In Soviet Russia, the EFF stops accepting Flat Money donations!

In Soviet Russia, Gavin invites the KGB to speak!

In Soviet Russia, Satoshi tries to discover who YOU are!

Surely a longer nonce would increase the overhead, because more bytes must be processed on every hashing attempt.

I think those prefixes should be harpo, zeppo and groucho.

So please start your own block chain with your own economics and your preferred incentives. Within a year we'll know whether Bitcoin or Patvarillycoin is the one that got it right.

Based on the paragraph that I quoted above, why would you not want to do this? Why would you prefer talk to action?

Eligius works great for me. I connect to mining.eligius.st so that I automatically get redirected to the current pool, and I simultaneously run poclbm on my local bitcoind for solo mining.

That way, pool and solo mining get about 50% of the hashes each. But when Eligius is down, all of the hashes go to solo mining. Nothing is lost.

At my hash rate, a solo block is only going to come every year or so. But pooled mining will take a year or so to get 50 coins too, so that's OK.

A GPU card hashes around 50 times as fast as a CPU. The switch from CPU mining to predominantly-GPU mining occurred during the second half of 2010. So bear in mind that the average miner had around 50 times as many megahashes/second at the end of 2010 than they did in mid-2010.

If you adjust for that, the chart would be fairly level.

Well exactly. Like you say, you can hit some rounding errors. And you don't want rounding errors, because they are errors. So you are not "fine with a double". Financial math needs to be exact.


If you're using varchar, it's not sufficient to use varchar(10), which is not even enough to store a value of 12.12345678 bitcoins. Storage is cheap enough that you should use varchar(17), which can hold any number of bitcoins up to the maximum possible of 21000000.00000000.

If you're using numeric types, DECIMAL(16,8) will work perfectly.

You also need to use decimal-safe arithmetic in your PHP code. The "bcmath" and "gmp" libraries are decimal-safe math libraries for PHP.

Here's a reference to numeric types in MySQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-types.html

From that page:

Isn't that what lawyers are for?

The standard client is open source software. Just add a setting to display amounts in Bitcoins, Millies, Mikes or Satoshis.

If you're not a programmer, start up a bounty for a programmer to do this.

There's no possibility to change the definition of what "one Bitcoin" means. You can't have one name meaning different measurements. But using sub-units instead of the largest unit is unproblematic. Go for it!

The story is on the front page of SlashDot now.

Do you really think some lawyer can get thousands of independent businesses and hundreds of thousands of individuals to abandon their usage of this word? No chance.

What's the alternative? An expensive community-run foundation to hold the trademark around the world, together with the cost and effort that it will consume? And all the infighting deciding who controls the foundation, and who can use the foundation-held trademark, and how they can use it? Maybe if Satoshi were around to hold the trademark it would work, but not otherwise.

It's not worth it. Just ignore this douchebag unless you get a C&D. In the extremely unlikely event that you do get a C&D, don't pay to settle, and don't pay to defend. Just temporarily switch to the separate un-trademarked words "Bit Coin" until the douchebag gives up wasting his money. And make the most of the free publicity that your business will get as a result of publicising the C&D!

A word to the wise, Atlas.

Loud announcements mean nothing in real life. Real progress takes determined action over time. It took me over 40 years to discover this, so I don't begrudge that your posts so far include lots of loud announcements with little evidence of the determined action over time. Also, it took me over 40 years to gain the same understanding of society and freedom that you already have, so props to you!

As for your new persona: it's going to become obvious anyway, because there's no-one else in the forum quite like you. So why bother changing? You're going to turn 18 anyway.

I don't think grief is necessary. If your (U.S.) business gets a nastygram from their lawyer, just switch to the term "Bit Coin" for the time being (since the ordinary words are not trademarked). Then their lawyer sends a nastygram to the next Bitcoin business, and the next Bitcoin business, and so on. Eventually they run out of money from paying lawyers and abandon their trademark, and everyone resumes using "Bitcoin".

Spending time and energy worrying about this is pointless.

I'm surprised you guys are bothered by this. The registrant isn't going to be able to enforce the trademark, so why not save your energy and ignore him?

Realistically there's no way that Bitcoin will be mentioned in the new constitution. Nor is that needed. All that is needed is that there are no laws prohibiting Bitcoin.

I suggest you focus on the incredible opportunities for commerce and innovation that will be opened up by the first country to embrace Bitcoin. All it needs is for someone at the top to say that Bitcoins are OK, and it will dispel the fear and legal uncertainty that currently permeates the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Those laws don't "protect" anyone. They just drag everything to the same level of mediocracy, and take away "treating the consumer well" as a differentiating factor in the market.

Bitcoin is mostly a well-balanced remix of already-established concepts, with just a smidgeon of inspired original genius to make it work.

Many millions of years.

It's not impossible for a collision to be found, but there's not enough profit in it. Even if someone can find one address every hundred million years, all they get to spend is the balance of that one address. This equates to an averaged cost of fraud of way less than a millionth of a cent per transaction.

It's not worth worrying about, when any simple trojan or social engineering attack is sure to net a few wallets.