Most clients will handle it for you.  You specify the fee per kB.


0.1 mBTC per kB?  Still even if it is you reach this conclusion based on a sample size of one.  I just reported I paid the same amount less a few hours ago and was included in the next block.  Think you might be jumping to conclusions?  Think there might be another reason your tx is delayed?  One day when going to work the highway got closed down.  It took me 3 and a half hours to get to work.  Should I use that single sample to estimate the average commute time?

If you post the tx id others can provide some insight so you know more.  If you don't want to that is fine but there are other reasons why your tx might be delayed.  Assuming you need to pay 5x what others are paying is kinda silly, unless you just like paying a lot more than needed in fees.

Saying the fee amount alone is next to useless.  The fee is based on fee per kB.  Transaction are prioritized based on fee per kB.  You are buying space in a block.  So the amount of space you need is relevant.

I just sent a tx this morning with 0.1 mBTC per kB and it was included in the next block.

Mining is a embaressingly parallel problem.   If a 1 TH/s rig is operating at a loss then a 1,000 TH/s rig (which has 1,000 the output and use 1,000 the power) would also be operating at a loss.


Large miners aren't going to deploy more than it makes economic sense.  Still your claim was nobody could afford the electrical upgrade so why then jump to something silly like 10 GH/s.  Even in the US a "normal" outlet is 15A @ 120V.  With a 20% derate for continual loads that means a safe load of 1440W.  With currency efficiency being 0.8 J/GH we are talking pretty close to 2TH/s.  In countries which use 240V it is more like double that.  Now someday 2 TH/s (or 4 TH/s) might not be a lot however a million miners with 2TH/s (or 4 Th/s) each is still a lot of hashing power.

Will mining be a get rich quick scheme?  No.  Then again Bitcoin doesn't need it to be.

Then there is no need for a blockchain.  The blockchain is the very expensive cost of having a decentralized network.  There is no point to a centralized decentralized network with no of the benefits of decentralization and all of the costs.

State digital fiat money already exists.  Take your existing bank accounts, add the ability for users to send funds directly to each other, eliminate cash.  Done.  No mining is even necessary.

Actually the issue is more with free tx (or tx with unconfirmed inputs, or other tx which weird issues).  Very few paying tx with confirmed inputs are being "left behind".  Also gmaxwell point is spot on.  If you force miners to include tx you open up whole new attack vectors which don't exist now.  Even if your rule was implemented right now miners would already be "compliant" as far more than 25% of waiting paying tx are being included.

Unlawful sale of unlicensed securities.  The act is a felony (at least most states and certainly in Australia if that is where he really is located), the felony make him not the company liable.  He hasn't even registered a corporation so his personal assets have always be unprotected (even if he was unaware of the liability) but even if he had operated behind a corporation the act of an overt felony by an officers for his personal benefit would allow creditors to ask the courts to pierce the corporate veil and find him and his personal assets not the corporation liable.

Well not exactly.  The sale of unlicensed securities is a crime in Australia (and in most other countries if he is not a resident there).  Granted if he truly is anonymous he may never get prosecuted however if he is truly anonymous then he wouldn't be prosecuted even if he simply stole the balances.

No legal counsel would advise him that he hasn't violated the law.  Now you probably are right in that he thinks it is lower risk to defraud through "non securities" then outright theft and that is why he is "helping" it just happens he is wrong.

grue I can do it and you know you can trust me.  It actually would be a favor as I need to do some testing of the company PayPal integration.

Drop me a PM if interested.

Or you simply buy more coins that you want to hold to cover both your holdings and your purchases.

I bought a $2,000 domain name in Bitcoins.  That month I bought $2,000 more Bitcoins than I normally would.  net-net I helped the "bitcoin ecnomy" and had the same number of coins I would have had if I had bought the domain with dollars.

I generally buy $1,000 worth of coins a month (every month) anyways.  Buying $3,000 instead of $1,000 isn't any harder.  I always buy a little excess to cover any potential purchases and if I get an unexpected purchase and can pay with Bitcoin I do and the just buy some more.

Not my Bitcoin fork.  Of course, they can make a new fork, they could today.  Hell they don't even need Bitcoin they could just make a centralized currency which has no non-electronic form.   Imagine bank accounts today with no cash.

So basically in a long round about way your conclusion is Bitcoin will fail because all governments will outlaw it universally in all countries on earth AND be successful in that action.  Ok if you believe they can accomplish that outcome then yes it will fail and there is no hope.  However every other non-state alternative would also fail because this is a power of the state issue not a flaw in Bitcoin.  If you really believe that then why are you here?

You sure you have private keys and not addresses?

