I've not done the specific calculations (and yes, it can be calculated), but if you look at some of the exchanges that accept Bitcoin and Litecoin (like Vircurex or btc-e, can't recall which), they require 6 confirmations for Litecoin as opposed to only 3 confirmations for Bitcoin.  I think the ratio is actually probably a little higher in Bitcoins ratio than 2:1.  But I don't know exactly.

And the reason exchanges require so many confirmations is that they are dealing with large sums, and irreversible transactions.  If you're selling something inexpensive, or a subscription that you can revoke, than 1 confirmation is probably plenty.  In fact, some merchants credit your account as soon as it hits the network.  I'm sure you're aware of this, but I mention it for the sake of newer people here.

ahbritto, I agree that they have an excellent team.  Don't understand your 2 hours remark.  And yes, they do sleep, but it was 2-3 p.m. their time when I sent my support request, so it's not like I'm e-mailing them at 12 p.m. and wondering why they are not responding.  There's no need for sarcasm.

Also, I posted this for other people's benefit as much as for mine.  Users have the right to know if their payment will be delayed by an unknown amount of time, particularly if they are trying to do a time-sensitive transaction such as arbitrage (which gives us all liquidity, Ripple included).

One thing I've noticed is that about 80-90% of the people in these fora are using the terms "bull trap" and "bear trap" incorrectly (e.g., 6 out of the last 8 times I've noticed the term).  They are using them to mean exactly the opposite of the investopedia definition.  I'm by no means an expert invester, but even I know what these terms mean.

As to whether or not these are actual bull traps or just normal volatility for a small cap asset that has just crashed due to market manipulation and is returning to its true value is hard to say at this point.  This (long-term) bull hasn't been trapped yet over the past 4 days -- quite to the contrary.

I've e-mailed help but no response yet for a Ripple deposit I made this earlier today that has not yet appeared on my account.  I think they've been under dDOS, so I can understand if they're busy with other stuff, just a little concerned about my transaction.

hi aantonop, great initiative!  If I can help out, please let me know.  I could help if you need some client-side JS for validation or something, or if you need anymore work done on WP (although it's been several years since I last worked with PHP, I'm sure it would come back although you're responsible for any residual effects this has on my programming prowess [joking]).

Please let me know if there's anything I can do.

This.  I've made 50% more Bitcoins in the past few days but I'm neglecting my work.  Argh!

You know, as someone who has launched several businesses over the past decade, and worked my ass off at customer service and everything else, only to fail for various other reasons (competition, etc), this stuff amazes me.  People end up with a multi-$1000 a day operation that falls into their lap -- really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many people -- and their response is to treat their customers like shit.  Folks: these kinds of opportunities are fairly rare.  Treat your customers like gold.

No.  In popular speech, "dilettante" refers to someone who flits from field to field, never acquiring anything more than superficial knowledge of a given subject.  It's typically used pejoratively.  A "dilettante" originally referred to an admirer of the arts, but hasn't been used in that manner since the 18th century.

If you have any doubt as to how the word is used in today's world, google the phrase "he's a dilettante"  (with quotes) and see what comes up.

Thank you for your post, Alex.  Have you used any of the Bitcoin software?  Have you tried My Wallet on blockchain.info? What's on your wish list for Bitcoin in terms of software?  What would make it easier for you?

As a developer (although not a core bitcoin-qt/bitcoind developer), I'm curious to hear what you and others think.

Congratulations, and thanks for letting us know.

How did you have it shipped?  Is shipping insurance expensive?

Bravo Osmosis!  Would you post a Bitcoin address so we can help support your efforts?  And maybe I should talk to you about how to do the same in my home state (SC).

There are some excellent alternatives to Mt. Gox that already exist: bitstamp, campbx, bitfloor.  But most of you all won't switch or strongly suggest that your friends/family go to one of these alternatives.  Why in the world would we with technical know-how want to spend time building yet another exchange when it's clear most people just go with the best-known name.

I have to ask: if you're concerned about Bitcoin's health, why didn't you spend your coins on goods and services instead of cashing out into fiat?  Serious question.

I enjoyed your post, but this is false.  Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of new millionaires were minted.  I personally know several who made a fortune during that time.  Some may have blown it afterwards, but that's another story.

And while I appreciate with the message behind your post, I also think your timing is off by a year or two.  We are at the *very* start of this Bitcoin mania.  Plus, there's a critical difference between Bitcoins and dotcom stocks.  It wasn't the case that with each new dotcom stock owner, the dotcom boom became a better system.  But in the case of Bitcoin, each Bitcoin adopter increases the network effect, which is critical for currencies and payment systems.  So if the worst thing that happens is that Bitcoin is worth $300 after 10 years, then it will be a huge win.   Flat earnings are a bad thing for Cisco, but for Bitcoin flat "earnings" would signal the consolidation of its place as a global currency.  

