True, but it would happen.  At least for a while.  Credit cards are not going to just fade away anytime soon.

Wouldn't matter in the least.  Amazon.com could sell bitcoins directly, sponsor a separate trading site, or sponsor any of the current market sites and it would instantly become the biggest player over MtGox.  And Amazon wouldn't need to move 10K per day, because it's more likely that the value of bitcoins increases to the point that a thousand per day represents values in the millions of US dollars.  All the metrics are arbitrary except to one another.

If Walmart.com starts taking bitcoin, and selling in in person at their "money services" counter, they would be bigger than Amazon in this respect in very short order; and the value would shoot for the moon.

I chatted as well, and got this...

<snip>
You are now connected to Edmond from Amazon.com.
Me:Bitcoin as a payment method?
I was wondering if Amazon had any plans to accept bitcoin as a payment method, and if so, when I can expect it?
Edmond:Hello , my name is Edmond. I'm sorry about this. I'll be glad to check that out for you.
Me:Why would you be sorry? What did you do?
Edmond:As I checked as much as I want to give you more information about the Bitcoin as payment. However, as of now there is no further notice feom our management about this but if there will be already a notice form this I'll send you already an email that we can now accept Bitcoin as a payment on Amazon.
Me:okay, thanks.
</snip>

So I'm also of the opinion that there isn't really any official position on bitcoin from Amazon, and near term adoption as a payment method is unlikely.

It's not too soon for bitcoin, but Amazon may or may not be cautiously considering such a move.  Bitcoin is ready for such events, but the inclusion by Amazon or any other major player is going to introduce some major price movements again; because it won't just be one.  If Amazon does it, there are many others who will do it also in short order.

'

Both perspectives are correct in their own way.

Yeah!  That's just what I was thinking!  Joe Six Pack and Aunt Tellie would never have trouble with scientific notation!

</sarcasm>

The same process applies equally to square footage coverage per gallon of paint.  I had assumed that you were talking about something other than reading the label and taking their word for it.

I think I should be offended, but I have no idea what point you are actually trying to make here.  Can you point out my error in either the above crosspost, or the current thread?

The American Standard is based upon English Imperial, to be sure, but not only is it not quite the same (it's 'evolved' since then, there are several less commonly used units that have no English corollary) it continues to exist, along with metric, because Americans continue to choose it.  I have an American built car that has both Miles-per-hour and Kilometers-per-hour on my speedometer, this is required by government edict.  Every freeway sign in my state since ~1999 has distances expressed in both systems, also by fiat.  I know many (mostly former military) people in my city that could quote you distances in both systems without any obvious mental effort whatever, but the only time I've seen driving directions preferred in km was when I overheard a conversation between the counter attendant at Mammoth Cave National Park (a young woman of about 20) giving driving directions to some 30-something guy who (by his accent first, and confirmed later when I saw his license plate) was Canadian.  He couldn't wrap his head around miles, but this young woman switched from miles to klicks without missing a beat.  Which, considering her rather thick southern drawl, I know that most people (from other American states) would have assumed she was uneducated.  I'm pretty certain that she has never had to use metric for anything growing up, beyond school work.



Says you. I use metric at work nearly every day.  I maintain massive plastics injection presses and assembly lines for a living.  I have to have both sets of tools, because even though most machines are American Standard, there are many machines that only Germans seem to make.  I find it amusing that metric bolts don't come in as wide a standard spectrum as AS bolts, and to compensate there are fractional metric bolts in the millimeter range.  The engineers there really hit the roof whenever someone finds a metric bolt in a fractional size that also fine threaded.  Those have to be special ordered, even though I could buy the closest AS equivalent at Home Depot.  The early engineers who developed the standard spectrum of AS bolt sizes during the Industrial Revolution didn't just pull those fractional inch sizes out of their hind ends, nor did they say "hey, I think an eleven-thirtyseconds just sounds good!"  Yet the standard specturm of Metric Allen bolts run from 3 mm to about 20 mm hitting every integer number with a couple of oddball fractionals in there for more specific purposes.  The standard units were obviously chosen to match the metric system units, not their engineering design goals.  I'm pretty sure the same can be said for just about every aspect of metric tooling and hardware.

Really?  Alright then, show me how you can get from cm to liters of paint in metric.  Without using a computing device or a conversion table.

