I'd like to see a discussion started though. I think awareness of firstbits needs to increase. I introduced a few developers who seemed surprised but immediately interested. As for collisions in the block, I thought they were first ordered within the block and then later assumed to be simultaneous within the block. There was a slight word-change to the algorithm, at least enough that someone had to make a change (maybe puik or genjix?).

Firstbits are incredibly useful, but I think it should see more side adoption. There have already been a few minor tweaks to the algorithm (like collision handling within the same block).

As for the index, 4 bytes, 5, whatever, it should be possible to calculate the optimal radix-prefix periodically. I just can't imagine the index is a significant portion of the blockchain (before merkle tree pruning). But it's absence has philosophical consequences.

I think private key import is cool, but my consistent drum beating (from the side-lines) is for simplification, transparency, and modularization. I believe bitcoin could have been a lot further along if the core did not attempt to protect users, the wallet was plain text, the local blockchain and wallet were completely independent, and generally more hacker-friendly ... is the opaque nature of the bitcoin client a matter of different philosophies (monolithic GUI vs. Unix utilities), or the evolutionary consequence of man-decades of work and discussion over performance, scalability, and usability?

Please get a Yubikey, that would have prevented this.

And sorry, I didn't mean to sound like a prick in my first post, but honestly this isn't the best place to post for MTGOX Account related questions nor should we encourage it as a community.

If you ever need help with anything MTGOX related (including getting a Yubikey for your account) go to there support page here https://support.mtgox.com/home

How is it that there is no index already? I'd like to see an index for native client firstbits support.

Currently bitcoin is a toy, and will most likely remain one until more amusing toys come along to replace it. It is at a best a 1.0 effort that while internally consistent in its logic, didn't anticipate that opportunists would centralize its use and made no provision to prevent it from being turned into just another piece of script ( say that slowly and clearly ). I suppose you could say it is successful as a simulation game within its own limited definition.

The absence of public ownership for bitcoin's design is probably the best indication that its creator recognizes its limitations. If he doesn't at this point in time, one would sincerely hope he hooks up with some management who could make better use of his talents than he can working by himself. It's a shame that he evidently developed bitcoin to this point without partners or peers to give him reality checks along the way.

Your viewpoint that criticism that causes you cognitive dissonance must also come with something that relieves it or otherwise the critic is a bad actor is one of the most childish things about you. You see, your favorite toy can suck out loud and no one who says so is obligated to spare your feelings about it. Wearing your intellectual immaturity on your sleeve is merely your emotional deficiency, which I suspect is mostly a result of your inexperience and lack of education.

Sorry, no one has to fix bitcoin in order to point out areas where it could use improvement. It's funny that this even needs to be said but appropriate given your born-yesterday-and-likes-it-that-way attitude.

It's obvious you spent a lot of time thinking about behavioral economics before you LOL'd it. If you could ever get your head out of your own ass long enough to catch up with the rest of the world, you would already know how very simple-minded, quaint and parochial your insistence on rationalism is, that sort of thinking was already well on its way to becoming passé before you were born.

By the way, what are you a sargeant of? I was a captain by the time I left the U.S. military, the early 1970s was a nasty time to think about making a career of it, I'm very glad I didn't, notwithstanding it helped me grow up a lot in a hurry. Clearly you could benefit from challenging yourself by getting out of your comfort zone, not that I would suggest the military as a first choice.

I got what I wanted, it's not about you, junior. It's been easy enough to sort out the people around here who actually know something about anything from the hopeless fanboys using bitcoin to fulfill a desperate emotional need to be part of something they perceive as successful. If they are teenagers that's to be expected, but there's clearly a lot of arrested development running around here that just never grew up or had any success.

I finally did get some useful information that I think will help my clients to avoid making imprudent choices with respect to Bitcoin World 1.0, and I gained a better understanding of how it has painted itself into a corner in which it will remain until it passes out of general interest completely or becomes something other than a second rate collection of clones of traditional institutions. It was interesting while it lasted, too bad currency exchange and speculation resulted in it becoming a de facto centralized system of the type some would tell me it was meant to replace.

