Do you honestly think the US government is going to allow a significant number of retailers to accept bitcoins?
Why not? The currency is public and traceable, and no one seems to have objections to Microsoft Points, FarmVille credits, Linden$, etc. How, exactly, do you ensure compliance with tax laws when people are spending bitcoins? You don't. And the IRS isn't going to be understanding about that.
How, exactly, do you ensure compliance with tax laws when people are spending US paper dollars (cash)? (rhetorical question...) |
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This was the US govt's thinking on the subject, as recent as June 2008: Money Laundering in Digital Currencies US National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) For the record, I think bitcoin is less likely to be used for money laundering due to its small size (US$225k market value), its public transaction record, and the special nature of each coinbase. |
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MtGox: I'd suggest a data output for all trades with timestamp, price and size. With this info, apps can be created for sites like biddingpond.com which give live exchange rates. Would also like to put the exchange rate on my own sites and blogs. The graphs on MtGox aren't all that, let someone else run with the idea.
Visit http://mtgox.com/code/ticker.php for the ticker, or http://www.mtgox.com/code/data/getTrades.php for the last 24hrs worth of trades. Or you can pull exchange rate info from the data links at the bottom of the page on http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ |
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I can see this as a security risk if the updater were able to be set to automatic. Invariablely, some users will disregard the risks in the ongoing absolute trust of a particular server, and enough might be able to break the system if some cracker were to be able to compromise that trusted server and replace the client download with a compromised client with malware. Even if that only lasted for a short time.
That's why crypto-signed updates have existed in software systems for over a decade. You don't need to trust the server, if you have a public key stored locally. Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc. sign all their binary software packages with GPG, as an example. Eventually bitcoin will catch up with the times  Even without auto-updates, this is a serious vulnerability with the packages on bitcoin.org. Posting SHA1 sums is useless without a cryptographic signature of some sort. |
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+1, updating from existing clients would be a useful feature.
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I think charging per-trade would be reasonable. Most other markets have some sort of per-transaction charge.
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Technically, they are debit cards not credit cards.
In any case -- thanks for offering this service to the bitcoin community!
I think it would be great to see
* $25, $50 and $100 gift card denominations
* ability to have clients pay bitcoins, to reload an existing Wal-Mart MoneyCard (reloadable VISA debit card)
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I wonder if Mt. Gox will switch to debit cards only, with the presumably lower chance of reversal.
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FILE* output = popen("/var/www/bitcoind.cgi getblockcount", "r");
Seems like an incorrect execution string. |
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Currently, there is a clear incentive to spending CPU time to generate blocks. For every block I generate, I get 50 BTC. But when the 21mil BTC mark is reached and no more BTC are being generated, would it be correct to say that I would have no incentive to spend costly electricity to generate new blocks, since I don't get anything more out of it?
You get transaction fees. |
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c.f. the copyright FAQ already posted. The default is "cannot copy without permission" even if a copyright notice or other legalese is absent.
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seconded. copyright is a right, not a liability. By not specifying terms in a license jgarzic is just trolling for a reaction. I vote his non-cooperative self-grandizing be rewarded by banning his contributions to svn and the forums. This way he can start his own fork with a license requiring each user to pray to him before launching the client.
The terms are specified by the law. You cannot copy without permission. A license is one way an author gives permission: it lists rights and disclaimers the copyright owner feels is relevant. The MIT/X11 license specifies your rights to bitcoin source, as set out by the author (satoshi). What you appear to call trolling is what the rest of the world considers standard practice. You cannot just copy CNN's web page, either. |
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jgarzik: Will you provide this information? If not within your next post in this thread, I will be certain to delete the contents in the wiki post and request that an admin/mod delete the wiki page entirely so that it is a little bit more difficult for it to be used as a reference for further developments. This should help to prevent usage of the documentation produced and publicized by you and prevent any legality that may otherwise be pursued by you or anyone else in this matter.
It is the standard "license" afforded by the law and the Berne Convention, attached to all copyrighted works -- one must obtain permission from the author before copying. And I have not given permission. Mainly, I have not given permission because it is woefully incomplete, I have some plans for that doc, and it was not only illegal but disrespectful to copy it without asking first. Still waiting for a simple acknowledgement that it was wrong, which would make me a lot more amenable to a creative commons license. But as long as the community blatantly endorses illegal theft of copyrighted works, the motivation to cooperate is rather low. If necessary, perhaps the protocol can be altered slightly to accomodate for documentation of the protocol in a way that is different from that of jgarzik's documentation and thus a kind of documentation can be produced by someone else so that its it not similar to or deemed a derivative and can be established as a unique work and hopefully this is done by someone who does not pursue a similar claim of ownership causing even further discussion to take place. I am uncertain of whether or not this is necessary, but it seems to be a kind of solution that can resolve the matter rather quickly.
There is no need to alter the protocol, that's silly. I have never claimed that my copyright covers the protocol itself (because I don't want to, and more importantly, I legally cannot). It is the specific English description of how things work that is copyrighted, not the protocol itself. If someone comes up with a bitcoin protocol description, without starting from my doc, that is 100% legal in all countries as far as I'm aware. Anyone who writes their own protocol doc gets their own copyright, may assign their own open source license to the work, etc. It is highly unlikely that a from-scratch effort would result in the same word-for-word data, the same arrangement and order of document sections, etc. |
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I'm glad that you've decided to release this under the "same license as bitcoin itself"....
source code patches != documentation |
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cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU 000 @ 3.20GHz
stepping : 4 cpu family 6 model 26 stepping 4 is an Intel Core i7. That's a 23% speedup with -4way, 63% total speedup with -4way + hyperthreading. 33% faster with hyperthreading than without it. Does bitcoin perform any self-tests at startup, to verify that hashing is working? |
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I would love to see a bitcoin module for WHMCS. Or gplhost's DTC, thus enabling bitcoin billing by shared hosting / VPS hosting / dedicated server hosting businesses. |
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Update for cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU 000 @ 3.20GHz
stepping : 4 Machine has 4 cores, each with 2 hyperthreads. /proc/cpuinfo shows 8 virtual processors. without -4way, setgen 4: 5.7 Mhash/sec without -4way, setgen 8: 5.0 Mhash/sec with -4way, setgen 4: 7.0 Mhash/sec with -4way, setgen 8: 9.3 Mhash/sec So, the old wisdom of "hyperthreading slows things down" is now shattered, on this machine. |
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My -4way results: slower for two older boxes, faster for newer one.
("model name" comes from Linux's /proc/cpuinfo, which reports directly from CPU)
1) model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
total cores: 2
without -4way: 0.999 Mhash/sec
with -4way: 0.850 Mhash/sec
2) model name : Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 280
total cores: 4
without -4way: 4.6 Mhash/sec
with -4way: 4.0 Mhash/sec
3) model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU 000 @ 3.20GHz
total cores: 4
without -4way: 5.7 Mhash/sec
with -4way: 7.0 Mhash/sec
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If you don't want to use knightmb's files, you could just delete your blk*.dat files, but it's going to be a lot of load on the network if everyone is downloading the whole block index at once.
Anybody wanna volunteer to create blk*.dat for block chain <= 64637 ? Maybe the official binaries could simply ship a known-good block chain, to save time and bandwidth? |
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How about explaining to us stupid newbies what we would do with the blockchain once we download it?
It means replacing files in the bitcoin data directory. It is not recommended, unless you know what you're doing. Easiest and safest way is to backup wallet.dat then redownload everything. |
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