You have the right to your opinion, and I'm sure that 'inertia' has much to do with it, but my point stands.  Americans use the American Standard by choice.  I was taught the metric system in school, and I'm sure that you were also.  I used metric during my military career.  I do know how, and so do most Americans who managed to graduate high school.  And many products in the grocery store are in metric, and that doesn't tend to trip anyone up, either.  So it's not all a matter of 'what we are used to'.  Again, there is not a single case of a nation moving to metric because the public voluntarily did so in the absence of some kind of government edict.  Not a single one.  And your examples, although intresting, aren't exactly representative of real world problems.  Why would you need to know how many inches are in a mile quickly?  They are two vastly different scales, and are thus almost never used in the same context.  Which is exactly true with "how many cm in a km?" which I note that you didn't ask.  How many cups in 3 gallons?  Well that would be 6 half-gallons, 12 quarts, 24 pints, 48 cups in three gallons.  No calculator necessary.  See how that works?  How many troy ounces in a ton?  That's a rediculous question from the start, since not only is troy not an American Standard measurement, they are in entirely different scales and wouldn't every be used in the same context anyway.  Again, "how many grams in a kg" isn't a comparable question.  How about how many grams is in 7 metric tons?

And how many cubic inches in a cubic mile?  Are you serious? 

Are you trying to imply that you wouldn't need a calculator to do this in metric?  I sure would need one.

I know a lot of engineers, many I'm related to.  The truth is that engineers use it only because their employers require it, most of them don't really like using it either.  The *only* architect that I ever encountered that used metric, by choice or otherwise, learned very quickly why his peers did not; construction workers hate using metric units, and will go out of their way to make their employers' jobs harder.


There is no case of a population voluntarily moving to metric in the absence of government influence.  None.  I don't blame Europe for getting together for a common standard, because their imperial units were all screwed up and different from one another; but base 10 units only work well on paper, not in the human mind.  Most of the American standard units are based upon halving of larger known units, thus base two.  It's easier for the human mind to visualize halving and quartering of larger units than one-tenthing, which has much to do with why the American public never embraced the Metric Standard.  

Wait, have you been paying attention for the past four years?  For that matter, for the last 20?

Grraaaiins!

I need some sleep.

The network is very robust, it can't be forcibly stopped without destroying the Internet itself. For that matter, not all of the nodes can even be identified.  A crash at MtGox would, at worst, cause a crisis of confidence.  I doubt even that, because it's already happened and we are all still here.  I bought bitcoins before Mtgox was around, and I'm sure I'll do it again without them.  A market majority position doesn't imply that they are a critical component of the bitcoin infrastructure.

I don't doubt that the bruteforcing of addresses, as they presently exist, would require a truely astronomical computational ability, and is certainly safe for decades.  That was the point of the design, after all.  However, I think that it's also a bit silly to assume that such astronomical computational abilities will remain out of reach for humanity forever.  The only cryptographic algo that is provablely secure from brute force forever is the simple Vernon Cypher, which has no applications here.

Yes, sorry.  Address keypairs are created by ECDSA, while the hashing is done by SHA256.  The bruteforcing would have to be done by ECDSA hardware to create any address collision.  Basicly a huge rainbow table would have to be built and the list of lost addresses would be compared against it.

Besides, there is a long term solution for the lost coins anyway.  Eventually, hashing hardware will continue to increase until SHA256 alone is no longer secure.  Long before this, another algo will be swapped into Bitcoin in it's place (or in addition to SHA256, the code in question is modular as well as there are already two 'modules' to use, both just happen to be SH256 at the moment).  Eventually, everyone who still has funds are going to move those funds to addresses using the more secure algos, and the lost coins will be exposed for being the only addresses left on the blockchain using oly SHA256.  That's when the 'salvage' process begins, and the treasure hunters of the electronic currency age will be doing everything that they can to be the first to force a SHA256 'collision' against those (now known) lost addresses.

Actually, we don't know that.  All that we can really know for certain is that there are addresses in the blockchain that have not transfered funds away in a very long time.  We can't know if they are lost unless the owner of the address says so, and can prove that he is, in fact, the owner of that address.  However, the way the system is designed, if the person making the claim can prove that the address is his, then he has the secret key to that address, and thus the funds are not lost.

Also, we don't really need those lost coins, it doesn't really matter how many are lost, because the 21 million BTC limit is arbitrary anyway.