Actually I too thought on first encounter with wallet.dat that wallet was a bad word to use for it.

But what would actually be better?

canofworms.dat?

HereThereBeMonsters.dat?

Perseus-Pouch.dat?

Lets not confuse it with /etc/passwd.

privkeys.dat?

-MarkM-

Roman has a "u" ?

-MarkM-

I thought the 12th was the earliest that a payment could happen?

So presumably all the premature waiting people have been doing will be over... they can start waiting in earnest.

-MarkM-

Ok, pence it is, since millies and micros both start with m and we don't want any silly non-British (ahem Roman, but who cares) alphabets!

-MarkM-

Where did Satoshi host the original blockchain downloads, if there were any?

For example, a stub chain that included the genesis block?

I ask because some commonly used sites require certain types of license for their free to use options.

Sourceforge, for example, if an author uploads there, at least as a free user, they would be in violation of terms if their upload was not covered by a license that falls into some range of what type of license it is, wouldn't they?

On the other hand possibly uploading copyright images you have permission to use alongside your free open source code might not actually require you to have those images open-sourced prior to uploading them.

So this is basically a grasping at straws attempt to seek author intent in author actions.

-MarkM-

It is trivial to create yet another merged-mine-able blockchain-based currency.

There are numerous capable coding-businesses in which one could invest some "quid" to obtain a new blockchain "pro quo".

It might not be as dirt cheap as getting DeVCoin created was, but then again there is no indication yet that you are going to do as much of the actual coding work yourself as Unthinkingbit, who commissioned DeVCoin (yet actually did most of the coding himself, as it turned out) did.

"Investing" in a business that so far seems singularly lacking in coding capability seems a rather obtuse method of promoting the creation of code.

-MarkM-

Lets be traditional and very British about it!

Don't write 1.030010 BTC, instead write B1,30m,10p! One coin, 30 millies and 10picos, maybe colloquialised to one coin 30 mils and sixpic, or even what the heck call the pics pence?

After all, all this silly decimal stuff is just silly nerd stuff, new pence was a funnymoney scam, not one coin of it real sterling silver fergoshsakes!

People managed with pounds, shillings, and pence for how long, and all of a sudden they can't handle coins, millies, and picos?

What is the world coming to!?!?!

-MarkM-

You put coins in wallets where you come from?

I thought most people put coins in purses or pockets and notes-aka-bills in wallets.

So much cultural variation! Biblical David or somesuch ancient carried bread in his didn't he? Or was that purse? Hmmm... Was Medusa's head carried in a purse or a wallet? Times change, cultures vary, but part also of my point was try focussing on the part of their wallet where they carry ID and/or credit cards, hotel room door swipe-cards and such.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Also, at first sign they are thinking of the wrong type or aspect of wallet, maybe try "no no no not billfold, not coinpurse, wallet!

(I have one that has a billfold section and a coinpurse (horrible to use, too bumpy/bulky in use) as well as normal wallet parts for IDs and cards etc...)

(See what I did there with that "normal" word? )

Multiplying by powers of ten (such as 1000) is harder than dividing by 12?

I suspect you picked a poor example, unless your kind of math savant syndrome is just weird.

I knew there was a Tonalist among us, but now it turns out there is a dodecalist too now?

-MarkM-

This is silly.

It is far from true that mining will be centralised among beverage drinkers, with only drinkers of coffee using coffee-warmers.

Some ingenious tea-drinkers will find ways to adapt coffee-warmers for the purpose of warming tea, and drinkers of hot chocolate, ovaltine, mulled hot cider and other hot beverages will be inspired to attempt adapting them to the warming of their beverages also.

Now if you are asserting that the number of drinkers of hot beverages in the world is far from sufficient to match the mining power of various NSA cyber-centres, Wall Street datacentres, massively merged mining establishments and so on and so on, I'd like to see a few numbers put on your projections.

Or do you maybe consider a coffeewarmer for every hot beverage drinker simply another free hashingbot for the botnetters?

I paid more each for a couple of second-hand 5870s than a coffee-warmer is going to cost me. So the move to ASIC seems like a move toward making it less expensive, not more expensive, for average beverage-drinkers to obtain computers and equip those computers to mine cryptocoins...

-MarkM-

EDIT: p2pool is probably worth mentioning again too.

The genesis block is presumably BSD-licensed, as it is part of the code? I am not a lawyer.

Or at least, certain parts of it, such parts as are part of the code, are? I am still not a lawyer.

However that license does not protect it the way a GPL license would have. Still not a lawyer.

Was that deliberate foresight? Someone wanted to ensure they could sieze control of it back at some later date or something so deliberately avoided ensuring all derivative works are covered by the same license? I suppose I could consider being a plaintiff... (Bait and switch, maybe? or is BSD expressly designed to make bait-and-switch perfectly acceptable and the victim's fault for not fully comprehending the implications of the choice of license?)

-MarkM-

Just got directed to this thread from another in another section, so while it may seem necro to the locals in this section it is fresh elsewhere.

I would like to add that I think a lot of people have the wrong impression about IRC, possibly because of things like "Instant Messenger" which have somehow led them to think chat is about instant response.

