can be bought at the market stall on Saturdays for £1, but which costs £1.99 at the department store and £2.99 at a specialty store. The free market doesn't "dictate" that everyone sells for the "market price".

The electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network is much the same whether or not you send your .1 BTC payment, so there's no incremental cost. But if you divide the total electricity consumption by the current level of transactions, it comes out around $5 of electricity per transaction.

Therefore, if you had ten times as many transactions, each one would only be associated with approximately $0.50 worth of electricity.

In the longer term, the electricity consumption will vary according to the hashing power of the network, which will be driven by the exchange rate and also by mining fees. But in the short term, more transactions equals less electricity per transaction.

To see this, consider that the block reward of 50 BTC is worth over $200. So miners would be happy to spend up to $200 of electricity to mine a block. If the block contains 40 transactions, that comes out to $5 per transaction. Sure it's not quite that simple, for example because people pay different amounts for electricity, but that's the rough idea.

The mining cost per transaction is currently around $6. Assuming miners are operating at a small profit, perhaps $5 worth of electricity is being consumed for each transaction. That means around 50 kilowatt-hours, or 180 MegaJoules, per transaction.

That's a lot of electricity! But as the number of transactions per block rises, the electricity per transaction will drop.

Perhaps this phrase specifically means the minting of coins.

No society has ever experienced a deflationary spiral. It's not a realistic possibility. It's not something to fear.

But those who advocate inflating the monetary base just love for people to fear the fiction of the deflationary spiral.

Learning ANY second language makes it easier to learn ANY third language. It wires up the brain for multiple languages. So don't worry about that.

In 50 years, the majority of the world will speak English, Mandarin (Chinese) or Spanish. The Chinese are teaching English to their youngest generation in a big way. So Spanish will be the most "useful" language to learn.

Spanish is also easier to learn than Chinese. It is pronounced the way it is spelled, and uses the same alphabet as English. Fluency in Spanish will greatly increase your enjoyment as a tourist in Spain, the Canary Islands, most of South America, and much of the Carribean.

Of course, if "usefulness" and "ease of learning" are not your criteria, the field is wide open. French and Italian are beautiful languages, and open up the enjoyment of French and Italian movies. I would not bother with German. It's not an attractive language to my ear, and young Germans speak great English.

Even if Satoshi had wanted to use one address, it would not have been possible. There were no mining pools back then, and each generation creates a new private key.

All that we know for sure is that Satoshi mined the first block.

No. The path forwards is to discover how this is being done, so that people whose computers are compromised can get rid of the malware.

Meanwhile, empty blocks are a minor irritation but do not threaten the foundations of Bitcoin.

Here are Satoshi's thoughts on the matter from the early days of Bitcoin:

We are writing off this "news", because there isn't any news. At this point he's just pimping his conference presentation.

If he announces anything substantial, we can consider it on its merits.

Perhaps 353 is actually the number of shareholders, many of whom own more than one share?

Watch the movie first. Then read the book.

It's a big task to read the entire source code in one go. Reading source code "in the abstract" is hard work.

Why not pick some aspect that particularly interests you. For example: coin allocation, or the user interface for the address book, or block discouragement, or whatever. Then explore that part of the code.

Better still, find a change you'd be interested in making. That forces you to get to grips with that part of the code.

Oh, and have you even compiled the source code yourself? That's the first step, and it can be an interesting and educational experience in itself (especially on Fedora or Red Hat where you'll need to overcome some dependencies). Even if you don't plan to make any software changes, the building the application will help you become familiar with its files.

Here's another way to think about this:

Satoshi was quite clear that it was reasonable for each miner to set a fee threshold for transactions to be included in their blocks, and that a market would develop amongst miners.

So mystery miner's actions are no different from a miner who sets a fee threshold of 21 million bitcoins to include a transaction in the mined block.

Here's a link to the Theft Act, and here's an excerpt:


Even if Bitcoin is classified as "goods", I don't see anything in the Theft Act that says AML procedures make any difference.

Please supply a reference to the law to which you refer.

All countries have the same law? Who would have thought it.

And what do you mean by "an address that happens to be in your system"?

No, that's not how it works. The only things that count are the difficulty and the number of blocks.

Someone might win a block after spending 30 minutes hashing, or they might get lucky and win the block after spending 5 minutes hashing. But the strength of the blocks are the same.

A bad guy rewriting the block chain will still take on average 10 minutes to find a replacement block, no matter how long it took the winner of the original block.

Heh, that would be funny! But I think DeepBit's miners would soon notice the statistical anomalies.

1. Hacking into 100k computers is a crime against the owners of those computers. It's not an offense against the Bitcoin network, which does not require processing of transactions and certainly doesn't require "consent".

2. Stealing 43k BTC from Linode is a crime against the owners of those BTC.

Since you asked, that's the difference.

Also, there is an upside (of sorts). If mystery miner is getting 25% of the blocks, there's less risk of DeepBit getting 51%.