Try a different exchange?  There isn't such a thing as "the price".

Pretty much all of it is wrong, sorry.

Difficulty scales to keep the block rate around 10 minutes.  It has nothing to do with how many blocks have already been mined, nor how many coins exist.  The maximum difficulty shows on that page just comes from the range of the sha256 hash function.  It isn't something we need to meet, nor that we are expected to meet.

Fortunately for us, no one put you in charge of anything important.

1 is not a given.  You can't possibly define "best", much less "stable".  Hell, you probably can't even define currency, but that isn't important here.   At any rate, you certainly haven't tested various configurations to check their properties for bestness (whatever that is).

Also, it does not appear to me that your conclusion follows from your argument.  You have a bait and switch thing going on.

It takes a while to translate The Simpsons into Russian.

The key.

A person's willingness to accept bitcoin is directly related to how well they've processed this reality.

I'm just not sure I'd call it all a scam.  Parts of it certainly are.  But letting everything float freely isn't a scam, it is an evolution, a necessary step towards bitcoin.

Just out of curiosity, what on earth makes you think that there is a relationship between the number of bitcoins already produced and the hash rate of the network?

Can you clarify the bolded word?

In English, "clarify that bitcoin are treated" has a slightly different meaning than "clarify that bitcoin be treated".  In the first case, they are suggesting that a standing presumption be made explicit.  In the second case, they are proposing a standard into a void.

My German is really, really sketchy.  I can follow the translation in broad strokes, but a subtle point like this is far beyond me.

Normally, a transaction has 1+ inputs and 1+ outputs.  Each block has a special transaction in it that has no inputs, which is used to reward the miner.  Where the input would normally be is a freeform field named "coinbase".  The term is also commonly (but incorrectly) used to mean the generation transaction itself.  (My bad.)

Once upon a time, a guy mined two blocks using the exact same address for the reward.  Both of those generation transactions were identical, so they had the same hash.  In bitcoin, the hash is a, ahem, "unique" identifier, so spending one of them spends both of them.  Thus, 50 coins "destroyed".

This won't happen again because blocks are now required to have their height in the coinbase field, which makes them unique even if they are otherwise identical.

And the network only checks that the generation transaction's value is less than or equal to the subsidy + the fees.  Nothing stops you from making a block that claims less than the full reward, but doing so is silly, and nowadays, expensive.  A few blocks in the past, however, claimed less reward than they could have, so the worldwide total will be slightly less than it could have been.


Any 256-bit string is a private key.  Multiply (in EC math) G by that private key, and you have a public key.  Hash that public key in a particular way and encode it and you have an address.  Neither the multiplication nor the hashing are reversible.  You can pick a random number, hash it and see what the address would have been, even though you don't have a private key that would work for it.  Or, you can skip right to the end and make an address without knowing what the public key should have been, much less the private key.

The address hash is 160 bits.  We do know that for every input, there is one output, but we don't know that for every possible 160-bit number there is necessarily an input that creates it.  The address in my hash, for example, has a pubkey that can be hashed to create it.  But we don't know if there is any pubkey that hashes down to the bitcoin eater address.

I'm not sure if EC multiplication has the same property or not.  I *think* that for every valid public key, we know that some private key matches it even if we don't know what that private key is.  A proper cryptographer could answer that for sure.

Bitcoins are very abstract.  The definition of "destroyed" gets fuzzy here.

Blocks claiming less than the full possible reward most closely fit, in my opinion, the concept of destroyed.  These coins can only be recovered by a change in the protocol.*  Also in this category is the permanently unspendable coins from one or the other of the two blocks that had identical coinbase transactions.

Coins sent to keyless addresses are the second best fit.  No one has ever known a privkey that could redeem those coins, and so we have no reason to believe that such a key exists.

Coins sent to keys that were generated but then lost is the weakest fit.  We know that a key to that address has existed in the past, and so there is every reason to believe that the key could be found again.  Thermodynamics blocks us from doing so, but math itself doesn't bar our way.

* Such a change may not be completely crazy, but is still really unlikely.  It wouldn't hurt much to allow miners to claim some fraction of the coins lost through this method in the past.  Of course, it wouldn't help much either...

mastercoin is a scam system where all transactions in the mastercoin system involve sending a payment to some dude's bitcoin address.

What the hell is 9/13?

I believe it was when Sirius sold 5000 BTC for $5.

I've seen recent references to it (example), but I haven't bothered looking for a primary source or the date.

This thread may be amusing in today's context.

There is no such threshold.  Well, there might be one down in the 0-10 megahash range with the CPUs where the expected number of shares earned between now and infinity is less than a half.  But 20 Ghash/sec is nowhere near that.  Once again, I'm mining with about 7 Ghash/sec, and while I see plenty of variance, sometimes going 4 or 5 days without a payout, I still get paid, and my running averages are hovering rather close to my ideal expected payout.  (I'm actually up a fair bit right now because I had shares active during the very recent string of crazy good luck, including that block with the 20 BTC fee.)

Take 30 days again.  We'll consider your farm as 5 units with an expected earning of 0.1 BTC per day each.

If you were fully on p2pool, you'd earn 30 days * 5 units * 0.1 per unit = 15 shares = 15 BTC. - this takes 30*5=150 unit/days

With your system:
Always on p2pool: 30 days * 0.1 per unit * 1 unit = 3 shares from your dedicated p2pool boxes = 3 BTC - this takes 30*1=30 unit/days
Because you have 3 shares, your other boxes will spend 3 days working on p2pool:  3 days * 0.1 per unit * 4 units = 1.2 shares = 1.2 BTC - this takes 3 * 4 = 12 unit/days
This leaves 108 unit/days, each of which is worth 0.1 BTC, for a total earning on the other pool of 10.8 BTC
Add them all up, and you get 15 BTC.

In reality, the second number would be a little lower, because the other pool probably charges more in fees than what you are donating for p2pool.

Is any of this making sense?  If you had exactly the right hash rate to find a new share (on average) right as your previous share was rolling off, so that you had exactly one share in the chain at a time, you'd earn X per block.  If you have half that hash rate, you still earn X per block, but you do so half as often because you only have an active share half of the time.  In reality, X isn't so constant, but it still works out to earning exactly the right amount, over time.

p2pool does not cheat small miners.

Yes.  Some fraction of the time you will have 2, 3, 4,... active shares, but for a smaller miner, 0 and 1 will be vastly dominant, with 2 as a novelty, 3 as a rarity, etc.  At any rate, the sum of the series is 1/2 in the example.

This makes no sense.  Do you have even a rough idea of how p2pool works?

To simplify things, pretend that p2pool's hashrate is good for 1 block per day, and that the share chain only tracks the last 25 shares.  Each share is then good for 1 BTC.  Your mining rigs have a hash rate good for 0.5 BTC per day.  You will, on average, find 1 share every other day.  So, roughly half of the time, you will have an active share, and half the time you won't.  While you have a share active, you will earn 1 BTC.  While you don't have a share active, you will earn zero.  Over 30 days, you'll end up with 15 BTC either way.

What part of "over time" and "in the long run" do you not understand?  Did you miss the part where I'm running a third of the power that you are running?

I don't really care about you, but I'm not a big fan of you spreading lies in here.  P2pool does NOT cheat people with low hashrates.

I guess if you really need that $7 each day for daycare, it may make sense for you to mine somewhere where you can get the steady payout.  But you would earn more over time on p2pool.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/hugh-hendry-throws-bearish-towel-his-full-must-read-letter

The US has been weakening the dollar intentionally for several years, and against China's wishes.  The last thing China wants is a weak dollar.