I'm not really in the know, either, but here's the latest vague/coded gossip...

Bitcoin/USD hybrid debit cards with a Mastercard or Visa partnership backed by a Bitcoin-centric Credit Union should be hitting the market this year, though. If BitInstant hasn't already (all they need are signatures and legalwork to open, not a massive amount of investment -- the CU could be kept pretty hidden if BitInstant doesn't want to do much with it), they'll probably be launching a credit union soon. This will open up some adoption/innovation floodgates, with BitInstant at the helm of financial innovation and possibly even "financial services" market share in the Bitcoiniverse.

So, Charlie will probably be the next sociopath.  There's another company looking to do something similar with regards to debit cards (can't remember their name). At least one of these companies will suffer spectacular failure after spectacular hype. Pretty much always happens, but a company as large and determined as BitInstant (should they suffer initial failure) will certainly rise from whatever ashes may come from an initial burn.

CoinLab's always launching new queer promos/services, frequently not even remotely directed at BTC users. Who knows what they have up their sleeves but large stacks of cash....

My crystal ball says ASICMiner will likely see massive hype soon with a new, rather clever shark on their Board. Lots of investors will be dumping new money on the company within 3 months. Something spectacular will likely happen.

Known for queer inventions, Bitcoin is also likely to churn out a new charity fundraising for-profit which converts BTC to USD specifically for charities, paying BTC users to collect funds. This should be announced within 4 months, and publicly launched by the end of 2013. They may possibly venture into the MMORPG world with dev/pub backing to collect in-game currency and convert that to USD for charities.


That's all for now! 

I did ID escrow for Goat, used transliteration software, and double-checked data when he refused to release his info to Nefario, keeping it encrypted and hidden away, and have absolutely no conflict of interest (aside a gut feeling of skepticism), fwiw.

BitMit's down, try PMing steamgames. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=62795

The obscure, but almost universally-supported "read receipt" function could be used.

It's that eerie-calm twilight which occurs between periods of high drama. I can't think of much notable happening over the past month. Stossel did a quick Bitcoin segment for FNC on the 3rd (very narrow, though positive -- praised Bitcoin for facilitating "anonymous" and tax-avoidable drug, porn, and gun transactions).... and uhhh...... think that's it. Current services are regularly receiving minor upgrades, and the exciting upcoming products remain upcoming. ASICs are expected to hit roughly -2 months ago.

Some sociopath(s) we consider a hero will likely excite us again (for better or worse, though likely worse) in roughly 1-2 weeks, causing some volatility.

Welcome back to Bitcoin.

No. I was initially very surprised given I've had hundreds of thousands USD (though always through other people) worth of transactions going in and out of his program and furnished my personal information for Pirate when the collection notifications went out from PPT ops. Initially not being contacted terrified me a bit, wondering if I was being kept in the dark intentionally by the SEC due to my other activities. Thinking about it more, though, that's ridiculous because they'd want to interview me for information (under the guise of it being about someone else) if they were going after more people in a "BTC securities crackdown." I think it more likely someone filed a complaint and included the email addresses of PPT ops off GLBSE data.

At this point, it's really more important I repay lenders than worry what the SEC might do to me when there are probably no complaints against me and I doubt the SEC'd care about an unlisted, inactive operation which's paid back a large majority of amount owed and starting payments to cover the lenders off GLBSE in a few weeks. I read the SEC even gives out awards sometimes if they nab someone on provided information if the person scammed >$1m.  

Ah.... Funny you mention that. The original, now-forgotten proposal for Colored Coins was much different from the current implementation. 

Ummm.... what? He's practically violated every law in the SEC-relevant CFR, and he inarguably violated SEC regulations if he did have USD coming from hedge fund managers as he claimed.

Finished filing a fresh complaint with the SEC. Reference Number: TCR1357453781000. Will provide updates.

Uhh.... Okay. Try to scam me.

Thanks for bumping this. Is the SEC contact still communicating? Trendon needs to be extradited if out-of-country.

It's been down for ~12-16h, now. Tosaki noted server troubles without elaboration, but it didn't sound out of the ordinary. A >half-day outage is pretty severe, though... so dunno.

You live in Iceland?

Is there any particular objection to having the actual messages sent to associated email addresses instead of just a "you have a new message" notification with a BitMit link? Less clicks = less time = good. No idea if implementation is trivial or not, but would be appreciated.

I believe his assumption came from torac's posts which kept stating the forum is a non-profit.

Will a distinction be made between accounts likely not "owned" by the seller, and accounts "owned" by the seller, but where the service the account is registered for does not permit transfer? If Torac sold nzbs.com accounts he owned, would that be okay, even if nzbs did not allow transfer of accounts? -- N/m, saw you just responded to that.

Hmmm... Actually - what's the forum policy on selling forum accounts? Can I sell my own account to Torac? He seems pretty desperate for a sock and has hundreds of thousands of potential future dollars to dole out.

Atlas isn't even a super hacker. Torac's probably taken over Theymos' cpanel account and posts as him, while Theymos posts as torac, except torac has a must-approve option set, allowing him to modify Theymos' posts prior to them posting.

I guess we'll know when torac gets bored once Theymos starts a sticky thread... "LICK THE BALLS OF YOUR BOSS, SHEEP BITCH!"

I frequently forget to load up -qt when I go to sleep, but can't run it during the day because I have other things to do on multiple computers and am too lazy to run back and forth from office to shut -qt off whenever I'm looking for something online. If I used a program like NetLimiter, now having a figure on how much -qt should require to keep blockchain updated, I could probably just limit the amount of bandwidth bitcoin-qt uses, keeping it to maybe 10kbps during the day, unlimited at night, and still stay at or close to current with the blockchain.

