License plates as the new physical currency FTW.

In general there's an engineering tradeoff with encapsulation. If you encapsulate everything possible to the maximum extent, you end up with a bloated piece of software that's difficult to understand (simply because it's so much bigger).

On the other hand, failing to encapsulate certain things leads to software that's less malleable; harder to change without breaking things.

I think there's a lot to be said for adding encapsulation to those parts of the code that actually get worked on, and adding it at the time when the benefit becomes apparent (such as the example that you give).

So I suggest that you write two patches. The first patch, to encapsulate CTxOut::nValue, can be submitted to Bitcoin. The second patch will be for your own purposes, to implement demurrage or whatever it is you need to do.

I'm a happy user. I get paying ads on my website about two-thirds of the time. The rest of the time I get the default OpFab advertisement.

Right now it seems a bit strange to have ads running on my website for "Islamic Bank of Bitcoin" because my website isn't their ideal demographic, but hey it's a good way to earn a small but steady trickle of bitcoins.

In the long run, Bitcoin is either going to be worth nothing, or a very large amount. So I figure it doesn't matter too much what it does in the meantime.

The state will naturally try to interpret it with current laws. If you don't want to irritate the state, stop scratching it.

Is it farmers who are crop-dusting? They need to fly low. In my part of the world the low-flyers are military jets doing pilot training.

Try posting something constructive instead of an ad-hominem attack. Besides, I'm only four years old.

I'm not even referring to scamming, just to incompetence. If a business can make money when they do the right thing, and not lose money when they do the wrong thing, there's no incentive for them to stop doing the wrong thing. But if the business loses money when they do the wrong thing, they'll very promptly stop doing the wrong thing.


I was going to use Witcoin as an example of a business that doesn't seem to be evil, but then it occurred to me that you might be assuming that business == corporation. As I use the words, a business provides goods or services in a voluntary way that benefits itself and its customers. A corporation depends on the power of the state to protect its profits whilst socializing any losses (i.e. distributing them to others). In theory, and sometimes in practice, a corporation can also be a legitimate business.

You mentioned Sony, which illustrates my earlier point. If Sony doesn't lose money by installing rootkits, they will keep installing rootkits. If Sony makes a financial loss by installing rootkits, they will very quickly stop installing rootkits.

Notice how lop-sided that article is.

The article explains (correctly in my opinion) that if an ATM gives you too much money, the bank is entitled to get that money back from you. But if the ATM pays out less than you asked for, "getting this money back could prove tricky".

I would really like to see a Bitcoin Adjudication service set up that, after considering the evidence presented before it, issues judgements not about statist law but about honour, ethic and reputation.

It would then be up to the perpetrator to decide whether to restore their honour. If they didn't, it would be up to the community to ostracise them. In a well-defined community, ostracism is a very powerful mechanism.

Here's what the "$1$" prefix means. Don't read anything more than this into the "$1$" prefix.

Originally, MtGox stored hashed passwords in their database. A few years ago, this was considered reasonably secure, but the development and distribution of "rainbow tables" made hashed passwords insecure. (A "rainbow table" is essentially a reverse-lookup which takes you from a hashed password to a candidate unhashed password.)

In response to this, many websites (including MtGox) upgraded their systems to store salted hashed passwords instead of plain hashed passwords. This makes basic rainbow tables unusable for password cracking.

The problem is: how do you upgrade the existing passwords to use the new salting scheme? You don't know the existing passwords; you only know their hash. So you wait until the user logs on with a password that matches the hash. At that point, the user has just entered their actual password so you calculate the password's salted hash, and store that in the database in place of the unsalted hash.

A common technique (which was used at MtGox) represents the salted hashes with a prefix of "$1$", to distinguish it from unsalted hashes and to identify the salting/hashing scheme.

tl; dr:  From the presence of the "$1$" prefix we can deduce that the user logged in one or more times after MtGox changed to salted hashes. From the absence of the "$1$" prefix we can deduce that the user created their account before MtGox changed to salted hashes, and did not log in to that account between that time and when the password file was leaked.

1. The same characteristics that make Bitcoin work well for honest people, also make it work well for dishonest people.

2. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about whether/how Bitcoin will be tolerated/attacked by government discourages honest users of Bitcoin to a greater extent than it discourages dishonest users of Bitcoin.

3. Therefore, society would benefit if law enforcement would focus on CP and the like, rather than the currency used to facilitate it, and if the use of Bitcoin itself is legally unencumbered.

4. This is unlikely to happen.

Charles Peralo of the Seasteading Institute mentions Bitcoin as a preferred currency for seasteds, at 8:25 in this interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3axaN1ewHo

Does anyone in the northwest of England want to sell a car for bitcoins?

I'm looking for something small like a Toyota Yaris or Aigo, from a reliable marque (i.e. not European-made), and not in a dark colour. The car's age is not critical, provided the price is appropriate.

Send me a PM, or post here, to let me know what you're selling.

I think it's much more likely that your tax money will be spent to attack it.

I like the term "flat money".

Probably 99% of the population has no idea what "fiat money" means, yet they all know about "flat money" (ink printed onto flattened pieces of dead trees).

Paco's excuse is so strange.

There are many people at this forum who don't yet understand why the 21 million coin limit is not a problem, and how Bitcoin could function with absolutely any pre-specified limit, but Paco Ahlgren has the knowledge, intelligence and background to understand this perfectly, and I'm sure he does understand it.

Very, very odd.

I'm sure you also have a little fear that next year someone will say "why did I sell it for such a low price?".

Satoshi always used tor and an anonymising email service, so it seems unlikely that he would have chosen to reveal his identity to Paco.