Only the graphic designer(s) / sculptors who actually design it know for sure, but the rest of us will recognise it when we see it.

-MarkM-

Possible domain names are actually even more numerous than possible bitcoin addresses, aren't they? Or about the same maybe?

So bitcoin addresses that actually print out as some cool intelligible string might well be as limited a resource as domain names, though discovering a private key giving you the actual use of such a possible address presents a challenge even more difficult than mining blocks.

-MarkM-

21 million per block for the first/genesis block and none thereafter could be one method.

-MarkM-

Dear ____________,

As a well known public figure associated with Bitcoin development and well versed in the technical underpinnings of the software and its cryptological bases, I feel it important to advise you of a - to say the least - *highly unexpected* mathematical result which will be as disastrous to your project as to the mainstream banking community, whom I admit I feel no such urge to warn of their impending doom.

It is absolutely imperative to avoid precipitating a panic and also of course it is to Bitcoin's benefit that the centralised banking systems about to go down in flames not be forewarned of this amazing mathematical fact.

Because speed is of the essence, precompiled binaries of the bitcoin client and daemon have been prepared for all platforms, prehardened against this bizarre mathematical development, obtain them via secure server at https://securebitcoin.ng/

Due to the very obvious danger of attackers discovering this exploit by examining the source code, source code of course cannot be provided until all major nodes of the bitcoin network have safely made the transition to the fixed algorithms.

How about a bitcoin computer in a bitcoin tin? (I am not clear on the iconic-ness of altoids as a symbol of bitcoins...)

-MarkM-

Oh cool, sounds like WebSurfinMurf might like the plan some Freeciv Galactic Milieu nations are considering for at least a start toward "backing" their currencies then, as the plan is to auction off each year some number of the production-points of some of their cities. Thus basically offering production "work" in return for some as yet to be determined by bidders number of units of their digital currency.

-MarkM- (Want a unit of galactic marines built? Only 80 production points, get your bids in now! )

(Most of their discussions on it are about for whom they are willing to build what, exactly...)

Not really, no, since the altnet or alternet or outernet or whatever projects never limited themselves to a single top level domain, on the contrary the product they offered was any top level domain of your own that you want except those already assigned by the Assigned Names Authority or whoever it is that decides when all of a sudden .doctor or .professional or .sex or .porn subdomains will be put up for sale by a "registrar". In the alternet systems you basically chose what new top level domain you wanted to be registrar of.

-MarkM- (markm@markm.markm on some such net someday maybe? )

(I didn't like those projects as they refused to honour the .fnord domain I'd already set up my own root-servers for...)

.bit might not be as popular an alternative TLD as .sex and some of the others supported by altDNS projects the adult site industry convinced large numbers of adult site surfers to adopt but maybe its popularity could be increased by buying .but at the varous other altDNS systems so it could be reachable using their nameservers too?

(Do they even still have lots of users after all these years? I don't know...)

-MarkM-

P.S. is bitcoin a possible threat to the namecoin blockchain?

Can''t the attacker constantly trawl the IRC-discovery channels looking for new nodes to connect to, and maybe even thereby never flap more than once at any specific node?

(Get 8 connections, flap at them, drop them, get 8 virgin nodes, flap at them, drop them, pick another 8, etc... ?)

-MarkM-

It seems to rely though on knowing exactly which machine you need to timejack in order to double-spend in a way that results in useable services or merchandise.

For example suppose I run a website that accepts Bitcoin payments in return for some promptly delivered readily-resellable product or service.

It knows the IP address and port of my, or my financial service provider's, bitcoind or of a tunnel to such a bitcoind.

The attacker tells my website it wants to buy, my website asks the remote bitcoind for an address for the transaction and tells it to the attacker.

What machine is the attacker going to try to timejack in order to fool my website into handing over its good or service?

-MarkM- (Could Ocean's Thirteen timejack all the major pools' pool-servers at once, maybe?)

For clarity, at least when in dumbed-down mode, it should maybe not take dumbed-down to mean hide all the details like a knowledgeable user might prefer due to knowing all the details very clearly but rather, to be dumbed down like a "wizard" or even a "guru" routine.

That is, walk you through it step by step asking for confirmation of each step ("wizard") and possibly even (a la "guru") actually attempting to explain what it is all really about despite those who prefer the "wizard" approach wanting very very much not to ever ever have to understand anything about anything and most certainly not anything even remotely related to computers or computing.

So maybe something like:

You have asked to pay #.## bitcoins to [alias or address of intended recipient].

Due to the precise denominations of the coins currently in your wallet, this
will be done by sending them # coins, and in addition will require "breaking" #
coins to attain the precise amount to send, resulting in #.## change which
can be sent to any of the following addresses:

[ ] A new never before used one of your own that you have not yet backed up due to it has not been invented yet.

[ ] An old never before used one of your own created on ##/##/####, which might exist in a backup if you made a backup since then.

[ ] A (or the) default change-address you configured for this wallet in the wallet configuration section (see help etc etc)

[ ] The default charity you have configured for this wallet in the wallet configuration section (see help etc)

[ ] Some other address, in which case please input said address now: _________________________________________

-MarkM-

(I left out [ ] Send the change to the same address the payment is being sent from, because it seems unclear why, or even whether, it is apparently necessary at least in some circumstances to send it elsewhere. Does the protocol prohibit the sending address(es) appearing in the list of recipient addresses maybe for example or what?)

