Pharmacist - you know there is this thing called google but, that said, AMA = Ask Me Anything

Wouldn't bother me. Great technologists and geniuses are always very weird.

Look at Bobby Fischer - absolute god of chess but the man was pretty darned weird and led a strange post-Chess life.

75% of all the coins have already been mined so it is fair to say we are already in a situation where the vast majority of Bitcoins that will ever be have been minted.

Mining of the remaining 25% will continue for another century so it is not really worth discussing what will happen in 2116 - we'll all be long dead by then. Most likely, Bitcoin will either have faded into irrelevance or it will have taken off at which point the fees from transactions will be more than enough to compensate miners.

We will never "run out of Bitcoin" since old coins can be recirculated and are infinitely divisible. Even if 90% of all the coins in circulation were lost to misplaced wallets, the other 10% would be more than enough.

If he moves some coins from an early block and he's convinced Gavin he's Satoshi I think that is convincing enough proof.

The original Bitcoin code wasn't particularly clean C++, had lots of flaws, and borrowed huge amounts of existing technology so what we may find is that a fairly average technician, but certainly a visionary, was the father of Bitcoin. That would not be that surprising - look at Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc... they weren't really genius coders and were very flawed human beings but both built billion dollar empires.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

If Craig Wright is the real Satoshi, and wants to prove it, ALL he has to do is sign one new message with an address known to belong to Satoshi and post it on here.

Junior members do this routinely in the lending area to prove they own an address but the creator of Bitcoin can't figure out how? Give me a break.

He's either not Satoshi or wants everyone, except Gavin apparently, to think he's not Satoshi.

"Many of you know me as a junior account with no credibility who loves conspiracy theories"

FYP

Definitely seems like a sob story - if OP needs money and has physical collateral, just go to a local pawn shop. You'll get the cash immediately and can take care of your dog right away rather than wait 2 weeks to ship stuff and then wait more time to convert your BTC to something the veterinarian accepts (unless he takes BTC which most don't)

Generally you should not invest in a Bitcoin casino. Many potential problems:

1. The operators may disappear with your investment.
2. The site may be hacked resulting in a loss of all or most of their BTC
3. A high roller might "break the bank". Betting limits help limit this but incredible win streaks do happen.
4. A cheater might exploit loopholes in the software to gain an edge
5. The business is mysteriously unprofitable for "unknown" reasons that the operators blame on variance
6. The site may be shut down, sometimes permanently, by denial of service type attacks. Don't expect quick refunds of your investment if this occurs - operators may spend a fortune trying to get it back online.

Can you send gold almost instantly to someone halfway around the world who has no physical address? You can send him Bitcoin if he has ever given you a public virtual address.

Unless they are idiots, nobody is trying to "brute force" that address. It would take all the computers in the world hundreds of trillions of year to "brute force". The cost of that would be nearly infinite - far more than the sum value of all Bitcoins let alone the trivial amount associated with that address.

Big Oil nowadays is more like Bankrupt Oil. Perhaps we should change the name to reflect the fall from $150 down to $40 a barrel.

Unless you are hording it (NOT recommended) or mining it with non-free electricity (not common, most profitable miners have access to near-free power) there would be few impacts. If you needed $400 in BTC for, say, some online transactions you would just buy 400 of them instead of 1. Same as back in 2010.

The dollar is much better store of value than the Ruble for the simple reason that the US economy is 10 times as large as Russia's and vastly more diverse.

As for Bitcoin, the value is very arbitrary and reflects a balance between investor hording and the huge sums paid out to miners to keep the network operating. That's a razor's edge - a very slight imbalance can cause huge swings in valuation. Please do not think or imagine for a minute that Bitcoin is some stable store of value. It's the polar opposite - more comparable to a penny stock.

There is broad scientific consensus that athropogenic climate change is real. Solve by inspection problem if you look at any ice cores covering past 20k or so years.

That said, the contribution of Bitcoin to anthropogenic climate change is entirely trivial. Removing Bitcoin will NOT solve or substantially reduce the scope of the problem. Moving to renewable energy sources for electricity generation is the answer. Nuclear, solar, geothermal, etc...

No, there are not "many machines right now trying this" since all the compute power in the world could run for 100 trillion years and not find the private key associated with a public address. Would be a futile waste of time. That is why Bitcoin works; if the private keys could be found from a public one the whole protocol would be broken.

More generally, the compute cost to find that private key on average would far, hundreds of orders of magnitude, exceed the balance associated with that account.

A Bitcoin address is a hash of the public key and cannot be easily associated with other addresses related to the same key ("account")

Hence, someone who wishes greater anonymity can simply generate a new address for each transaction and spread their send/receive transactions over N addresses effectively hiding the total account balance.

For larger companies, anonymity not really important. Everyone knows, for example, that Apple has billions in cash. They don't need to keep that a secret.

While transaction fees are presently low, the true cost per transaction, paid for through currency dilution, is enormous:

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

This is clearly unsustainable since it requires a massive number of buy and hold Bitcoin investors to effectively subsidize miners. Investors at $5/BTC had some reasonable expectation to gain money. Investors at $400/BTC are just paying for the network; little or no chance of appreciation (see the people who "invested" at $1100/BTC, $900/BTC, $700/BTC, etc...)

Here is the current cost per transaction graph for those who are curious:

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

An INSANE $7 per transaction and all of it is getting paid for through inflation. Why I don't invest in Bitcoin, illustrated. Great to hold for incredibly brief periods of time but these fees will almost certainly bury investors over the long haul. They are forking money HAND OVER FIST to miners who are forking money HAND OVER FIST to utilities.

The people getting rich off of BTC are electricity providers...

On the plus side, you can delete that YOVI wallet and free up some space on your hard drive.