A little OCD is sometimes productive.  I've discovered a couple other unlicensed Part 15 device bands that the FCC explicitly permits public use of, even though they are all officially federal government bands.  To be specific, they are vhf bands likely reserved for military functions.  And yet, according to this little gizmo (http://reboot.fcc.gov/spectrumdashboard/searchSpectrum.seam) there is a fairly wide spectrum available between 255 Mhz and 322 Mhz and again between 335.4 Mhz and 399.9 Mhz that Part 15 devices are permitted to use.  I tripped over them due to this website (http://www.pocketwizard.com/wheretobuy/frequency/).  I would suspect that these bands are fairly wide open, since they are not worldwide bands.  Great for practical testing of devices and communication protocols, certainly.  It shouldn't be difficult at all to make small & portable devices that can communicate over distances of a klick or more even in an RF noisy urban area.  And with so much bandwidth (potentially) available, more robust and modern communication methods should be available as well.  Regular wifi radios can be used for devices to connect to the internet or (in ad-hoc mode) directly to each other to trade blocks.  So what is really needed is some means of a one-to-many message broadcasting mode.  I don't know if it'd be better to use phase shift keying modes & modified varicode, or multi-frequency shift keying with forward error correction to transmit bitcoin network messages as raw data.  And off the top guess, and I'd say starting at the top end of the higher open band at 399.9 Mhz and moving down in channelized sets would let devices communicate well to great distances by shifting to narrower & higher signal-to-noise versions of the chosen mode in order to extend their clear propogation reach when necessary or wider & more bursty versions when a selection of other bitcoin devices can be heard to mesh with.  I'd say that QPSK1000 would be the widest practical version of PSK, potentially narrowed all the way down to BPSK10 on the narrow, slow and far-reaching end.  Or prehaps a single quarter-channel wifi radio (5 Mhz protocol instead of the standard 20 Mhz that is used in the 2.5 Ghz band) for the reuse of common chipsets, with a batman like mesh network constantly trying to find other bitcoin devices.  This would make the interfaces with normal wifi routers, as well as the development of bitcoin specific routers, both cheaper and easier to interface.  Or perhaps using Dash7's open source protocol OpenTag as a baseline would be more appropriate.

I really can't keep this up alone without my head exploding.  I need some help from some other radioheads on this forum.

In my research on the feasabilty of using the 27.120 MHz & 40.680 MHz ISM bands with low power ( half watt or less) devices to broadcast the transactions, I noticed something interesting.

I was concerned that 1) efficient antennas in these frequency ranges would be too big to be practical and 2) occasional 'skip' would interfere with devices far afield from the one trying to broadcast locally.  But then I though that using skip characteristics intentionally might be useful in it's own right.  The problem being that, since the F layer of the ionosphere is about 150 miles up, the devices that produce 1/2 watt transmissions would have to be detectable by a computer that was listening at least 300 miles away, because the only way to deliberately use F-layer skip to this end is to use Near Vertical Incidental Skywave to exclude interference from broadcasting towers & prevent radio shadows from buildings & geography.  The quality of the transmitting gear is important, but not as important as the quality of the receiving gear and the digital mode chosen.  Now the range of NVIS is roughly 300 miles max, simply because the practical useful angles are from 45 to 90 degrees from the horizontal; so with a reflector at 150 miles up, the emission wave simply can't travel farther than this reliablely.

However, the frequency that is best for using NVIS changes from season to season and from night to day.  For this reason, using NVIS with very low power devices is going to require the ability to change bands.  So I went back to the ISM bands listed on Wikipedia, and was looking to see if there were any lower frequency bands that could be used, and I saw these.

