Well, coloured coins (or the approach in this paper there) are not much more than taking e.g. a 1 USD note, writing down the serial number and claiming that whoever hands you this exact note can choose to get your car instead of just a different dollar note. Then you sell it off for the price of your car.

This approach does still NOT deal with the issue of trust or fraud - while it would be impossible to counterfeit a certain Bitcoin, it might be possible, that the car does not even exist any more or the one who claimed to hand out the car actually doesn't want to sell the car... Same goes for anything else that can be tracked in the block chain. I could hand out 1 million coloured coins for 1 EUR each and sell them for bitcoins. If the price of BTC rises against the EUR it might even be possible to pull this stunt off, so for the extreme bulls out there, here's how to do leverage in the wild west!
Anyways, just like one has to trust me that I'll be able and willing to pay back EUR for the coins I handed out, there's also no way to force me to do that - and good luck in court with something like THAT ("I paid internet funny money for some different internet funny money, but this guy said he'd give me EUR for that different internet funny money that is actually the same internet funny money as the first one. - No, he's NOT a licensed e-money dealer at all, I just fired up this software...").

I prefer Ripple to this one, as it deals with this trust issue by involving people you know (as far as I understood it) instead of staying completely pseudonymous.

Soweit ich das verstehe ist die weiche Grenze 250 kB und die harte Grenze 1 MB. Wenn also jemand einen größeren Block (unter 1 MB) erstellt, ist der auch für alle anderen im Netzwerk gültig. Solange man nicht seinen eigenen Code ändert, wird man aber nur max. 250kB Blöcke selbst minen.

Hard forks werden eher entstehen, wenn man das 1 MB Limit durchbrechen wird (müssen) - bis dahin ist aber noch etwas Luft, dennoch will Gavin ja wie zitiert mal schauen, wie Miner mit einem knappen Limit umgehen bevor irgendwelche Standardregeln geändert werden.

^^^ This. Humans are NOT carnivores (and as much as vegans would like it to be, also not herbivores) - we're omnivores and can eat and digest quite a wide range of things.

Still I didn't really see solutions to the 2 main issues:
1) Raw milk that's older than ~12 hours shouldn't be sold and if it's older than 24 hours it shouldn't be consumed (except if you cook it beforehand). Getting around that (freezing?) is hard and probably not safe in larger quantities. Large quantities does not mean just a few 1000 liters by the way...

2) It seems to be illegal to sell raw milk in some states of the US. No matter how you try to get around that ("But I only gave a tip!", "I paid for the gasoline he used!", "I pay for membership of the milk club!"), this stuff won't hold for long in court - why do you think prostitutes (probably also something illegal in some states in the US) don't sell monthly memberships to the BJ association?! Maybe you can rather make sure to have a deal with some farmers + local dairies to have "premium milk", "raw quality milk" or whatever sounds good to still have that local touch + charge a premium on high quality milk, but that's safe to drink and store, because it's pasteurized (but comes from happy, healthy, grass-fed cows)? It's also possible to only pasteurize, but not homogenize milk so the product would "feel" the same (and taste as well...) but can be shipped, stored, sold in local markets and so on.

Quickly skimming over that paper seems to describe an implementation similar to ripple.com to me, only with storing conversion values somehow in the Bitcoin block chain and not seperate ones...

Also the "real" bitcoin whitepaper was also quickly followed by a working example implementation. A lot of other nice electronic money schemes only exist on paper, what also makes Bitcoin stand out of all of that is that it is NOT just a nice idea (a few original twists, but all in all the things described by satoshi weren't exactly rocket science) but that it was followed up by an actual implementation that gained enough traction to become what you see today.

Satoshi's paper only has barely 9 pages, lacks in lots of deatils and examples but is easy to read and when viewed together with the implementation also easy to understand.

This "second paper" (written in MS Word by the way) is more than 1 year old but the scheme described is not used, implemented or even widely discussed as far as I'm aware in the Bitcoin community. Also it cites 0(!) sources, not even the "first bitcoin paper"...

Back to the bet, I don't like the fact that you promote essentially spamming the block chain with gold, USD and oil currency transactions.

I rather guess they are just crypto nerds and as exited as a lot of other people that finally a currency based on cryptography has taken off and is "out in the wild".
Also a nice hello to the NSA person reading this and biting his/her knuckles for not being allowed to comment at all about his/her work and any of the assumptions in this thread.

