It depends on your definition of "receive". If you consider a pending transaction sufficient, then you can receive your BTC in seconds. If you consider "receive" to mean 6 confirmations, then it can take over an hour.

The term "air" can refer to the location in which air is or the air that happens to be in a particular space at a particular time. It's not really sufficiently well-defined for a yes or no answer to "Is air property" to be meaningful. Suffice it to say that if you pollute air on your property in such a way that it damages my use or enjoyment of my property, the majority of free market advocates would argue that your conduct should be legally actionable. Whether you say that means they consider air to be property or not is not particularly important.

It's not that simple. Pollution is a hard problem for any system. It gets simpler when you get public property out of the picture, but it's still a big challenge for any legal system.

Most advocates of even a pure free market do not believe that you can pollute in such a way that you harm other people's use or enjoyment of their property and the legal system should let you get away with it. But neither does anyone, so far as I know, have a perfect solution to the problem of pollution -- in any political system.

It's not an free market issue, unless you encounter someone who says "a free market means anyone should be able to pollute any air or water that passes through their property with impunity, otherwise you don't have a free market". Few people say that. In practical terms, most free market advocates who are not anarchocapitalists will hold that ultimately, until someone thinks of a better way, the government (if for no other reason than because it runs the courts of last resort) will have to decide what pollution is allowed and what is not.

Some free market advocates support Pigovian taxes, where polluters must pay the full amount of any provable damages their pollution causes. I personally don't support such taxes for the reasons that Coase pointed out. Again, it's a very hard problem. I don't think anyone has a perfect solution.

With no public roads or public parks, what would you need laws against polluting? I don't care if you pollute your own stuff, and we all support laws against polluting other people's stuff. Pollution laws are part of the problem, as they set permissible levels of damage you may due to other people's property with impunity. True, they do draw the line somewhere short of killing everyone on the planet.

Then what will homogenize the immigrants and keep children out of the labor force?

I think you missed the part about a free market requiring an effective police and court system that can enforce agreements and penalize the use of force or fraud. I don't think Somalia has that. Also, just having a free market doesn't ensure success or prosperity. You need gas in your car for it to run, but you need other things too.

First, monopolies like Microsoft and Apple rely very little on patents. They don't even rely on copyright, because it doesn't provide them sufficient rights, in their opinion. They rely on contracts. Second, they'll mostly likely fail no matter what. Unless they can keep innovating and providing the products their customers most want, they'll be eclipsed by a more agile competitor.

The most effective way to maintain a monopoly in a free market is to be the most efficient company, providing the products your customers most want at prices they are happy to pay. Some market segments are 'natural monopolies' in the sense that they have unusual factors that make monopolies more likely in those segments. A good example is operating systems -- there is a benefit to running the same operating system many other people are running even if it's slightly inferior for your particular application. In these areas, a monopoly can be a little bit worse than their closest competitor and still maintain near-monopoly market share.

But if we all benefit from running the same operating system, even if it's not the very best one, why shouldn't we? Until a competitor is sufficiently superior that it's worth the cost of switching, of course.

There are market failures that can occur in a free market where you can have near-monopolies even when it's not particularly efficient. But they are so rare as to be almost non-existent compared to regulatory failures. (And, of course, advocates of free markets believe that it is entirely appropriate to use force to break up monopolies maintained by force or fraud, just as it is appropriate to do so for non-monopolies maintained by those means.)

It's hard to take this kind of comment seriously, but just in case, the answer to your question is: The prohibition on the use of force except in defense and the requirement that people honor their agreements.

Claimed. Thanks. You gave way too much info. Try to make it harder next time.

Ahoy!

The answer to three questions would be extremely helpful:

1) Over the longest possible time period, how many blocks has this pool found?

2) Over that same time period, how many blocks would you have expected them to find?

3) What is the standard deviation for the expected number of blocks found?

I understand this is difficult to do because of the difficulty changes. Since the difficulty changes should be random with respect to the pool's luck, you might have to do the calculation separately for each difficulty range. That's just as good, since those time periods aren't vulnerable to selection bias.

A better analogy is this one:

A certain town has 500 people. You suspect that maybe some of them are psychic. So you ask each person to try to correctly identify the suits of some cards they cannot see. Of the 500 people, you find 3 that did extremely well in the test. So you say that you suspect those 3 are psychic. (However, you would expect about 3 out of 500 to do that well by chance. So these are just the people you suspect.)

So, you'll continue your analysis. You'll test those 3 people. But wait, someone already did that. So you'll just check the previous results. Lo and behold, the data shows that those 3 people succeed way beyond what you'd expect by mere chance, perhaps the chances were only 3 in 500 that they could do that well by chance.

You cannot use the same data both to decide which pool to accuse of cheating and to validate that same accusation. Some pool has to have the worst luck, so bad that it's hard to believe looking only at that pool that its luck was that bad due to mere chance.

I would just add to evorhees comment that he only focused on half the picture. You also need a strong political system including police and courts that can deal with cases of fraud, intimidation, and theft. You need a society that respects property rights and holds people to their word. There are a large number of things that you must not prohibit to have a free market, but to have an effective free market, there are a few things you must strongly prohibit and those prohibitions must be enforced.

And either way, the best way to catch it would be to look at the average over the longest term possible. You can always find bad days. Half the weeks will be below average. And if you get to pick the start date and the finish date specifically to bracket a run of bad luck, you can always find improbable events.

It should be instant. Did you confirm that the orders didn't go through at all? If necessary, download your entire trading history. If you really can't find them anywhere, I'd contact their support immediately.

Right, but the higher the percentage of pool hoppers, the higher the percentage of the time the pool's expected payout per share is below average. This means that the more pool hoppers, the lower the pool's payout to someone who contributes shares at a constant rate. That is, pool hoppers profit at the expense of the non-hoppers.

I think the best analysis would be to start by taking the longest period possible. If the odds of performance that low by luck alone over that longest possible interval is not less than 5%, I'd say you can pretty much ignore the possibility of cheating on the part of either miners or the pool. If the pool is stealing from miners, it's not like sometimes they're going to cheat and sometimes they're going to sneak in bonuses.

Two reasons:

1) Same address as what? The coins being sent out come from transaction outputs.

2) That would disclose which output is the 'change' and therefore, by process of elimination, which output(s) are to the recipient(s). This is information the client can easily conceal.

Part of this problem is that the bitcoin system thinks of coins as belonging to transaction outputs, the client thinks of coins as belonging to accounts, and humans think of coins as belonging to addresses.

Because if everyone in the pool is a pool hopper, the pool will die the first time it has bad luck. If every miner will only mine when the payout is more than he could get from a PPS pool, as soon as the payout is expected to be less, nobody will mine and the pool will die.

The 'echo' command, by default, puts a newline at the end of its input. You can suppress this behavior with '-n'. (You can do it either way, but this may explain why different tools might given different results.)

Test against another pool. Rejected shares usually indicate something broken in your mining setup such as unreliable hardware. It's also possible that some proxy or NAT device is mangling your data.

By my math, such an attacker would have to have at least 1/7th of the pool's hashing power.

One would hope it wouldn't do the transaction. If it did the transaction, you'd never be able to claim the coins unless the key happened to still be in memory.

No, they won't. A new address will be generated and added to your wallet. When you're archiving a wallet file, you want it to contain as many spare addresses as possible, not as few. A size of 0 means 0 extra keys will be generated -- keys will only be generated when needed.