I agree with the OP 100%. I've been advocating 'portfolio', but 'keyring' is good as well. DeathAndTaxes I've read many of your responses to newbies who are thoroughly confused by keys. Why add an unnecessary extra layer of abstraction? People may not understand public key cryptography nor transactions, but 'wallet' goes a long way to hide the truth and keeps people stupid.

Why must one backup a wallet periodically? Why is the cash in my wallet not like real cash? How do I make anonymous transactions? If someone has a copy of my wallet, can I just send and receive all the coins to a new address in my wallet? Why are funds sent to and from my wallet associated and traceable? If someone sends me a wallet, is it mine, can it be trusted, why not? Why do I need to be connected to the internet to confirm my wallet balance? Why does my wallet file get bigger even if my balance gets smaller? Can I delete my old wallet if I create a new one? How can someone have stolen my money if I still have my wallet? What is an address, why don't I just use the same one?

All of these questions are asked - or perhaps should be asked. And the answer invariably contains the notion of keys. Why not call things what they are?: A private local keyring. Keys can be copied and deleted, wallets can not. People generally have multiple keys but one wallet, we can not hide addresses. Addresses are like safe deposit boxes. The analogy of address boxes and keys is easy to understand and very close to the digital reality.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it really is a

You might want to mention fees on the 'wallet' page. I was aware of fees and yet couldn't find it.

50 BTC is the reward for verifying a block. Within the block is a transaction from "nowhere" to a new address totaling 50 BTC (a gift from the block chain gods). Also within that block are numerous other transactions, all of which originated from some address(es) to new address(es) of various amounts collected from numerous unknown people.



And all of these transactions must be verified in a block before it is confirmed or accepted by the entire network.



Every valid transaction must be recorded within a block in order to be confirmed/accepted by the network.



Only one transaction is required. Though, what you describe is not a typical transaction. Typically a transaction is from one or more addresses from a single person to another address of another person and the remainder is send back to a new address of the first person (spare change).

Imagine you want to buy a chocolate for 8 pesos. You give a 5 peso coin and two 2 peso coins. The recipient returns a 1 peso coin. In this scenario you sent 9 coins from three 'addresses' to a single recipient who returned 1 coin to you (a new address). It's not a perfect analogy, but close..



A block is a collection of transactions. Each transaction is from some set of addresses to another set of addresses. The balances of addresses are 'spend'. Transactions are recorded in blocks and both of which after an hour or so of uncontested confirmation become part of the permanent record.



Perhaps you should wait for the above to gell before diving into pruning the blockchain.



You can create the transactions and you may choose to pay a transaction fee. If no miner bothers to lock your transactions in a block, then the network will never accept your transaction. Your transactions will be forever (or for a long long time) unconfirmed.

A transaction is just a line in a balance sheet something like:

AAA (which had 10 BTC) sends 6 BTC to BBB and 4 BTC to CCC

A block is a collection of transaction lines. The transactions and previous block are verified with a stamp of approval by a miner. This chain of blocks (verifying the previous) continues on linearly such that it becomes more and more difficult for any miner to reverse old blocks by claiming some alternate history of transactions.

The block chain is a bit like tradition, the older and more widely accepted, the more 'true' it becomes.

I've mentioned it in a live chat to luke warm response

AKA a bank run

Did he notice the cockroach lay eggs in his ear?

There are plenty of trust-based services on the LAN. High performance data-stores rarely authenticate and encrypt traffic, but rather assume the network is secure.

You need to trust that the node is in fact sending the transactions and not trying to identify you by your address balance requests (though ANY node can and may attempt that).

I'd like to see a simple onion network between nodes without Tor.

Don't we still have that right?

Perhaps we can fork a thread on licensing.

Lesser or not, I think the Affero licenses fit nicely within the bitcoin ecosystem. It would be excellent if the bitcoin community limited (or combined) the licenses used by its various projects. The Satoshi client uses MIT (3-clause BSD), but later projects seem to be focusing on the GPL family.

Is the community better served by sharing code or supporting proprietary businesses?

I've been trying to get Amnesty International to accept bitcoin. They have chapters in nearly every country. Considering they deal with issues in tyrannical societies, I would think bitcoin a good fit. Any suggestions?

I think a sufficiently innovative altchain wouldn't be recognizable as a bitcoin derivative. For example, a crypto-currency that doesn't use a blockchain at all, or a currency based on per-demand computational power, storage, bandwidth and credits.

I have a habit of setting stops/trailing and use BUY when I mean SELL or vise versa. I always just 'deal' with it as reversing the market order is more costly. It usually works to my advantage... except that one time...

Zhou, I do not think the trailing stops are working correctly.

My SELL stops are trailing too quickly/incorrectly. I set a SELL t-Stop at $3.8 an hour ago and it is up to $4.15 now, though the Mt. Gox market has only come down in that time.

That's interesting. If true, then the best way to move in and out of bitcoin is legitimate trade rather than via exchange market.

I was considering looking into PJAX due to your use. Maybe you could just remove it from the login page? I've also been hit by the SSL redirect, but have figured out how to compensate.

The only other minor annoyance, is the sorting... 4.2, 4.24, 4.22, 4.1, 4.18, 4.16, 4.14, 4.12, 4.08, which I've solved by always setting slightly not-round limits 4.199 or 4.201, for example.


If you set a SELL trailing stop at $3.8 and the market moves UP, then your trailing stop will move up. But the trailing stop will not move if the market moves down. Reverse all that for BUY trailing stops.

Smickles, has the price moved ABOVE the price at the time you set the trailing stop?

It is working for me.

A minor but constant annoyance: my browser does not remember my Bitcoinica username and password whenever my session expires (daily) and so I have to hunt for my super-secure password each time. Does anyone else experience this annoyance? What is it about my configuration or Bitcoinica's HTML that's not sticky?

Is there any domain registrar that supports bitcoin? Rob, with your new fame and support for Namecheap, perhaps you could suggest that they accept bitcoin. Perhaps you could make a note of it directly on your post.

Oh absolutely. I'm not defining summer and winter solstices from a meteorological perspective, only from a solar/astronomical perspective -- where the sun rises each morning. The equator has nothing to do with it. I am claiming that it is winter now everywhere north of the tropic of capricorn (23°26′S) where I believe the sun rises South of East each morning (or not at all in the Arctic). In six months it will be the opposite but from south of the tropic of cancer (23°26′N). And this perfectly demonstrates your point. The solstices are of little practical use within the 47 some degrees of the tropics where half of the Earth's population lives.

Note: I mixed up my tropics earlier. Maybe I'll draw a little picture.

Muchas gracias