Address (note the begins with one and is generally shorter than a private key):
14CD3Ra5yMjWaEA3HTX5nAqvYb8sSjMheJ

Private Key (one format could be in an alternate form):
5KEWNTr5Jsk4H147KkNE2NZTg9zXESU5m6rmibfJQMvMswL6WiZ

If you have private key.
1) Don't share it with anyone.  Access to private key = ownership for all practical intents and purposes.  If you give someone the private key so they can help and they steal your coins they are probably gone.
2) As indicated above you can import the private key into any wallet, even a new QT client wallet, an eWallet, or a different client and gain access to the funds.

If you have the address not the private key then you have nothing. Addresses are public knowledge.  The private key is what allows the owner (and nobody else) to spend/move coins.

True however in real terms global GDP growth is relatively slow at <2% annually.  Lets use 2% that would mean in real terms (adjusted for inflation) the global money supply is likely to only double every three to four decades.  Lets say quadruple in a person's lifetime.  Bitcoin probably still has enough units for many lifetimes. 


It is important to distinguish betwen real (economic term for adjusted for inflation) growth and simply growth in the nominal number.   Now if history is any guide in nominal terms the global money supply will probably grow much faster but all that excessive money growth simply means the value of a unit of currency just buys less.  The excess monetary growth will just show up in price inflation.

If that was unclear lets imagine that on 01/01/2014 the currency supply doubled overnight.  So going from $5T (M0) to ~$10T.  Yes the number of currency units has gone up from 0.5 quadrillion to 1 quadrillion but a US penny now has half the value.  In real terms the value of the money supply hasn't changed.  In simple terms this is why over time money is worth increasingly less and issuers (central banks) eventually decide to drop the smallest currency unit.  Canada for example recently dropped the penny and the Euro has already defacto dropped the euro cent.  So the nominal supply is some base unit (say dollars) will rise but the number of discrete units isn't going to rise faster than the global economy in real terms because that "overprinting" will be offset by reducing the divisibility over time. 

Honestly I wrote that, thought it was unclear, adding to it (turning it into a novella), tried again a little shorter but it still seems unclear so not sure if it makes any sense but I am going to stop before I ended writing a textbook.

If there is no network (I don't need a specific trusted individual I just need the network) then there is no Bitcoin to begin with and banks aren't using it as a reserve currency anyways so the experiment has failed and this is a moot point.   If the network exists I don't need a trusted third party to engage in commerce.

As far as cash not needing a third party?  Are you kidding?  It requires a central authority to mint and actively police the supply for counterfeits.  In order for you to accept "cash" you need to trust the central authority.   Are you willing to accept Zimbabwae dollars?  Why not?  Oh probably because you don't trust the issuing central authority.  If you DID accept Zimbabwe dollars prior to hyperinflation then your trust in the central authority resulting in you losing effectively 100% of your cash wealth. 

Bitcoin is the first "cash" which doesn't need a central authority, and it doesn't need a trusted third party to engage in transactions.    I will probably deposit Bitcoins in a Bitcoin backed bank to receive bank script to use instead.  Will some people?  Maybe (if they are stupid).  Will it hurt me?  No because they no me will suffer the inflation and when those banks inevitably fail all that inflated money will cease to exist.

It might take decades.  For a currency to be used as a unit of account in commerce both parties have to be willing to use it.  Not just some mechant and some customer but the specific customer looking to use a specific merchant.  For an individual to use a currency as a store of value they just need to believe that SOMEONE, anyone will accept it in the future.  That is somewhat simplified but you can see the network effect requires for direct commerce are much higher than for a store of value.

Imagine a hypothetical store.
Does the store accept Bitcoins? No? Then no Bitcoin commerce is possible.
If the store accepts Bitcoins does the customer have Bitcoins to spend? No? Then no Bitcoin commerce is possible.

However if you believe that Bitcoin will be increasingly used as a store of value then that means in the example above the second requirement is more likely to be fulfilled in the future even if it isn't today.  100K Bitcoin holders means 100K potential customers.  1B Bitcoin holders means 1B potential customers.   If adoption as a store of wealth continues to grow (not just value of the currency by the number of individuals holding it).  More currency holders means it is more likely merchants will accept it as payment to gain access to those currency holders.

Imagine I am a merchant that makes widgets and all my competitors make widgets.   At the current time none of us accept bitcoins as payment.  If someone has wealth stored in bitcoins and wants a widget (lets assume these widgets are expensive) they need to trade it for local currency and buy indirectly.  This means they face additional time, cost, and risk.   It would be much easier for this bitcoin holder if at least one widget maker accepts bitcoins.   If I accept bitcoins then I can gain an advantage over competitors even if my prices are marginally higher (as long as bitcoin holding customers see value in a direct transactions).  If you believe in free markets and economic competition then the end game is that eventually there will be large enough critical mass of potential customers that at least one widget maker will accept bitcoins to tap that market. 

