Ok then stop mining.  Simple solution.  Bitcoin needs miners to protect the network.  It doesn't necessarily need you (or me, or any individual miner) to mine with your specific inferior hardware.

Mining isn't a "free money for nothing" game.  It has a purpose.  That sole purpose is to protect the network.  Higher difficulty means more protection for the network.  Coins only have value because people believe the transactions are irreversible.  Lower difficulty enough so that someone can easily attack the network and it doesn't matter how many coins you have because they will be worthless (x BTC * 0 = 0).

Or not.  When the protocol supports confiscation of private property by fiat (meaning "by decree") it simply loses all legitimacy. Bitcoin would be adopting the worst aspects of state control with none of the benefits.  I for one will be selling my coins at market and looking towards a better protocol.  Nobody would trust a currency where some group can decide in the future to retroactively erase your ownership.  Nobody would it is idiotic.

The only "kill switch" is the one you foolishly are reaching for, and of course that was the intent of the FUD.  You are just falling for it like a pawn.  The good news is that it simply is impossible to achieve so there is harm the uneducated can do.

Incorrect.  The address is a checksum hash of the public key.

To OP the public key is generally hidden from view.  Most transactions work with address directly and public key is only used internally when coins are spent.  The public key is included in the tx so that the tx signature (created by the tx body & private key) can be validated.  There really is no reason you need to know the public key but if you really want to see the public key you can use a tool like pywallet to dump the wallet.

On edit:
Another option is to compute the public key from the private key.  Public keys are deterministic.  Given a specific private key, the proper algorithm (ECC), and a choice of compressed or decompressed one will always compute the same public key.  The public key doesn't need to be stored because it can be recomputed as needed from the private key.  Actually the only thing you need to ensure is never lost is the private key.

The network right not has a combined computing power of ~170 TH/s (terrahashes per second) or 170 trillion double SHA-256 hashes attempted each second.  Sometimes people like to provide a FLOPs equivalent but the reality is that FLOPS is a measure of floating point math and the Bitcoin network combined executes exactly 0 FLOPS a second.  

If you need something tangible a high end GPU (HD 7970) does about 700 MH/s so the network has computing power equivalent to ~250,000 high end GPUs (170,000,000 / 700 ).  Obviously the whole network isn't made up of only 7970s but it provides a reference point.
 

A mobile device can run as a lite node.  A full node will require a copy of the blockchain. 

1) Update the config of his node to allow smaller outputs (it is a single line of text in the bitcoin.config file).
2) Update the config of your node to allow smaller outputs
3) Find a miner willing to include transactions with smaller outputs in a block.
4 optional) Convince enough nodes to relay these smaller transactions so you don't need to send them direct to willing miner(s).

Transactions with outputs smaller than the dust threshold (54.3% of min mandatory fee on low priority transactions) are still valid.

No.  If you make a backup of your wallet the address exists twice but it doesn't double your money.

Imagine you had a safety deposit box which only had one key and you put $500 into it.  Thus only you can spend the $500, and to do so requires the key.  
Now imagine the bank screwed up and gave a second copy of your key to someone else by mistake.  Same deposit box, same $500 inside it but now two keys which open the box.  Has the money been doubled?  Can it be spent twice?  Of course not it simply means whoever use the box first can spend it and once spent the funds are gone.

Bitcoin works the same way.  Your client/wallet doesn't have any coins.  It has a set of keys which allow it to transfer ownership of coins in the blockchain.  Instead of one safety deposit box "your coins" are distributed across tens of thousands of nodes all over the planet.  When you spend coins you send a message to the network saying "hey those coins at address 1xyz... please transfer control of them to 1abc...  I have signed this message with the private key for 1xyz so you know it is a valid request".  The bitcoin network includes the transaction in the next block and the global consensus on where coins are located has been updated.  All nodes now agree the coins are not at 1xyz... they are at 1abc... .

The limit isn't defined as a number value it is simply the upper limit from the sum of block rewards.
The code defines the block reward as 50 BTC which is halved (technically right shifted) every 210,000 blocks.

