It becomes robbery when people are forced to participate in said inflationary system.

It's actually not that rare an occurrence. I seem to recall a thread discussing it several months ago, after which it didn't take long before I noticed it once or twice.

You make an interesting point, and I'm actually rethinking my stance on free-market fractional reserve banking because of it.

Even if a counterfeiter tells everyone that his notes are counterfeit, what about the people who then hand his notes to others? In a world where non-FRB was the norm, this would definitely seem to be fraudulent. About the only way I could see it NOT being so would be if (1) every bank issued their own notes (for gold, bitcoins, dollars, etc.) and (2) the FR banks clearly indicated on the notes (and on the checks, etc.) that they used fractional reserve banking.

Food for thought....

In light of Gavin's statements, this seemed like a very reasonable post to me.

Anyhow...

Thanks for the update, Gavin. And thanks to all the coders and testers involved with fixing this.

Well, clearly we have differing views on the magnitude of the Fukashima disaster and how widespread its effects have been. No point in harping on it in this thread.


Believe me, I'm not in favor of any sort of forceful intervention when it comes to peaceful people making poor choices. And yes, from what I know (never used it,) I do believe Bitcoinica was a legitimate way to interact with the market.

My call for caution goes beyond Bitcoinica though. What happens if naked short-selling becomes a sizeable portion of Bitcoin's markets? What if the desire to prevent such a thing leads to calls for government intervention? Should people take unwarranted risks just because they've been led to believe something is properly regulated by "authorities?" Taking a second to think these sorts of things through is simply a wise thing to do when it comes to a technology as potent as Bitcoin.

I can only imagine that that was a joke.

I have to agree with LightRider: there are definitely arenas (nuclear power, microbiology, etc.) that show that humanity needs to balance its (natural) pursuit of efficiency, development and growth with caution and a common-sense approach to risks. Considering its potential, I would think this applies to Bitcoin as well.

I'm a little surprised that no one has created a simple, small program by now that just reads the wallet.dat file and spits back out a simple text file of the private keys, in the desired format (hex or whatever format starts with '5'.)

If anyone else thinks that that would be of use I might see how hard it is to do. If the file format is readily available and not too complex, it shouldn't take too long to whip something up.

Exactly. Increase demand.

Now, how to increase demand? I can think of two primary ways to do that:

1) Use them more, and promote their use (advertise, even if just word-of-mouth.) NOTE: Using them for savings is a bit risky, but still counts as use and sends a signal to the market just the same.

2) Make them more valuable. You can do this by contributing ideas, $$$ or effort (code, a business, etc.) to the bitcoin economy.

Ron Paul didn't actually mention the 0% loan thing (unless I missed it in the crosstalk,) but he kinda did come close. He talked about how the Fed bailed out a bunch of rich people regarding the mortgage crisis, then asked why wasn't the money just given to the mortgage holders (average Joe and Jane) as that would have been far more fair.

If you can't run the standard client on your computer, you will likely have a hard time running another full client. Beyond that, even if you could run a different client, you would need one that could import a standard wallet.dat file. I don't know which available client fits that bill, if any, but you can check the Alternative Clients section of the forum for some options. (If Electrum has a Linux version, it may work, as it's a "thin client.")

Barring that, you can still get at your private keys so you can import them into an online wallet. Look through the forums for Pywallet, a Python-based toolkit that can extract your private keys from your wallet for you. It's not the easiest thing to use, but should do the job.

Well, just as a closing comment I'd like to say that I disagree with the highlighted text above.

I still believe your initial idea, of just printing one-address wallets from an offline, air-gapped device is still very valuable. If it were available right now, for the right price (<$20) I'd be looking to get one or two ASAP, and I'm not worried that my system is compromised yet. I can handle my own transaction sending. But a quick and easy way to spit out addresses for storage (with accompanying private key) greatly simplifies things.

Just my 0.02btc.

Yep.

This sounds great. Watching....

It's certainly a nice, helpful change. (And looking back at that, I meant 4GB instead of 4MB. Wow, am I showing my age or what?)

I suspect Goldman Sachs and associates.

(And yes, I'm referring to the news from Reuters.)

You can usually go to

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

to check if it's just your system that's experiencing a problem accessing a website, or if others are having it too.

Well, that's good news. Last I heard (I hadn't been keeping too close an eye on the threads) it required, IIRC, around 4MB 4GB of RAM.

Time to give it a shot. Offline transactions, here we come.

Back even when blockchain.info charged a fee, I kept my (encrypted) private keys with an account at StrongCoin as well as with blockchain's wallet. Bitcoin is still in its infancy, you have to expect some downtime from some of the startups on occasion. Having multiple places from which to spend your keys helps make it less of a nuisance.

I haven't tried Multibit yet, but if piuk is recommending it, and it can import private keys (c'mon Satoshi client developers!) then I'll check it out too.

As for Armory... I still love the ideas behind it, and continue to promote and support it, but personally I'll probably have to wait until it's a standalone program before it can run on my laptop.

Fascinating.

And I'm pleasantly surprised at the FAQ having some level of detail, even if it includes info that wouldn't be seen as entirely positive (like a hard limit in the amount it can carry.) It's as if the creators (*gasp!*) actually know a little something about how bitcoin works, enough to toss more than just a few lines of fluff on there.

Cannot wait to see how this develops.

Finally, after just hearing everyone else rave about it, I just placed an order. With bitcoin it was a cakewalk.

Hopefully this thread resulted in a surge of orders, although I am wondering how much bitcoin business the site was doing up to this point. (Enough to bring the owner here, I suppose.)