Just broke 9!

There can't be any very accurate timing, no, but it should be possible to track the average time per block and extrapolate. But that's beside the point, just an accurate % done relative to the last block at startup is what's desired.

We're not interested in time guesstimates, but in progress. Right now, progress is shown starting from the genesis block, but it would be much more useful to show it starting from the last downloaded block before syncing started.

GuinnessBIT, this has been bothering me a lot to, and I agree with your proposal completely. I don't know what the others are on about, this should be fixable. The client knows the block depth of the newest block it has, and it supposedly knows the depth of the newest block, or it can make quite an accurate guess at least. Those two numbers should be all that's needed to implement the much more meaningful progress bar.

The criminal code should be a general reflection of how most people in a society perceives right and wrong. Yes. And sometimes those perceptions change faster than the laws, and in those cases laws need to be changed. But until that happens, you're still a criminal if you break those laws. So break them, and wear your criminal title like a badge of honour. It's called civil disobedience, but you're still a criminal. You don't get to personally decide who's a criminal and who's not. And that's my point.

Of course I would, because I could be criminally punished for it. That's what crime means. It has nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with what laws say you can't do. Some laws are unjust and it's understandable if people break them and don't feel bad about it, but that doesn't mean breaking them does not constitute a crime.

That's not easy or even possible for anyone, and age has nothing to do with it. I'm sorry if you're battling with agoraphobia or something, but you may have to leave the house in order to get bitcoins.

True, but most newbies will go to bitcoin.org and just get whatever's there, which is currently a full-node client. Their first impressions will be accordingly. Either the reference client needs an SPV mode, or bitcoin.org needs to list more alternative clients and explain the difference.

Fra i fjor skal nordmenn betale moms på kjøp av elektroniske tjenester av utenlandske tilbydere. Jeg lurer på om dette også angår handel med bitcoin. Dersom jeg kjøper bitcoin på f.eks. Mt Gox, må jeg deklarere disse på noen måte? Hva burde jeg oppgi til myndighetene når jeg overfører penger til utlandet?

Onion addresses are derived from the service's public key, so like bitcoin addresses, it's not easy to make a very readable address. SR already has a pretty long vanity address, and making an even longer one would be extremely time consuming (probably years or decades). Teach your grandmother about browser bookmarks instead.

This is only true if the obfsproxy software is used, and it's very new, immature and rarely used so far. For most purposes, Tor is completely unavailable for use in China.

So you changed your mind after posting and want to blame it on being "sarcastic", fine with me. I'm glad we agree now.

Crime is defined by what's in the law books.

That's a bad translation. This forum is for speculation, and kentrolla speculates that much of the bitcoin economy is in drug trade, and that the SR redesign will attract more users to them and thus to bitcoin. It's not an endorsement of anything, it's a statement of belief in how things work. I don't think I agree with it, but then I don't agree with most things in this crazy subforum. No need to jerk your knees.

I took the liberty of adding your fine collection to the Research article on the wiki, and reorganized the list of articles there into a nice sortable table. IMHO it's a more natural place for these kinds of things, and I hope you will join me in maintaining the article.

I'm struggling to understand how this is not viewed as an impending catastrophe for Bitcoin. 1MB can only hold so many transactions, and there are already some blocks that are half that size. That would seem to mean that transaction volume can barely double from today's puny number before transactions are queued up for ages or even discarded unless they have juicy transaction fees. Of course a hardfork is highly undesirable, but don't you think it will have to happen, eventually?

You mean "theses", which is the plural of "thesis" :-)

Awesome collection, I've already started plowing through these.

So you don't have equipment for a full client. In the future, you'll be in the vast majority. Just run an SPV client, nothing bad about that.

I would like there to be more about this:

I suspect this has to do with the maximum size of a block, which I understand is 1MB. I recently learned that this limit cannot be increased without a hardfork, a change in the bitcoin protocol. The passage seems to trivialize this.

I think that's a too simplistic attitude. Bandwidth doesn't follow Moore's law; instead it often regresses to where many people now suffer severe bandwidth limitations, peering partners start arguing about money, and powerful companies fight network neutrality. Instead of sitting back and waiting for bandwidth to become ubiquitous and limitless, Bitcoin development must be focused on scaleability.