Soon to be only way to get USD into and out of Mt. Gox.

Miners have complete control over which transactions they include in a block. They don't need to use the default rules, nor do they need to change the protocol. A couple lines of code could create the necessary incentive to clean up all of these "unspendable" dust outputs.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0

Exactly.

It's a great idea, just remember the first rule of Bitcoins - you don't actually own them unless you control the private keys.

Use CoinLab as a convenient way to move dollars into the exchange and buy bitcoins with them. Then withdraw your bitcoins to a wallet you control.

Don't hold funds in the edge exchanges - use them as an escape route.

It seems like it should be possible to set up online/offline Armory instances, generate the public and private keys with a separate utility, and import the private key into the offline instance and the public key into the online instance.

They don't necessarily need to forgo income. At high enough transaction rates there must be some economic value in keeping the UTXO set small enough to fit in RAM. Presumably miners are smart enough to analyze their capital equipment costs and determine the correct magnitude of the incentive.

Blockchain.info is down again so I couldn't get exact numbers but I know the current transaction rate is less than 10 tps. 10->2000 is three orders of magnitude. If we are less than 2 on average now it should be 4 orders of magnitude.

Before that happens fully functional nodes will no longer need to store the entire blockchain all the way back to the Genesis block, and blocks will become a list of transactions instead of including copies of the transactions themselves, to cut the average bandwidth needed to participate in the network by half and reduce the burst bandwidth requirement to almost match the average bandwidth. The average user might not be able to participate with a 10 year old laptop and dial up modem, but with reasonably modern equipment and connectivity they can still be part of the network.

If we're talking about a Bitcoin economy that is generating 2000 transactions per second there's a bit more to it than just the block reward.

Don't forget to scale the existing fee revenue by three orders of magnitude.

Then make sure to add in the nodes operated by Bitcoin-dependent businesses that absorb that cost into their overhead.

Downloading an amount of transactions equal to Visa, based on today's bandwidth costs, would be less than $20/day.

True at the moment, but in the long term block space does not need to be rationed. It's not even strictly necessary for anyone to keep every transaction all the way back to the Genesis block.

The only data that absolutely must persist forever for the network to function is the UTXO set.

One coffee shop is still part of the tip of the iceberg.

Bitcoin eventually needs to be able to handle multiple coffee chains, each with tens of thousands of stores, all serving 1000 customers per day.

Everything he does is non-standard. He invented his own FHS and init implementation, just because. Integrating his software with any system vaguely unix-like is an enormous pain in the ass that people only ever tolerated because the alternatives to his software (Bind) sucked that much at the time.

World domination by 2020

Does anyone still make dot matrix printers?

You could make it economical to clean up the mess, which is a better long term solution because it doesn't rely a constant arms race to filter out bad behaviour.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0

At least one client developer is willing to automatically clean up those unprunable dust transactions if the right incentives are in place.

More Bitcoin sites need to give users the options of uploading a public key to encrypt email messages with.

It could happen...



It could also go to zero.