I want to see concrete numbers: How many bits per second in transfer and how many transaction verifications per second can an average computer do?

Keep in mind that if I count the average in my household, the average PC has ~3 cores with ~2 GHz, ~6 GB RAM and about 2 TB of HDD space. In other areas of the world that might not even be reality in 5 years...

I don't see why 90% would be required and not just the majority of one of the 3 options (1% larger, same, 1% smaller). To block a change in the 90% model you need "only" 10% of the net hash rate. To have something you want to see in a ">=33.4%" version, you need more than 3 times the hash power and other can still force the opposite change by not voting uniformly.

To abstain, you'd just create blocks with alternating options so it evens out or you can add "abstention" as 4th option.

Could you please clarify this a bit more? How does a user with a 5 year old computer and an "average" (what is "average"?) connection benefit the network by operating a full node? How will "average" computers and connections look in 20 years?

Exponential growth in block size = unhappy miners = small transactions will be preferred and miners will find a max. block size themselves based on their bandwidth + ability to announce blocks

Also in other news: A server in a data center with a good CPU and a few TB storage costs far less than 100 USD per month. This does not even take into consideration potential special bitcoind hosters.

While it might be expensive, it is nothing that an average person wouldn't be able to afford. Smoking cigarettes is probably still a more expensive hobby than running a full node in a bitcoin environment with 100 MB or even 1 GB max. size blocks.

According to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Network an average transaction is ~0.5 kB (let's say 500 bytes).

Max block size = 1 million bytes, every 10 minutes. This means 2000 transactions per 10 minutes, 200 per minute and 3.333... transactions per second.
The minimum transaction size is "~0.2 kB" --> that's where these 7 transactions per minute come from.

One question is then also what to do with more complex transactions if there are only 7 "minimal" transactions possible in a second (e.g. can we "dumb down" smarter transactions) and so on.

At the moment by the way we're close to bumping against a quarter(!) of this limit, the only reason this is discussed now is that Bitcoin might continue to gain traction and take shorter than another 12 years to bump against the current hard limit of 1 million bytes per block.

Es existieren max. 2 100 000 000 000 000 (2,1 Billiarden) Währungseinheiten derzeit. Das lässt sich mit 51 Stellen als Binärzahl ausdrücken. Ein paar Nullen haben noch Platz, aber dann geht's schön langsam dem Ende zu mit 64 bit Zahlen (21 000 000 000 000 000 000 (21 Trillionen) braucht dann 65 Stellen). Mehr als auf 1/1000 Satoshi zu gehen lohnt sich also mit existierender Technologie kaum.
Meine Vermutung zu 8 statt 11 Nachkommastellen ist, dass man dann µBTC mit 2 Nachkommastellen (so wie Cents) noch darstellen kann. Andererseits könnte man bei 11 Nachkommastellen auch nBTC mit 2 Nachkommastellen darstellen...

Ähnlich ist es ja auch bei Edelmetallen - auch wenn es theoretisch möglich ist, einzelne Goldatome zu verkaufen, gibt es doch physische Limits.

"Normale" Forks (2 gültige Blöcke gleichzeitig gefunden) werden von Minern geregelt.

Hard Forks sind Blöcke die NICHT den derzeit geltenden Regeln entsprechen (z.B. Blöcke > 1MB). Auch würden nicht alle Transaktionen weitergeleitet, weil full nodes auf einem anderen Hard Fork dann z.B. double-spending vermuten würden bzw. von manchen Transaktionen ja nichts wissen.

Ideally you'd also add the URL of your page ("...linked to account <accountname> on example.com."). Also a timestamp + a user supplied secret/random string might be useful.

Well, that's what one is mining for, but also the timestamp is far from given (it has to be within a certain range) and some other fields can also be chosen by the miner. So while the nonce is the real "secret", there's still some local information that's not too easy to know.
Miners might be able to share these other fields between each other though (but is trying out a handful of timestamps really faster than just getting a header instead of a nonce...?).

With only a hash of the previous block header, one could already try for a few seconds to mine an empty block, then with the merkle root + transaction hashes coming in you can start to check out which transactions you already can forget about/move into that previous block and you can already say which transactions you know of are for sure not yet in a block (you can't tell if they are still valid though, as one of the unknown transaction hashes might have changed something). Then you get the missing transactions as well and then you can start including the remaining valid transactions. You can do so earlier too, since you are running on an empty block anyways - so it might be better to "risk" creating a block that might turn out valid than to do nothing.
Currently I guess this is done more or less at the same time, as there is no real issue with getting a block quickly.

As long as miners can have custom clients and relay blocks directly between them (which they should, to reduce stales), having rules that make blocks propagate slower through the network is a "fix" on the wrong end.

Was an Fehlern "nonsens" sein soll, wenn man eine HTML Seite ausliefert, die mit <head> statt <html> beginnt, erschließt sich mir nicht so ganz.

Der "billige" Validator ist vom W3C und gibt sowieso Hinweise zu jedem gefundenen Fehler/Warning.

Well, you could easily run one of these "central servers" yourself too.

