I truly hope so.

The opposite of "breaking past $1000 sometime", given that the current price is $516, is "breaking past $266 sometime".  This is "almost doubling" versus "almost halving".

Interesting, I didn't know this.  Let's see what I can add:

Tow Woods, an anarcho-capitalist and senior fellow at the Mises Institute, regularly fills in for Peter on his show.  He's really quite interested in Bitcoin and while he reserves judgement on the technology as a whole (recognising a lack of strong historical parallels and that his own understanding is limited), he has commented on being impressed with the logic and lucidity demonstrated by various Bitcoin proponents (Erik Voorhees is his "go to guy").

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I reject Peter's claim that greater merchant adoption will suppress the price.  It seems as though he's ignoring why people are holding bitcoins in the first place.  I find it almost impossible to justify the assumption that most people will want to reduce the dollar value of their bitcoin holdings as those bitcoins become more useful.

+1

Anyone that reduces the taxes they pay, either legally or illegally, has my respect.

The first character of an address is roughly the "type" of the address.  Technically, if you unpack an address from its base58 form, the first byte will be the "version byte".

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes


Testnet script hash.

But there have been better times to buy Bitcoin.  Some examples:

• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012

Yeah.  Basically 52 random base58 characters.  No backup.

I rehearsed it every day for the first 2 weeks but reduced the frequency and these days am comfortable rehearsing about once per month.  I checked again following your post and managed with no hesitation (not as fluently as when I enter my e-mail password, but fairly solid).

I check it with a dedicated computer.  I just check that the private key is valid (the checksum is ok) and that it generates the correct address.

I've had this address for nearly a year now.  I transferred the balance from my last cold storage address, for which I also memorised the private key.  I just tried to recall this old key and was surprised to find that I succeeded, although I'll admit I blanked a couple of times and it took me about 2 minutes to recall in full.

I couldn't recommend this method to anyone, but it serves my purposes well.

Or, perhaps more accurately, like asking a person how much they have in the way of cash or precious metals at home.

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It's fun to see the these poll ranges change with time.  Anyone remember this one?

I committed my cold storage private key to memory and destroyed all other copies.

Ah yes, I remember now.

Blocked.

I peed myself laughing.

I can't remember why I added you to my ignore list but I've decided to unblock you for my entertainment.

A long, slow slide is just what Bitcoin needed.  I welcome a "significant loss of confidence in the system itself".  If Bitcoin can be easily killed by such a loss of confidence then it would be better for us to learn this now rather than later.  If it survives (as it did in late 2011) then it (and cryptocurrency in general) earns another stripe.

Not to my eyes: http://bitlegal.net/.

No problem; I'm glad I didn't offend you.

I didn't get involved in GPU mining until after the peak of the 2011 June bubble (I did a bit of CPU block generation when I first started, found 5 blocks with 140 khps ).  It must have been fun mining through early 2011.

Yes, this is precisely what I noticed.  You seem to have an extremely hostile opinion of pimps and you're not shy about expressing it.  Now, I respect your right to dislike a certain profession, but I personally hold it in high regard and feel it far from deserves such an assault.


You routinely call it in the most obnoxious, hate-filled, and condescending way possible.  The world is not black and white, yet you continue to believe that anyone with a different world view from yours is a fool.  There have been a number of great philosophers who have written on social anarchy and you do them a great disservice by allowing their texts to close your mind.

I guard my insults carefully, but from your comments around this forum, I fully feel that you deserve the label "nasty" and I throw any reputation I have here behind it.  I'll watch for a response, but I don't expect anything remotely mature to emanate and will ignore you thereafter.

You probably mean late 2010, early 2011.  Late 2009, early 2010 was when this forum was established and bitcoin 0.2 came out (TOR support).  I don't recall seeing anyone toy with the idea of using GPUs for block generation until April of 2010.

I didn't get involved until the release of bitcoin 0.3, in mid 2010.  I was pleased to get some bitcoins below 1 cent per coin (barely, the price was about 0.0086 USD/BTC when I started and, little did I know, was about to rise very quickly); I guess I should have kept more.

+1

I see now why some describe prostitutes and pimps as heroic.  They are doing honest, productive work and have to put up with such bile and even threats of violence.


You're easily the nastiest person I've seen on this forum all year.  I'm sure I speak for many of us when I say "We pity you; deeply".

Strange list of "second generation altcoins":

• Ripple is a decentralised system of credit (the system itself predating Bitcoin by a number of years).
• Namecoin was the very first altcoin (fork of the Bitcoin protocol) to my knowledge.
• Mastercoin is a layer on top of Bitcoin facilitating smart properties/contracts.

These ones probably do qualify as second generation:

• Peercoin (a rebranding of PPCoin, first to use proof of stake, from 2012)
• Nextcoin (a completely new codebase, from 2013)

I've been fond of proof of stake since I first read a description of the concept by Meni Rosenfeld.  However, I was also a fan of Namecoin (great concept) and an adamant Litecoin naysayer so you might take my opinion with a pinch of salt.  I'm not a dev, but I've been involved with Bitcoin for nearly 4 years.

I'm not sufficiently versed on the internals of Nextcoin to make a fair critique of it with reference to Bitcoin.  I can't see any obvious flaws in reasoning so I'm hopeful that it's fundamentally well designed and will thrive.


Certainly, but I personally think it's far more likely that Bitcoin will remain the kingpin for the following decade.  Of all the "new jazz", I don't see any of it being merged into Bitcoin.  I'm sure we'll see hardforks (to take off satoshi's training wheels; for various bugfixes; et cetera...) but something like PoS is a whole other ballgame.

I think the problem here is more with a Bitcoin ATM which is designed to wait for 1 confirmation.  There's still plenty of work to be done in the space of "fast payment verification" and I'm looking forward to see further market solutions (green addresses was one).

Deposit banks are one part of a solution.  People would keep some of their bitcoins in a bank and the ATM would be able to accept transactions from the bank with no confirmations.  This could be arranged to maintain anonymity.

A little more sophisticated: Payment insurance companies would allow people to pay with bitcoins quickly and directly.  Such a company will charge a subscribing merchant a monthly fee and require the merchant to reject certain transactions it deems invalid in a short time window (say 5 seconds).  It will pay out in full if any of the transactions it deems valid in that 5 second window are successfully double-spent.  Consequently, the insurance company would have a strong incentive to make sure they are very good at detecting potential double-spends, while letting through as many innocent transactions as possible.  They would be well-connected to the network and would probably spend a lot of money analysing the blockchain.

This isn't really a problem for the core devs.  Besides, ensuring that sufficient decentralisation is maintained as the network scales is a more pressing concern.

Finally, while this is a problem for Bitcoin's adoption today, it is important to note that cryptocurrencies which have the same essential model as Bitcoin but simply set a lower confirmation time are not solving the problem, they are just adjusting the balance between this problem and that of orphans.  I'm wary of this approach, simply because the orphans problem becomes more serious as the network scales.

Replace "masquerading" with "known".