A currency can be used as a store of wealth or a unit in transactions.   The store of wealth use requires less of a network effect so it will grow quicker but baring some failure of the system that will boost the growth as a transaction unit use as well.  It however will take longer and require more potential customers holding the currency.  We have seen this effect somewhat already.  The earliest holders of the currency were miners so products and services offered for bitcoins that met that demographic were more successful than ones which didn't.  Think used computer parts vs cosmetics.

There is no trusted third party.  Tx is from adam to bob directly.  Both adam and bob can confirm the tx is valid, completed, and irreversible.  Adam and bob need to trust each other as currency is only half of an economic tx.  If adam is buying goods from bob then adam needs to trust bob will ship but that is first party risk not a third party risk.

Maybe you should read Satoshi whitepaper.  You actually did read it right.  I mean it is hard for fix something you don't understand right?  There is no trusted third party confirming txs.  Transactions are confirmed by a network of psuedo anonymous entities.  The proof of work provides security not that you trust a particular miner.

Well I don't think you will ever be able to spend a satoshi or two.  I mean lets say someday Bitcoin money supply is ~$5T USD equivelent and that makes a satoshi worth say 0.2 US cents adding extra decimal digits isn't going to get you space in a block chain.  For that to happen it would mean that a miner is willing to accept the equivelent of 0.02 US cents or less as a fee.  IMHO that is never going to happen.  It wouldn't even pay for the network we have now.  VISA processes about 8K tps.  Lets guestimate that global tx volume is something like 100K tps.  100K tps would be 3.2 trillion transactions annually.  At a fee of 0.02 US cents per tx that is only $630M USD a year.  Miners make more than that right now.  $630M annually in miner revenue wouldn't build the network necessary to protect a "single world currency" situation.  It would probably have to be something like at least 0.1% of global GDP which would be $75B annually and tx cost would be on the order of 2 to 3 US cents per tx (2013 dollars).


The blockchain does have some cost on a per tx basis and that will always constrain the minimum economical tx size even if the block sizes was unlimited.  There is a certain amount of transaction cost, disk storage cost, and orphan cost (due to the time to broadcast a block).  Transactions may remain "cheap" as in a few US pennies in value (whatever that ends up being in BTC) but it is very likely that sub US penny on blockchain txs aren't part of Bitcoin's future.  Now off blockchain maybe but there is no requirement than off blockchain limit themselves to 8 decimal places anyways.  Today you could make an ewallet which allowed transfering one quadrillionth of a bitcoin to another off blockchain account.


Still the point wasn't "IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN BECAUSE I SAY SO", if it happens it happens just pointing and honestly I probably will be dead long before it happens anyways.   Still under most probable scenarios 2.1 quadrillion units is enough.  There is no point in adding additional units which can't be used discretely anyways.     The protocol is unlikely to be forced for trivial reasons.  To put it into perspective today there are only 0.5 quadrillion US pennies in the global currency supply and the US is one of the laggards in removing obsolete currency units (low value of a purchasing power basis).  If you valued the global currency supply in other currency units like Euro or Pound it would have even less discrete units but the world works just fine. 

Lastly all this assumes a highly dubious scenario where Bitcoin replaces all other forms of currency on the planet.   Bitcoin today can't even prevent marketshare loss to alternatives but it is going to replace all forms of currency both private and sovereign in the future?

Well it is important to remember that raising the block size won't "solve" the problem because it isn't so much a problem as a compromise.  The reason why I say we have time is because miners are currently using all the space "available".  If the memory pool was empty of tx older than the last block and block sizes were rising day after day I might feel differently however IMHO if the block limit was 10MB right now blocks wouldn't be any larger.

Agreed.  Often is protocol design there is a saying "don't let perfect be the enemy of good".  Is going from one static artificial limit to another static artificial limit perfect?  Of course not.  However it is simple, easy to model, and well understood.  It won't be the be all end all solution which "solves" the issue to 2140 and beyond but it does buy us some time in a low risk manner.

The one thing I actually like about the "orphan cost" is that it acts to limit blocksizes below the cap.  The cap is 1MB today but nobody (as in not a single block in the history of Bitcoin) is 1MB.  So the cap is really acting just as a safety mechanism to prevent malicious activity.  The real "economic cap" is well below the 1MB limit.  That won't change if/when the cap is raised so the thinking should be what cap still protects the Bitcoin network from centralization and blockchain bloating attacks.   With current technology I think 10MB is viable. 

If someone wants to solo mine from a home connection they may have to pay for upgraded internet service but it isn't outside of the realm of possibilities like a 1GB block would present.

You don't need to go online even once to receive Bitcoins.  Once confirmed the record existing on every node in the network.  Your wallet doesn't contain any coins.  It contains the keys which allow you to spend coins sent to you.  You don't need to go online except to spend Bitcoins.

I have Bitcoins sent to offline paper wallets which have never been online.  Not once, not ever.  They paper wallet was created offline and the private key has never been entered into an online computer.