It's really unfortunate that no one competent and willing to take ownership of the design decisions is around. That alone is enough to set expectations very low. There's an "enterprise software" company, Computer Associates, that would be an ideal final resting place for bitcoin if there ever turns out to be any real money in it. CA is known as the mausoleum of software, it creates nothing but instead acquires the work of others who by and large disconnect from their work after selling it. The result is that the software is never enhanced, it's only maintained enough to keep it salable by people who only ever work around the edges of it. Bitcoin already seems to be frozen in amber, so there wouldn't even be an uncomfortable transition to the realization that everybody's favorite cryptocurrency is in an evolutionary cul de sac.

BTW, your comment on the economics of mining presumes rational behavior, and yet economic behavior and choices are full of examples that are famously irrational, enough so to merit a Nobel Prize for work done in this area. Here's a Sunday magazine section light read on the subject, there's tons more where this comes from if you are interested.

harvardmagazine.com/2006/03/the-marketplace-of-perce.html

Oh, and regarding "the unspoken rules of investment". Are they part of another magical cult? Is that why they are unspoken?

Key import/export has just been merged for 0.6.

Wallet import/export needs a bit of work still, so is delayed.

Key removal support has been dropped, because of too many dangerous side-effects on wallets (in particular in combination with accounts). I'm willing to maintain this as a separate branch, though.

I said "the return to mining".

Your analogy fails in that Bitcoin mining isn't an industry, it's a game that serves only the claustrophobic world of bitcoin, which is itself a game. Bitcoin mining produces nothing and would not be missed if it disappeared tomorrow. Seriously.

So in summary:
"Bitcoin is wasteful, and here are much better ways to do it.  I haven't got the implementation down because there is no simple answer but Bitcoin is wasteful because there are much better ways to do it."

Well, clearly then, the return to mining is an economic inefficiency that should tend to zero over the long term, that it does seems to be the consensus. Besides, the mining capacity arms race results in equilibrium being a moving target. I seriously doubt most miners who make a hardware investment for that purpose at this point in time will ever reach break even before something better to do comes along.

Too funny! Ok, sonny, I won't trot out the string of degrees I have in mathematics, economics, and law. I won't cite my 30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street. I won't even discuss my role as one of the earliest implementors of the RSA cryptosystem in that industry. All that was a long time ago, I would pay people to do that stuff for me now had I not done so well as to be out of it completely. None of that is relevant in a world born yesterday.

In any case, the only practical value I see in bitcoin is as a transactional system.

I am sufficiently experienced to recognize that in the worst case a black box behavioral emulation of bitcoin as a transactional system could be built, perhaps out of as little as hamster wheels and rubber bands, perhaps more. Decentralized distributed data models are very common, there are many solutions to maintaining coherency in them. So on and so on. Yawn, been there, done that.

A really good way to not get sucked into the paradigms of a given tool set is to start with requirements. Rather than retype the work of others, I would suggest you take at look, FOR EXAMPLE ( just like BOINC is an EXAMPLE, you dingbat ) at this refined set of proposed requirements posted elsewhere on this forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54222.msg647423#msg647423

You shouldn't be surprised that the adults in the room are not taking bitcoin as seriously as it takes itself, many of them have seen a lot more than you have. Did I mention I knew some of the implementors of Flooz? 

By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.

No shit? To borrow a phrase from the mayor of Chicago, that's fucking retarded. Are you suggesting that this preposterous business of spinning wheels at ever increasing rates is necessary to maintain the security of the blockchain? If so, failure is inevitable. So many flaws, thanks for pointing this one out.

Give the technical details.
The means of benchmarking GPUs, FPGAs, or whatever are too obvious to waste space on, in fact the more heterogeneous the platforms, the better for having them cross-check each other. Besides, existence proofs are always compelling, witness the BOINC project does this for CPUs and GPUs as well and it is not centralized other than as a matter of recordkeeping convenience. Of course, the BOINC project generates work of tangible value, whereas bitcoin asks for unbounded resources just to barely keep itself going, so there's a shared interest in central recording in BOINC.

It's been said before, but Nakamoto was very prudent not to burn his real identity on a 1.0 prototype. He's obviously much more clever than the folks who have internalized his work as gospel, a silly thing to do with a wholly synthetic mathematical game.

Why is that? Please elaborate. Peers benchmarking each other could do the verification. Once again, you are only telling us how Bitcoin works, it seems you are having trouble thinking outside that tiny little Bitcoin Box. ROTFLMFAO, what's the weather like in 2008?

  its just weird the money would sit there for 4 months and then disappear shortly after you come back. My gut tells me you got 'sniffed' somehow.