It wouldn't help here. The verifier just checks that the code matches the published code.

.  Twenty minute blocks for four weeks is hardly "dysfunctional" esp since blocks that long or longer happen with fair regularity.

Just a minor plea: Please don't build more address generators that don't use compressed keys.  Compressed keys are faster to generate and uncompressed ones bloat the network.

Uh. Right. We decline to list one of the Foundation founders and board members as a press contact, and this proves that there is no separation.  I think this is the point where I'm supposed insert one of those meme images.

**facepalm**

Lamport is fine.

Quantum computation does not give an exponential speedup in the general case. It can not solve arbitrary  problems that take 2^N time on a classical computer.  For general non-linear search (which is _most things_) quantum computation is theorized to give at least and at most a sqrt() speedup,  in other words something that takes 2^N operations on a classical computer takes 2^(N/2) operations on a sufficiently large quantum computer.   This means that e.g. for a hash or block cipher you can double the number of bits and get back to where you started in terms of operation count.

There are some problems like factoring and the related discrete-log problem which can be expressed in a way which has a special periodic structure which has much greater speedup, but this is not usual.  It's why it's believed that RSA and ECDSA will not be strong against large QC's.

All this is predicated on "sufficiently large" QC's which may actually turn out to be physically impossible to construct, e.g. the noise level or coherence time my degraded exponentially in the number of qbits based on some yet undiscovered issues... so who knows.

Fortunately the way Bitcoin is constructed we are already somewhat hardened against quantum computers: When you use Bitcoin correctly and only use each address once the public key is only known for the brief window between announcement and mining, limiting the time under which a ECDSA attack could happen. The script system is flexible and we could introduce quantum-computer secure signatures at any point in time in a backwards compatible way, and start running them in-parallel with ECDSA signatures.

Unfortunately, while I'm a great fan of lamport the signatures are between 16KiB and 65KiB (for 128 and 256 bits of QC security, respectively).  Basically a 150 fold increase in transaction size and bandwidth.  Imagine a blockchain of 1TB instead of 7GB now. While we'd introduce them if QCs started to look like they might become an actual threat in the next decade, they just aren't viable absent that kind of threat.

The structure of the foundation is described on the website and the bylaws are online. The foundation is a 501(c)(6) trade organization— like a chamber of commerce— not a charity, which is why they aren't listed on guidestar.  All of this information is readily available online.

Basically The Bitcoin Foundation is a Bitcoin "boosters club" created by businesses and individual members who cooperate to do whatever they like to help and promote Bitcoin.  It doesn't administer or run Bitcoin in any capacity, except to the extent that its participants are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.  (The separation between Bitcoin.org and the foundation is, in fact, nicely illustrated by this thread).
 

It's listed right on the Bitcoin.org site, click developers.

Obviously Satoshi is not so active anymore.

Please spare some patience and some courtesy for people who are spending their time trying to improve things. I think he's been doing a good job listening trying to balance various views and he does not deserve the hostility being directed at him in this thread.

Nope. It doesn't have that property.

Because you still owe taxes on that transaction.

Because getting prosecuted for tax evasion is far far more miserable.

This thread is borderline off-topic for this sub-forum. Or rather, I think it's off-topic but there isn't a subforum that it would be more on-topic in.

It also begins with a misrepresentation of the expected performance of quantum computers: They are not even theorized to provide an exponential speedup in the general case. (If it did lamport wouldn't be strong against QC either)

There is no way in hell that I'm going to sticky it.

Eligius appeared to trigger some cgminer/Avalon bug once two days ago, it was work-around within 20 minutes of it happening. You sure seem to be prompt with repeating old information about issues everyone else has had.
Making coinbase payments has ~nothing to do with a pool's payout granularity policy. Ironically, the best known coinbase paying pool (eligius) produces a far smaller amount of small payments than many large pools which will happily make daily payments of 0.01 btc.  You can still keep the overall bulk of the coins in coinbase payments while still batching small payouts— the result is that pool only ends up carrying the sum of yet-unpaid small miners instead of a big wallet.

Graet has clicked the report to mods button and asked that the misleading subject line been changed and complaining that this was sticked.  The subject is actually just copied verbatim from the ozcoin IRC channel topic.  I wouldn't have needed to post this if Ozcoin sent out a broadcast message to miners at the time they updated their IRC topic to say mining was a donation (and I did subsequently ask Graet to send out such a message, but was told that he was unable).

In any case, I don't know what to change the subject line to since Graet didn't offer an alternative in his post above.