Delivery of raw milk is actually the weak link - if you cannot get and consume it yourself on the same day, you shouldn't drink that stuff at all. There's a REASON that pasteurization exists, and it's not to "filter out blood" but to ensure you get less sick than you could. Most examples here about "it didn't harm me" were about milk consumed the same day or from very nearby - not shipped/delivered. Unless you have a valid business model that involves a "milk man", you're up for trouble once your first customer dies or gets seriously ill (and looking at a few pages about the wonders of raw milk I guess the people drinking the stuff are also the ones that might be of the "If I can still eat it out of the bottle with a spoon and don't need fork + knife, it's still ok!"-type). If you can manage to pick up milk at some nice local farmers and deliver milk from last evening to the doorstep for breakfast - good for you, but then you might be better off in accepting USD and making sure you operate legally.
Once some fanatics from southern Florida start ordering raw milk online with you, I'd recommend you to stay away from that stuff and rather sell drugs on silk road - less chance that a customer dies, or worse - survives and sues you.

Proteins don't break down, they coagulate. With raw milk they do this in your stomach (pour some hydrochloric acid in a glass of milk and be amazed - that's what happens), with pasteurized milk they (in small amounts) do it before. Also some vitamins don't really get along too well with heat, so they also get destroyed partly. The (often unhealthy) obsession of people with vitamins is left for another thread I hope though...

There's not much happening to the fat when being heated, what changes though is the homogenization treatment that most milk gets to make sure the fat doesn't swim on top after a while but stays in solution. This means the "fat bubbles" are made smaller and stay in solution over the lifetime of the milk.

More info can be found in wikipedia for example, in case you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk#Processing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization#Pasteurization_of_milk
As you can also see there, heating milk for a few seconds does NOT suddenly change it's contents and nutritional value completely.

If you use raw milk as ingredient for (especially) cheeses, you need to label them accordingly and again have to be very careful about contamination.
Butter = milk fat, more affected by quality than treatment
cheese = milk protein, see above. Raw milk cheeses exist but if you've seen how cheese is made, you'll also know why a few bacteria more or less won't matter there. Also the way cheese is created is not a very nice environment for germs to begin with.
yoghurt/kefir = more or less milk gone bad - here it might make a difference, but it would probably be far too risky to get a bad strain of bacteria in your milk. I doubt that you'd get really consistent quality out of raw milk and it pays off more to use good quality milk.
baked goods = far longer and higher heated than pasteurization during baking, why should a dozen seconds more matter in the final product?!

Again, it seems you are mixing "raw milk" and "high quality milk" in your mind - every milk on this planet starts as "raw milk" and can be used as such inside a dairy. It mostly isn't and that's for good reasons.

The enigma wasn't used in banking applications...

I bet that these people living in these societies did NOT have a life expectancy that comes even close to the ~80 years that are the norm is western countries these days.
Also their cancer rates were probably much lower... This does not mean that raw milk helps against cancer, but that people died before getting old and degraded enough to get cancer.

Don't get me wrong, I come from a country with a lot of cows and I guess it won't be too hard to convince farmers here to just hand me a couple liters of milk without pasteurization (and yes, I just looked it up, it seems legal here, but only if the farmer sells directly from the farm - probably to get over issues with long transport routes). It's just that nearly nobody wants to do that, not even the organic-hippie kind of people I know. Also it would probably be cheaper than pasteurized milk, because farmers get only ~25-35 € cents per liter for their milk, so if they sell me 1 liter for 60 cents, I pay twice as much as the market and it's still cheaper than buying at the supermarket.

Strangely it seems that rather people in the US want to go "back to the roots" in some kind of romantic "good ol' times" fantasy with raw milk. Even googling raw milk in german brings up several translated US pages on the first page telling you how evil pasteurization is instead of people asking in forums where to buy the stuff (and the forum posts are generally like "US americans seem to be really into raw milk, WTF? Is there anything to it?").
Maybe US milk from the supermarket just sucks (I generally wasn't impressed with food quality in the US at all when I was there) and the few farmers offering raw milk would also produce great pasteurized milk compared to the average product? Of course making a great mystery and whatnot around raw milk then helps their marketing and enables them to create such ridiculous prices. Over her by the way farmers would rather go the organic route, get certified and approved independently and prove their "worthyness" that way instead of offering raw milk and proving that they "dare" to sell the stuff and showing this way that they are confident that their product is good.

The farmer would still need to sell received BTC for USD by the way and then get tax issues...

USD von wo zu PayPal? Einfach per Banküberweisung an PayPal, falls die Dollars auf deinem US Konto liegen...

You can try... and please share your findings!
Btw. you'd need to send 25% more than the average, which also moves the average up a bit (in reality you'd do a few iterations in increasing the bid + calculating the average, since BTC is capped at 8 decimals. You can still come to a perfect value in every situation if you leave out all other players.). Everyone else however who already has a bid in the system can also already anticipate your move and/or try to place a second (higher or lower) bid to move the average in a fitting place below their first bid.

