The hashrate estimation is noisy.  It requires a lot of smoothing.

A sliding window like you suggest would work too, but it has the same problem: short high spikes in hashrate cause the difficulty to rise then persist through the rest of the 2016-block window, making the net blockrate come out about the same in the end.

So it would work, but it wouldn't have much advantage, and the hashrate is stable enough that there's not much incentive to fool with something that works.

Yes - Bitcoins have had dozens of crashes.  It's pretty exciting as markets go. 

BlockExplorer?  Pffft.  All the cool kids are using http://blockchain.info/ these days.



Not sure what's wrong over there but blockchain.info works if you need something for now.

Oh, sorry, I was making the point that USD is withdrawn as USD and I completely ignored what you wanted to know. 

BTC withdrawals are mentioned in the original closure thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63749.msg746924#msg746924

I wouldn't be surprised if they're accommodating some customers with unusual needs, but that's not a mass liquidation of their BTC.

Reading that message I'm not sure if he's actually holding BTC or if he just wants to withdraw his "Bitcoin" (TradeHIll) balance which is really USD.

In any case, my evidence is the fact that they're issuing checks to handle everyone's withdraws.

Bitcoin isn't illegal.  It's just a bunch of banks colluded and told Paxum to either quit dealing with Bitcoins or they'd quit dealing with Paxum entirely.

Your premise is wrong.  TradeHill isn't liquidating BitCoins.  BTC holders withdraw in BTC; USD holders withdraw in USD.

It depends what you mean by "based on" the dollar.  If you mean backed by the dollar, the problem is: who does the backing?  You can do it as a centralized system (one entity that guarantees an exchange rate back and forth, and which makes money on some kind of fee structure); that's basically PayPal.

It doesn't work as a decentralized system.  Think of it this way:  If I have a bunch of DollarCoins, and I want to turn them back into USD but there's little demand for them right now and lots of other people are trying to unload their coins too, who's going to put up the USD to buy them all?  You can lower the payout until people no longer want to sell them and things are back in balance - that's a market-based solution, which is how BitCoin works.  But what incentive does anyone have to guarantee a specific price?

Try running a little economy with a pencil and paper for a bit and you'll see the problems pretty quickly.

I'd look at the power supply first.  Try one from another computer.

I see. That's an interesting exchange. I'll have to think about that some more.

Huh?  I didn't (and don't) see the answer anywhere in this thread.  Vandroiy said he doesn't feel like writing it down by which I assume he means he doesn't feel like transcribing a whole other discussion over to here, but he's implied several times that it's a group effort somewhere.

Who is "we"?  Is this happening somewhere I can read more about it?

They're only as anonymous as the issuer makes them.  If the issuer keeps records (court order, or hacked), they become pseudonymous.  TOR tries to prevent single points of failure like this.

Pretty clearly the former.  $1000 for 80% of everything is not plausible.

@fm1234:  A market order for 80% of everything would buy all the order books and then leave them waiting for anyone to make an offer, and they'd be stuck taking ANY offer (which would go sky high).  It would have to be an all-or-nothing order, which some exchanges allow.

It would depend on why it collapsed.

Litecoin is a pretty obvious choice for being very similar to Bitcoin, but that might mean it shares the same fate.

I've had my ideas that I've pushed for a while on how to improve Bitcoin, but rather than just forming yet another blockchain based on a couple ideas, I'm waiting at least another year or two to see what other flaws surface or good ideas are proposed.  But if Bitcoin folded tomorrow, I'd take the opportunity to just launch it, after making one last improvement: fix whatever killed Bitcoin.

Then you're just getting your and other people's coins back, same as a regular mixer.

Even $20 is high.  I'd happily sell out for 2x market value and just roll it over into Bitcoin2.

You can:

Use the command line to manage bitcoind
Use VNC to view your Linux PC remotely
Use X11 forwarding through SSH to start Bitcoin-QT remotely ("ssh -X ..." on Linux, install xming on Windows)

Or choose one of these:  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Frontends

Be sure to set a strong RPC password!

I don't know a comprehensive guide, but that list has all the commands. I can help if you have any specific questions.

Oh, I think I see what you're saying.  You're suggesting paying the entry, intermediate, and exit nodes with the same payment?  That's not really necessary.  There are plenty of entry and middle nodes.  Exit nodes are the bottleneck.  Also, making the payment to all three nodes on a circuit with the same transaction has the same problem again - normally the middle node protects you against the entry and exit node collaborating, but the payment would compromise that.

Also, this still has the problem that you need to keep getting clean coins for each new circuit you set up.

Unless I still misunderstand you.  Please explain it more if I do.