LOL that was so two hours ago. 

+1, that's why I'm here.

I do feel sorry for those of you who've never dealt with highly speculative investments before and who got lured in by promises that the sky's the limit (sometimes from other noobs, sometimes from scumball pumpers), but pyramids are everywhere...  People get pulled in all the time.  Someone has to be the example we can point to.

That said, I'm laughing the whole way down because the people who're losing big are the silly speculators who ran it up in the first place, and they're the ones who're making BC so volatile that I can't use it as a transactional currency.  I want to buy things, not invest in hopes and dreams, and I can't have my thing until yours is thoroughly crushed.

It's why I'm pushing the idea of a speculation-resistant altchain.  Things shouldn't be allowed to get here in the first place.


... which is why I think BC is economically broken.  I figure it'll start lower than a buck, but same idea.  I'm afraid we'll have a series of mini-bubbles which will prevent stability from happening for at least a couple more years, during which I'm wasting time and money on international wire transfers to get business done, and feeding PayPal a cut for the small stuff.

Unfortunately the only way around it is a different economic model, and altchains aren't going to be taken seriously any time soon.

Damn, I missed the knife. 

... but there will always be another.

For those not familiar with it:



We're currently at Capitulation.  I speculate wildly that Despair starts somewhere under $0.50, but anyone who calls a bottom with any kind of authority at this stage will likely eat their words.


Heh, I've heard that one all the way down, but usually it lasts at least a few days.

I just put in my withdraw.  Sorry to see you guys go.  You're everything I wanted in an exchange: convenient to get fiat in and out, a simple website, good customer service, and a nice local office we could go burn down if you screwed us out of our BTC.   In all seriousness the US presence with no silly anonymity games is why I was comfortable leaving my money with you, and it's why I'll be interested in any other services you offer in the future.

Honestly I'm surprised you lasted this long.  I know you were running a tight shop, but there's just not enough transaction volume in the present market to support so many exchanges.

Sad to see you go after you were doing everything right, and thanks for a good run.

We only see trades, not deposits and withdrawals, so it's hard to say how much fiat is actually put into the system daily.  However, any time there's not enough influx of fiat to cover what the miners dump, the price will fall.  With falling price, miners lose incentive and drop out, which causes the power consumption to fall.  In the long run this balances out.  The daily currency trades are a lot greater than the power bills, and I expect they're really not that strong a force in the market...  Mining follows price, not the other way around.

And yes, that's an awful lot to keep the network running.  50BTC/block is an lot of payout for a currency that doesn't have a very strong economy, but it's propped up by wild-eyed speculation (but less every day, fortunately).  After block 210,000 the reward drops to 25BTC, thus cutting the mining costs in half, and similar drops occur in the future.

So while it's absurd now, the mining cost will fall in the future (resulting in less power spent mining), unless the BTC starts getting some wider acceptance, in which case greater payouts to miners are justified.

Basically this is what 0.4 does with wallet encryption - your public keys are always available, but to spend any coins you have to supply the password to retrieve your secret keys.

Your method would make it easier to take the secret keys offline and keep them on a USB drive.  But what additional security are you providing compared to putting the entire encrypted wallet on a USB drive and only use it (and decrypt it) when you want to spend?

Just move your wallet.dat over and you're set.

Not if they pay out with generated coins.  Then it just says "Generated".

The 50BTC generated per block doesn't have to be sent to one wallet then divided up - it can be directly generated with a cut to everyone who the pool owes.  Eligius does this, and perhaps others.

 * The insured item is intangible, which will scare off traditional insurance companies
 * The replacement value is volatile, which increases the risk to the insurer
 * Insurance fraud would be too easy: how can you prove they were stolen by a hacker and not deliberately given to your buddy to launder?

The first two could be addressed by creating a market-traded insurance instrument instead of using a traditional underwriter, but this market is way too small to develop something like that.  I really don't know what you'd do about the fraud risk.

Yes, it just scans the raw disk for anything that looks like valid keys and saves them.

The sooner you do it the better!  The more you use the system the more likely it is to be overwritten.

Backups!  At minimum get a USB flash drive and save a copy of your wallet.dat after every few dozen transactions.  if you have a lot of coins some offsite backups are also in order.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet#Backup

Did you have any luck with the recovery tool?

