Keys are 160 bits, if I recall correctly.  Brute force would require a computer somewhere between the size of the solar system and the galaxy working for a very long time to find a lost key.  By the time we can build a computer capable of finding a key, the issue will be moot.  Compared to that, searching the entire volume of the earth for lost gold, say a cubic millimeter at a time would be trivial.  And searching the entire ocean floor at this level of detail, through the top couple meters of crud, is totally possible right now, just not economically feasible.

Advances in mathematics might make it possible, or even easy, to find in the future coins that were lost today, but presumably the same (or similar) advances would make the coins of the future relatively just as difficult to recover.  So, even if we can find today's lost coins tomorrow, tomorrow's lost coins will be just as far out of reach (more or less).  And thus there will always be some lost coins.

Very little of the gold lost at sea has been recovered, so far.  Except for portions that may have fallen into subduction zones, all of it is at least in theory recoverable with more or less current technology.  And whatever actually did fall into subduction zones is recoverable with technology that is possible.

Lost bitcoins are not recoverable with any potential future technology, according to our current understanding of the universe.

For what it is worth, I don't see lost bitcoins or deflation as a problem.  The losses are tiny relative to the size of the market, and always will be.

Or maybe he traded some good or service for them.

Surely these speeches were advertised in advance, right?  Care to provide links so we can verify that these speeches actually took place, and that it was you that gave them?

No, and no.  Also, I'm not sure that this was "the bubble", not sure if it popped, and not sure if we survived whatever it was.

Give it time.

I didn't mock it.  I said I didn't give a f*ck about it.  Huge difference.

Good luck with your new thing.  Hope it works out.  Also sorta hope you come off as less of a tool to any new people that discover you/us through it.

Check your URLs, usernames, and passwords.

Every time that I've run into a problem like this, it was because one or more pools was down, or because I had botched my configuration.

The difference is that lost gold is almost always recoverable.  Lost bitcoins are, generally speaking, not.

So, you want to spread freedom by restricting choices.  Good call.

This strikes me as being at odds with the goal of having a higher quality of posts.

By the way, no one here hates you because you have some magic brilliance that let you think of it first.  We aren't jealous.  We just find you very annoying.  Also, I sorta suspect that a decent minority of us don't give a f*ck about facebook, myspace or twitter.

Circuit breakers are only possible with centralized control.

I LOLd.  #3 through #6 are silly.  Good luck man.

The client will already complain if the clock is wrong by a lot.  I think that should be enough.  NTP is trivial to install, configure, and run on any OS.

2 will be used before 1.

Better idea is to space them out by 10s, or even 20s, so that you can squeeze pools in between without having to renumber them all.

The remaining duplicates are probably coming from the clock problem ArtForz found.  Since you are running NTP on your server, I recommend patching bitcoind to disable the crappy clock adjustment.

The file is util.cpp, look for function GetAdjustedTime().


Change to:


That should probably end up in the official client, in case any devs are watching.  If they really want to keep the clock adjustment even though NTP does a much better job, the getwork() function in rpc.cpp should be changed.  pBlock->nTime needs to be set to nPrevTime, which increases monotonically, after the call to IncrementExtraNonce().

Heh, I wish you had given some notice that you were going to take down the miner1.btcguild.com URL.  All of my stuff was still pointed to it, and I didn't notice it was gone for about 10 hours.

I use the flex proxy, so I didn't lose any work, but I was pretty confused trying to figure out why my stuff wasn't working while the website kept counting up rounds.

Edit: fixed .org -> .com

There are bids, and there are asks.  Orders clear when the two meet.  You don't cash out at $30 by putting your asks below that price.  The only way to move the price down is for sellers to be willing to accept less.

I'm not saying that this wasn't a correction/panic sell off, because it really looks like one.  I'm saying that a cashout attempt at a given price cannot drive the price below that level, it merely prevents it from rising above it until the volume clears.

So, if early adopters were waiting for the $30 mark, why did so many of them cash out at prices far, far, far below that mark?

I don't think you understand how the exchange works.

"Federal" is one of thsoe weasel words that makes you think it is involved with the government.

Hint:  It mostly is not.

You don't start generating v.2 blocks until the majority of the nodes will accept them.