Don't feel too bad, at least you thought it was a glitch, most people think it's actual hashing power that magically made its way to the network.

Keep in mind that the majority of miners, as the majority of long term investors, are 2 completely different crowd. While a few might think of swinging between mining and buying depending on the market, most just don't. Miners that see the difficulty skyrocket will stop buying mining gear, true, but their long term planning is more likely to be about selling their hardware and BTC and exit the market altogether.

For the rules of supply and demand to be applied properly, you need an omniscient crowd. When you see the amount of people that are mining in DeepBit, it seems obvious that a good portion of the mining crowd just doesn't think things through about their profitability.

Difficulty may and should slow down the gearing up, but a slow down in the mining race would affect the price more by outright reducing supply rather than encourage swapping around.

Bitcoin is a currency on its own. This is yet another layer on top of fiat. Nothing to see here, move along.

The block contained a transaction of 20BTC too. The problem is that all the transactions were identical. I'm not savvy with this but if the miner indeed hashed a fresh block with the same transactions in it, it seems he simply included the 20BTC transaction on his own, instead of creating a new tx from the API. Don't quote me on this but I presume the API would have provided the tx with a new hash, which his included tx didn't have, and the problem would have been avoided.

From my understanding this isn't a case of hash collision, both blocks were mined with exactly the same transactions list. This is why the Merkle root is identical.

The only pool that redistributes fees is LukeJr's. The fee are still meaningless for now. They are anywhere between 0 and 0.05 BTC per block on average. Fees are expected to overcome block reward at the earliest 6-7 years from now, when block will reward 6.25 BTC each.

And prints comics about the holy Bitcoin bubble, mother of all bubbles.

There's a pattern I've witnessed in here. Goes like this: Someone comes in here writing a caustic critic on Bitcoin. Whether the critic is well written or not, it often more than not delve into political implications. People argue against the political statement, critic and his defenders stray from the political point to spill into some heartfelt tear shedding emotional rant about anarchists being at the crossing point between stupidity, youth, irrationality (oh the irony) and whatever else they care to mix in. From there on, shit goes monkey ass.

I think if it wasn't for nursing ill thoughts towards the government and the way things are run, this project wouldn't have been born. If there is motivation in frustration, I think that everyone from the developers themselves to the first day adopters have joined at least partially because of that frustration and the need to break away from this enforced nonsense. In sum, I'm describing everyone who is somehow responsible for the state in which Bitcoin is now.

As such, I think this difference should be clearly expressed and nurtured in here. There is no need to register here to use Bitcoins. The mining and technical forums are devoid of politics. The loon fest and flame wars are limited to the general, economic and off topic forums. I say, let them be!

Is this a classic "bubble, it's gonna pop, run away" thread?

You guys need to take it easy. To get outraged by some loon who goes around spouting his murder fantasies is not befitting of an adult. This is the internet. There are content parsing practices that are your sole responsibility in here. Don't feed the troll, don't read the people you don't respect, don't take part in threads you don't value and so on. To blame the whole Bitcoin community for it is childish. To demand for the content you can't stand to be "moderated" is borderline whimsical. It's akin to hating on Facebook or Youtube because you stumbled upon an religious fanatic spouting hateful nonsense. This is a public forum, you don't like some of the content, simply ignore it.


From my standpoint, I think eMansipater is already too tolerant and welcoming with pontificating hypocrites thinking they hold the keys to the universe and the block chain because they read half the front page on the wiki and were told by their grandma that inflation is golden, so you people better cherish that cause you won't get it any better from anybody else in here.

Lastly, to delve in the spiral of forum ethics in this thread only serves to bloat the discussion, the topic of which is for the community to offer new comers answers as to why this critic of Bitcoin is fallacious. You want to discuss ethics and moderation, there's a meta forum for it.