Yeah, the GUI sucks for this.  You can start a bitcoind and get it through the CLI:  "./bitcoin listtransactions".

Or just let me know the exact value of BTC you received and I can look it up.

You were probably mining with Eligius, and stopped a week ago.  They just paid out your remaining balance.

If that's not it let us know the address it went to and we'll see what happened.  You can PM me if you don't want to post it publicly.

A) There can be about 2^160 addresses.  This is a very large number, and there's no concern that we'll start having collisions any time soon.  In the very unlikely that we start generating addresses so fast that it's plausible a collision may happen before the end of the universe, we can increase the hash size and it'll be solved forever.

B) It's not technically impossible - it's just so extremely unlikely that it can be safely assumed that it will never happen, as above.  This is not a "oh, you'll never win the lotto" kind of unlikely.  It's a "You can generate addresses using all the computing power on the planet until humanity no longer exists as a species and you'll never see a collision" kind of unlikely.

C) The coins/bills have a keypair assigned.  The BTC are sent to the public key which is printed on the outside so you can verify the balance.  To redeem them you crack them open to discover the private key, which lets you import them into your wallet and/or spend the coins.

D) You can generate addresses all you want and no one will know or care.  The blockchain only grows when an address actually receives coins.  The transaction fees for small or frequent spends are there to prevent abuse.  If you want to send tiny amounts to a billion addresses, that's fine - you'll have to pay a large transaction fee, and then we'll store it for you.

The keys to access your coins are in the wallet.dat file.  Hopefully you saved a copy of this before you reinstalled.  If you didn't format the hard drive when you reinstalled, do a file search for wallet.dat.  The tool maged linked will find it if it hasn't been overwritten yet.  You can also recover your coins if you have an older backup copy of your wallet.dat - it's valid for up to 100 transactions after the last backup.

If you can't recover this file at all, your coins are gone.

I invest my BTC in USD.  I'm getting 1500% ROR over the last few months!

It's my opinion that the BTCs fundamentals are still in the low-cents range, and even with rampant speculation to support the price it's still going under a buck.  I'm a total bear.  

So, to answer your question: Unless you need to spend them now, the cheapest BTCs are the ones you buy in the future.

Sure, I'm aware of that limitation; I don't have a solution to devaluation in an unbacked currency.

I'm not worried about devaluation generally: it's a fact of life in currency.  I'm just trying to prevent massive bubble-popping devaluation like we have now by preventing bubbles from forming in the first place.

It wouldn't be perfect, but wouldn't it be better than the crazy speculation cycle we have now, which has resulted in a widespread "OMFG it's a pyramid scheme! stay away!" sentiment?


This is absolutely true (at least at first; my variant would let it float after the initial growth period), but my goal is to have a useful transaction currency, not an investment vehicle.

The barrier to mining is pretty high, but you don't need a hash monster to have a wallet and play with the system.


I floated an idea for this a few days ago:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45830.msg547015#msg547015 (it's in a few pieces in that thread.)

It's been turning over in my mind for a while.  I think it might solve the early adopter / rampant pyramiding problems of BC.  I'd love to have some critique on it.

How is it impractical or impossible?  I don't know if it's economically sound, but the mechanism I described is very simple to implement.


I don't consider fluctuations inherently a problem.  Like you say, that's the nature of a small market.  The problem is the wild-eyed speculation that coins will be worth 1000x in a few years if we just push this thing hard enough - I think that's undermining Bitcoin terribly.

My goal isn't to prevent all price fluctuation.  I'd definitely want a very heavily-smoothed inflation algorithm, to let the market do its thing (arbitrage, market making, forex, etc) over the short to mid term.  The inflation is to limit to long-term price speculation to prevent bubbles during deployment - training wheels until it's big enough to ride on its own.


That's a fair argument.  Let me take a different angle:  Why is this less trustworthy than Bitcoin?  It's preprogrammed inflation, not at the whim of a central authority - which is a lot like Bitcoin - but it adds a stabilizing outside influence.  It also adds uncertainty, but is that uncertainty bigger than that currently surrounding Bitcoin's future?


You do, but take a look at the market cap: that's a pretty direct measure of the global trust of Bitcoin. 

I trust Bitcoin to function as designed, but the design may be economically flawed.  How are we going to achieve widespread trust if we can't get past the current small-scale problems?