6.780 MHz
13.560 MHz

Now, for a simple device that can switch from one band to a completely different one, it's best to have a set of frequencies that are harmoncis of one another.  This turned out to be simple, because 6.78, 13.56, 27.12 and 40.68 just happen to be exact even multiples of 3.39 Mhtz.  This little bit of data, combined with the fact that there are no other ISM bands on lower frequancies than 40.680 Mhtz, makes me wonder what the hell uses 3.39 Mhtz and could produce harmonic resonate emissions to any degree to justify the establishment of a protected band for the harmonics; particularly one that could produce significant interference all the way to the 12th harmonic (40.68 Mhtz)

According to a quick google search, 3.39 Mhtz happens to be the primary frequency for HAARP.  I can find no other data to contradict such claims, and no other purpose for 3.39 Mhtz to offer another explaination.  Also the fact that Wikipedia says that HAARP uses 3.5 megawatts of transmitter power would tend to support the position that those harmonic frequencies wouldn't be useful for anyone trying to communicate.

I'm not much of a conspiricy theory believer, so I'm not going to address that topic, but it might be safe to say that any attempt to establish a frequency & mode standard for Part 15 bitcoin devices on any of these bands is destined for frustration & failure.  I had intended to set up a high quality listening station in order to monitor these bands for quality over an extended period of time, and test out a few QRP modes for the purpose (such as PSK10), but I think that might be a pointless endeavor.

It is my experience that I can only manage one at at time.

Not as far as I am aware.  Feel free to write such a quick start guide.

You answered your own (implied) question.   Bitcoin has a potential velocity rate several orders of magnitude faster than what is possible or common with fiat currencies today.  Increases in velocity tends to suppress the market trade value of bitcoin.

Members of this forum are pretty gunshy about external links to software, do not post links to this pristine miner.  Offer it to the developers in the devepers section once you can do so, and let them vet it.  Any attempt to post a link to this software in the general sections, or without letting the developers check it, will quickly earn you a 'scammer' tag and you will likely be banned for malware.  If it's worth having, they will include it in the software section and give your friend his due mentions.

I don't understand the question.  Are you talking about the golden coins under my avatar to the left?  If so, this has more to do with your time as a member & post history on this forum.  It's not really a reputation issue.  If you are talking about something else, I have no idea.

+1 Bees Brothers

Outstanding quality honey candies.

I ordered a large box of stuff from Bees Brothers, but intentionally didn't use my forum account or name, so that my repuation on this forum wouldn't influence him (in the sense that a newspaper food critic entering your resturant seems to always end up with the best waiter in the place).  All of the candy was delicious.  I'm not a big toffee fan, so I gave the sample of honey toffee to my wife.  When she bit into it, her eyes rolled back into her head and she didn't speak for over a minute.  Her overall assessment was highly favorable, to put it mildly.  The honey caramels are excellent, and of the quality one expects to find in a specialty candy shop.  All of the other products are also of professional artisan quality, the kind of things one might expect to find on sale in the shop portion of a Cracker Barrel resturant.

EDIT: the bag of roasted almonds was gone in 6 minutes, and it only lasted that long due to rationing.  I have four kids & only 1 wife, but all four of us loved those almonds.  Wife said that she was headed to the gym after that sampling fest.

Yes, I now need a fifth hand.  Go back and actually read what I wrote before typing something else.  I specificly noted that we were talking about (and likely confusing) two differnet subjects.  I know full well that tps bottlenecks are related to network latency and not hashing of blocks.  I stated as much, if you had bothered to read it.  You have a right to your opinion, and a right to be wrong, but continue to be an ass and I may just choose to exercise my privilages.

There are 'hooks' in the code that are intended for future algos to be added to the existing process, or be replaced by them, by consent of the network.  The larger the network grows, the less likely this is going to happen for trivial issues, but if someone 'breaks' ECDSA then the network would have to migrate to another cryptographic signing algo.  There is a known path for this; in fact, it's expected from the start that bitcoin will not always use the same algos.  For example, bitcoin currently uses SHA256 in hashing the block, but it uses it twice.  At some point, another hashing algo will be added in place of the second SHA256; thus reducing the bitcoin network's dependency upon this single algo.  In such manner, even the complete breakdown of SHA256 wouldn't compromise the security of the blockchain; for both types of hashing algo would have to be broken at the same time in order to compromise the blockchain security model.  Right now, there isn't an alternative hashing algo to compete with SHA256, but several are being developed and tested presently.  Once one of those comes out one top, whichever is considered best by the network (and is different enough from SHA256 that they won't likely share a fatal flaw) will likely be added to the code by the developers.  The vote on the matter then comes down to whether or not users choose to upgrade, or stick with what they have, or simply choose a forked client to upgrade to (written by a developer who prefers a different algo that the other developers rejected, and decided to take his ball and start another team).  Your participation (or lack thereof) is your vote.  Whichever outcome results in the greatest hashing power overall overtakes the rest of the network and becomes the defacto standard.

