That is because of how you were raised.  You'll adjust.  I promise.

Or try it again in a few days.  The form says they are all processed manually within 48 hours.  Presumably, they would just cancel it when they see that it isn't to a valid address.

That is just human nature.  The real fault doesn't lie in those that want to cheat, because that is basically everyone.  The real fault is in those that let (or help) them cheat: the politicians, and by extension, all of us.

I'm probably going to buy a couple to play with at work.  We have official record books going back to before our state was a state, and long term archiving of the data in those books is something that keeps me up at night.

By the way, building a DVD reader is pretty much a hobby project by now.  None of the technology involved is very difficult.  The only hard part is the laser head, and you can totally fake that with a low precision DIY head if you don't mind giving up some speed.

Also, the reason why a CD player can't read a DVD is because the pits are too small for the frequency of the laser in the CD player, but a DVD laser has no problem with the pits in a CD, and a Blu Ray or HD-DVD player has no problems with the pits on DVDs or CDs.  I figure that as long as we have spinning optical media, these disks will be readable.

It would be your balance, but either a random token (or a nickname of your own choice) instead of your account name.  That way everyone could verify their own, but no one would be able to figure out any of the others (unless they wanted to pick an obvious nickname so that they could demonstrate that they have what they say they have too).

1. It would be trivial to delete old addresses when you are done with them.

2. Nothing prevents anyone from using a single address for everything.  Oh, and I have never seen any indication that the multiple addresses scheme has ever caused any real problems for anyone, ever.  Unless you count forum posts asking why it changed, or posts like this speculating that it might cause confusion.  Your story reminds me of late night infomercials full of actors pretending to be confounded by trivial every day tasks.

3. Yeah, I feel for ya.  I didn't get to this party early enough either.  Oh, and Congress/the Fed has the ability to create new money out of thin air, without limit, so whatever problems you think this might cause for bitcoin are already true in the real world.

4. Yup.  And this is mostly caused by people living in first world countries, where responsibility is unheard of because almost nothing ever has any lasting consequences.

5. In the real world, you have two choices, instant and horribly inconvenient (cash), or slow and convenient (everything else).  Everything but cash is reversible for at least several months after you thought the matter was settled.  With bitcoin, you can make the fast/easy/cheap tradeoff on your own terms.

6. Miners and relays are allowed to set their own local policy for including/relaying transactions.  Oh, and if you really do want micropayments, just make sure your client is connected directly to one of the several mining pools that have a policy of including all valid incoming transactions.  And if you want to help make micropayments more useful for the world, set your own node to relay everything and publish the address so others can use it.

7. Many of us have studied plenty of economies that had inflation.  Not perpetual inflation, because they always end.  Always.  And usually with a horrible mess and thousands dead.

8. Wait a second.  Wasn't your first point that bitcoin isn't anonymous?  Also, everything you say here is true right now in the real world.  It is just that in the real world, the costs of being careless are not paid by the careless, but by everyone, by way of higher prices and fees at vendors, banks and credit card companies.

Sorry, too long, couldn't read the whole thing.

But your idea seems to be that we should convince several people (or groups of people) with a quarter million dollars or so that they should speculate on the bitcoin markets, right?  And that instead of following their own discretion for pricing, they should all make trades at exactly the published rate from one/all of the exchanges?

Awesome!

What's that huge spike in the middle of the US?  A secret bitcoiner enclave in the Kansas City?

Reminds me of listening to Noam Chomsky.  Noam is the living master of sophistry, but jgraham is pretty good.

For everyone else, I'll let you in on a little secret.  If someone starts pretending that they needed more precise definitions for common words that everyone understands and uses every day, sit up and pay attention, because a sohpist is probably about to snare you up in his tar pit.  The same goes if they start to feign bafflement at a language construction that wouldn't confuse a three year old child.

While there is some wiggle room around "prosperity", this discussion sure as hell does not hinge upon any of the reasonable variations.  Also, everyone knew exactly what Joel meant about pollution, except those that put a lot of their brainpower into avoiding the clear meaning.

(Hash Rate) / (Difficulty * 2^32) = blocks found per unit time, ignoring changes in difficulty, stales, and other complications.

Current Difficulty is 1888786.705...
So, multiply that by 2^32 and you get 8.1122E+15.

Say you get 250 Mhash/sec, or 250,000,000 hashes per second.  You should then expect to find 0.0000000308 blocks per second, or 0.00266 blocks per day.  Multiply by about 50 BTC per block, and you have 0.1331 BTC per day.

If you are using a pool (and you probably should be), don't forget to subtract the pool fee.

Really?  I figured they would just use a wave machine or a reflow oven.

I've designed several PCBs, and sent them out for low volume fabrication before, but I've never had one assembled, or really even looked into it.  I just sorta assumed that it was pay per board, or pay per unit area.

I think that in his idea, you would display a nickname (or several) for each account holder along with their balance (or portion of their balance allocated to that nickname).  That way, everyone could look at the list and make sure their name was on it, that their balance was correct, and that the sum for accounts was the same as the sum of the addresses (shown on block explorer).  You wouldn't be able to go fractional by leaving some names off the list to balance things out because you wouldn't know which people are going to be looking for their own information.

You pay a transaction fee of X BTC to send coins out.  Flexcoin includes a transaction fee of Y BTC in the transfer.  X is easy to calculate from the transfer amount, because it is set by Flexcoin policy using a simple formula: X=max(0.01,amount*0.005).  Y is not easy to calculate in advance, because of the way the bitcoin client works.  But you don't care, because you don't pay Y directly, you pay X.

Next, Flexcoin calculates Z, which is the sum of all the cash out fees paid by users (X), minus the sum of all their paid network transaction fees paid by Flexcoin (Y).  Z is their operating profit for whatever accounting period they use.  They then distribute 70% of Z back to depositors as profit sharing (their lawyer makes them call it a "discount" so they don't have to file paperwork with the IRS), and they keep 30% of Z as their net profit.

Is that clearer?

There appears to be a problem with long polling.

I reset my stats too, and I noticed that some miners have many stales, but other miners have zero.  So, I looked at a box with two cards, one that was showing stales, and the other with zero.  The one with zero stales saw two LPs at 15:21 and 15:23 (central US time), while the one with several stales had rejections around those times.

If I had to guess, I would say return of the botnet.

They'll laugh at you.

Click around that street, or nearby streets, a few times.  Every picture of that side is fuzzy on the right and clear on the left.  My guess would be something on the camera's enclosure.

Is that the article you intended to link?  It has nothing to do about regulation.

You missed a factor of 1000.

G=billion (10^9), T=trillion (10^12), P=quadrillion (10^15).

Assuming your ratios:
1Ghash/Sec ~= 6.4 TFLOPS  means 1 hash/Sec ~= 6,400 FLOPS.

If we switched to floating point math, we would be around 13 * 10^12 hashes/sec, which is 83 * 10^15 FLOPS, or 83 PetaFLOPS.

But we aren't doing floating work, so our FLOPS rate is still zero.

I'm pretty sure that the block rate on ixcoin is currently limited by latency and churn, rather than hashing power, and it will stay that way until everyone gets bored or the difficulty catches up.  Could be a day or two.

To really mess with it, you'd need a lot of hashing power (but less than you'd think), and a hacked client that ignores reorgs.