European peace and cooperation has a short history, and the collapse of this monetary union, even in the absence of the actual destruction of the currency itself, historical animosities are very likely to return to the surface of public discourse.  It's already happened between Greece and Germany, with some Germans calling for Greece to sell off some of their prized islands and Greeks referencing the looting of Greece during WWII.  Fringe political parties, with strong 'nationalistic' platforms have also been receiving more attention, and winning more seats, across all of Europe.  Mish has predicted that the first polititian to openly declare the Machiart (sp?) treaty a dead letter will win in a landslide, no matter which country he hails from.

This provablely not so.  US manufacturing output by inflation adjusted nominal values peaked only four years ago.  We still make a crapload of stuff, most of it is of higher quality that can generally be produced in China for competitive rates.  Germany's industrial base is similar only moreso, as German factories produce some of the highest quality machined parts in the world.  Machined parts that manufactures consider critical for life safety are not made in China, as a rule, they are made in the US or in Germany.  Usually in Germany.  China makes lots of low end refrigerators, but the Sub-Zero is made in California.


Bah!  Wealth is relative.  The US has a long way to fall before the average middle class Chinese citizen lives in a wealthier society than an average middle class American.  Expats living in China don't count, they are wealthy by definition.

I was thinking more along these lines, and wondering if a passphrase plus a salt created by a standardized questionaire of usually secret personal info could be used, of the kind of questions that don't change.  For example, one such question could be "How old were you when you lost your virginity?" with multiple choice answers including each age from 12 to 24, and an option like "does not apply/refuse to answer" so that the multiple choice questionaire could take all such answers, as well as the numbers of the answers that users refuse to answer, and create a salt that could produce a unique.  The questions would have to be high in number, and of a standardized order so that a user could concievablely reproduce the wallet.dat while be unique enough that it won't produce wallets that could collide.  It would have a bias, as all such questionaires do, but it should a long enough of a questionaire that such a bias isn't predictable and of such personal info that users aren't going to answer such a questionaire outside of the context of the client.

Oh, sorry.

I see a potential problem with any phase based deterministic wallet.  It reduces the namespace of an attacker trying to force an address collision by searching for English phrases in the same way that a dictionary attack works against common passwords.  It's more than conceivable to have an accidental collision as well, if two fans of classical lit both choose "Call me Ishmael" or more than one Tolkien fan chooses the same quote from TLOTR.  Hell, an attacker who was just using the King James version of the Bible would get quite a few hits from Christians using their favorite verses.  It would be better to do it in reverse, by having the client generate a random number sequence and translating that into a set of English words that can be printed, saved as an encrypted file to be stored elsewhere, or memorized.

That is not at all incompatible with the current network, that is exactly how it was designed.  There is a limit to the "free" space in a block allocated transactions with a fee of less than the minimum standard, which I believe is currently 15Kb.  Any miner that includes more than that limit of free (low fee) transactions will get his block rejected, but a miner that refuses free (or low fee) transactions will not.  There is an increasing scale of minimum fees to unlock increasing size limits on the block, up to the hard max limit.  So as the size of the network grows, and transaction rates across the network increase, the average time for a transaction to get included into a block will increase due to the scarcity in blockspace.  Increasing the fee above the market median would incentivize miners to include your transaction over another with a lower fee, thus transactions that need rapid confirmations will command a higher fee while free transactions could take some time to get included.

There exists a forked client that does exactly this, allowing the user to probably recreate a damaged or lost wallet.dat file based upon a secret passphrase used as the seed for new addresses, but I can't remember the name of it nor could I vouch for it's trustworthyness otherwise.

More people in India have access to a cell phone than a "proper" toilet.  Half of the planet live in cultures that do not value Western concepts of hygiene.  Your statement above is irrelevant.

All kinds of things, from online services to game licenses to cell service to rocks to a handmade necklace from Etsy.

Over the course of the years, as the bitcoin economy grows, there will develop a premium on near-term transaction processing.  People who desire to have their transactions processed quickly will pay a transaction fee over the average rate, in order to incentize miners to include that transaction over one with a lower or zero fee.  Long before the last new bitcoin is created, the block reward will be so vanishingly small as to be insignificant.  If the bitcoin economy isn't large enough by 2025 or so, it never will be.  The last bitcoin won't be created until around 2130.


