Look, I'm ready to vote with my feet. 

Where can I download the source (or patch, or signed executable) for a bitcoind / bitcoin-qt / bitcoin-cli that has the 20MB block limit + annual growth?  I will start running it, immediately.

After all, it's not going to reject any blocks that current versions accept.  When a larger block comes along, I don't want to be one of the nodes that rejects it.

Or perhaps a small offduty Czechoslovakian traffic warden?

It's because the people who interacted with Satoshi were and are aware that Satoshi is not a "who".

Asking who Satoshi is, is like asking which color is smallest or whether a rope's heartbeat is stable.  It doesn't even make any sense. 

To anybody who thinks maybe they weren't being monitored before my outburst above and are being monitored now?  

That's crap.

There is absolutely no way this forum is not being closely monitored.  I presume that everyone participating here, including those participating via Tor, are fully aware (or at least should be aware) that this is true.  My 'educational' post above changes nothing.  

Cryddit

NSA programs for identifying Tor traffic on the internet: Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar, and Blarney.  These are partnerships with telecoms companies carrying the traffic, which identify encrypted packets fitting the Tor protocol and identify users sending and receiving that traffic.

XKeyscore is a database developed by the NSA that monitors all traffic sent and received by identified nodes, whether that traffic is Tor-encrypted or not.  IE, using Tor identifies your PBX (that is, your telephone line or cell account, not your IP address or your MAC which could change) for total monitoring. Xkeyscore also monitors traffic and identifies new targets for monitoring based on the content of their searches and the content of the web pages they're reading.  According to the NSA's tortured definitions they have not "collected" this information nor identified particular people for monitoring until a human being retrieves the stored information or designates a particular person - they claim in short that as long as it's their programs doing it as opposed to their live people, it's not a constitutional violation.  

Quantum (or QUANTUMINSERT if you're on the other side of the Atlantic Puddle) is a set of fake Internet backbone servers, placed by the NSA via partnership with the telecoms companies.  Quantum servers' position on the backbone means that they are usually capable of reacting before the legitimate servers to which requests are targeted.  Their response is typically to redirect monitored traffic (including the non-Tor traffic of monitoring targets) to or through FoxAcid servers.  China apparently uses the same technology to monitor and interfere with their dissidents, but I don't know what name they use for it, nor whether they share information with the NSA.  

FoxAcid is a set of fake Internet servers to which traffic gets rerouted in real time, effectively interposing a "Man in the Middle" into Tor and other traffic.  Usually this does not imply the ability to decrypt Tor packets; FoxAcid servers' main purpose w/r/t Tor is serving malware to the Tor computers.  When successful, this downgrades encryption, enables later tracking, or causes the computer to "leak" identifying information.  Arguably, FoxAcid cannot directly eavesdrop on a Tor session if you're not running something vulnerable.  In practice, it attacks targets that have run Tor traffic in the past, while they don't have all that vulnerable crap shut down.  Also in practice, these are the guys who have strong-arm capability over the people who manufactured or sold your computer.  You could be running something vulnerable at the hardware level and not know it. Finally, FoxAcid is also used to manage the NSA botnet of infected computers; that is, when a malware-infested machine makes a 'callback' for new malware, instructions, or to report on what you're doing, a FoxAcid server takes the call.  

EgotisticalGiraffe was one such malware delivered by FoxAcid; it was an exploit of a type confusion vulnerability in E4X, a library that the Tor Browser Bundle used for XML extensions for Javascript.  The type confusion resulted in XML-encoded javascript being executed even when Javascript was turned off.  It was not fixed until Firefox 16.0.2, after the Snowden Papers explained the exploit.

DireScallop is another FoxAcid payload.  It is executed from Javascript, and used to stop commercially-available security systems from preventing other malicious payloads from making permanent changes in security configuration on the target systems.

In Early August, 2013, the FBI was running more than half the Tor nodes, including the Tormail nodes.  When you're running more than half the nodes, traffic analysis really isn't all that hard. http://www.metafilter.com/130629/Possible-FBI-infiltration-of-TOR

In December 2013, a Harvard student used an anonymous account to access Tor, and used Tor to post a fake bomb threat to avoid a final exam.  The FBI found via logfiles that realtime traffic from offcampus did not correlate any Tor packets with the exact time when the threat was posted, got a list of Harvard computers that had used the Tor protocol in the timeframe in question, went through them one by one to find the one from which the threat had been sent, identified the person who had been using it at the time via non-Tor logged traffic, and arrested him.

2012: In "Operation Torpedo", the FBI used Metasploit to send Flash malware called 'Decloaker' to nodes that had recently been observed to use the Tor protocol, resulting in unmasking "a majority" of the Tor users on the net at that time.  This was not reported until December 2014:  http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fbi-metasploit-tor/

Here are three direct links to images of Snowden documents published in Der Speigel.  Guess what:  They're using traffic shaping and correlation attacks to de-anonymize Tor users!  "WELL DUH!"  
http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35538.pdf
http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35543.pdf
http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35542.pdf

September, 2013: A GCHQ program named FLYING PIG is discovered; it cannot decrypt SSL packets, but can identify SSL traffic that is encrypted using the same keys.  This was quickly extended to correlate Tor packets.  Details are unknown; this may be fixed now that DUAL_EC_DRBG is no longer used and it may not.  Interestingly, this came out in the context of an MITM attack in which the NSA was impersonating Google while engaged in economic espionage against Peterobaras, a Brazilian company.  