And now I need four hands to properly complete this one.  Hashing is transaction processing.  The OP's complaint is that a network node must verify each transaction (and blocks, including the transactions within) before relaying them or adding the new block to it's local chain; yet the current algo that bitcoin uses for this action is particularly slow, so there might be a limit to how fast the average computer can process the flow of the network (there is) before the network as a whole begins to choke on the delays of thousands of computers that fail to keep up with the flow.  This isn't an new observation, as the demands on bandwidth & cpu time are predictable with growth.  That is exactly why light clients are named in the whitepaper from 2008 and why clients that do not require or keep a complete local blockchain (Electrum, Stratum, BitcoinSpinner, etc.) exist now and will continue to exist.  As has been mentioned, there is no reason to expect the casual end user/consumer to need to run a full client.  There is every reason to expect that running a full client (or a Stratum server) is going to be a specialized commercial service for hundreds or thousands of individual users

Yes, but the client won't let you send transactions if they include inputs that are less than 6 blocks deep, unless those same inputs are change to yourself from a previous transaction.  


Yes, he would.


EDIT: Although the client might appear to let you send quicker than this, because the client (by default) chooses from the oldest of it's eligible transactions to use as inputs to a new transaction.  So if you have many transactions of various ages, the client generally attempts to consolidate the oldest transactions.  This behavior is beneficial to Bitcoin in general, in the sense that those older transactions could then be pruned from the blockchain by any client that desires to do so.

This is an excellent point.  Bitcoin is modular, so if Mave proves itself to be as robust as it's inventor might like to believe, bitcoin will just assimulate it into itself.  The fact that Bitcoin & Stratum actually exist, and Mave is vaporware, is a secondary point.  Bitcoin has the market advantage and the capacity to evolve using new tech, Mave will never make it out of the cradle before it's best innovations are replicated by Bitcoin or some overlay such as Stratum.

Ah, I see.  You've started a new client, and it has to catch up with the rest of the network.  Since each full client requires a complete copy of the blockchain, with all of the transactions, all the way back to January of 2009, this first part takes some time.  It's not usually even the downloading part that takes the time, it's the verification part.  For the client to know independently that no funny business has been going on, it must independently verify every single transaction in each block & the block itself, one block at a time, from the genesis block (block 0) all the way to the last block before it can know what your new balance actually is.  Odds are high that, unless you have a serious gaming rig, it'll take your pc longer to finish hashing through 175,975 cryptographic hashes of blocks (each with it's own merkle tree of cryptographicly signed transactions) than it will take the rest of the network to confirm any transactions intended for yourself in the meantime.

The transfer takes about six seconds.  It's the confirmations & clearing of the transaction that takes so long.  The clients require that a new transaction be 6 blocks deep into the blockchain before it can be spent again, which takes about an hour once the transaction makes it into it's first block.  Currently, that means about an hour, since there are no congestion delays to deal with.

Well, once one of the founders of Greenpeace comes out and says that Greenies are screwed up for rejecting the science on (carbon free) nuclear energy, it's past the cult stage.

What the moral of the story then?  Don't buy contraband on websites that accept paypal?  Don't trust encryption wherein copies of your keys are on file with a corporate server?  Or don't post packages of contraband from an address that can be linked to you?

The US dollar needs paper from trees & cotton, and printing presses, and a mint, and employees, and security trucks to move it around, and computers to count it all, and banks to hide it in, and construction of banks, and more employees.  All of these activities require electricity, and material resources, and human resources.

Ergo, the US dollar isn't green.

You can lock the thread yourself.  I don't recommend auctioning off stuff on this forum, there are better sites for such things.  But if you do, be explicit about your end time and reserve price.