For what it's worth, you can reduce the account-opening fee to 15 BTC by mentioning the key ID of an existing member:
http://polimedia.us/bitcoin/faq.html#13

Muyuu, at some point you just need to trust Matthew to do the right thing. The closing of BS&T is a one-off occurrence and it would be impossible to pin down every possible contingency in writing, without making things so rigid that the terms and conditions would sometimes yield the "wrong" outcome.

It's probably going to be very obvious whether or not Pirate defaults. If it's not obvious, well, you just have to accept that your wager is also a bet on what Matthew will decide.

Vladimir, I would be delighted to buy you a dinner or beer*, however I don't think I can get to London for the conference. Any other weekend I would be there, but I have a guest visiting that weekend.

*provided the restaurant or bar accepts bitcoins

100BTC
18pChH7Mf8DjP5Vxxva8R4UxRT22eMZd2j
Reckless? Matthew?

Don't forget that each UK taxpayer has an annual CGT exemption of somewhere around £10,000, and also that you can transfer assets tax-free to your spouse so that they can use their £10,000 exemption too.

Cara Navarre, if for any reason you don't proceed with Vladimir then I will sell you the option for the same price ($4000) and on similar terms. I have positive feedback from previous similar transactions here.

Bitcats, your use of large font, exclamation mark and bold type tells me that you're the one panicking. There's no point demanding that others stop panicking if you're panicking yourself.

The price at the exchanges is just the price at which people are trading if they want/need to trade right now. If you don't want/need to trade right now, the exchange price is totally irrelevant to how much a bitcoin is worth to you.

In that case you would benefit from reading some of Satoshi's old posts about "accounts". You could start with these:

The problems with "listtransactions" that are addressed by "accounts":
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2151.msg28228#msg28228

Jeff Garzik's counterpoint to the above post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2151.msg28247#msg28247

Satoshi's simple pseudocode showing how to use the "accounts" feature:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2202.msg28947#msg28947

Three percent per week interest is only sustainable in the short term.

If I were BDT, I'd make sure to establish an impeccable track record of paying every dividend in full and on time. Soon, people would flock to these reliable, profitable bonds and the price would rise. That would be the signal that the bonds could be compulsorily bought back, and that a new issue at a lower interest rate (say, 0.3% per week) would be successful.

Under all of this mess is an underlying business that could become quite successful. If only the website security and customer relations could be handled as professionally as Meni handled the IPO!

The purpose of "accounts" is to automatically adjust balances when there is a block chain reorganization.

Suppose you run a business selling widgets, and Fred sends you 10 bitcoins to buy a widget. If you have associated a receiving address with "Fred's account", that account will show a balance of 10 BTC.

Later, there is a block chain reorganization, and on the new block chain there is no longer a payment from Fred. In that case, the balance of "Fred's account" will show zero. If more blocks are successfully built onto the original chain, the block chain may be reorganized again, and the balance of "Fred's account" will again show 10BTC.

For many businesses, this is exactly what they want. If the business has an ongoing relationship with the customer, they know at all times how many coins they have received from that customer.

On the other hand, it's rather impractical, particularly for businesses with irreversable transactions or with lots of one-off transactions.

In practice, most businesses prefer to wait for (say) 6 confirmations of receiving the payment. The business then credits "Fred's account" (on their database, not in their Bitcoin client) with 10BTC, which the business regards as irrevocable. The widget is shipped to the customer at that point. If, later, there is a block chain reorganization, the widget business carries the loss on their books (although naturally if they know who the customer is they will try to recover the payment).

In normal circumstances, 6 confirmations is sufficient that a block chain reorganization is very unlikely to occur after that point. However, it's possible. When the overflow bug was affected, there was a block chain split that wasn't resolved until each user updated their Bitcoin software. For many users, this took longer than 6 confirmations (people gotta sleep, etc) so many people were running for a while on a faulty block chain that was destined to become orphaned.

(And yes, the ability to let an account balance go negative is a feature, not a bug.)

I'm offering a special for this weekend only: two pizzas delivered to your home or work for only 7995 bitcoins, paid in advance.

*Excludes Siberia, Antarctica and war zones

It's hard to achieve a regular 30 miles per day because there isn't usually accommodation available exactly where you want to finish each day's walk.

Many of the main roads won't have a footpath at the side, so you will generally use the more minor older roads which have less traffic and are also more interesting to walk on.

Walking routes aren't generally shown on Google Maps, and for walkers a much better set of maps is found at openstreetmap.org

A great walking option is the tow-paths at the side of the canals. There's an extensive canal network in the UK and in continental Europe, and you can walk many miles without roads. Canal tow-paths are also usually indicated on OpenStreetMap

Occasionally (once every year or two) they open the service road of the Channel Tunnel for a charity fundraiser walkthrough. If you can wait for that, you can do the whole thing on foot. Two to three months is my estimate, but of course it depends how far you want to walk each day.

When this thread began, 17 pages ago, the price had just broken $10 and everyone was excited.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I remember when you could get a pizza for 10,000 BTC.

Funnily enough, that's not how it works. If it really was clear that we would hit $10 soon, everyone would be frantically buying and we would reach $10 in a minute or two.

I'd rate "$10 soon" as quite likely rather than clearly true.

In real life, the cost of a big website tends to be ongoing and open-ended.

I suggest that you develop your website and service incrementally.

...and goat is betting that there will be a pirate default before the accumulated interest equals the premium that you paid. Caveat emptor.

edit: OK, I take that back. It's not quite that simple. Goat can structure this to make a profit with or without a pirate default.

I remember when a block chain was one of these things:



and a bit coin was one of these things:

From the left:

1.
2. OneFixt
3.
4. gigavps
5.
6.
7. reeses
8. pirate
9. goat
10.

Bernanke and Satoshi at the little table in the background.

Does anyone want to fill in the rest?