TUMULT, TURBULENCE, and TURMOIL:  NSA programs that monitor traffic at the wire or channel level.  They parse packets, without regard to where from and where to, looking for associative information -- for example, email lists from Google, YahooMail and other mail services - contact lists from LinkedIn - buddies lists from social media services - usernames appearing in the same thread (and especially in quoted messages, the way I quoted yours above) in forums like this one - etc - essentially anything that identifies people as having contact or friends in common.  So if somebody has both you and any of the same people you communicate with via Tor on the same mail list or buddies list, guess what - they already know that you have something to do with them!  

Welcome to life in my fishbowl, friend; they already know I'm a troublemaker, and now that I've hit this many keywords in one message, which they know you're reading, and which they know is a reply to your message?  They know you're a troublemaker too.  Have a nice day.

Okay, more specific answer as requested.

Right now I think Bitcoin is undervalued by about ten to one, meaning I think the present value of a coin is around $2000, or, in gambling parlance, its "edge" is  about 9/10.   But because the risk is very high, I would still advise against putting over $4K of your own money into it unless you have more than $1M to invest.

The odds of success are tremendously more important in a longshot proposition than the value it would have if that success comes to pass.   Bitcoin is very nearly a pure example of this.

The downside is such a complete loss and the space between upside and downside so unlikely relative to either, and the interest that could be otherwise earned on the invested money so low relative to the upside in the time it will take, that this is very nearly a pure Kelly Bet.  Meaning, you can think of this in about the same terms as a bet you'd make and collect in the same hour at the racetrack and not go too far wrong.

The Kelly rule is, bet your bank, times the edge, divided by the odds.

The upside potential is high, but still IMO less than 5% percent likely (by which I do not mean CLOSE to 5%, I mean LESS THAN 5%).  Therefore dividing by the odds means no matter what, even if it were paying out at billions-to-one, Bitcoin should be less than 5% of your portfolio.

How much less?  Well, that's the edge.  "Edge" is expected return divided by investment - if you believe something would pay off at 10-to-1, and it's fifty-percent likely, your edge is 4/5 because, on average, 4/5 of the chips you have after you bet are chips you didn't have before the bet.  So you'd bet your bank, times 4/5, divided by 10, or 8% of your money on it.

If you think Bitcoin's odds are 10-to-1 (ie, it is 10% likely to succeed) and its edge is, say,  99%  (meaning that after a bet, on average, 99% of your coins would be winnings, which would require a 1000-to-1 payout at those odds), then you'd bet 99% of 10% of your portfolio, or 9.9%.

If you think Bitcoin's odds are 20-to-1 (ie, it is 5% likely to succeed) and its edge is 99% (meaning at 5% it would have to pay out 2000-to-1) then you'd bet 99% of 5% of your portfolio, or 4.98% of your money.

So plug in your own numbers and do your own math.

For bonus points, since I already told you what I think the edge is and what percent of someone's bank they ought to put on it, you can calculate what I think the odds and upside potential are.

Those guys who were saying in the runup that people should mortgage their houses and borrow money to invest in bitcoin?  Those guys are crazy.  

Those based on Bitcoin or Litecoin sources (which, to be fair, is almost all of them) are at least possibly vulnerable if they have not merged the recent fixes from Bitcoin core or formed equivalent fixes.

That said, their blockchains are mostly much smaller and contain, in relative numbers, almost no transactions.  Whether they are vulnerable in practice depends on whether their blockchains do or don't contain any blocks that the new SSL will find problematic when their users upgrade their SSL.   

So, if someone wanted to destroy a whole bunch of altcoins right now, he could deliberately mine blocks that fail the new SSL check and pass the old SSL check.  They'd all hang when they tried to process the bogus block.

This is probably well after most people have already patched or defended against this, but the patch in question just got rolled out for Debian Jessie. 

Jessie has been on openssl1.0.1j up until now, and they're rolling out the 'k' version.

When upgrading Debian Jessie:

If you are otherwise vulnerable (compiled it yourself) you need to hold three items because of the way Debian breaks things up into smaller chunks.

Before upgrading your system do the following, either with 'sudo' or as root:  

apt-mark hold openssl libssl1.0.0 libssl-dev

no.  It hasn't.  Not since the run-up to the big spike a year and a half or so ago. 

The previous thirty days the volume in that market was only about $260k.

Heh.  Assume for the moment that I believe the market is entirely speculation driven.  If it is, then I profit when the crowd is wrong and I am right.  Under those circumstances I would be motivated to say that the market is fundamentals-driven and that people should be investing according to their perceived value of bitcoin. 

