Was that "eventually" intentional? Do you think the limit should be set now to accommodate the anticipated future volume?  If so, are you not concerned with the incentive structure you are imposing between now and then?  Or did you think that the limit should be dynamically adjusted as we go, to (almost) accommodate the growth?

No, he was not funny. Your comment, however, is alarming.

P.S.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135665.msg1445271#msg1445271

@Mike: for the sake of informed discussion here, would you please briefly explain the economics of fees in the scenario you are proposing? What is the incentive for payers to include fees, and for miners to keep mining?

bid:

ask:

Dude. Please.  The US government already has all the information they need, and some more. MtGox intermediate servers are in San Jose, California - even in this thread MT reminded us of that.

Even the "Canadian" exchange Cavirtex - and I've been their happy customer for a long time - is registered as a .com with at least some infrastructure physically in the U.S.

Now, you are aware of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act, right?  What's all this bullshit about U.S. government "needing all the information" They have all the information, and they've had it for a long time. And Bitcoin is doing just fine. So quit bullshitting about the government, and let's focus on real and practical issues here.

Large exchanges could provide valuable service to the community by publishing aggregated, anonymous data about the user base. With a little bit of effort on their side we could get a decent estimate about the numbers of active users, frequency of use, etc. Gox was on the good path with their transparency report, but I haven't seen any new ones recently.  The whole "trade secret" and "business intelligence" excuse to not publicize the data is mostly bullshit. It would not hurt anyone to make the information public.

On the other end, counting unique public addresses in the blockchain, together with some intense analysis of transactions could at least provide the maximum number of users - that is, we would know for sure that there is less then X million of people using the currency.

The best thing you can do is spend a little bit of time reading and understanding how bitcoin works, how traditional currencies work, and how markets work. Do not waste time on people's opinions and wishful thinking, just try to get facts straight and develop your own understanding.

This makes perfect sense. Please consider the A-type male connector.

I guess you meant Iran because of trade sanctions...? In that case, let's not discuss it in public, as discussion can hurt the efforts.

The address is obtained from ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)). Your blogpost is more than great at all levels - this is just a detail that becomes important, for example, when discussing security of Bitcoin.You would need to break badly at the same time all three primitives (ecdsa, sha256, and ripemd160) to be able to reverse a known wealthy address into the corresponding private key, allowing you to spend (steal) the coins. This pretty much eliminates all the concerns of type "what if digital signature algorithm is broken in future?".

So:
Private key into public key (ecdsa)
Public key into address (sha256 and ripemd160)
Only public keys associated with addresses that were sent from are publicly known.

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

 

Selling 95% is overreacting to a vague "bubble about to burst" thought. Anyway, I hope OP spends wisely and enjoys life...

To avoid confusion, it is worth pointing out that an address is a hash of the corresponding public key.

Now, that's a good point, but it assumes that donating to WL is something donators must do, so they have no choice but to spend their precious coins. I'd say no way; WL donation is not food or water or urgent surgery.

Just thought of a better way to answer the original question, but it's beyond my ability at the moment: look at the age of mined coins (age of first-time spent coins vs. price or price trend). Coinbase addresses are easily available, so this is easy for solo miners, but to get more data we should look at the pool payouts, not just the block reward (coinbase) transactions. This would clearly show if people tend to hoard more when price is rallying, and are easier to spend on the way down.

Finally, the big picture: assume all the coins are mined, and they are valuable enough so rate of loss is negligible. Fixed supply. If the economy available to coins grows, the value goes up. Perhaps people start spending less because of this, so the economic growth slows down a bit, at least until people get used to the higher value of coins and start spending more easily. If the economy shrinks, the value of coins goes down, making them easier to spend, thus stimulating the economy. I see no problem, and would love to live in  a world like that.

It doesn't matter how big part of an economy involves donations. Donations involve 100% of donations, and that is the data set we are looking at. People who did donate obviously did so regardless of price trends, proving false the hypothesis that "deflationary currency decreases willingness to spend". By "deflationary" they mean currency whose purchasing power is increasing (regardless of inflation or deflation of monetary base).

This is something not many people understand. It's pointless to try to "beat the market" unless you are willing to gamble without any risk management.

Well, since "strength in numbers" seems to be leading the poll, I thought I'd throw in my to satoshis regarding the Latin translation. Source: rusty remnants of one year of high-school latin, and native tongue that features latin-like cases and declensions.

in numeris vis

I am a proud owner of a 2011 T-shirt saying "Vires in numeris" - is this posed to become a precious collectible akin to all those postage stamps with typos or other errors?

"Long time" and "bubble" are relative terms, based on completely arbitrary time scale you choose to look at the data. There is a bubble every day.
The shouting of bulls and bears usually never specifies time - at best you get vague references such as "soon".

This. Also, I suggest OP try http://otherpower.com/?q=Conservation/otherpower_experiments_bicycle.html

Kudos!

Donation-accepting sites represent a nice opportunity to analyze spending and hoarding habits in relation to increasing value of bitcoins. I looked into some of the entities accepting Bitcoin donations. To date, Wikileaks has received over 1`500 transactions, the Internet Archive 500, and Bitcoin100 about 270.

Let's look at the champion: the Wikileaks. Still a small dataset, but it's the best I've found. They have been accepting donations to their public address ever since the June 2011 bubble, and there have been considerable ups and downs of btc price since then.

I took list of all incoming transactions from blockchain.info and historical daily prices of bitcoin in USD from MtGox via bitcoincharts.com. The value of each donation is then simply converted to the USD equivalent based on historical prices (based on the price on the corresponding date, not on today's prices).

Here is the outcome:


And another view:


No matter how hard I try, I see no correlation whatsoever. People just use ("spend") coins to transfer value, and don't seem to quit donating just because the price jumped 5x in few months. They don't seem to start donating more during the downward trends either. All in all, price skyrocketing doesn't seem to be a problem as it is often portrayed.

Thoughts?