That is a very good question.

Be careful of such commitments.

BTC has no use value, outside of the context of a medium of exchange.  BTC is both the currency and an effective, worldwide, transfer mechanism.  Just like gold's intrinsic value is rooted in it's properties that make it an ideal money, BTC's intrinsic value rests in the properties imbued into it by powerful cryptology and rigid code practices.  

The same way that it handles short delays.


If coins are created during the split, and the split lasts longer than 100 blocks, then those coins and all the transactions that depended upon them in the minority chain simply cease to exist after the merger.  There is no other way to do it, unfortunately.  If the minority blocks were permited to exist, block splits would become a profit vector in their own right, breaking the 21 million coin limit with ease.


If you have frequent connectivity dropouts, you probably shouldn't be trying to mine at all.  But blockchain splits should never be an issue, as it's trivial for a watchdog process to detect a blockchain split, particularly when it's on the minority side of the break.  As large as the Internet is, a near even network split, resulting in a near even block discovery rate on both sides of the divide, is astronomicly unlikely.  If the rate of block discovery, from your perspectives, drops by more than half then users should be suspending the acceptance of new coins created since the division anyway.


Have you read the white paper?

Very few of the American Indian tribes made any claim towards owning the land.  For the most part, the tribes West of the Missippi River were nomadic; and did not have a coherent concept of property ownership at all.  Tribes East of the Missippi, however, generally did.  In particular, the five tribes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Civilized_Tribe) that made up the Cherokee nation; who owned all of Ohio and much of the territories that now make up surrounding states.  I'm directly decendent from Cherokee stock, and I can prove it.  Are you trying to say that I should have a claim to the state of Ohio?  I reject that concept.  I've never owned it, and as far as I can tell, none of my ancestors were swindled out of anything.  Prejudice of the early white settlers aside, my ancestors chose to move of their own accord.  Probably, in part, because of their own prejudices.

You're incoming connection requests are being blocked at some point.  Most likely by a firewall in a broadband router.

He was talking about an Austrian economist stating that gold had intrinsic value by reason of it's use value.  Austrians don't normally talk in those terms, because use value doesn't equate to an intrinsic value.  Value is always subjective, and an 'intrinsic' value would necessarily have to exist, if it did exist, by reason of a commodities natural characteristics.  Gold's use value is not very closely related to it's elemental properties, but it's monetary value is related to it's elemental properties.  If gold has an intrisic value, it's directly related to it's quality as an ideal money, not it's industrial or commercial uses. 

The valuable posts in this thread occurred in the first three pages, the quality of posts have declined since.  I'm locking this thread.

Do you think that you could wait until they have had a chance to figure it out?

I'm a bit more secure and mature than to let jokes from random people on the Internet offend me. 

By his own version of the story, he withdrew the funds that he did because he suspected that someone's account had be compromised already, and he was not certain that it couldn't happen to him as well.  There has been no evidence to suggest that this event is anything other than what MagicalTux says it was.  Kevin understood, at least on some level, that he might be accepting stolen property.  This doesn't mean that Kevin did anything wrong at the time, but now that there is credible verification that was so, it's wrong for Kevin to keep that property.

Trust me, Synaptic is definately not the worst troll on this site.

And everyone did know, or at least reasonablely should have known, that MtGox was neither a financial market regulated under the laws of any particular nation nor even international law.  None of the Bitcoin markets are subject to such regulations, and thus such standards do not apply to Bitcoin markets.  At least not as of yet.  Anyone who was operating under any other perspective did so at their own risk.  This is risky business that we engage in, wildcat banking and finance.

Occam's Razor would imply luck.  I'm sure that Kevin wasn't the only one desperately trying to place a low-ball buy order as fast as he could, but perhaps he was just the one who clicked at just the right millisecond.  It is also true that, even assuming that Kevin's story is accurate from his perspectives, that he is in possession of stolen property and he knows this.  Unless he is going to try to present evidence to the contrary, this is an accepted given.  Thus it is proper for Kevin to return the funds and permit MtGox to undo the trades as best as he can.  Whether or not MtGox chooses to compensate the owner of the compromised account or not is his own business.  The fact that no policy existed that covered this scenario prior to the event is not relevant.

Not from me.

The support of a central bank.

Quiet dude, I'm trying to get some cheap here!

Yes, some miners that have been here since the first few months have mined substanial amounts, well into the 100's of thousands.  Most of those same miners have divested since then, and no longer hold such huge amounts.  I can think of only one miner, that I know of, that has likely never sold much of his holdings. 

I can't read this link, but what does it propose that doesn't already happen? 

The TeraFLOP's number is an estimate based off of the hashing ratios of common cpus and their FLOP's as benchmarked.  It can be inaccurate, but not by that much.