Now to get back on topic, the DoS attack is a joke, and so far the only technical issue this guy is able to raise against Bitcoin, and if I got it right, he states he needs around a million USD to DoS the network down. That casts a huge doubt over his actual skills, knowing Botnets and LOIC are pretty much free of charge. It always amuses me when people speak of how easily they could tear down the network but won't take it to the test net. This gets even better considering the amount of valid technical issues discussed on the forum, which that man obviously didn't bother researching.

His economical and political critics have been debated to death long before Bitcoin even existed...

You should also factor in how long you intent to hold on your coins. The figures you provided imply you sell your production on the spot. These parameters change if you hold on your BTC, although it naturally carries more risks.

I thought you were referring to the 50BTC reward.

The independent class makes the transaction list upload to the pool simpler since you have dedicated code to maintain and access this information. Naturally the pool needs to know which transactions the users have included in their block in order to verify the hash. The TX ID communication thing will work fine for this. The pool needs extra memory to maintain this transaction list, but it can be reduced to a certain extent:

1) only maintaining TX per ID, and per non included TX.
2) the class can send a "worker" group ID to the pool to put all the workers running from the same COM object (same machine or even same IP if you link your miners to one IP within your own LAN) under the same list in order to maintain a single TX list per machine and/or IP.

Lastly using IDs ensures the TX have been broadcasted to the network before hand. No shady business that way.

Slight nuance. Asymptotic means tends towards the asymptote. It doesn't mean it will achieve asymptote value.

$2 for power a day seems little low, the rest is sound. You can expect the difficulty rises to calm down if the price doesn't go up 2 weeks from now.

The pool, who else? The header is created with the pool's address.

That's some insane electricity price you got there, are you sure it's not 0.09 USD/kWh?

This is why it would be better to come up with a class independent of bitcoind, that will create the block header and provide the work on its own. This prevents modifications to the core elements while it allows to:

1) Skip bitcoind entirely for pool miners as it is done right now. Keeping things simple is always a plus. It also ensures miners aren't nodes in the network, as it is now.
2) Simply have the miners getwork() from that class, let's say as a COM object. Then as said before, the class can determine pool version and outright bypass its main functions if it is dealing with a classic pool, or provide the work as a modded pool would need it to. This allows miner developers to easily implement the change, while keeping it independent from further improvement related to pure number crunching.

You forget the increasing difficulty. There's no guaranty that the actual price to difficulty ratio will be maintained. If anything logic dictates that this ratio tends toward smaller and smaller profit margins, as people compete over the network.

You'd be feeding that work to yourself. The public key and difficulty are broadcasted by the pool.

Anyone can modify the code, but no one has the guaranty that the user base will update to their modified code. And what concurrence does Bitcoin have? A rule cannot exist without force to apply it. Policy makers hold that authority over their respective currency and economy because they have the full force of their government to back their decisions. Bitcoin is impervious to these forces, so how are they to be considered exactly?


That pattern is finite. At 21 million coins, no more minting.

You say you want to prune the chain? How would you deal with lost coins then? Do you intent to simply replicate old transactions in newer blocks? Wouldn't that hinder the demurrage fee calculation? The light weight client will eventually see the day so I don't think the whole block chain download will remain a problem in the mid term. The only reason a person with 50 BTC imposes less on the network than someone with 400k BTC is the flat fee. Reflecting volume on the fee would help against that in a better fashion imo.

From my understanding, spread out long term holdings will still have a small impact compared to live, broken down transactions constantly creating new coins to pay for odds amounts. I agree that "traders" are already paying for that service, but so have hoarders. Technologically, the spot these people have "purchased" in the block chain doesn't require further maintenance. The idea of demurrage has been brought up as an alternative to lacking fees, but I think the very concept of "simulated maintenance fee " vs actual maintenance costs needs a thread on its own before we can really figure out where to go with demurrage.

At any rate, we can't establish now that fees won't be reward enough to maintain adequate security in a few decades from today. Miners already have control over transaction inclusion, I think it is wiser to first wait for a tangible hint of whether or not the market can maintain high security naturally before we talk of modding the source.