I respectfully disagree. If there's only a few thousand bitcoins left in circulation, and one entity controls the rest, then the community will flee (probably to another blockchain), the infrastructure will shut down (why run nodes if you have no coins), exchanges will close (as trade grinds to a halt).
And in that situation, is there much value left in a bitcoin? Scarcity isn't the only thing that determines price or value. The last dodo wasn't worth "insanely much" when it was killed.

I believe this can be done on the client (or any alternate client) without modifying the network.
As it fetches new blocks it simply updates its ledger, instead of storing the entire blockchain (although it should store say X number of the latest blocks for security).
If the client is not mining, why would it need the entire blockchain?

Not my claim, but look up the thread, ppl saying they'll sell for billions or $infinity if it gets scarce enough.

The discussion was about some entity buying all the bitcoins, and the counter argument was that this was impossible, cause people wouldn't sell them all, because you can't force anyone to sell. Or that the price would get so high it was not feasible to trade it.
My argument is that at that point, bitcoin is no longer useful as a currency, so the malevolent entity would have reached the goal of stopping bitcoin. So he wouldn't have to actually get all 21 million of them. Just enough to stop the liquidity of it.

(P.S: Even though that's my argument, I don't believe that the value will increase infinitely as it gets more scarce. The supply / demand law doesn't work well at extremes for one. Secondly, the bitcoins are not destroyed. The entity still has them, and can dump them at any time. Would you really buy bitcoins at $1000 (or whatever would be considered a high price at that time) a pop, if you knew some entity, let's say a goverment bent on stopping it, had say 10 million bitcoins in their wallet? That would be extremely risky, thus most people would stop buying (or start selling) and stop the price increase.

He wouldn't need to buy all of them. If his purchasing streak pushes prices up so high, or so fast, that nobody will sell them or use them, then for all practical purposes, bitcoin is dead. A currency with no current is not.

I tried feedzebirds , but did not receive any payments, despite the website saying it had paid.
Anyone else?

I don't know about you guys, but my node worked for a while, but now crashes upon launch.

Money is debt.

True, but probably have the least incentive to make it crash. But I agree (as I posted on the newbie forum) with the limited number of btc any sufficiently wealthy party can destroy bitcoin entirely. So let's get encoin rolling.
Looking forward to it!

If you're on a mac, use the command to see that the client is using the disk a lot, especially when downloading / updating the chain. This makes it much slower than it needs to be. I was able to speed it up by softlinking the log file to /dev/null and placing the blockchain on a ramdisk so the harddrive wasn't touched. I'm pretty sure this can be fixed in the code (keep the blockchain in (virtual)memory until done updating it or program quits).

When someone adds you - will you be notified - and can you then see their public key?
Or do you need to check this thread and add those that have added you?

Wow, you almost did. That was a long reply. And very clarifying, thanks.

You can't solve the pyramid problem - the early adopters of bitcoin got / will get rich no matter how many new projects are started.
So I wouldn't base any project on "solving" that. It's also a short sighted view, it's more important how the currency will look 10 years from now - by that time those early advantages are bygones.


My jibe was directed at your previous statement , which might lose you the support of some people (granted it might get you the support of others - but I'd prefer something neutral that everyone can use.


Exactly. I'm not that keen on the proposal in this thread, but I'm very keen on Encoin, which I think has great potential, if we're able to pull it off.
Maybe revive the encoin thread, or make a proposal v5 thread? I'd like to hear more about your new thoughts on the SupplyNet for example.

It does sound like a political agenda, and a marxist one at that. Which is a fine viewpoint to have, but politics should be solved with politics in my opinion.
Although a stable currency is a valuable goal, I see a lot of confusion between the value of an xCoin vs the cost of producing an xCoin.
For example, bitcoins are valuable to me personally because I live abroad, and it's a fast and cheap way to transfer money to/from friends and family back home, for stuff like birthday presents etc. The value I place on bitcoins has very little to do with how much electricity it cost to produce it.
For a multinational corporation or organisation, savings on money transfers could be huge, so they might value it a lot. Again, regardless of the production costs.
I see you want to adjust production costs by manipulating difficulty, and at the same time value by manipulating supply.... but how will a market react to a commodity that is designed to thwart market forces?
I would prefer to see supply meet needs for liquidity instead, and let ppl determine the value on an open market. And for environmental reasons try to minimize electicity waste to the minimum needed for securing the network.

I like the idea of flexcoin, especially for enabling fast microtransactions, and quick transfers person to person needing but web access.
A merchant API would be nice though.

_{Flexcoin id: moneyisdebt}

Ah, clever.  That should work.
I'd say that alone (ledger / balance sheet, instead of a huge blockchain of transactions), together with removing the upper bound of coins created, are good enough improvements upon bitcoin to be worth trying out.
I'd prefer no tax, no coin bonus and no forced transaction fees though. A currency should be a currency, neutral, and not a vessel of political agenda.

I see, you just calculate your new balance next time you make a transaction. That should work.
Regarding ledger / balance sheets - I saw you propose this for encoin. But surely the block would need to contain the actual balance, not just the hash of it?

This would be technically difficult to do. If there are a million users, each time a block is created there needs to be a million extra transactions in the block.

The economic effect of this inflation I wouldn't know how to predict.

I don't really mine, since my electric bill gets too high - but I do hope this will spread mining out a bit. A few huge pools controlling all the mining makes Bitcoin centralized and insecure, as opposed to... well, the opposite, as it was supposed to be.

I was looking for a way to do microtransactions online. Most solutions out there require a US bank account, which I don't have.

I suggest you see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FaQNPCqG58
where a couple of researchers show a lot of what you can analyse from the blockchain.
Your answer might even be in there somewhere.

I'm not sure it would necessarily be that expensive - at current market rate it would be $5 x 21 million , which is not a lot for a government (or even some billionaires). Granted the purchasing would have to be gradual to not spike prices, and granted it would rise a lot near the end due to scarcity. But it seems it's a cheaper attack than the "take over 51% of the network" or outcompeting the miners' computing power. And I'm not too sure how useful it would be with only 1000 BTC in circulation - if there's no liquidity, it's quite hard to have a market. And dividing it to Satoshis is only useful is the price increased by several magnitudes - and since the entity could cause a price crash at any time by dumping, that would probably not happen.
I do indeed like the project, it's just that the 21 mill limit gives makes me uncomfortable, and I'm trying to see if it is (or will be) indeed a problem, or I'm just not seeing the whole picture yet.
Thanks for your inputs!