You can easily change that.  You could mine a block which has a 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 BTC reward today, of course all nodes running the current code will simply reject it as invalid.

No offense but this has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin.  At best it should be in off topic, more realistically it shouldn't even be posted here.

Exactly it is that simple.  The Bitcoin network has no concept of "ownership" only authentication.  If one can sign a transaction with a valid private key they can spend the coins.  If someone generates an address which produces the same public key as your address then they can spend your coins.

Nope.  Very big and 2^160 big are two different things.   It is like saying if we can go to mars (very far away from the earth) in a year then obviously we could just keep going and get to the nearest star "soon" doing the same thing.

Maybe this helps:
if a billion people, each used a billion new addresses, every second continuously for the next billion years that would be less than 1/460,000,000,000th of 1% of possible addresses in 2^160.

That would lead to a hard fork scenario, developers try to avoid that at all costs.  The goal isn't to "really stop" dust but to simply reduce the viability of creating dust.  If the vast majority of miners choose not to include dust transactions then dust transactions will be less common.  Will it go to 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% of all future transactions?  No but it will be a lot less than when every node and miner by default includes them because there is no simple, effective method of excluding them.

Simple version:
If a majority of nodes and miners want "spam" then it obviously isn't spam.  If a tiny number of nodes and miners relay/mine spam tx then it will be far more difficult to use these and there will be less of them.  Win-win.

The later or more correctly forks of LTC which is a fork of BTC.

FYPFY

This.  It seems many never really consider what equity is.  Equity is selling off future profits of an enterprise.  If one believes their enterprise is profitable AND they have sufficient funds to ensure that profit what rational reason would there be to sell off more future profit?

Hint: there isn't one.   Companies sell enough equity to meet their capital needs and not a penny more.

You can control what YOUR node does but you can't control what other nodes do.  If your node can't find another node to relay and another miner willing to mine your small, spammy transactions they won't be confirmed.

People like to speak about the Bitcoin network in abstract as if it is the unified system runnning across multiple computers.  The reality is that the "network" consists of thousands of independent nodes.  You can't force another node to do something they don't want to.  Prior to 0.8.2 other nodes had no way to block dust transactions.  Now they do.

franky1 pretty much everytime you respond to any post, on any topic I am 99% sure that not only will your response be wrong it will be batshit crazy illogical ramblings and no this time was no exception.  


No.  No they wouldn't.  Total hashing power rose 10%, the time between blocks will fall ~10%, not "a lot faster".

In your "example" there were 2TH/s and then there were 2.2TH/s.  Hashing power rose 10% the time between blocks will be reduced on average by ~10%.  The number of actual miners is utterly irrelevant.  2TH/s is 2TH/s and 2.2TH/s is 10% more regardless of who or what is doing the hashing. It doesn't matter if it is a single 2TH/s miner, 20,000 GPU miners, all miners in one pool, or all miners solo mining.  The only thing that matters is the change in global network hashrate.

Do you have ANY (as in even the most basic high level concepts) understanding of how the Bitcoin protocol works?  If not then why why for the love of God why do you continually try to "educate" others with your ignorance?

Not sure where you get the idea that 256 bit is outdated.  You do realize that key strength depends on the algorithm.

For example 256 bit ECC has equivelent security as 128 bit AES and 4096 bit RSA.  By your logic 3072 bit RSA is "new" and more secure.

I will leave you with this ...


Wake me up when the NSA has computers built from non-matter occupying non-space*.


*(Disclaimer as it is often misinterpreted the quote above doesn't apply to cryptographic flaws in the algorithm however that is a different topic then "256 bit is outdated".)

Can you post some clearer photos and where are you shipping from.

I am interested in buying some fake gold bars for specimens to try out an ultrasonic thickness gauge.

Network is running about 10% higher than than target difficulty so average block time is ~9 minutes instead of 10.  Also remember time between blocks is variable so any speed increases beyond that are "luck" driven.