Now, assume for the moment that I believe the market is fundamentals-driven.  If it is, then everyone profits (or not) regardless of the activities of speculators, and there is no motive to mislead.

My point is that if I were an entirely rational trader, in either case I would tell you that you should invest according to whatever actual value you perceive for bitcoin.

But I am not entirely rational.  At this time the market is mainly driven by speculation, so I could profit in the short run by misleading people if I committed the time and effort to managing a speculative portfolio.  However, I'm investing according to fundamentals and don't really give a damn about the short-term speculators opportunities to profit because making an edge via  speculation is a full time goddamn job and I have a life to live.  Long-term investments can be made in a speculative market, whenever the speculators crash the market below the long-term value.

Therefore, I *am* managing my portfolio according to the value I perceive for Bitcoin, and I *do* believe that right now it is undervalued. 

I was thinking about this the other day.  Every increase in fees means more utxo's fit the definition of "dust" in that spending them would require more fees than they are worth.  And fees will definitely increase.  If we suppose that at some point in the future the blockchain will transfer absolutely huge amounts of value with each block, then securing it is going to take a large amount of capital investment, and the fees will be large enough to cover that capital investment.   If fees are based on securing million-dollar transactions, then paying the same for the identical bandwidth to secure a five-dollar transaction is going to be impractical at best.

In the short run though, after the next reward reduction, fees are likely to increase and a lot of the present holders (those with Satoshi Dice outputs for example) will likely find that they have a lot of unspendable outputs at some point.

I don't have an opinion about that.

Well, obviously not.  Bitcoin's whitepaper and code are treated pretty much exactly the same as a paper and code presented at a conference by any cryptographer.  They've picked it up just as though it were an academic publication,  and attached his name to it.

I'm saying, it's not at all surprising for somebody with any connection to the cryptography community, writing any time since its publication just before the beginning of 2009, to refer to a "Nakamoto Consensus" or to the "Nakamoto Consensus Protocol." 

I read it as someone publishing some version of a hash on a document.  It's getting buried in the blockchain as a proof that he had it at a particular time.

Presumably, at some later time, he asserted (or will assert) that he had the document at that time and offer the blockchain tx as proof.

Which as andytoshi pointed out, probably has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself.  For all we know the author of this tx is just establishing his copyright on something, or proving that it hasn't been tampered with since that date.

Trading volume for last 3 weeks of January and first week of February is about 7x trading volume for the month previous to that.  And it's happened without major price movements.

Int....eresting.  Anybody got wild-assed guesses about what it means?  I've made some popcorn and I'm sitting back to watch what happens next.

The limit wasn't part of Satoshi's original plan, but keep in mind that the original plan was at that time very much a work in progress.  I was only involved for about a month back then.  When Hal and Satoshi started talking about involving more people, I dropped it.

FWIW, among Cryptologists the block chain is known as the "Nakamoto Consensus Protocol".  It's now a well-studied approach to the Byzantine Generals Problem.

Cryddit.

For what it's worth: 

I'm the guy who went over the blockchain stuff in Satoshi's first cut of the bitcoin code.  Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.  But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.

Several attempted "abuses" of the blockchain under the 1MB limit have proved Hal right about needing the limit at least for launching purposes.  A lot of people wanted to piggyback extraneous information onto the blockchain, and before miners (and the community generally) realized that blockchain space was a valuable resource they would have allowed it.  The blockchain would probably be several times as big a download now if that limit hadn't been in place, because it would have a lot of random 1-satoshi transactions that exist only to encode information for altcoins etc.

At this point I don't think random schmoes who would allow just any transaction are getting a  lot of blocks. The people who have made a major investment in hashing power are doing the math to figure out which tx are worthwhile to include because block propagation time (and therefore the risk of orphan blocks) is proportional to block size. So at this point I think blockchain bloat as such is no longer likely to a problem, and the 1MB limit is no longer necessary.  It has been more-or-less replaced by a profitability limit that motivates people to not waste blockchain bandwidth, and miners are now reliably dropping transactions that don't pay fees. 

Mark Karpeles stole about a half-billion dollars worth of Bitcoin by fucking over the people who, rather than keeping their own keys, allowed an online exchange to hold their bitcoins for them.  He's in court in Japan now, standing trial for securities fraud.  When that trial is over, both France and the US are trying to extradite him to stand trial on charges in those countries.  It turned out his online exchange leaked like a damn sieve - either into his own pockets, or as he claims into the pockets of other crooks.  Whether he personally collected the money or not though, he IS definitely a crook.  He kept right on operating the exchange fully knowing they didn't have enough coin to pay out to their traders, and knowing that more of their coin was disappearing every day.

Moral of the story:  If you want to keep your bitcoins, don't leave them sitting in an online exchange or wallet.  Some of these clowns think "fractional reserve" is an acceptable policy for a currency which is forced by protocol to remain finite.  Or, you know, they just want to steal your money.

Cryddit.