Early adopter prices would be more like $0.05.  I doubt very much we'll get anywhere near that level.

Just out of curiosity, who has the most posts?

A favorite quote of mine:  "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." -- Alan Kay

Here's my perspective...for about 5 years all I did was C++.  I loved it.  This was in the late 80's and early 90's.  My employer's library (big company) had a subscription to The C++ Report (which was about $300/yr at the time)...I lapped up everything in that journal and everything that Stroustrup had to say on the topic.  Then, I happened upon Smalltalk.  It was a language that had a clear goal and was honed over a period of ~10 years using the scientific method and it shows.  It's a beautiful language.  In retrospect I came to realize that C++ was a language that was designed in a rather haphazard manner...reading some of the articles in the C++ report were like reading the musings of a person that suddenly realized a deficiency in the language and hacked something in to fix it.  It was a series of one hack after another.  That's not to say that C++ doesn't have some convenient constructs to offer, nor that people can't do useful things with it (clearly they can)...it's just to say that as far as languages go, C++ is rather poor.  C sticks very close to the machine architecture and as such, is very useful (and of course since most OSes are written in it, it's most convenient for interfacing with the OS).  Stroustrup just did a poor job of grafting OO capabilities on top of C (and which in retrospect was probably a bad idea to begin with).  Objective-C was arguably a better approach to adding OO to C, but is still a horrible monstrosity.  Java, Smalltalk, and other OO languages that have a native interface are much better ways to combine the high level constructs of OOP with the lower level utility of C.  Google's Dart will be interesting...its "isolates" and optional type system may bring a couple long overdue concepts into the broader consciousness of developers.

This is just my perspective.  I try not to be a language fanatic and have no problem writing C++ code when I need to (among many other languages).  But, I also appreciate good language design and like to talk about it from time to time.

500!   

This is post number ...

genjix...I saw that 

I think you can actually do this in such a way that the funds are staged and have 6 confirmations ahead of time and at the actual meet up, you exchange a final signed transaction that delivers the coins.  No waiting around is necessary.  I don't think it's doable right now due to some features of the scripting language being disabled at the moment, but it should eventually be doable (and software would keep the button clicking minimal).

See this thread for the details of how it would work: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25786.0

Looks like it's going to be an awesome conference!

The pool operators should allow miners to provide the pool with an ip address where the pool can dial the miner to establish a connection...with a bit of software running on the miner's machine, it would allow the pool to initiate outbound connections to the members of the pool and operate though a bank of ip addresses that shield the pool from these DDOS attacks.

If the pools don't do something like this, then people will start resorting to setting up their own smaller, private pools if these DDOSes continue.

That's odd because mine are down.  Going solo.

This is where the slashdotter gets it wrong.  Everyone wants the work that is done to generate a bitcoin because without it, there would be no agreement on the official block chain and there would be no effective prohibition against double spending short of a centralized authority that maintains an official chain.  So, if you value the decentralized nature of bitcoin, then yes, that work is valuable to you.  Maybe you wonder why people continue mining at a loss?  Well, it's perhaps because they value the integrity of the network as much as they value the bitcoins it generates.

Banks actually make a ton of money chasing weaker hands between gold and fiat currency...just when you think things are about to collapse, they slam on the brakes to the money printing machine and send gold plummeting.  Of course, they are well aware of this ahead of time and can front run.  They can certainly do this with bitcoin and with anything else.  As long as they control the supply of dollars and as long as the dollar has a significant value relative to everything else in the economy, they'll be able to keep doing it.

They could keep the exchange operational for a while longer, but disable deposits and only allow bids to be placed.  Exchb could then hit those bids with some reasonably fair rate compared with the other exchanges.  That would let people convert whatever dollars they want into bitcoins and then withdraw those to wherever.  At the end of some period of time, you then just mail out checks for whatever dollars there are remaining.

This reminds me of a thought I had...price as a consumption indicator in a commodity currency.  It's often said that the interest rate is used as a signal to markets whether there is too much current consumption relative to future consumption (whether people should be saving more vs spending).  When interest rates are low, there are too many savers and not enough spenders.  When interest rates are high, there aren't enough savers.  Of course, central planning to manipulate interest rates screws up these signals.

But in a commodity currency like bitcoin where you have inelastic supply, doesn't the price (or more generally purchasing power) also serve as a similar indicator?  When the price is low, it's an indicator to spend less and accumulate more (trading current consumption for future consumption).  Conversely, when the price is high, it's an indicator to spend more and accumulate less.  Of course, at an individual level, it makes sense (buy low, sell high).

Follow on: and wouldn't the conclusion then be that since price is a valuable indicator, you wouldn't want to artificially mess with it (i.e. to provide artificial stability)...the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that trying to create a stable currency of any kind is folly.  It's folly when they try and do it with the USD, and it's folly to try and do it with bitcoin.  The first question you have to ask is "stable against what?" ...better off to just have a price index and set your prices using it rather than any currency used for exchange (i.e. sell your widgets for the cost of 2 loaves of bread..or the cost of your input materials + 5%).

It's not newsworthy, it's useful...poke around a forum long enough and you'll find someone that's says something that serves your agenda...then you quote it.  And, of course, if can't find what you're looking for, you just register under a pseudonym and post something that serves your agenda...then you quote it.

 (btw, do all these writers just copy/paste each other?)

I think it's inevitable that someone will do it at some point.  The key question for me (I need to study scripting capabilities in more detail to answer it for myself) is: if you have an alternate coinage (that is substantially like bitcoin), can you craft a pair of transactions in each block chain such that you have an irreversible exchange of one for the other.  Some people have posted about utilizing transaction expiration features to implement escrow like and transactions that can clear immediately...I think something like that would have to be used.  You would need to make sure both transactions on both block chains are embedded deep enough before the transactions are finalized.

The difference between being able to craft a pair of irreversible transactions on two different block chains and not is likely the difference between being able to implement a p2p exchange using bitcoin vs having to either use a new type of coin or make some pretty significant changes to bitcoin (if you want to make that p2p exchange be secure, irreversible, and only involve 2 parties).  With some of the stuff I've read about using expirations and exchanging transactions privately before announcing them, I'm optimistic that it can be done, but as I said, I need to study the scripting capabilities in more depth.

You raise an excellent point.  Why can't the exchanges just use ACH for withdrawals (at least for US customers)?  They're not expensive and the funds are available in a couple of days (if not the next day).  Maybe there's a good reason they don't, but I can't think of one.

Last I heard, no one actually took him up on the bet.

It's a nice idea, but has lot's of problems.  For one, it creates a central authority...what happens when that authority is compromised (perhaps shutdown by a gov't)?  I once thought about having an option on the exchanges to place a special bid that represented the amount of dollars (or other currency) you'd be willing to spend if the price went low enough...across all exchanges, the sum total of these special bids would be divided by all bitcoins ever mined to create a floor price...all these bids would execute if the price ever reached that floor.  However, people could just cancel those bids if the price started going low enough...so in the end, such a thing would be pretty useless (and needlessly tie up peoples' money at an exchange).

Maybe better indicators would help people estimate the fundamental and speculative demand.  That in turn might give some people more confidence that there actually are real support levels for the price of a bitcoin.  I'm not sure exactly what kind of indicators would help however.