Nonetheless, I personally think it will go up to somewhere between $1000 and $10,000 before it levels off, but then again that's what I've thought for several years would happen if Bitcoin were ever to gain mass adoption.  So if Bitcoin is gaining mass adoption -- and I think it is -- then my instinct tells me it's still massively undervalued. This is why there is such upward momentum now.

Finally, Bitcoin has already survived one crash.  If another one comes, only one thing will be different this time for me and many others, which is that I'm pouring money into it if that happens.  Because I spent a lot of Bitcoins toward the end of last year, I got caught with my lowest Bitcoin holding in 2 years when the price started to rapidly rise a few months ago.  I won't let that happen again, for sure.

This is brilliant.  Haven't laughed so hard in a long time.  Tipped!

Nice post.  Your comment actually touches on an observation I've made that driving me further into the market.  People often quote the Buffet investment advice to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.  And it's true, when we look around in the Bitcoin community, we're in a greedy frenzy.  At last, the project that we've believed in from the start is taking off in the way we had hoped it would.  So of course our first instinct is to put more money in the market -- lots more!  However, most people outside our community are not greedy.  They're curious, but also extremely fearful.  They don't understand Bitcoin, and can't figure out why it's working, but they see it's gaining value.  So they're confused, curious, but most of all fearful to put significant money into the system.  Now, there are also very savvy VCs and tech investors who do understand Bitcoin are who are starting to put big money into the system.  I think this is the reason for the big run-up.  But don't forget that the average person, or even the average professional investor, banker, or stockbroker, is not only confused about Bitcoin but also fearful.  And these people make up the vast majority of our population.  As such, I think a lot of us are heeding Buffet's advice -- even now.

Here's where Satoshi's real brilliance was: in order to create a currency that people use to exchange for goods and services, it is first necessary to get that currency into as many people's hands as possible.  So, you could just distribute them randomly, or allot x amount per person.  But then who would value them?  

The American psyche is such that we love to see people "make it".  We love to see assets gain in value and people getting rich.  I'm not as into getting rich as some of my countrymen (although financial independence is highly appealing), but I think this is an undeniable observation about most typical Americans.  Well, in Bitcoin we have a highly-deflationary (eventually) currency that has a limited number.  And it's rapidly gaining in value and making a lot of people rich.  So what do most Americans want to do?  They want to get some!  And then what happens?  Well, then they are Bitcoin holders, and if they want to buy something, they have the Bitcoins needed to do so.  Yes, at the moment Bitcoin is rapidly gaining in value so fast that most (but not all!) people don't want to spend them.  But once we reach some magical number, maybe somewhere between $1000 and $10,000, this will plateau out and more people will begin to spend their Bitcoins.  And at that point, we will have bootstrapped a working currency.  Brilliant.


By the way, I'm speaking of Americans to exclude any other nationality.  One of the most appealing things to me about Bitcoin is it's place as a global currency.  I look forward to the day when people from all continents use Bitcoins in their daily transactions.  I suspect it's not too far away.

I would love to know what kind of mobile phones the average middle-class Haitian is using (I know, there aren't many middle-class Haitians).  Smart phone?  Feature phone?  I've always thought that Bitcoin is going to need some type of JavaCard SIM Card light client to really spread to the developing world.  However, with cheap Chinese android phones starting to flood the market, I may have been wrong.

Thanks for the tip -- I'm very interested in this possibility.  So I can query Electrum for the unspent outputs of an arbitrary address, not just the addresses in the wallet? Is this part of the Electrum API documented anywhere?  Again, I appreciate the information.

It looks like I may have to run my own node on a VPS earlier for queries to the blockchain for unspent outputs, and then to broadcast the signed tx.  I'm running into problems now with the cross-domain requests to blockchain.info, even through it was working before.  I suspect that since both brainwallet and I are using YQL to query the blockchain.info API, we might be running into some kind of API limits set by Ben.  I've put in a support request to blockchain.info about the issue, and also asked here on the forum.

While I could change the code to use blockchain explorer's API (they use a different format), I hesitate to do so since we could run into the same issue with them.  

Meanwhile, I've put up some UI improvements to the github repo.

EDIT: Having looked into the blockchain.info situation further, it's clear that we're being blocked.  This is probably because brainwallet and I are both using YQL (Yahoo) to access blockchain.info client-side (otherwise we run into cross-domain issues).  As such, to blockchain it looks like one requester, and so we're rate limited as soon as brainwallet is.  It's possible we're running into daily limits, since I had only run 2-3 requests today when it stopped working.  In any case, I'm concerned the same could happen with block explorer API, so I'm looking into hosting this API myself.  Unfortunately, I had forgot that bitcoind client does not catalog the unspent outputs of every address -- just those from the local wallet.dat -- so there is no rpc command to simply fetch the outputs for a given address. As such, I have to build up that database myself.  I've started on this today and will try to get it done in the next day or two.