Haha - great idea - forward on the patent application to the NSA (although probably not necessary as they would already know about it) and to FinCEN and let them reap the benefits!

Your premise is very true although in recent years patents in the USA have been mostly granted regardless of how broad they are (perhaps as a money-making exercise in itself by the authorities that grant them) so that patents for ideas *are* being granted and then later have to be battled (at a huge cost to a small business).

The patent system really has no purpose in the modern world (it's original purpose was to encourage publication - we have the internet for that now) - the sooner it is scrapped the better (ditto for copyright - my other major bugbear).

Interesting link - thank you for posting that (well worth reading).


As the link you provided does point out if "no-one wants to pay" then worthlessness could indeed be the result - but I think the point of such contracts makes perfect sense and so I do also think that such creative solutions will probably address the issue that I raised (so point taken).

The day I decided that American patents (in IT at least) were ridiculous was when RLE was patented (back in the 80's).

Any student who sees a bunch of bytes like this: 0x40 0x40 0x40 0x80 0x80
will come up with the idea of: 0x03 0x40 0x02 0x80

anyone who thinks that such trivial stuff should even be "patentable" should probably consider patenting the English language itself (who knows maybe that will be next in the land where your own genes belong to some corporation).

True - but when most of the coins have been mined the tx fees are the *only* thing that will keep the network secure so if bitcoins aren't being used for many transactions then it could spell doom for the current implementation (so best to be used both as a store of value and as a currency rather than just the former).

Something can easily be set up in China if this (typically) silly patent is granted (and unfortunately many silly patents *do* get granted in the USA which then later have to be challenged making lawyers rich and small businesses poor).

Hmm... IMO that should read IF he did that then people would have a hard time taking Bitcoin seriously.

If the core dev at a whim decided to just "change the rules" and turn millions of dollars of hardware investment into electronic trash then Bitcoin would indeed be considered a bad joke.

Thankfully patents mean nothing in China.

Over time it is likely that the price will become more stable, however, in the meantime it is easy enough to quote prices in a local currency and provide a BTC conversion based upon the "current" rate (based upon Mt. Gox or some other source). The VPN I use does exactly this (i.e. the invoice is in USD for which a BTC value is calculated based upon the current rate when I decide to pay).

Assuming that you change your BTC back into fiat on a daily basis as a merchant (and you can always use a service such as Bitpay to do this automatically for you) then you will be insulated from these fluctuations.

Saw their post on the forum - so not sure how to answer that - but I guess you could say it took me a month or so to notice the post.


Not confusing at all  - got some mBTC from Gavin's faucet to play with and within a week or so after that I had bought around 10 BTC from a BTC purchasing service (not particular good rates but very easy).


No research at all (beyond an internet search for Bitcoin) - just downloaded and installed the software and then ran it (or did you mean something else?).


Apart from the issues of using an exchange to get BTC I really don't think my mother (my grandparents have been dead for many, many years sorry) would stuggle as much as she did learning how to use Word.

As for Suzy in accounting my wife (who studied accounting at uni) has no troubles with Bitcoin at all and waiting for the blockchain to download (when using the Satoshi client) is the only reason she wouldn't be up and running in 10 minutes.

Yes - correct - if you have the finances and the knowledge then I'm sure you can make money out of it (but for the majority of people that is simply not the case).

Can't agree with that - I pay for my VPS using Bitcoin - takes only seconds and is easier than any other way I've ever done a payment over the internet (and costs me no intermediate fees).

Internet services such as VPN's and VPS's are already functioning well as are DNS websites and hardware websites.

The adoption may be slow but it is not dying and as long as people are prepared to keep at it I think it will survive.

Although I would agree that we are much better off without "Bitcoin Bruce" now his video series (The Bitcoin Show) was useful to learn about Bitcoin and had some decent interviews.

I think that "arbitrage" is the "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" that in actual reality doesn't exist.

It has been used many times in history to fool people into joining into schemes (Charles Ponzi's being perhaps the most famous) but your chances of making money out of such "opportunities" are slim at best.

I agree with the sentiment (too much FUD spread around in general) but at the same time it should be understood that the entire *premise* of Bitcoin was to "solve the double spending problem" (so IMO not really a useful thing to tell people that you "can double spend" as it then leads people to infer that Bitcoin is *fundamentally flawed* which is isn't).

Whilst it is *possible* it is actually in practice rather difficult to do (I tried once after making a huge mistake with fees doing a raw tx).

Any node that has seen the first tx will ignore the "double spend" attempt - making it virtually impossible to then do so after only a few seconds across much of the network.

Yup - seemed like the most logical way to do it - hopefully the same approach will be added to the Satoshi client as well down the track.

Although best practice is to always use a different address for every tx sometimes you might accidentally re-use an address or someone might send you another payment to a previous address (for another purpose) and using bitcoin-qt you currently can't label the tx itself (although it may *look* a bit that way in the UI).

Whilst it makes sense to label an address and to make that the "default" label for a tx involving the address when editing the "label" in the tx history I think it would better to have that label just apply to the tx and not to the address itself (technically a map from tx id to label rather than the current address to label).

Without this it becomes impossible to fix up labels when the same address was inadvertently used two (or more) times.

e.g.

tx1 to address 1addr... labelled "payment for item #1234"

now a tx2 comes into the same address (assume this was not done intentionally) - if we change the label in the tx to read "payment for item #2345" then now both this tx and the original tx show the same label description (as it is not keyed to the tx id but to the address itself).

Thoughts or suggestions?

Indeed it doesn't matter (and note that this question has been answered many, many times before).