At some point the big mining pools will provide a service to merchants. If the transaction carries a sufficient fee, the miners will certify that they have seen the transaction and that they will include it in the next block if they are the ones to generate that block.

That way, merchants can gain "good enough" assurance that the transaction they have seen is "the good one and not the double spend".

I thought 42 meant "I am Satoshi!".

What happens to your bitcoins if the device breaks?

What you are seeing is only the first Trough of Disillusionment.

Gotta love the way the Economist map labelelled Libya as "low risk" for social unrest.

1. Satoshi would not have written a blog post about Bitcoin in a non-anonymous place.

2. Paco has not just deleted his Bitcoin blog post. He seems to have deleted both of his blogs and is redirecting the domains to his "Discipline Book" site. Very odd.

If you write a client that implements the currently-disabled script operators, your client can interoperate gracefully with existing clients.

Your client can connect to existing clients. Standard clients will not relay any non-standard transactions that they receive from your client, so you need to connect to at least one willing node. For example, luke-jr operates a node that will relay non-standard transactions.

You will want to get your non-standard transactions into a block. There are some operators who will mine blocks that include non-standard transactions. Non-standard transactions will take longer to get into the block chain (a few hours rather than about ten minutes) because not every miner will hash them.

Once your non-standard transactions are in the block chain, they don't cause problems. Clients that don't know about them will still accept the block, but will just ignore the individual transactions that they don't understand. The counterparties to the transactions that use your script operators will of course use a client that recognizes them.

And when your script operators have been demonstrated to be useful and proven to be safe, they are likely to be incorporated into the standard client.

There are already some non-standard transactions in the block chain, and the existing clients cope with them just fine.

CPU mining is only removed from the GUI interface. You can still CPU mine by starting bitcoin (or bitcoind) with the -gen option.

I think it is you who is taking IXcoin too seriously!

You don't need to charge VAT until your turnover is above some large amount, something above £50000 per year. By the time you reach that level, someone will have worked out how VAT applied to Bitcoin businesses.

I suggest you go to the newsagent and get the magazines for market traders. They are full of ads for suppliers who will give good discounts on reasonably small orders.

1. Buy some bitcoins.
2. Do something newsworthy so that Google Trends will rise.
3. Sell bitcoins.
4. Profit!

It's surely living dangerously to include the word "bank" in your service name.

The mybitcoin site says the claim form will be up for 30 days. So what's going to happen to all the BTC left over, from people who haven't visited the site in 30 days?

This great TED Talk isn't even really "off-topic", because it shows that you can lose your bitcoins to a hacker and still be happy. I hope allinvain is paying attention!

It would be best for Tom to distribute all the Bitcoins as best he can, THEN to call in the receivers. Otherwise, I predict that the Receiver's fees will be about equal to the value of the coins, and depositors will get nothing. That's how it tends to work when a small business is wound up.

Or a man (or woman) can post a bounty for a developer to enhance the software.

Indeed. But it sounds plausible enough and soothing enough that people who haven't thought about it deeply will buy into it.

Thank you, twobitcoins and gmaxwell, for the pointing to the actual code and the actual block. Much better than speculation!

Satoshi always acknowledged that it was a trade-off.

If you make the blocks too frequent, you get more cases where two blocks are generated at nearly the same time. Due to network propagation delays, this can cause temporary splits in the block chain.

On the other hand, if you make blocks too infrequent, it takes too long for a transaction to become essentially irrevocable.

There are going to be lots of rallies and lots of crashes before Bitcoin stabilizes somewhat. Some of them will make last month's rally and crash seem insignificant by comparison.