There were hard forks in the past already and Bitcoin will get over this one (if there even is going to be one, but it's likely at least...) as well.

If a single person lending money (menaing NO leverage) on a leveraged platform can make the BTC price drop, they could do it also on their own. Let's say I lend out 1 million USD cheaply, thus stabilising BTC because people lend from it to keep the price up. Once my supply is off the platform, the price drops.
I could also just do what I suggested before (offer the million USD every day for 1 day less until the 01/04) and have the same results - or also I could buy BTC on the 01/04 (maybe even leveraged!) and crash the price even harder.

Once I have a load of money (= enough to manipulate the market) I can do evil stuff in any case as far as I see it. However I might rather consider lending this money (thus stabilizing prizes + using your platform) if I can calculate better when I get my profit.

Das waren Satoshis Regeln in seinem Client um die Aufnahme von Transaktionen zu regeln (wichtig um Spam zu verhindern). Die max. Blockgröße war schon immer 1 000 000 Bytes. Jeder hätte einfach die Regeln auskommentieren können und 1 MB Blöcke erzeugen können, die als gültig akzeptiert werden würden.

Ebenso kann man auch jetzt schon 1 MB Blöcke erzeugen, die meisten Miner (oder besser gesagt Pools) verwenden aber offenbar das Regelwerk von Bitcoin-qt das eben mittlerweile ein soft-limit von 250k hat.

Mich wundert es eh noch immer, wieso es keine auf Pools spezialisierten bitcoind gibt (mit besseren Möglichkeiten Transaktionen zu filtern etc.). Vermutlich stammt das daher, dass es bisher auch einfach fast nie nötig war Transaktionan abzuweisen, außer sie waren eben extrem spammy.

As I wrote I'm unable to deposit BTC, so no I can not check, since I'm unable to put any money on the platform.

Currently there's a maximum of ~7 transactions per second.

If 0.0001% of the total population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population --> ~7 billion, 0.0001% of that are 7000 persons) use Bitcoin, they can do max. 604800 transactions alltogether --> 86.4 transactions per person per day.

ArcticMine might be off by ~2 orders of magnitude (0.01% --> 700k users --> 0.864 transactions per day max.) but still even with "only" less than a million active users, they have to wait more than a day to be able to do 2(!) transactions!


About transaction markets:
I gave the example elsewhere as well, TOTAL transaction fees will not be different with small and unlimited block sizes (miners need to pay for their electricity etc.).
Let's say 2 BTC/block are required in fees for a miner.
There's a cost (blocks take time to transmit to other miners and the longer it takes the more you risk an orphan block) associated with block size, so if a miner can choose between 200000000 transactions with 1 satoshi fee and 2 transactions with 1 BTC fee, he's better off with the 2 transactions than the 200000000. The equlibrium might be higher with unlimited block sizes than with some limits, but rest assured that miners will find ways to determine how to force fees and make sure they are paid.

I did ~1 transaction every 2 days in Bitcoin, there are soon 8 billion people on this planet. Bitcoin can not handle 4 billion transactions per day. Not by far. If I would use Bitcoin in my daily life (from buying my milk until tipping a waiter) I guess I'd do ~1 dozen or more transactions per day. Even with lots of big payment aggregators this might be not enough to sustain. Also the larger a payment aggregator becomes, the easier it is for them to do fractional reserve.

Please prove to me that 100% of MtGox' funds are covered by BTC and USD! Now prove to me that all transactions on the blockchain are 100 covered. See the difference?

Also please stop the freaking deflationary spiral talk already, there are alternative chains with inflation and/or demurrage out there that you are free to join instead of bitching about BTC.

Colored coins are very similar to you taking a 1 USD bill, noting down the serial number and stating that you personally consider this as a "special" 1 USD bill and will hand anyone who gives it back to you 100 USD. Then you sell it for some money.

This has the exact same issues as with colored coins. You might have a "special bill" right now in your back pocket but as long as you don't know about the guy who hands you 100 USD for it, you'll still value it at 1 USD (everybody else will too). Also even if you manage to find about this, buy the special 1 USD bill for 90 USD and go to that guy he might rather ruin his reputation and claim that this was just a joke, you're stupid for paying 90 USD for 1 USD bill and if you have a problem with that you're free to sue him. In $remote_country.

From your question (assuming that you can physically color a virtual item) I still deduct that you still high on whatever it is you consumed that made you come up with this thread.

Btw. it might be nice to let people decide when not reserving funds to still choose where they borrow from. You could still pre-fill with whatever you want, but if somebody WANTS to have a worse rate (e.g. because it's fixed instead of dynamic), let them have it!

Also with your given example: Who pays the interest in the last 2 minutes of that position being open? How long does it take until you are no longer able to use these USD for 1 day positions? When exactly does the lender get back the USD? 24 hours after you clicked on "reserve" or 2 minutes later, after your position is finished?

You still didn't clearly state how anyone will make any profit on your platform specifically that makes it different from just speculating on any exchange.
Also your weird habit of marking random words in yellow and white is highly annoying.

I'm outta here, maybe I'll check later if your trip has ended or if you're still writing incoherently, quoting incorrectly and ignoring existing platforms.