The main differences between block headers going from a miner to the other are:

1) Coinbase transaction address (the address you submit to receive the 50BTC reward IF you hit the jackpot)
2) Included transactions. There are no rules whatsoever regarding this. As a miner you can integrate any transaction that you wish, even fake, corrupt or non standard ones. This is why the network can be attacked by someone with alot of processing power, because he can add in transactions for coins he already spent, as long as he gets to solve a block.
3) Timestamps. The global time accessible on the network isn't precise. You have to add a timestamp to your block header, and this one is a median of time values recovered from neighbor nodes which need to be within 70 minutes of each other to be considered valid.
4) Client version. Some people don't like to update heh.

=O le carroto.

The moon.

The network evaluates the hashing speed every 2016 blocks. It then adjusts the difficulty to achieve a target of 6 blocks per hour or 2016 blocks completed over the span of 2 weeks (14 days).

Naturally, if the 2016 blocks of a span are computed faster than in 2 weeks, the next span will see its difficulty rise accordingly, and the other way around if it took over 2 weeks to cover the 2016 blocks. There has been 2 occurrences of difficulty reduction so far IIRC. The last one was early-mid April I think.

Unless you're bitching at the manufacturer cuz the car won't move when you press both pedals at the same time, in which case I call PEBCAC

2 choses:

1) La chaine est publique donc meme si il est possible pour une institution banquaire de mélanger tous ses dêpots sous differentes addresses, il est tout aussi possible de savoir le total des fonds dont la banque dispose. La banque peut toujours essayée de passer par un intermédiaire supplementaire ou d'échanger directement ses clefs privées avec une autre institution, mais ces pratiques sont incriminantes et tendent toutes vers la meme conclusion:

   Bien que la reserve fractionnaire est evidemment praticable sur le Bitcoin comme n'importe qu'elle autre monnaie, la transparance du Bitcoin va vraisemblablement forcer les banques à déclarer publiquement la mise en place de reserves fractionnaires sur les dêpots, au risque de heurter leur crédibilité au prés du publique. Surtout, ce que l'on vera, ce seront des institutions financières qui pratiqueront la reserve totale sur tous leurs depots et accomptes.

2) Avec le Bitcoin, on a pas besoin d'une banque pour avoir un "compte". On peut directement recevoir son salaire sur une addresse Bitcoin, on peut payer electroniquement sans l'intermédiare d'une banque et ainsi de suite.

eh ben c'est du beau travail le service au professionel...

The only deterrent technological aspect to Bitcoin is the mining/proof of work concept that secures the block chain. Thankfully, you don't have to know a single thing about it to use Bitcoin to your heart's content.

The guy trying to play the BTC market doesn't have a lender of last resort, the Fed, that also enacts the fractional reserve banking act in his favor. In the sub prime crisis, you had financial institutions speculating with money that wasn't theirs on a bubble they created themselves while the Fed ensured them it was all good and that it would cover for the losses (and it did). That's called moral hazard IIRC. The guy playing on BTC is risking his own money and won't be covered by public funds if he messes up.

Inflation supports rampant debt and malinvestement, it doesn't have much to do with consumerism, which is mainly a subjective factor derived from quality of life. In that case, you'll witness more consumerism under BTC than fiat.

If it involves idiots crying about early adopters and deflation, indeed...

Well I'm glad I never bought any game gold, but I kinda feel bad about persecuting farmers now ='(

And I was looking forward to what currency they use in Hell ='(

How is he going to speculate upon anything if he's the only buyer in the market for the prices he himself pushed upwards. If he drops his BTC, the prices will only go down. Unless his master plan is to throw his money at BTC holders. In which case, I say go for it.


And your savings valuating just by sitting there.

Then you know you're in for a nice ride.


There has been a legion of thread discussing deflation, you should look those up before thinking deflation is outright bad. There is not limit to the divisibility of BTC, so I don't see how a 21M cap would doom the currency.


Mixing "cosmetic" decision making rule in the core code based on user action is a good recipe for security holes

Also, real stats...

A thing about early adopters:

2 things can attract you to Bitcoins:

1) The outstanding price: You are mainly showing interest in Bitcoin because of the value it managed to cumulate. As such, you wouldn't have bought in when pizza's were being sold for tens of thousands of BTC, so you don't deserve to rant about it nor do you have any right to pretend to that profit.

2) The usefulness: You see Bitcoin as proper store of value and a potential currency that is both economically sound, technologically innovative, and may very well change the face of the world. As such, you understand that early adopters deserve their profit, that the time at which you bought into Bitcoin is not relevant to your ability to use to its full potential, and that even today, you're still an early adopter and you're in for a ride.

Nah we're cool, Vlad's mining array will go Skynet on him before that happens, so we'll have proper warning.

It's funny how this type of thread is getting more and more outrageous as we get through the difficulty spans. Full caps this time around. I'm expecting 1337 speak and a bunch of ~~~~ in 2000 blocks. Anyone taking bets?

Any PCI-e card will work on that mobo.

The market is way too thin right now, and the rate of adoption is expected to be exponential so you won't see long term stability (1+ year) until BTC is making the front page of some popular daily newspaper in every country of the world