Botting this might even work, as currently the stakes are far too low (I don't have the money for blowing away 100 BTC immediately on a penny auction and also I'd need to automate the payback process then because there would be more bids) and there's also low incentives for other to seriously gamble or invest time/work for this amount of BTC. If this were a new game on Satoshi's dice, you could expect some quite heavy botting and counterbotting very soon though. Add to this the fact that you can easily bid several 100 BTC with this system as the fee is fixed and not percent based to move the average more.

I find it generally weird that people are so eager to extrapolate from their own experiences to a whole market. Of course raw milk can be made safe and as already said for both raw and pasteurized milk it's really unlikely that you get sick. Also if you consume the stuff at home yourself from your own goats I guess you have a higher interest in keeping everything clean.
As also shown though is that the risk is far higher in raw milk that IF something is contaminated, it might be worse than in pasteurized milk. The data that supports this was posted too.

Comparing this then and claiming "it's safer to drink raw milk than to ride a bike" is however a wrong conclusion. Take another bad example: "No human has died while staying on the moon, ever. This means we should all go to this totally safe environment in outer space and live forever!".

On the topic: How is Bitcoin better suited for this than just sending USD by wire/Paypal or paying in cash? Also farmers probably will want USD on their accounts, so they have to use something like BitPay which has Terms of Service that might not like this business or they have to learn how to do some kind of Forex trading on MtGox et. al. just to be able to afford the next bag of food for the cow...

Oh, and something else: How high are milk prices in the US anyways? To compare: In my country organic milk costs 1.05 EUR per liter (or more), cheaper (still local) non-organic one down to ~85 cents.

Wouldn't already a valid header (or even just the hash of that header) be enough to start mining at least an empty block?
Also if you produce blocks large and fast enough to drive someone out of mining you'd also drive a lot more full clients off the network.

Miners already have quite high incentives to DDoS (or otherwise break) all other pools that they are not part of, no matter the block size. I think there are more effective, less disruptive for users and cheaper ways of driving competing miners off the grid than a bandwidth war.

"Gambling and all "investments" that are so risky they might as well be gambling (HYIPs, pyramid schemes, etc.)"
^^^ didn't really fit this idea in my opinion, as compared to a game of luck this one is highly influencable by anyone taking part, similar to a bet (...or an auction). Also this is NOT a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction where all bids are lost to the operator, I chose only to take a small fee, not depending on bid amount.

Also this auction is strictly time limited (unlike a penny auction that typically continues after each bid), unlike pure gambling it also has actual quite some risks for me as the operator and there are already several dollar or progressive auctions in this subforum which are actually worse than this one by design.

As a test for an idea I had, I want to propose (and conduct) the following auction system:

You can send bids of at least 0.01 BTC in up to 8 decimal digits of precision to the following address to win the 1 BTC deposited there:
1FHEiDZtMnWg6DtsaFGuT6DKUNadhjH6Ct
(https://blockchain.info/address/1FHEiDZtMnWg6DtsaFGuT6DKUNadhjH6Ct)

The winner however will NOT be the person who bids the highest and also not the one who bids lowest - to win, you need to bid as close to 125% of the average of all valid bids as possible.

An example:
The average bid amount of all valid bids is 0.01337 BTC.
0.01337*1.25 = 0.0167125, so whoever did bid closest to that amount is the winner.

In case several people who bid exactly the same amount would win, the transaction who got into an earlier block wins. In case it's even the same block, the one with the higher fees paid to miners wins (yay miners!). In case this STILL doesn't break the tie, the lower transaction ID wins (to have some slightly arbitrary "coin flip" event - I hope it's enough randomness for a 1 BTC penny auction...).

Please make sure to send bids ONLY from addresses YOU control, similar to gambling on satoshi's dice. A lot of people will probably NOT win the BTC auctioned off and get back their bid, so be prepared for that.

You can place as many bids as you like until the next retarget (at block #223776), all transactions included in blocks until then (above 0.01 BTC) will be considered valid bids.
Every transaction counts as seperate bid, so having a 0.01 BTC bid and bidding 0.05 BTC after that means you have 2 bids (0.01 BTC and 0.05 BTC), not 1 (0.06 BTC).

Fees:
I take a flat fee of 0.005 BTC off every bid, no matter how high it was initially and I'll keep 100% of the winning bid of course. Also I keep 100% of all bids below 0.01 BTC as punishment for not reading. The rest of the bids will be returned to the address they came from (if several addresses are involved combining unspent outputs, I'll just send it to one of them). I'll pay any transaction fees the network might require and I'll use the blockchain.info "sendmany" implementation for that.

Transactions that come in late (after block #223776) but before I returned all loosing bids will also be returned after having the fee deducted, but they won't be used in the calculation of the winning bid and they also can NOT win. If somebody sends BTC AFTER I reimbursed all bids, I consider this a donation and a token of appreciation and you will NOT be reimbursed at all.