IRC is, to many, especially old-timers, rather something one leaves on 24/7 and where usually if you have a question someone with an answer will get back to you when they have woken up, gotten around to sitting at their computer for their computing-shift whatever hour of day or night that might be where you are or where they are, taking care of all the stuff they need to get out of the way before settling down to read, and read up on what has been said while they were asleep / away / etc.

It is also something in which you can have umpteen channels open at once, which is part of why you don't want graphics and such that eat a lot of bandwidth, you want simple concise plan text so a whole bunch of channels makes takes only a tiny part of your bandwidth.

Once you are in umpteen channels you realise you are not going to have time to read everything that happened on every channel while you were away, but that doesn't matter. For one thing, everying there who notices who is there knows you could have been watching at any time and could watch at any time, your comings and goings are due to your client sometimes losing connection while you sleep and automatically connecting, and due to all your channels being opened when you boot up your machine (after some problem or upgrade-needed forced you to have to reboot it).

Thus you have permanent presence as a lurker, and at any time you can peek into any of the channels you are in with your comings and goings being announced on the channel. You can switch from your browser to your IRC client from time to time while spending time on the forum, just peek, see if anything interesting is going on. Some people are "live" in some channels so you do quite often get to watch "live" interactions.

IRC "posts" are usually less wordy than forum posts, which can also bring "character" to life much in the way the pithy very sketchy characterisation in the "J" thread of the Old Testment created literary characters vivid/clear enough to carry across the centuries, characterisation possibly not out-done until Shakespeare.  

Seriously, just set up an IRC client and leave it on a few months, see if it doesn't "grow on you" over time even just as something that is always there to peek at, to peek into the "lives" of the people behind the numbers on the OTC web of trust.

Note that many of them can also be observed in various other channels too...

-MarkM-

I was not being sarcastic, I was realising myself that although I recall wallets as being where one keeps money, who-ever named the private keys repository in bitcoin might well date from an era when wallets are not for keeping money in but, rather, for keeping the stuff you need for identifying yourself as being authorised to access money.

-MarkM-

A wallet is the thing you keep your cards in, right?

The cards with the magic numbers on them that give you access to money?

What generation are you from? Maybe old enough to remember when people kept paper in their wallets instead of printing their wallets on paper?

-MarkM-

P.S. The cards that nowadays chances are have to be scanned/read-by or typed into a computer to get access to that money?

I would have been interested until for some reason I had to visit the bank down the street and happened to chat with the teller in some way that brought up the problem of Network Solutions pretending to accept paypal but then once you get down it it ends up rejecting paypal if you don't have a credit card linked to your paypal account.

That led to her claiming the bank can issue debit cards that are disguised/coded as credit cards, so that those accepting them cannot just take one look at the card number/code and go like hey that is no credit card, gedoutahere!

Free!

At that price, how could I refuse? So now I have what purportedly ought to pass on the net as a credit card, and it was lack of such a tool that had kept me from getting into AWS several times over the last few years, if only for the free trial level year.

Which come to think of it would be a way of testing if that card really does perform as the teller claimed.

I guess I'll have to get back to you when the freebie runs out or I fail to get it or when I decide to upgrade it, since getting money into my bank account to feed the card would involve selling bitcoins for fiat anyway.

One gotcha that does worry me though is if I get AWS myself there is only Amazon to worry about. If I get it through you who will Amazon consider to be the owner of the code and data I put on their system, me or you?

-MarkM-

I only read the first two listings. They said less than 100,000 of some kind of fiat using a $ so I am thinking maybe USD.

It was such a nice power of ten number I stuck with powers of ten.

Also, were pizzas really ten grand each or was it two pizzas for ten grand?

So yeah I fudged the math. Who'd'a thunk anyone in a math-meets-finance forum woulda noticed?

-MarkM-

P.S. Plus, my internet marketing copy skills must be rusty as you don't sound like you followed the link.

P.P.S. Lets blame that on the author quoted. Its his copy's link, afterall.

A clean, legal SEC-registered OTCBB shell company for less than the price of a pizza! That is actually quite cool.

Diclaimer: Pizzas have depreciated drastically, I hear they are a lot less than ten grand now.

-MarkM- (Yes in bitcoin of course. This is a bitcoin forum, isn't it? )

Just to illustrate how weird the tunnel-vision is, think about the weirdness you might see at a mall...

You feel like some ice-cream, so naturally enough you go to the ice-cream store.

Realising you are running out of cash, you are gratified to see there is a dollar store...

Oops! WTF? Waddayamean you don't sell dollars?!?! This IS a dollar store isn't it?

If you thiink Monty Python's cheese shop skit was funny wait till you imagine how this one would go...

-MarkM-

P.S. Yes, I am implying people's excuses against the O.P. are silly/funny.

Hey, if you don't want the volume of a full p2p network fine.

Each server can run its own user-inbox-storage server and not care about your p2p hopes until you pony up the storage your idea would require.

How much p2p data do you actually want?

-MarkM-

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117080.0

and likely using

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77301.0

(For example if you use WIndows, a pre-build binary is available there.)

-MarkM-