Yes for sure, it would not be a surprise if laszlo and/or jercos were using non-standard clients. But lots of transactions come from non-standard clients yet are not marked "Strange". So there must be something unusual about the data itself, and there may be some interesting consequence.

I thought I would look for the pizza-purchase transaction. There are two candidate transactions. Both of them are for 10,000 BTC on 22 May 2010:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1CZDM6oTttND6WPdt3D6bydo7DYKzd9Qik
http://blockexplorer.com/address/17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ

According to Bitcoin Block Explorer, both of these transactions were spent as "Strange" transactions. The first one (above) was spent a day later, the second one was spent in the very next block after it was received.

What does it mean for a transaction to be "Strange"? Strangeness doesn't seem to have stopped the transaction outputs being spent again later.

Vladimir has been selling his mining contracts for over six months now. I think you would have heard some specific complaints on the forums if he had not been delivering what he advertised.

The prefixes "deci" and "centi" are not SI prefixes. They are leftovers from the pre-SI metric system, and they add more complexity than benefit. So let's keep it simple...

1 BTC = 1 bitcoin
0.001 BTC = 1 mBTC = 1 millibitcoin (nickname "one Millie")
0.000001 BTC = 1 uBTC = 1 microbitcoin (nickname "one Mike")

The base unit of 0.00000001 BTC is the same as 10 nanobitcoins, but I think this will be confusing because we cannot represent 1 nanobitcoin (so how can we have ten of them?). The existing usage seems to work well enough:

0.00000001 BTC (nickname "one Satoshi").

Probable urban legend. It always happens to an unidentified buddy, never to the poster.

It takes time for new ideas to become widely understood, and then it takes even more time for them to become widely accepted.

Just give Doug Casey some time. He already understands many of the problems that Bitcoin solves. In five years Doug will be proudly telling everyone how he has been involved with Bitcoin since 2011.

Although I work at a desk in front of a computer, I totally agree with you.


Human – business evolution by patriziasoliani, on Flickr

A compromise between right and wrong is still wrong. A compromise between good and bad is still bad.

The "Depth of Market" screen, and a "Last 24 hours" chart are working now. Big sell at $17, big buy at $13.

Ideally the fee-setting algorithm will eventually become a plugin so that people can safely and conveniently experiment with different fee strategies.

Come to think of it, the coin selection algorithm would also benefit from being pluggable.

But this is a good interim measure. Thanks!

Inflation in the UK is 4.2% if measured by the CPI, 5.1% if measured by the more realistic RPI, and a bit more still if measured by how much the cost of living is increasing for the average person.

So an interest rate of 4.2% is, at best, not making any money. At worst, it's losing a few percent of real value each year. And that's before taking into account that most people will need to pay tax on any interest that they earn. And before taking into account that inflation will probably be a lot higher before this 3-year investment matures.

When I was younger, you could generally count on making 3% from a savings account after tax and after inflation. That hasn't been possible for a few decades now.

We would also need to outlaw units of time greater than one hour.

Every time I see "Tam-Bitcoin" and "Bong-BitCoin" on that page, I feel like it could be made into a great song. Then I see the "de bitcoin" part, and I know the song has to have a reggae beat.

I also heard about Bitcoin from the July 2010 Slashdot article.

A series of problems meant that I couldn't start mining until the difficulty increases had almost made CPU mining impractical. Then I waited too many months before making the decision to get a 5870 GPU card.

Bitcoin (blue), MtGox (red):

Yes I'm sure.

Firstly, from the "Difficulty" page that you referenced on the wiki, it explicitly says "The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks".

Secondly, we can see from the history that there have seen several difficulty rises of over 50% (and one of the maximum allowed, 400%). It would be mathematically impossible to get this amount of rise if the calculation was measuring all blocks to allow for catch-up. No matter how fast the most recent 2016 blocks are mined they can't increase the total historical mining rate (since the genesis block) by a factor of 50% to 400%.

Why don't you sell the code and the customer base as a going concern?

Stormy, the article you linked to makes a strong case for using bcrypt. Do you know of an article that discusses the practicalities, preferably with source code examples or a library?

The initial difficulty was originally chosen so that the expected block rate was well under 6 per hour, because there was no need to generate a lot of blocks until there were a reasonable number of transactions.

You really need to exclude all of the "difficulty=1" blocks from any calculation of average blocks per hour.

Everyone who uses Bitcoin anytime in 2011 is an early adopter. Probably 2012 also.