I believe only BTC, but I suggest asking in IRC for more details.

As some are aware after some financial problems and a hacking incident ozcoin's BTC service is apparently not in service.  According to the prior update on the their IRC channel all continued BTC mining is being taken as donations.

I thought some people might appreciate this being made more visible.

(And perhaps— take the moment to remind people that Solo mining and P2Pool don't carry systemic risks of central pool operators getting hacked; and that pools that do coinbase payments generally have less theft exposure then other kinds of centralized pools)

This thread— clownshopped josh and all— has almost nothing to do with custom hardware. Shame shame.

This has almost nothing to do with custom hardware.

What happened? Things were going so well around here.

I note: People paying 75 BTC for a 10GH/s 110nm ASIC miner.

Well, if you want to help Satoshi out,  go build a nice system for anonymously participating in something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0

I wish this were true, but the feedback I've seen constantly is that many people are insulted and angered by the small amounts they get from a single small mining setup, even some who were told what to expect going into it... even when the amounts they get will actually become non-trivial when accumulated over weeks of 24/7 mining.

There are people who find it fun, but it's certainly not everyone.

Humans are a funny breed. They seem to be demotivated by the fact that someone else is making 100x more even when that person has >100x more operating costs!

I'm now not aware of anyone making devices without selling them. (The one party I was aware of was convinced to change their practices— consider, if they don't sell devices their consolidations may threaten the decentralized security assumptions of Bitcoin— even if this doesn't immediacy debase the coins they produce the community may change the PoW and make their hardware worthless, there are some subtle reasons why changing the PoW is more viable than you might guess).

Small devices should be available soon in a number of forms.  The fact that the first major wave of deployments will be large devices also gives some advantage to smaller participants in the long run, since they won't be saddled with big investments in 110nm infrastructure. (Not to mention, that 110nm infrastructure will probably eventually resold to people who can use the waste heat for low prices)

It's my personal hope that the somewhat reduced access to the relevant equipment will be offset from decreased competition by people who are stealing resources to mine and as a result be at least a wash in terms of equality of access.

I am continually very concerned by this, but I don't think the deployment of ASIC is by far the biggest threat to the distributed nature of Bitcoin.  I think the far bigger threats are that almost all mining is done through a few centralized "pools" and that fewer and fewer users run actual network nodes that independently validate the rules of the system— instead using hosted wallets and various kinds of thin clients.   If your highly casual GPU miners are just blindly selling their computing power to a pool, it doesn't contribute much to the distributed nature of the system. (It does make the economy more distributed, but they can do that by buying coins).


The sales from one hardware vendor alone (avalon) are right now somewhat over 1500 68GH/s units as I understand it, this is enough hash to replace the entire hashrate we had from GPUs and FPGAs in January five times over. The belief is that BFL has sold many more than this.

I would expect this to lower costs for an attacker to reorganize the chain to conflict transactions by giving him choice of hardware.

This would make _validation_ expensive too. A shame, as the tiny scrypt size in LTC doesn't really achieve memory hardness... and I'd bet that dedicated hardware would get a _larger_ speedup then we get for sha256 because of this.  An interesting question is: how do you create a function which is strongly memory-hard to search but not (/less) memory-hard to validate?

There are other interesting ideas in the space of memory-hardness.  For example, you could define a POW function which is an operation over the spendable transaction index which then proves that miners have high capacity for validating transactions— perhaps better aligning the operating motivates... and eliminating the miners that just blindly sell computing power without having any interest or capacity to participate in the actual validation.   (Using data in a globally known merkle tree is potentially one way to make a asymmetrically memory-hard function)

Hah. You and a lot of other people, actually. I spent time talking about cryptocurrency things with Hal due to his RPOW system before Bitcoin existed, and "used" bitcoin early on (well, as much as you can use it when almost no one else does!) but didn't bother keeping my wallet. But whatever, Bitcoin is interesting and important regardless of what value people assign the coins and how much you "could have had" but don't.

They are distinct, and it does matter. One transfers wealth from the economy at large to miners and one does not.  You might want to argue that it's reasonable to make the transfer, but it's easy to point out scenarios where it would be harmful. ... So I just suggest that if you want to talk about the uncertainty issue you do it in terms of the pure form, not one which is also mixed up with a wealth transfer.

You don't have to recycle for that, you can just take them out of circulation with certainty. This avoids the economic distortion of transferring wealth to whomever your recycling gives the coins to...  so don't conflate recycling with being sure what the supply is, they're separate issues.