All nodes could become archives nodes which only store a fraction of the historical data.

1) Interpret the transaction hash key space as a being circular.
2) Pick a random hash value, call this the target hash.
3) Design a probability function with the shape of a bell curve which produces a value of 1 at the target hash and on average would match 1% (or any other desired fraction) of the key space.
4) Apply the probability function to the hash of any prunable transaction the node is aware of. Permanently store transactions for which the function is true and discard the rest (alternately, save all of them but use the probability function to selectively discard transactions when disk space is low).
5) As long as the total number of nodes is a sufficiently high multiple of 1/(desired fraction), and the nodes have sufficient disk space on average to hold their desired fraction of the key space, then the all of the historical transaction will probably remain retrievable.

Does David Malki read the Speculation forum here?

I thought PPTP is fundamentally broken?

It would have been fine back when only a handful of people were using colours in their signatures. Now that everyone is doing it all colours become annoying.

I must confess that there are some investors that I wouldn't mind seeing lose their money by buying worthless paper. Certain institutional investors, for example. I strongly suspect that large public sector pension funds like those managed by CALPERS created the shareholder pressure to strip mine the US tech manufacturing base in the 2000s (start with a profitable company, lay off R&D and customer support, divert all funds to marketing to pump the share price, when it falls apart ship everything to China).

Is CoinChat that site that encourages people to include obnoxious visual pollution into their signatures, which subsequently causes me to add them to my ignore list?

To start with, don't even try to secure your bitcoins on a computer that is connected to the Internet.

Offline wallets are a minimum requirement when it comes to securing bitcoins.

I have pretty modest aspirations for Bitcoin: I just want it to be as successful in the currency world as TCP/IP has been in the networking world; i.e. I'm looking forward to a future in which there are no Bitcoin currency exchanges because there are no longer any currencies to exchange with.

The reason I like the distributed filesystem approach is that the storage requirements of a universal currency are going to be immense, and loosening the requirement that any node maintain a full copy of everything at the same time makes it easier to solve. Freenet has a self-assembling datastore where each node specializes in terms of what keys they store, and while it doesn't guarantee that keys will be be retrievable forever, it does a good job in practise (subject to certain caveats).

That makes it a good starting point to design a system that could scale up to the kind of storage system Bitcoin would need a decade from now if it's still on the road to becoming a universal currency.

On the other hand there's no guarantee that the Dollar and the Euro are going to make it to 2025, so it's always possible that we'd need to scale up very quickly much sooner than anyone could anticipate. It certainly wouldn't be the first time for that to happen to Bitcoin.

Yes, freenet's alpha and omega is its privacy model, but again, thats why its architecture teaches us relatively little of value for the Bitcoin ecosystem.[/quote]I disagree with that, because their privacy model required them to make everything work automatically. You just start up a node and it bootstraps and specializes without any user intervention at all. This is something that other distributed storage systems, like Tahoe-LAFS, don't have.

Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth suggests that high end home broadband users will have 10 gbit/sec connections by 2025. Does it not make sense plan ahead?

That's true. The cost of strong anonymity is that storage nodes are dealing with encrypted blobs whose contents they know nothing about, so they have to drop keys randomly when an individual node runs out of space.

A Bitcoin-specific storage system could do better than this, for example by dropping prunable transactions before unspent transactions.

What kind of storage architecture will ultimately be needed if Bitcoin is going to scale as far as 10⁶ transactions per second? Laying the groundwork for a network of that capacity is not overkill IMHO.

Hint:

The Freenet project has managed to create a 30+ terabyte distributed, redundant, content-addressed filesystem. It works in a plug-and-play fashion, where individual nodes specialize with regards to routing and as to which keys they choose to store automatically without requiring any explicit configuration. Nodes can enter and leave the network randomly without having much of an impact on key retrievablity.

Their design would be a good starting point for building a distributed datastore for Bitcoin. All the objects that we care about are already identified by their hashes, so it would be easy to adapt their storage model for Bitcoin.

I saw an avalanche of orders when Bitinstant first rolled out their new site.

So you want to do large cash transactions without any kind of escrow?

What you get by paying the going rates on LocalBitcoins is a lower chance of being robbed. A legitimate seller charges a reasonable rate for their time. A thief looking for a mark will try to entice someone into bringing a large amount of cash to a meeting with no intention of giving them any bitcoins.

On the other hand you might get lucky, so might as well save a couple percent by operating with no safety net, right?

You need a modern computer with a decent amount of RAM to run Armory, but if you've got enough Bitcoins to worry about losing them then it shouldn't be a problem to spend a couple of them to upgrade your computer if necessary.

https://bitcoinarmory.com/using-offline-wallets-in-armory/

It depends on how you do the transaction.

I strongly recommend going through a service like LocalBitcoins because it has a built in escrow and is set up to reduce the possibility of either the buyer or seller cheating.

The clarity of Jon's responses were exactly what I was looking for back in September, back when the Foundation was first announced.