At a guess (not having seen the prospectus) probably only en masse.  Typically with an investment trust, shareholders can petition to have a winding up vote [probably only possible after some sunset date, though].  If the trust is consistently trading at a discount (i.e. the shares are worth less that the underlying assets) then it's in the interest of shareholders to vote to wind up the trust.  When this happens, the trust has to sell all its assets and distribute the proceeds to the shareholders.  Obviously it's not in the interests of the shareholders to wind up the trust unless the shares are consistently trading at a significant discount (i.e. the shares are worth less than the underlying assets).

Generally this possibility is enough to keep things stable and create confidence in the trust, and make it track the underlying assets, at least very roughly.

I'm assuming I shouldn't be seeing the "Armory is incompatible with Bitcoin Core 0.10+" message in the announcements tab of the dashboard - given that I'm running 0.93 release :-)

It's under the heading "All available notifications" - not sure if that's supposed to mean that it includes notifications that don't apply to me (but if this really is the intended behaviour then may I respectfully suggest that you reconsider your UI design here)

roy

I'm intrigued by this.  Are you saying that as of 0.93.1, the Armory database in a default installation will only take up 120MB of disk space?

And I don't really see that changing.  The platforms need the teenagers and the college students who are learning to program to be able to use their platform otherwise they are just hurting their future supply of professional developers.  AIUI, even iOS development has become less onerous over the years, both in terms of fees and in terms of what you have to agree to in the developer agreement.  A software ecosystem that excludes developers from it can't survive in the long term.

EDIT: Anyway, we're probably going way off topic for the thread here

Last time I downloaded Xcode it was free.  Pretty sure you can still develop for OS X without paying.  [EDIT: And have you any idea how much an MSDN/Visual Studio subscription costs per year?  But you can still develop with Visual Studio Express for free]

OS X is a minority user group in much the same way that Linux is a minority user group.  They're broadly comparable in size. [EDIT: which is larger seems to depend on who you ask and what metric for "larger" you choose.]

Sure, it remains to be seen which way Windows and OS X are heading - without a crystal ball it's impossible to tell - but it's quite possible [EDIT: even quite likely] that in the very long term they'll both evolve into walled gardens, and FOSS operating systems will be the only unrestricted general purpose operating systems.

[As a complete aside, I've seen one commentary that suggested that the reason for Valve's interest in developing their Linux-based Steam Machines is precisely because they are worried that in the long term (think >10 years) Windows may well stop being an open platform where their users can install games via their Steam platform - rather than being limited to only installing software via Microsoft's app store.]

roy

Winklewii isn't so much a spelling mistake, it's a humorous plural of Winklewoss (there being two of them).

I guess because their name when said out allowed sounds similar to words ending in -us, many of which have a plural ending -i.  (Why spelling it -ii rather than -i, I don't know - makes no sense to me.  Maybe just because the best know such word is radius/radii, or maybe something to do with the Wii?  Who knows)

Which release did it change in?

In the past Alan always said that running a modern online Armory with an old offline version was absolutely fine.  Has this recently changed?

Well, with headers first, the raw blocks on disk may be out of order, too.  I guess that counts as a change of format.

roy

Haha, so lowest prediction $20 and highest $100,000.

I'll buy that.  I predict that the price will remain with the range $20-$100,000 for the foreseeable future :-)

If you run p2pool (with your own local node) then pretty much anyone can retain control.  Although some hardware has problems with stales.

People didn't perceive them as having sufficient utility to justify the expense.  And the reality is that by 1992 they were starting to become affordable - they just weren't perceived as such.   I think my first phone has actually nearly free on a contract that cost me something like £30 a month, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as what many people pay today.

It's not that phones have got a lot cheaper, but that people's perception of those costs, and of the utility, has changed enourmously.

roy

BTW as an early adopter who lived through some of those early mobile technology years I can tell you that the average person did not see the utility in mobile phones back in 1992 when I bought my first (analogue) mobile phone.  They were perceived as expensive to buy, expensive to use, battery life was poor, and most people frankly couldn't see the point.  In fact, most people back then saw mobile phones as the preserve of high earning bankers - and of drug dealers.

I'm always surprised by people who think that six years is a long time in the timeline of a technology.  Motorola and Bell launched the first commercial radio telephone service in 1946.  Some interesting insight into the adoption of the early services can be found in the fact the first British radio telephone service was launched in Manchester by the General Post Office in 1959 and after four years it had just 86 users.

But I'll be generous, and not count these early technologies.  I won't even count from the first cellular system (launched in Japan in 1979).  I'll be really generous and start counting from 1991, the year of the first digital cellular networks - even though by this point mobile phones had been widely available in most Western countries for quite a number of years.  Fast forward six years from 1991 and that would take us to 1997, which is still three years before the pictured phone was launched.

Let's think back to 1997.  In 1997 mobile phones were just starting to get significant mainstream adoption in some geographic areas, but private use was still hampered in North America by the relatively high airtime charges for incoming calls (which meant most people tended to leave them switched off, and only use them for emergencies).  Phones were still used mainly for making and receiving voice calls, although texting was starting to gain popularity in areas where it was available.  Texting, though, was still largely limited to GSM networks - and in countries outside GSM-land texting was often limited to only communicating with people on the same network (where it was available at all).

GPRS wasn't widespread - data back then was generally CSD, which was basically dial-up Internet.  But even if you could afford the per-minute charges for Internet access, there's not much you could do with it except tether a laptop using a special serial cable (which was challenging enough to set up that it would have been limited to geeks and to professionals with IT departments to set it up for them).  There wasn't much else you could do with your network access - not only did mobile phones not have web browsers back then but we'd have to wait another year before we even had phones with WAP browsers (remember WAP?).

Possibly the first forerunner to the modern smartphone could be said to be the Nokia Communicator.  The first model, the positively huge Nokia 9000 (pictured left) had just launched the previous year in 1996.  This was again clearly the preserve of geeks, early adopters and IT professionals



It would be another ten years before the first iPhone would be launch, heralding the start of the modern smartphone era - a full 16 years after modern digital cellular services first launched, and a full 61 after the first ever commercial mobile phone service.  I know we're all impatient to see how Bitcoin will develop, but six years is not a long time.

roy

Love the chart!  I'm reminded of this one (which I'm sure was from a thread here ages ago - although right now google only finds me the chart and not the post here)

Discretionary income?  If you have discretionary income it means your electricity bill is too low - solution: you need to be running more miners

I'm 50/50 on this.  Either yesterday's low of $365 was the bottom, or $365 fails and we retest the 11 April low of $339.

roy

Awesome, thanks Con!  My Monarchs are being detected, and throttling and thermal cutoff seems to be working correctly.

roy

Welcome to 1997.