There is a common misconseption here, I think.  A bitcoin is simply a unit, it doesn't actually exist even as a digital artifact; like an email or an mp3 file.  There is only the transaction entries in the blockchain.  The blockchain functions as a massive, collective ledger system.  Amounts are deducted from an existing address in the blockchain and added to another (new or existing) address in the blockchain.  There is a size limit on a block, but that is a agreed convention between miners who all use the 'conventional' codebase.  That limit can be raised, or removed altogether.  Standard clients have no size limitations on blocks or wallet.dat files.

Do you mind if I post this on some homeschooling lists?

By what reasoning were you supposed to get 22 btc for 50$?  That would have been quite a deal.

My own opinion (as a member, not a mod) is that the little animation of a dick waving at a photo of a gay forum member who has, for good or bad, set himself up as a self-declared representative of the Bitcoin community at large is probably safe enough for most peoples' workplaces.  If that little avatar is not safe for your workplace, then nothing outside of AOL would qualfity.  If it's a problem, you can turn off images or don't surf the forum at work. 

If you were to donate said bitquarter to the needs of the forum, I'm sure that is as good a reason to have you whitelisted as any, but I'm not the person to talk to about that.

I can't give you a reference, because I'm no more inclined to use the search function than you seem to be.  A modified client could only flood the network to a point, because there is a limit to the number of unique transactions any given client could produce from any given wallet.dat before it was forced to attempt to double-spend (which an honest client will not even try to do) and any transaction that attempts to spend coins that another transaction before it has legitimately tried to spend will be rejected as invalid, and not forwarded for that reason.  Since even a modified client can't send coins to himself that he has already sent to himself without the first transaction being included into a block, the 'spamming' of the network can only proceed at a pace dictated by the rate at which blocks are created and miners include free transactions into blocks.  Since free transactions generally require aging, such costless spamming is severely restricted.  A fee paying transaction would likely be included in each block, but the costs of spamming would be born by the spammer, and eventually he would run out of funds.

Yes, but that set of features is based upon the transaction 'scripting' which is not implimented yet.  And even when it is, I can't imagine that miners are going to be willing to process a scripted transaction without a fee.

The current vanilla client doesn't refuse to forward the transaction, but most miners are not going to include the transaction until it's old enough to qualify as a free transaction.  I believe that the current client defaults to a transaction fee, but that can be changed in the settings.  The vanilla client will refuse to create a transaction based upon an input transaction that is newer than 6 confirmations old.

No you don't.  There is no democracy as a national political structure anywhere on Earth.  The US is a federated republic, and nearly all of Europe are parlimentary republics. 

Why?  Just request that Steam take Bitcoin as a payment method.

This ^^

A zero confirm transaction in real life is just like cash in this way.  The vendor can instantly confirm that the coins that you are sending them both exist and that, at that moment, they are legitimately yours. (And without needing to verify your identity for the majority of transaction events)  This is far better than even what the retail vendor can do to verify that a $20 bill is not counterfit, which is largely limited to the use of a pH marker and going on faith that their cashier isn't a complete idiot.  The fact that it's possible to defraud someone who accepts zero-confirm transactions doesn't equate to that being an unacceptable business risk, particularly when compared to the risks of not only counterfit cash, but credit card fraud and check fraud that vendors are notrequired by legal tender laws to accept as a condition of doing business.  Confirmations would only be required for high value items on the order of a motor vehicle, or online digtial products that 1) are instantaneous and irreversable and 2) do not require that the user provide their identity in some fashion.  For example, Valve could accept bitcoin through Steam with zero confirms because they 1) can reverse the purchase of a license or virtual item if the customer's coins never arrive, whether that is intentional or not and 2) Valve knows who their customers are, even if they don't know what their real names or home addresses might be, because they know their IP addressses.  Any online vendor that sells physical products, say via dropshipping, can simply confirm the deal at the end of the session and only approve the shipments to the dropshipping company once a few confirms have occurred, or cancel said shipments with an email notice if the confirmations never materialize within a rational time frame.  This practice, once common, will be as acceptable to the online shopping public as the practice of providing an unknown server your name, addresss, CC number and date of birth; in addition to being significantly safer and more convient for the customer.  It would also have the side benefit of protecting the vendor from the possibility of long confirmation delays because the customer was unwilling to add a transaction fee, for if there is no transaction fee and the transaction languishes in the queue, the deal will simply expire and if the customer was legitimately trying to buy something, he won't be so inclined to try to save .01 BTC.