Yes.

Actually, a number of major grocery stores already do online orders with home delivery. All we need to do is convince them to accept bitcoins as payment.

Why? The great thing about bitcoins is that anyone can accept them, with no limits.

Or delivered in refrigerated trucks.

Again, why? Not only is this trivial to do (customer presents the goods and their receipt, along with an address for the refund, and they get their bitcoins back), it's actually illegal not to do it in most jurisdictions.

Unless one of the dependencies conflicts with your current version of libc6, and APT decides the best way to resolve the situation is to uninstall libc6. The fact that the following command: appears more than once in my .bash_history would seem to indicate that Synaptic does not always know what the Hell it is doing.
</rant>

Fixed. Don't forget, order matters with the and operator. If the first operand evaluates to false, the second operand won't be evaluated at all, since the and operator is guaranteed to return false regardless of what the second operand is. This is why that line didn't cause an error when the Internet connection was detected successfully: the erroneous expression was never evaluated. The same thing happens with the or operater if the first operand is true.

Thank you.

Well I'm guessing (and this is pure speculation on my part) that you'd install it the same way you installed all the other dependencies for Armory? And Armory itself for that matter?

Don't put that in, he doesn't know what he's talking about. To say a currency is "backed" by something means that the issuer promises to exchange that currency for something at a certain exchange rate. eg, back when dollars were backed by gold, you could walk into any bank and exchange your dollars for actual gold. Bitcoins are not backed by the electricity or processing power used to create them, and as a matter of fact they're not backed by anything. Gold isn't backed by anything either, and neither is fiat money anymore. Bitcoins (and gold) have value because they are scarce (there's no way to produce more after the inital supply runs out) and because they are useful as a medium of exchange (you can buy things with them). That's it. They're not backed by anything nor do they have to be in order to be valuable.

It seems to work fine except for crashing in flames if it can't detect my crappy Internet connection:


So, uh, what's the package I need for it to work offline?

What exactly is the definition of "sale of alcohol" in your juristiction? I think you'll find that it does not actually require the medium of exchange to be legal tender (otherwise people would just use foreign currencies get around it). I think you'll also have a hard time convincing a judge that a fungible commodity (which is what bitcoin is) with the word "coin" in the name is not technically money.

Peut-être que oui. Quoi de mal à cela?

a. It's clearly a brilliant idea.
b. Bitcoin/MintChip exchanges will likely spring up within a day of MintChip being released.
c. Ah, well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad!

2^16 is always 65536, regardless of whether you count from 0 or from 1. The number is exactly 2^48/(2^16-1). I thought I could simplify things by saying it was 2^32, but that plan didn't seem to work as intended.

First of all, to back up your wallet, assuming you're using the standard client, find the wallet.dat file in your bitcoin directory (location depends on operating system) and copy it to a safe location. Given the amount of money you've got, you really should be backing up your wallet at regular intervals anyway, even if you don't plan on reinstalling anything, in case your hard drive goes kaput and you lose everything or something else bad happens.

However, you probably don't need to reinstall bitcoin. It sounds like your copy of the blockchain may be corrupt. Assuming you're using the standard bitcoin client, close bitcoin, backup the files blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat in your bitcoin directory to another directory (note that you'll need a spare 1.5 GB of disk space), delete the originals, then restart bitcoin. This will cause it to download the whole blockchain again from scratch.

If it can't download the blockchain again at all, then you've got a network problem, and you should copy the blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat files back (after closing bitcoin) so that you don't have to download the blockchain again after you fix it.

If it is able to download the blockchain again without any problems, see if it can get past the troublesome block this time around and update successfully. If so, then the problem was that your original copy of the blockchain was corrupt, and you can delete your backup of the corrupt files, because there's no point keeping them around.

Try sorting by number of votes rather than by date (this is why you shouldn't post when drinking).

Searching for public keys by email address is not reliable, as some people don't (and in some cases don't want to) have their public key on a keysever. Also, most keyservers don't verify keys, so it's all too easy for someone to upload a bogus key to the keyserver to prevent people from being able to receive their bitcoins (or steal the bitcoins, if they have access to the recipient's email). A better idea is to allow public key files to uploaded or copy/pasted, and/or specified by URL.

Also, I think you mean encrypt the message before sending. Signing it won't achieve anything.

Tracing transactions to IP addresses flat out doesn't work, since it only gives you the IP address of the node that relayed the transaction, not the node the issued it. For example, my most recent transaction was relayed by an IP address in Sverdlovsk, Russia which is almost, but not quite, on the other side of the world from my real location in Australia. I don't think there's any point in using Tor for Bitcoin. You can if you want, but I don't think it accomplishes anything.

There are two ways transactions can be traced, and Tor will not protect you from either of them: first, investigators could try to put names to bitcoin addresses, which could be done fairly easily if you buy or sell bitcoins using a non-anonymous payment method. Second, they can ignore bitcoin completely and focus on the physical delivery of the goods you're buying/selling with bitcoin. Any number of things could attract attention to your deliveries, and once they track the package to your location, you're busted, and they won't really care where the money came from.

