I'm not sure I understand the instructions. Are you suggesting that the person announces their balance here, then moves it to 5 other addresses so that they can post links to Bitcoin Block Explorer as evidence?

Apart from the fact that few people would go to that much trouble, there is the downside that by consolidating your coins you link their histories together. Not everyone will want this.

Atlas, why don't you show your own wealth? If no-one else shows theirs, you will be permanently ranked Richest Bitcoiner #1.

Mt Gox used to accept PayPal for transfers in and transfers out. But PayPal froze their account after scammers bought Bitcoins with stolen PayPal accounts.

Maximum freedom allows people a greater range of positive, fulfilling ways to live their lives. Minimum freedom leads to desperation, and more people do evil stuff.

Anyway, the original poster asked "How could we prevent this without governments?". I ask, how could we prevent this with governments?

Yep. Two categories ought to be enough:

1. Do you believe things for which you have sound evidence?
2. Do you believe things for which you do not have sound evidence?

And convince Tycho and Slush not to conspire with each other

Of course he's supporting Bitcoin. He means that the project is dangerous to governments and central banks.

Enough vague speculation. Here is Satoshi's actual answer:

Wei Dai's home page is here.

Nick Szabo's home page is here.

Satoshi Nakamoto's home page is here.

I agree with you, Jed, that comparing Bitcoin to familiar things such as PayPal is the most productive option.

But I can't bring myself to tell people "Bitcoin is a free paypal that anyone can use" when Bitcoin isn't always free to use. And I can't think of an honest slogan that's as catchy as your slogan.

Luke-jr already accepts non-standard transactions and mines them into blocks, if you include a fee of 0.00004096 bitcoins per 512 bytes, and connect your (modified) client to his node using "-addnode=nat.router.dashjr.org".

It may be a "pump-and-dump". The perpetrator buys some bitcoins, then spams the internet with bitcoin-promotion in the hope of making the price rise before selling out.

BiddingPond is by far the best way for a newcomer to get some Bitcoins, beyond the 0.02 they can get from the faucet.

Thank you khal for your response. I've updated my previous post to reflect your clarifications. The points that are still unclear for me are:

1. Does the block reward stay at 50 coins, or does it reduce over time.

2. Is there a 21 million limit for generated namecoins.

3. The "special 0.01NC that is sent to you and reserved" is the coin that represents the domain name, right? It sits in your NC wallet but can never be spent, even if you let the domain name lapse, right? Where does this unspendable coin come from: the domain reservation, the first update, the renewal, or all of these?

The MIT license is compatible with all the major open source licenses. So you can re-use Bitcoin's code in your project, whether your project is GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, Perl Artistic License, etc. If the main Bitcoin client was GPL, it would not be possible to re-use the code in some open source projects.

If you think that Bitcoin should be under the GPL, you can do that. Just take the code and re-license it as a GPL project. The MIT license is free enough that you can do that. Call your version "Bitcoin GPL edition" or something, so that there's no confusion.

I understand the philosophical reasons why many people prefer their projects to be copyleft. But there might not be a big enough ecosystem to sustain a GPL Bitcoin. You can try it though with your GPL edition.

Watts are a unit of power, which is the rate of consumption of energy. Energy is measured in either kilowatt-hours (one kW-h is 1000 watts being consumed for an hour), or Joules (one Joule is one watt being consumed for one second, so one kW-h is 3600000 Joules).


If 160 Watts will (on average) generate one bitcoin each 24 hours, then the creation of each bitcoin uses 3.84 kW-h (0.16 * 24) or 13.824 Megajoules. That's about a dollar's worth of electricity where I live.

The target is for 7200 new bitcoins to be mined each day, which would require 27.648 MW-h (Megawatt-hours) or 99532.8 Megajoules (which is approximately 100 Gigajoules).

At the target of 7200 coins per day, the power consumption of the Bitcoin network would therefore be 1.152 Megawatts (i.e. 7200 times 160 watts).

At the moment the Bitcoin network is running about 60% above the target generation rate, so the total power consumption would be proportionally higher.

I don't get it. If he thinks it's wrong to endorse Bitcoin for profit, why would he want to visit #bitcoin-otc?

Anyway, he received 360 BTC in donations (about $2800 at the current MtGox rate).

"Bitcoins are super-convenient barter tokens for the internet"

Vinced estimated a maximum of 30 million names. It seems that this is limited by block size, which can be increased.

So let's see if Namecoin scales reasonably. I haven't used Namecoin, so please correct me if I've misunderstood anything. I'm just looking at Namecoin from the point of view of "do I feel satisfied paying out my bounty?".

Here is my understanding (edited to reflect replies up to 17 May). Please correct any errors:

1. 50 namecoins are generated with every block.
2. The block target time is 10 minutes.
3. Generation difficulty scales the same way as Bitcoin.
4. The number of namecoins per block doesn't decrease. It's 50 forever.
5. There is no 21-million limit to the number of namecoins generated.
6. To reserve a domain costs 0.01 NC plus mining fees, so there is a hard limit of 720000 new names per day, but in practice the limit will be much lower because not all namecoins are used to reserve domains.
7. To activate a domain costs an amount that started at 50 NC but halves every two months, down to a minimum of 0.01NC plus mining fees. So after about two years, the activation cost (cost of "first update") will be as low as the renewal cost ("name update").
8. The renewal cost is 0.01 NC plus mining fees, at least once every 12000 blocks. In practice a figure of twice per 12000 blocks seems realistic, to allow for DNS changes and also for people to renew before the 12000-block deadline to avoid the risk of losing their domain names.
9. The mining fees are kept by the miner who generates the block containing the transaction. The 0.01NC fee to reserve a domain is sent back to you in the form of an unspendable coin that represents the reserved domain. The "first update" and "name update" fees are burned.

If these points can be confirmed or corrected, I'll have a better feel for namecoin's scalability.

(PS: Kiba: chaord's bounty had an expiry date, so the total bounty is lower than your figure.)

...and bitcoins are divisible. A quarter of a domain name isn't much use to anyone.

That would be nice. But mainly I just want it to not be shut down.