If you really need an answer on how I can't keep up.....   At night, -qt is also competing with programs including Skype (which sucks down ~50MB/day), Chrome (usually with auto-updating pages like Gmail because I forget to shut them off), and a miner (consuming 25MB/day more). Chrome varies, but probably consumes roughly 10MB at night. Combined at night, then, assuming 10pm-8am, programs other than -qt consume ~41.25MB over 10 hours, which'd work out to be 4.125MB/h, .06875MB/m, ~9.2kbps. -qt runs only during those 10 hours (when I remember), so for the sake of quick, rough guesstimates, I'll say it has 7.5 hours to run. It was claimed above that blocks are currently ~10% full. I'm not sure how exactly that'd translate to kbps, but I'll just assume it's ~10% of 13.3kbps. So, -qt should then consume only ~1.33kbps. Multiply by 3.2 (24/7.5) and you get 4.256kbps to run -qt from 10pm-8am and keep up with the blockchain. In total, I should be consuming ~13.456kbps at night. But then you have to take service outages into account, which vary widely in times per day, and duration, but it's safe to say my service is out >20% of the time, the ">" being what I'll trade for the bandwidth the miner, Gmail, and Skype won't be utilizing at full capacity. So now the effective rate I need my Internet connection to be at night is ~16.1472kbps. My connection varies wildly, but if I had to take a guess based on MB/day I consume from logs, assuming I'm utilizing the max amount of bandwidth all the time, I have something along the lines of 31kbps on average (almost as fast as dial-up!), a bit under 2x what's required. Though, you could've ignored everything I wrote in this paragraph since you'd only need to read that I start "large" (5MB+) downloads at night. No guarantees on the math, but that should be about where I'm at.

Glad to see such an in-depth discussion. Thanks for everyone's response.

All unit-holders should now have a list of how many units they hold in their inbox. PM me if you don't have said email and believe you should.

Forget the belt and get a manly growl in your voice.

Get your manly ability to compartmentalize, and put it to use. The kid's wronged you. He's probably going to murder your son. You want to rip the boy's eyeballs out, make him eat them by telling him if he doesn't, you'll stomp on his little kiddie testicles - but you know you'll stomp apart his testicles and cut his throat open even after he eats his eyeballs. That's how much you have to hate this kid, and how much you need to want him to stop. You don't have to "really" want it, you just need to find a way to channel that boiling rage toward your father which you've never been able to express; the seething anger which you constantly feel cracking its containment vessel apart; the darkest part of your soul you so desperately want to unleash on him to, in one moment, make him experience what you felt throughout your childhood as a result of his existence. ... Pretty sure everyone has those feelings.

Anyway - using this sudden rage, bark out "NO!" You're trying to condense all those horrible feelings into one word. Crisp, menacing, loud. You should try perfecting it before testing it. If I'm remembering correctly, you should try it on your wife when she attempts to spend money. Don't ever let any "silly" feelings creep in when you're preparing to say it - and preparation should only take a split-second. Don't "think" about it, just get pissed off. I've never had it not bring the victim to tears, but if he doesn't look terrified, maybe you should keep going and threaten to stomp his testicles apart.

(TBH, I completely agree with gyverlb, and that's been my experience with 2-year-old daughter so far since I somewhat recently started trying this approach. Sharp, unmerciful "NO!" and she'll reel in shock, whimper a bit. While she's doing that, we tell her why I did that. If she throws a fit because of it, we ignore her, and she'll eventually come over and hug one of us. Usually, though, she stops immediately and starts to want positive attention from me, which is great. Your son probably doesn't need to be brawling to enforce his natural rights [if you're into that] with the other toddlers just yet, so I can't think of why your son has to be the one to instill the fear of God.)

I can't keep up with the blockchain anymore. I am now roughly 150 blocks behind.

I cannot run Bitcoin-qt during the day because I'm on a tethered 3g connection and do actually need to use most of the available 5-150kbps of bandwidth during the day. My only available alternatives are dial-up, which simply couldn't keep up with the blockchain even if on 24/7, and satellite, which, aside its terrible latency issues, has bandwidth caps harsh enough to make downloading the blockchain a two-week process. I'm a bit beyond the Last Mile zone, which most people probably don't have to deal with, but many more people do have to deal with increasingly-common bandwidth caps, and certainly not just with satellite and mobile ISPs.

Where am I to go, but a centralized server handing me only information they deem true and relevant? What am I to do, but throw away the largely zero-trust system I was initially interested in? There are alternatives in the "Lite" world.... Some people let me "own" my coins, instead of tossing it all in a collective wallet. Some people are even generous enough to allow me to keep my privkeys to myself. If their service goes down, I could go to another private entity, but I can never again hold what the majority agree is "the blockchain" - just what small groups of people, or individuals, tell me the blockchain is.

I love Armory. It's a fantastic product. I need a blockchain to use it, though, and I can't keep up. I can go to family/friends' houses to leech off their cable connection, so I'll see transactions days after they happen. Maybe the migration to lite clients isn't necessarily bad, but I don't think active nodes shutting off could possibly be considered good.

So what can we do? Expand our definition of "dust" and further limit freedom to use Bitcoin? Do we forfeit the zero-trust vision? Do we wait for a real solution? How much longer? ... Someone sent me a couple BTC this morning. I wouldn't have known if he didn't email me.

Anyway - enough wispy bullshit -- Is there a solution I'm missing, or one in the works? Or should I just suck it up, quit my bitching, and download Electrum?

I do free Engrish->English translations, fwiw. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131682.msg1410158#msg1410158