You, sir, are one of the early adopters, along with everyone else who is already here. Not even one-third of the bitcoins have been mined so far.

Also, remember that that the earliest adopters could only mine with CPU. Today the CPU is 50 times slower than a decent GPU, but back then the CPU mining code was less efficient than it is today, maybe 100 times slower than a GPU.

Also, the earliest adopters spent their time or their bitcoins making the system workable. Today, people can get a GPU and just start mining, but it wasn't always so. The bounty for the first open source GPU mining code was 10,000 BTC, paid by one of the earliest adopters, but you can use that code for free!

This forum, with its easy-on-the-eye theme, is so easy to read. Who wants glitz?

Luke's name and reputation are clear already.

The press in the UK has been reporting many people who have "come out of the woodwork" to tell about similar experiences with him in the past.

and Microsoft too ... as the actress said to the Bishop!

I added you to the list. Feel free to supply a more accurate figure.

You guys crack me up. It's pretty-much a law of disruptive technologies that they fail if they try to do too many things at once.

If you want the public to use a new money system, you can't also expect them to use an unfamiliar system of numbers. That would restrict the target users to the intersection of those who are interested in new money systems, and those who are interested in unfamiliar numbering systems.

The fact that the general public doesn't use scientific notation anywhere else, suggests that they won't want a money system that adopts it.

So, if you want BTC to succeed, scientific notation is out. Tonal notation is out. Greek suffixes are out. The SI (metric) prefixes (milli, micro etc) I think are OK. They are already familiar to most of the world's population, and even the 'Merkins will get the hang of them eventually.

Namecoin lets you register your own name in the .bit top-level domain. For example, you could register dikidera.bit

For browsers to be able to see .bit domains, they must have their DNS settings changed. It's easy enough to do. Of course there needs to be a DNS server somewhere that will serve these domains, but that's not a problem.

Like Bitcoin, the Namecoin system is peer-to-peer and can't easily be shut down.

In addition to registering domain names, you can be a namecoin miner. This is vaguely analogous to being a domain name registrar, in that you can charge fees for mining the blocks that contain people's domain name registrations and renewals.

True. But it's also true that Average payout minus 3% both when the difficulty was 25 000 and when it is 250 000 loses significantly compared to good luck when it was 25 000 and an unlucky streak when it is 250 000.

If you want to maximize your expected profits, mine solo. If you value predictability and dislike variance, mine pooled and forfeit the pool fees.

I paid in advance for a Bitcoin pinback from divergenta. I received a torn envelope in the post, and the pinback had fallen out. Divergenta cheerfully sent a replacement which arrived well-packed. The product looks great.

I received mine today, and it looks great!

The third photo in the original post gives the best impression of how it looks, but the "graininess" is due to the photo and is not how the real item looks.

The "pinback" is what I would call a badge. There is a simple safety-pin clip at the back.

The logo is distinctive, yet the badge is small enough to look discrete. It's ideal for Bitcoin meetups, or in-person exchanges. The finish is professional. It doesn't look at all amateurish or home-made.

That might be true for current users. Future users won't want anything more complicated than "I want this transaction to be confirmed (a) in about an hour, or (b) in about a day."

Or even better, just a checkbox labelled "Priority transaction (fee applies)".

If you have good luck in your solo mining early on, the pools will probably never catch up.

The way hashing works, there's never any "catching up". All there is, is the probability that the next hash might be a winning one.

With solo mining, you occasionally get a block of 50 coins. Or a little more, occasionally, with fees. With pooled mining and a 2% fee, your expectation would be to get 49 coins, on average, in that same timespan.

That applies no matter what the timespan is; no matter what difficulty-changes there are; and even whether you are CPU mining.

I'm solo mining and haven't found a block since 17 April, and I can understand the temptation to join a pool.

But in the long run, one will always make a little more by solo mining than by joining any pool that charges fees.

The chart is cropped for efficiency, I presume. It takes about 10 seconds to plot on my phone, so I wouldn't want it to have any more data points.

And the way-out bids and offers don't mean much, because they inevitably disappear before the price gets anywhere near them.

They would be interesting though, because they would reveal how many coins and dollars are held by MtGox.

Thanks for clarifying, vinced. If the fees can be arbitrarily small, then the 21 million limit is not a problem. And the block size can be increased as necessary. I no longer have any reservations.

The design is better than I had initially thought, and the business model seems sound and sustainable too. I wonder if theymos still has reservations following these clarifications.

Anyway, I'm totally happy and ready to pay my bounty. Namecoin is a great project!

If he was English, his lawyer would have obtained a superinjunction so that most people would never have heard about it.

So you'll need to assemble the list based on supposition (like The Times newspaper does for their "Rich List") and let people correct your suppositions if they wish. Here are a few wild guesses to get you started:

satoshi: 500,000
artforz: 400,000
knightmb: 372,000
Legion: 46,850 (claimed here)
happyland 14,000 (claimed here)
vladimir: 2100
atlas: 1500
uukgoblin: 1000 (offered for sale at #bitcoin-otc)
kiba: 100
Joseph: 0.13

If proof exists, then it's not supernatural anymore. So it makes no sense to say that one can be swayed by proof to believe in the supernatural.

Atheist: someone who believes in stuff that's true.
Theist: someone who believes in something supernatural based on their faith that it's true.

All the atheists I know would believe in any god for which proof existed. They've just never seen any proof, nor do they have any reason to suppose that such proof exists.

No. You collect transaction fees, if any, when you generate the block. Instead of getting 50 bitcoins for the block, you will occasionally see that you got, say, 50.2 bitcoins because the block you generated included someone's very large or very small transactions.