This was a legit legal question yet you guys have derailed it into a childish discussion... amazing..

Haha shows how much you know. I was one of the biggest opponents to Solidcoin and its minions. But keep trying to know what you're talking about he he he

I didn't know Smoothie ever had any coins....

in this case instead of cost in hash power for clients, it costs in namecoins and the namecoin verification nodes(miners) are paid to keep "key integrity"

perhaps namecoin does something that I'm not aware of as far as man in the middle attacks but im pretty sure that if i gave you my name coin address, an attacker(lets say a moderator in this example) could replace my namecoin address/id on the post, I don't understand how namecoin is solving this MITM issue (or perhaps I'm looking at the namecoin solution different then what is being presented)

I don't get this whole thing.  Can't goldmoney be transfered from one goldmoney customer to an other goldmoney customer?  If so, it should be easy to exchange bitcoins into goldmoney in both ways, via any currency exchange service.  

So to me there should be no need for GoldMoney to deal with bitcoins in any way, as long as they provide internal liquidity for their customers.

I pulled this out of my IRC log:

[02:45:51] <gmaxwell> It's more or less dead now— pretty much abandoned by its creators... it's been sort of spammed to death because they massively lowered the cost to get names, so there is effectively no anti-dos in it anymore.
[02:46:03] <gmaxwell> Which is quite sad, because it's a useful idea.
[02:46:58] <gmaxwell> There are some fundimental challenges, e.g. it's not possible today to have a lite (not full blockchain) namecoin resolver which is secure.. though its fundimentally possible to create.
[02:49:03] <Atheros2> That's unfortunate. I was thinking about why it couldn't be (or hasn't been) used to alias Bitcoin addresses but I guess that is the reason.
[02:49:23] <gmaxwell> (it seems that all altchains get more or less technically abandoned... none of them even bother to backport critical security fixes from bitcoin)
[02:49:36] <Atheros2> hmm
[02:49:54] <gmaxwell> Atheros2: well it could be but you currently would need a copy of the whole namecoin chain, which is small compared to bitcoin but _huge_ compared to the actual amount of namecoin usage.
[02:50:25] <Atheros2> gmaxwell: I see.
[02:50:27] <gmaxwell> (nmc's database is about 1.1gb right now)
[02:50:39] <Atheros2> gmaxwell: Indeed, that's pretty big.
[02:51:09] <gmaxwell> it would be bigger but it seems it's too boring to even bother attacking right now.

That is a good idea isn't it!

Unfortunately, I asked a 'hero member' (I forget who) on IRC about this possibility and why no one was doing it with Bitcoin addresses yet and he said that Namecoin is "more or less dead now. pretty much abandoned by its creators... it's been sort of spammed to death because they massively lowered the cost to get names, so there is effectively no anti-dos in it anymore."

auspices of pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who eponymously named the currency’s smaller units “satoshis” and issued 100 million to be used across the net.

And the check isn't even necessary since the address won't work in the Bitcoin client that "Other" is using unless it is valid in the first place.

Bitcoin and Bitmessage keys will be interchangeable. Today I coded the key generation sections; Bitmessage will even save keys in Wallet Import Format.

However Bitmessage will use two keys- one for encryption and one for signing. Thus Bitcoin addresses (which are only a hash of a signing key) wouldn't be sufficient for Bitmessage. It seems to me that Bitmessage addresses could be turned into Bitcoin addresses but not the other way around.

That is exactly the same thing as: making a cursory inspection of an address followed by a detailed inspection of the last few characters of the address (as an address can be considered to be the pubkeyhash with its own checksum appended).

My understanding of Bitcoin is fine, thanks. Are you disputing my claim? Where in Satoshis paper is economics addressed?


I said the website is useless, not that page specifically.

Let's see how a casual reader might approach learning about Bitcoin. Bear in mind, they are not very motivated, maybe they figure they have five minutes to take a quick look at this thing they heard about.

Go to bitcoin.org. Click "learn about Bitcoin". That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? See some entirely superficial and nerdy information that is hard to understand, like what does "Double spending is prevented using a block chain" mean? Maybe, they spot the "Bitcoin Wiki" link in the top right corner - not that it's very easy to see. Click it. Get dumped into an un-organized index of all topics with the Technical category applied. Stop.

How about another attempt?

Go to bitcoin.org. Maybe spot the link that says, rather mysteriously, "We use coins! Start here". This is a statement, not a description of what you might find there. OK, so we click and arrive at the site. Click questions/answers. This is better. The 2nd-to-top question on the economics section is "Does hoarding really hurt Bitcoin" But the answer is a, again, a wall of text that superficially might appear to be an official answer of the project, but in reality is just a random opinion from David Schwarz/Joel Katz. It's not a badly thought out argument or opinion, but it's got some very deeply questionable things in it, and the answer doesn't provide any references or citations. For instance it tries to claim that hoarding is usually bad and studies have shown it's bad, but Bitcoin is special.

Actually, "hoarding" or what you may call deflation has been shown in studies to be uncorrelated with depression. That's a critical, key point that should be top and center with a link to the study itself. But there's no mention anywhere to be found.

Finding the myths page requires a lot of clicking around disorganized and unprofessional looking websites. But even if you manage to find the Bitcoin Myths page, the question addressing deflation (which is one of the most common topics you see raised) is buried in question 17, which simply links to the deflationary spiral page, which is enormous and doesn't provide any explanation that fits into a 5 minute browsing session.