I was following you until the last paragraph. How or why is it unethical exactly?

Then there are three likely possibilities:

1) The program is looking for the wrong server name or port.

2) Something is preventing the program from connecting to the server, such as a firewall.

3) The server is down.

You have pushpoold connecting to the client on its network port. You need to connect on its RPC port (8332 by default, but which I think you changed to 8338). Also, change your RPC password in both bitcoin and pushpool, 'test123' is not secure.

I think that's your only mistake. With that fixed, you get 24 coins paid in and 24 coins paid out.

I watched someone buy 235K IXC on the exchange. I don't know for sure if they still hold it.

The difference was that bitcoins were unique and innovative. If not for that, nothing would have distinguished bitcoins from any number of scams that have parted suckers from their money in the past.

The biggest problem with this scheme is that it creates several perverse incentives. For example, sites with no value whatsoever and very low bandwidth could use malware to launch DDoS attacks on themselves to make money. Even if they only had a miniscule amount of bandwidth, they would still get paid for packets that never made it to their pipe.

Also, most sites have saturated outbound bandwidth but plenty of inbound bandwidth to spare. This would given them a perverse incentive to induce visitors to send them useless data as much as possible to fill up their inbound bandwidth to make more money.

If the receiving ISP keeps the money, nothing is done to stop DDoS attacks. Neither the sender nor their ISP pays any more money, they just change who gets it, so they have no incentive to stop the attacks. And even if the 'victim' site gets the money, the DDoS can still do damage way above the value of the compensation.

Also, with the technology needed to do this, you could implement much better solutions. The problem is largely that the technology doesn't exist, not that there are no good ideas for ways to solve it if you get to assume anything is possible.

Someone pumped in about $2,000 and the rate shot up from .0006 to .001 -- there are something like 400,000 IXC outstanding, so at .0006, it would have only taken 2,400 bitcoins to buy every single ixcoin. Because the volume is so low, the prices are mythical.

Sooner or later, prices will nosedive heavily. I'm thinking sooner. The next question is whether ixcoins will survive that nosedive.

On the bright side, we now know what critical defect in bitcoins are solved by ixcoins -- insufficient divisibility.

If you don't particularly need to verify the transactions, you don't need them. The miners generate the hashes without the transactions, so it's obviously not needed to check them either.

(The header contains a hash of the tree of transactions. With just that hash, you can verify that the block contains proof of work, but you could get duped into accepting a block with illegal transactions. But since you haven't accepted the transactions anyway, that should be harmless. There are trade-offs involved in this approach, no doubt.)

To some extent, the crisis was caused by government-imposed rules on mortgage backers that pressured them to extend loans to people with progressively less and less ability to pay them should the housing market drop. And also, to some extent, the crisis was caused by government borrowing.

However, another big factor was a bizarre one-off event -- the specific risks of securitizing mortgages. It wasn't generally understood that if a mortgage issuer is going to play hot potato and sell the mortgage as soon as possible, all the normal incentives to ensure the long-term stability of the mortgage go away. This was an unforeseen consequence of innovation of mortgage securitization. I see no reason it could not have happened precisely the same way under any other economic system. It was simply a lack of omniscience.

I do agree that some of the other factors could not have occurred in a completely free market. But other similar factors could have occurred instead. So while, of course, the crises couldn't have happened precisely the same way under any other system, I don't see any particular reason you couldn't also have had a perfect storm of unexpected crises in a perfect Libertarian utopia.

Again, though, the solution is basically prosperity. That's what helps you cushion and weather a crisis. That what changes the concept of a crisis from "bodies are piled up in the streets" to "we had to downgrade to basic cable".

The bitcoin code had a kill switch (called 'safe mode') in versions 0.3.11 to 0.3.19.
http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=898.0
http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=2228

It's a commodity that works like a currency, like gold. It's not a transaction clearing system, like Visa. You can certainly make transaction clearing systems that handle transactions denominated in bitcoins, but bitcoin itself is not such a system.

In the Visa system, where does the currency come in? Visa doesn't shuttle dollar bills around, they clear things electronically. The currency comes in when you pay your Visa bill and Visa pays the vendors. That's where bitcoin would come in too.

Bitcoin is not a microtransaction system, but a microtransaction system that handled bitcoin transactions would be a good thing to have.

Bitcoin is not meant to replace Visa any more than dollars or gold are meant to replace Visa.

Then how do you explain the Magna Carta? The United States? The collapse of Communism? I'm not screaming, I'm thrilled.

Fortunately, that's not true. There's lots of profit in satellites, space tourism, asteroid mining, and so on. The longer we wait to do it, the better we'll be able to do it. Too soon is just as bad as too late. In any event, command economies face the same problem of balancing long term and short term progress. There's no magic solution.

Take a look at any long-term charts for air pollution, water pollution, and so on. The optimum level of pollution goes down as technology goes up because the cost of remitting pollution goes down while the benefits do not.

The "brink of disaster" argument has been made for decades, it's nonsense. It's like screaming at the top of your lungs that a car is going to crash every time it approaches a curve. The driver sees the curve just like you do. He's going to turn whether or not you scream in panic. The system is stable because it can and will change, not because it can continue indefinitely in the same direction.

I see the curve just like you do. I'll turn whether or not you yell at me to. I'm not a fan of dying. Our cognitive and technological capabilities make us unique as a species.

If you're concerned about species extinction, you want technology to advance as quickly as possible. An asteroid or other cosmic event is just a matter of when, not if. We had better be able to leave this planet when it happens or it's all over.

It is so easy to do encryption right (for this type of problem), there is simply no excuse for doing it wrong. It is, in fact, more work to do it wrong then right. The bitcoin client already links with OpenSSL, which includes well-tested implementations of the most reliable encryption algorithms. The other problem is that people know that it is so easy to do this right they will assume they can rely on it.

Bizarrely, it may have all it needs to be a medium of exchange. It's scarce. It's easily exchanged. It can be denominated in units and divided. Identical denominations are interchangeable in the market. It's (at least for right now) easily exchanged for bitcoins, which means it can be easily (indirectly) traded to hard currency. At least right now, that may be enough.

If bitcoins grow much faster than ixcoins, as I expect, it may act in the market as a kind of fractional reserve system for bitcoins. If I know I can trade X ixcoins for Y bitcoins, I may not particularly care whether I get X ixcoins or Y bitcoins (and to the extent I do care, a few extra coins might make me not care so much anymore). So every extra X ixcoins produces may act in the market as Y extra bitcoins because Ixcoins share so many of bitcoin's properties.

I think this is an absurd and mind-bogglingly bizarre result. But it's not entirely implausible. However, if nothing else, there is significant additional risk with ixcoins. I feel perfectly safe leaving assets in BTC overnight or when I go away. If I had a heap of IXC, I wouldn't take my eyes off them for an hour, lest they be worthless when I return.

I would suspect heat.

Let me put it as simply as possible: DO NOT DO IT YOUR OWN WAY. Do it a way that has been designed and tested by experts and is known to be secure. Anyone, even experts, can design a mechanism that seems secure to them that is in fact horrifically insecure.

There are no shortage of simple ways to do this that are known to be secure. For example, using PBKDF2 to produce the key, AES-256 as the algorithm, HMAC-SHA1 to detect tampering, PKCS7 padding to handle wallets that aren't a multiple of the block size, CBC as the block chaining mode, and so on are all known to be safe. They may not be optimal, but they are safe unless misused.

"The server" meaning what? What server? A pooled mining controller? A local instance of pushpool?