What about having services which allow people to access their wallets remotely? If a datacenter stores the blockchain and handles all the transactions then the end user wont have to worry about losing their wallet, storing the blockchain, etc. the end user simply has to be able to initiate the commands and see the results. Sure this may appear to be less decentralized, but look at the internet, not everyone hosts their own website, not everyone has their own dns server.
I addressed this elsewere... http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16764.msg219594#msg219594So if we assume the OP assumptions are correct (I don't, because I understand the system better than he) then the worst case scenario is that bitcoin is limited to 4 million nodes, not users. Surely the wealthy (or otherwise distrusting) might choose to run their own nodes, which might be costly in 20 years, but that is not a real limitation on the average Joe. |
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The dollar or any other fiat currency is not based completely in debt neither. Fiat money is, itself, debt. The framers of the US Constitution referred to them as 'debt instruments' and banned their issuance in the Coinage Act. They are obligations of the bank itself, backed up by the "Full Faith & Credit of the United States". When you go work for a wage, the first thing that happens is that the employer is endebted to the employee. The employer then pays the debt by transfering that obligation to the government, via the Federal Reserve bank. They are not called "notes" without reason, just like a mortgage is a "note". |
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Is there a way to reinstall the client and start again but keep the same address or is there another fix to this???
Kill your client, wait an hour or more.... restart your client from the command line using the following switches... -rescan -noirc -addnode=ip.address.of.a.known.fallback.node -addnode=another.fallback.ip google "bitcoin fallback nodes" to find addresses, choose them randomly, not from the top of the list. |
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thankyou guys: I got really panicked: I bought one coin, came thru fine,so I got all excited and bought 10, and then freaked out...I was trying to research it, but I'm o.k. now, and see that it's loading up the blocks...is it always this slow tho, about an hr?
If the transaction is sent without a fee, then it will be ignored by the miners until it's old enough to have the minimum priority level to be included in the free transaction section of the block. With a voluntary fee, the priority is much higher and the miner's will include it into the next block. |
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No, your computer's hashing rate should be fairly even. The difficulty has no bearing on your personal computer.
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I think you are looking for a portable bitcoin client. Yes, bitcoin can be made portable so that it boots from and stores it's wallet.dat file only upon a thumbdrive. It's not straight forward, however, but only requires that you know how to write a simple batch file to start bitcoin with the -datadir= flag to point back at the thumbdrive itself. It's also wise to encrypt the drive with a program such as truecrypt.
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Someone has to start a bitcoin insurance company first. Have at it.
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Hi Silk Road ops, I'm just wondering if you guys are taking any precautions against LEO infiltration... how would you detect this? So far I've seen nothing I don't like about the site  We are not silk road. |
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I've been reading a lot about Bitcoins lately, and I'm impressed at what seems to be an extremely well thought out idea. I still don't understand a few things that I'm surprised is not the focus of more conversations here, though perhaps I'm missing something:
1. How do most of you expect to realize your bitcoin value when it is so incredibly illiquid? Upon trying to purchase bitcoins it became immediately apparent that one needs to jump through hoops to enter the market, with such process taking eons in light of the incredible volatility of this market (something I imagine is caused by relatively low trade volume). Without a means of quickly injecting cash into the market to capitalize on swings - and as importantly - having to suffer gouging exchange rates in order to do, what really is this other than a round-robin of folks who are mining coins and throwing them back and forth with each other?