For what purpose? As far as I can tell, the only reason the from address is needed at all is so that the person receiving the email has a chance of recognising the sender and not deleting the email on sight (after all, the email does look suspiciously like some sort of weird scam).

You think that's unwieldy? My wallet contains the equivalent of thousands of pennies. It's a real nuisance when I'm trying to pay the grocery bill. But that's nothing compared to my savings account. It contains millions of pennies. How do you suppose the bank keeps track of them all? It boggles the mind!

There are currently about 9 million bitcoins in existence today, and the current exchange rate is about $5 per bitcoin. So someone could just buy all the bitcoins in existence for around $45 million, right? Wrong! First of all, not all of the bitcoins in existence are for sale on the markets. If you offered to buy everyone's bitcoins for $5 each, you'd only end up with a tiny fraction of the bitcoins in circulation, because most people just aren't interested in selling their bitcoins. At least not for $5. If you want to buy more bitcoins, you'll need to offer a higher price to convince the more stubborn sellers to part with their precious coins. So the more you want to buy, the higher the price becomes. Looking at it another way, if someone buys some bitcoins, the bitcoins still in circulation become rarer (because there are less of them) and therefore more valuable. That's just supply and demand. There's just no way anyone could buy all the bitcoins.

The other thing to keep in mind is that bitcoins can be divided into as small units as you like. Even if you own the very last bitcoin on the planet (the other bitcoins having been bought by an insane trillionaire with apparently nothing better to do with his money than to try to collapse an economy), and that single remaining bitcoin is worth (say) a billion dollars (but you're not going to sell it to that evil trillionaire, oh no, not even for a billion dollars), you'll still be able to buy a burrito for 0.00000001 bitcoins, no problem (if for no other reason than that the seller does want to sell his small piece of the billion-dollar bitcoin).

One last thing: not all of the bitcoins that are going to exist, exist yet. Even if someone did manage to buy all the bitcoins currently in existence, new bitcoins are constantly being mined, and miners are under no obligation to sell their coins, for any price.

A few usability pointers regarding the email messages (keeping in mind that they will be read by people who may not have heard of Bitcoin before):

Your from field should read: "Coinapult" <emailaddress>
It is very important that you format your from field like this.

Your subject line should read something like: $sender has sent you some bitcoins!
Since the whole point of Coinapult is to send bitcoins to people who don't know what Bitcoin is, and by extension would have no idea what Coinapult is, saying "You've been hit with the Coinapult" does not convey any useful information, and would most likely be interpreted as spam due to the weirdness of it.

The body of the email should:
* Start out by saying $sender has sent you $amount bitcoins using Coinapult.
* Then explain what bitcoins are, in the simplest terms possible (but no simpler).
* Explain that if they don't already have a bitcoin wallet, they'll need to either download a bitcoin client or sign up for an online wallet service; and provide instructions for doing so.
* Then provide the link to claim the bitcoins.
* Provide an assurance that no fee is required to receive the bitcoins and that no personal information will be requested at any time. (Otherwise most people will see it as yet another "Get free money now! After paying a large transaction fee upfront" scam)
* Inform them that if the bitcoins are not claimed within 30 days they will be refunded to the sender.
* Then finally put the sender's message.

Yes, this is an issue (and an extremely serious one), but judging by the number of companies (including banks ) that send passwords and other sensitive data in plaintext email, and the fact that almost nobody uses or has even heard about PGP, I'm forced to conclude that nobody actually cares about security in the slightest, even if their money is at stake. The only difference here is that bitcoins are anonymous, so now people can steal your money with virtually no chance of being caught. I don't know what to suggest either (apart from lamenting the typical person's apathetic attitude towards email security).

Looks like HostGator (their hosting provider) got wise to their little scheme. In retrospect, it might have been an idea to just tell them what their servers were being used for, but I just assumed they were in on it the whole time. Why else would anyone use a commercial hosting company for a highly public hack? HostGator doesn't accept bitcoins, either, so I wonder if the hackers were also dumb enough to pay for the hosting with an account in their own name... now that would be ironic.

Each bitcoin is divisible down to 8 decimal places. There is nothing "unwieldy" about using these fractional values, you just use different units, eg 1 mBTC = 0.001 BTC, 1 µBTC = 0.000001 BTC, etc. It's not like we have to actually mint really tiny coins or anything.

I just tried deliberately claiming coins with an invalid bitcoin address, and got this unhelpful error message:
Which implies the system successfully broadcast the bogus transaction! Fortunately, the coins didn't just disappear, and I was able to later claim the coins with a valid address, but there should really be server-side validation of bitcoin addresses, allowing the site to display a more, well, helpful error message, explaining that the bitcoin address the user entered was invalid and that they may have mistyped it, and ask them to re-enter it.