After the block #223776 has been mined, I'll publish the outcome and stats and start paying back bids as well as the winner.
I'm human, errors can happen and this is not an automated process, so please be a bit patient after the block has been mined to let me triple check everything. I'll try to be as fast as possible (I expect a payout after max. 24 hours), but please don't expect to get your bid back already in block #223777.
Also this is an experiment, I know that I'll loose a bit of money if less than 200 bids are entered (which, given the "popularity" of this subforum is already a bit risky) but that's ok. I'm rather interested if people actually like the idea enough to bid and how high they bid and I think that fun is worth the time and 1 BTC.

As editing is not possible here, I'll probably post from time to time the current averages and other stats to keep the thread afloat. Also feel free to comment (please stay on topic) as well as announcing your guesses here (of course, only what's in the block chain ultimately counts).

Happy bidding and may your guess be the best!

Penny auctions with a fixed ending time promote sniping bots (that bid at the last second) and if e.g. every bid extends the time by x minutes you promote the use of bots nevertheless who can bid 24/7 (to win when most people are sleeping) and you risk auctions going on forever.

Also penny auctions promote late bidding, so either you risk actually giving out items far below value if there are few bids and you start with a short time frame or you will have a LOT of "dead" auctions until the last minute(s).

Something that promotes earlier buying are raffles ("I sell 101 tickets for 0.01 BTC each and the 10 winners get 0.1 BTC"), but these are just like lotteries and selling goods might not work that well.

On the other hand if you have the means to break SHA256(SHA256)) (=mining) and ECDSA (=Bitcoin private keys), why waste that on Bitcoin?
Don't get me wrong, maybe Bitcoin becomes a big threat for the establishment in the future - but there are far more valuable targets.

Another thing to consider:
Not every great cryptographer is from the USA, there are other countries with smart people out there as well... of course NSA will be ahead a bit with cryptoanalysis (I read recently an interesting article about Bitcoin mining with SAT solvers) and breaking codes just because of the ressources they have - still that doesn't mean they can magically "break" mathematics. Current crypto is considered strong enough that it makes much more sense to attack the implementation (side channel attacks) than the actual algorithm. as bitcoin however only consists of data, not hardware they need to attack the mathematics behind ECDSA and SHA256. This doesn't require a huge budget, this requires brilliant people which can show up anywhere on the globe.

Lastly:
Even though a lot of crypto nowadays is public and 100% open source still only few people understand every detail behind and even fewer then really start questioning established truths or trying out if assumptions actually hold. I bet there are some algorithms out there that are considered quite secure but that have some flaws that are very well hidden and only surface after you start from scratch and test everything. Also there's a huge class of proprietary algorithms that are "secure by obscurity" and usually easily broken because they contain rookie mistakes.

Why this obsession with 22 digits (and no, I don't see 22 digit numbers as "unambiguous way of expressing a geolocation")? Actually you're using 11 digits for a slice ID and another 11 digits for a cube ID... also decimal is not everything, as I already said, binary representations matter too.
I have to correct myself by the way, the SliceID is also not easily guessable of course (441 (or 442?) possibilities), but it can be fixed after finding the correct cube in a slice.

"Pretty good number" is not convincing enough for me, sorry. GPS satellites are at ~20200 km altitude - add to this the ~6371 km radius of the earth and you cannot even map these satellite orbits with your system.

With fixed point in space I meant fixed above the surface, e.g. 1000 km above the north pole or whatever. With your added timestamp however one could even take the center of our solar system as reference point and just calculate planetary positions at certain times...

Calculations might take less than a second depending on the hardware used... Please code some examples that take the current (2008, 10km resolution) standard geoid data and convert GPS coordinates with/without elevation and return the respective cube number. It's not even that hard and without some examples people won't anyways take you seriously.

Since your location numbers are seemingly quite random (at least for people on the surface of the earth) using these as ZIP code might not be very useful - just in my living room I have more than a dozen cubes that probably have VERY different decimal representations.

Naja, aber gibt es irgendwelche Leute die MEGA akzeptieren?!

Ich habe jetzt nicht gerade eine plötzliche Flut an Links von Mr. Dotcom's Honeypot im Netz beobachtet... und diverse 1-Klickhosterbörsen scheinen auch eher unbeeindruckt von dem Ganzen.

There's still the issue with people claiming no new coins will come into generation after 2033 (since a similar graph is posted on wikipedia etc.) - maybe you can somehow indicate more clearly that it will still go on in the future?

75 @ 0.39
(=29.25 total)

I think that increases of 0.01 are too high btw. considering that the starting price is just 0.38 per share and one has to buy in packs of 25 shares.