I like Litecoin. And I actually think its worth having some alt-coins as a hedge. Any change to the Bitcoin protocol can be implemented as long as the majority of users go along with it. As the user base increases, the percentage of users who actually take the time to understand how Bitcoin works and how any changes will affect them, will decrease. What happens in a situation where a change is implemented which you don't agree with, but people go along with it anyway because they don't care enough to understand why they should reject it? In this case it would be nice to have an alternative block chain with an already established user base to switch over to.

This is just an instinctive feeling - feel free to point out any obvious flaws in my argument. I certainly wouldn't say Litecoin is 'better', but I think there's room for more than one cryptocurrency. The value is determined by the users and developers behind the coin. So rather than 'diluting' value away from Bitcoin, I tend to think of it as all coins competing for a finite amount of 'value' (total potential user base worldwide)

Date needs changing (2012 was last year I think)

So you understand that we are already completely dependent on a network of computers, the availability of electricity etc. and that floods, EMPs and other real world threats on a level that would threaten the Bitcoin network would already cause devastation to society? And therefore building a protocol on top of this to be used as a currency and using it as a store of wealth is not much further a stretch?

150-160 feels about right.

As long as your balance is still in escrow it doesn't matter if they move coins, perhaps to cold storage for security reasons? Seeing as they act as a trusted third party, you are trusting them to keep track of your balance in escrow and then settle payment on your behalf once you confirm receipt of your order.

Do you have any idea how the current banking system modern western society works?

This would be much easier.

Keys are generated in pairs. When you first open your qt wallet, 100 keypairs are generated. These are then used when you tell the client to create a new receiving address, or when you make a transaction and a change address is needed.

EDIT for clarity: your wallet holds multiple private keys each with a corresponding public key.

EDIT (again): Yeah sorry you understood correctly, I missed the bit from Kluge

Your qt wallet has a pool of 100 addresses. So yes, you need to backup again after every 100 transactions. Or increase the keypool size, which is something I haven't managed to do myself...

If an exchange is to function properly, orders to both buy and sell must be filled. If I want to set up an exchange which artificially raises the price per bitcoin, I don't just get the benefit of being able to sell my coins at that higher rate - I must also buy coins from sellers at that price. If not, people will quickly realise that I am running a scam - for example, I set up an exchange and declare the price per bitcoin to be $200. Anyone seeing this rate would obviously choose to sell at my exchange instead of others, and would also see a nice opportunity to profit by buying elsewhere and selling to me. If I don't have the dollars to fill those orders, this forum would quickly fill with SCAM notifications about my exchange, and rightly so.

Exchanges actually operate by simply matching buyers and sellers, and taking a cut on every trade. Price gets evened out across exchanges by arbitrage trading. The reason for the big difference in price at the moment between Mt. Gox and the other exchanges is the difficulty people are having in withdrawing their fiat funds from Gox. Under normal conditions, the spread would quickly disappear as people buy coins elsewhere (creating upwards pressure) in order to sell for profit at Mt. Gox (downward pressure).

These are fairly simple market dynamics, although are often overlooked by people who are new to these concepts. I hope this has helped to shed some light on your question.

They're change addresses. Its part of how the protocol works.

If you are fairly sure that this guy is a scammer, you should try to track him down and threaten to take him to court. I don't know what country you're from, but after the judge's ruling in the Trendon Shavers case, it seems that you could stand a reasonable chance?

Spot on - if price goes up, its a bubble; if it goes down, its a crash. Either way, its a trap. Quite simple really.

That was my worry on this one - A paper wallet is only as trustworthy as the person who created it. So if you want to trust it completely, you have to make it yourself...

Good luck getting interest if they don't even have the money to pay you back.

Why are you expecting price to drop?

I expected this to be pretty significant news from a speculative viewpoint, my immediate reaction was that this would definitely be good for the price. But nobody seems to be discussing it? I was hoping for some insight from you knowledgeable folk on the speculation board!

Who created these paper wallets?

Can you give more information about the paper wallet? If funds were already sent to the wallet, they should not have been affected by any issues with blockchain.info

Heres the Tx id:

https://blockchain.info/tx/1f16b2a02ce10a873574b6c3eee4f3d8cf61ca376927a0bacdb5d4120c6ad298

Thanks!

Yeah that's my assumption - I saw a post a day ago or so about it, but I've been waiting for a bit more confirmation after the whole Thailand thing. From what I've read, however, I think this one's legit.