Bitcoin itself is highly liquid, it's just that the exchange of bitcoin to/from any other currency isn't. Try exchanging a Euro for a US$ in downtown Detroit without going to the airport. If your business model doesn't require the exchange of your bitcoins with other currencies every time, then the liquidity of Bitcoin will become apparent as, slowly but surely, all your suppliers or their competitors begin to accept Bitcoin themselves; and thus you can remove one more step from the supply chain. By accepting Bitcoin, you can partially remove credit card companies from your online business model. Once your suppliers do the same, you can also partially remove the fiat currencies themselves as well. We are still probably decades away from the point that an online successfully accept only bitcoin as online payments. 2. Without a centralized clearing house or "overseer", what is to stop people from simply stealing from each other, and eroding general faith in the currency? To me this currency can be seen to take the worst aspects of printed money (irreplacability) and combines it with the worst aspect of digital storage (lack of security and permanancy without extremely sophisticated means). In order to use bitcoins it is, by definition, necessary to make "open" one's wallet, and to do so - in the digital context - to many more people than pulling out a dollar bill at the local store.
It's still early, and as such the clients that are already available are a bit primitive. There is much to be done in the area of security, we know this. Currently, leaving your client running on your PC with the bulk of your bitcoins in the same wallet.dat file is like walking through downtown in a crowd with your wallet on your shoulder. If you are not capable of securing your wallet.dat file to a decent degree, then don't buy any bitcoins.
3. What is to prevent a collapse of the currency from permanent deletion? Should someone with 100,000 BTC erase his/her wallet, does this not necessarily reduce the availability of the absolute amount of moveable currency? There must be a point, assuming aggregation of wealth over time by fewer and fewer people that such a scenario could drastically wipe out a large portion of the currency.
The currency is infinitely divisible in the protocol and to the eighth decimal place in the current client. The destruction of BTC, in large or small amounts, just results in the slight value increase of those that remain in circulation. They are, after all, just numbers. |
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The onlyonetv interview will be during the live show, which is on at 2PM (time zone?).
Eastern |
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Couldn't someone just generate millions of addresses and use up every possible variant?
Theoretically speaking, of course. What would happen if this happened and there literally was't anymore viable addresses left to be generated?
Although the namespace isn't infinite, it's beyond human comprehension. If you set a brand new, high end computer to the task of seeking a collision (what you are describing) you might finish up before the Sun turns into a red giant and engulfs the Earth into heat death. It's unlikely, however, that said time frame is a concern. |
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Do they have any kind of assurance in case of errors?
What kind of assurance can you give yourself? |
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Screw you guys. I operate best if I shock awake (via loud alarm clock) at 4 or 5 am and get sleepy around 11pm or so no matter how hard I try to stay awake. Hell I could be completely stimmed out and fall asleep at 2am.....totally jealous:(
I don't go to sleep until 3am normally. I've seen the sunrise before bed on more than one abnormal night. |
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I can't keep my eyes open through the day, yet, come night, I am wide awake. What it do, body?
Night owls unite! Myself, my wife and three of our kids are night owls. The last kid is a morning person, screws us all up. All my kids are homeschooled by my wife, and I'm a late shift working man. Try sleeping to 10 am before breakfast and then starting school in your PJ's at 11 am. They don't know what it's like riding a school bus, much less waiting for one before dark in the snow. They still complain anyway, so sometimes I threaten to give them weggies and stuff them into their lockers, just so they will better know what the alternative is. |
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Personally, I couldn't care less what the governor of NY's legal opinion is on Bitcoin, or pretty much anything else.
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Yes, it will be fine. Addresses are valid forever, it's just bad for anonimity to use them more than once. Actually, you can receive with them hundreds of times, but it's best not to reuse an address once it's been used to send coins once.
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I just encrypt the wallet.dat file onto a cheap 128 meg thumbdrive then put it into my safety deposit box. Destroying the unencrypted copies on my PC is also necessary. |
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I was thinking about clearing out my client.
Just send them to MtGox or a private online wallet (like MyBitcoin). Do not use MyBitcoin! I sent them a message about a lost password more than a week ago. I still have not received a reply. The only way to contact them is through the online system they provide (which I used) and apparently they don't even check that. Wait, how did you use the internal messaging system without your password? Something stinks. |
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Wow, Horkabork! That's rather creative. How long did it take you to come up with that BS?
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Get used to disappointment. |
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