There is a client being developed that is agnostic as to various details about the blockchain-based currency it works with, you tell it about them using config files giving it details such as what port to use for that currency, what genesis block to use, how many coins if any it mints per block and so on. Initial testing and ddeveloment is being done using original bitcoins, testnet bitcoins, beertokens and so on. Once it is nice and easy to install and use likely we'll be spammed with endless streams of config files for more and more new currencies one could choose to use it with if one so desired.

Various Freeciv Galactic Milieu nations are already brainstorming about how much of their own various currencies to offer for how many of each of the various new currencies this new client will allow to proliferate they should consider buying to add to their own currency reserves as diversified backing for their own currencies...

-MarkM-

All else being equal, what kind of curve does your valuation based on difficulty follow?

For example if all buy/sell/trade interfaces for blockchain-based currencies all accepted any such currency, but at different exchange rates, what kind of relation would you expect, or possibly even code if coding artificial intelligence market-maker bots, between difficulty and value?

Or if considering multiple currencies confuses the issue too much, how much value would how much change in difficulty change your personal valuation of how much a bitcoin is worth to you?

The "you" herein is intended generally to each reader.

Possibly some readers do not particularly care whether difficulty is high or low, only whether technical indicators seem to be predicting a rise or fall in the price of the coins?

But because I have seen many comments indicating that any blockchain running at less difficulty than whatever difficulty bitcoin happens to be running at any given moment in time is relatively worthless compared to the higher difficulty blockchain (at least if the higher difficulty one happens to be the original bitcoins' blockchain) I am interested in clarifing numerically that "relatively" relation. Is it a simply direct ratio? Or exponential? Asyptotic at some point? Or what?

How important would difficulty be if it turned out that the original bitcoin was the one running at lower difficulty? How much value would bitcoins lose in your personal valuation at what ratio of lower difficulty that an other or many other blockchain(s)?

Do those who believe prices will reach some kind of equilibrium near the cost of mining them believe whichever blockchain comes closest to that equilibrium would on that basis seem to them a better buy, having a more realistic, in their system of valuation, price?

-MarkM-

"Universal Bit Coin", quite distinct from the early-adopter's bootup period old-bitcoin "Bitcoin Temporary Centuries" (BTC)  which were designed as a temporary measure to appear as one hundred of an arbitrarily chosen power of ten of satoshis in early alpha and beta stage clients.

-MarkM-

You want the banks to let *you* join the "folk who can screw them" club?

Unlikely. Right now "all" you have to do is splice into their Interac cables, little hashing required. Why would they *give* you a line into their network?

How much is their existing network costing them? $1.50 per transaction they do at a box in a bar for a patron of the bar? Or are they soaking that sucker er I mean patron for a whole lot more than their actual costs?

I expect the only "thick clients" on their network will be their own branches, the government central bank watchdog of each nation they have licensed branches in, and the clearing house / exchange centre of each other bank they interac(t) with.

-MarkM- (Regular Joes don't want thick clients anyway, right?)

P.S. They could even set difficulty targets. "We know the authorised processing power for hashing each participant has registered and contracted to maintain, so if difficulty rises we start a network audit to discover where the unauthorised hashing is taking place..." (Such attempts to disrupt the network would probably be at least a federal offence, if not an act of war...)

The government could sanction/bless 21 million coin blockchain currencies of any bank that puts 21 whole actual original bitcoins on deposit at the central bank to "back" them. The government could thus act as buyer of last resort for each bank's branded currency (branding is in, branding is cool, everyone wants to brand stuff), buying it at one bitcoin per million coins if no-one else will buy the stuff.

Thus people need not use actual bitcoins, the global reserve currency, in their day to day domestic affairs...

-MarkM- (Actual number of bitcoins to be deposited to back each coin not necessarily having to be 1 per million, of course, that is just an e.g.)

That is kind of an amusing contrast when set against other claims that it is too easy to simply start another currency using Bitcoin code and co-operate with / compete with the original Bitcoins.

If original bitcoins keep going up in value like they have been, pretty soon it will cost you less than a bitcoin for a whole new 21 million coins of your very own, named whatever you want to name them up to trademark / servicemark type law limitations, or even more than 21 million if you prefer your currency to have more than 21 million available to circulate.

So don't moan about not being able to grab millions of coins dirt cheap, go ahead and grab some of any or all of the types that still are dirt cheap and if they too are not cheap enough for you simply start your own that you can sell as cheap as you think such things ought to be.

Play your cards - or your Freeciv Galactic Milieu nation - right and you might find you have at least as many buyers right off the bat as there are Freeciv Galactic Milieu nations that have already started their own currency, and at least as many buyers eventually as there are nations supported by the Freeciv software (hint: it supports quite a few already and the number keeps growing...)

-MarkM-

Very compatible. The clients and daemons used by Martian Bank branches on Earth (Sol III) actually function as normal standard Bitcoin clients when the command-line switch that causes them to use the Martian network and blockchain instead of the Hacker nation's network and blockchain (known here on Earth/Sol-III as Bitcoin) is not used.

-MarkM- (The Hacker nation is every bit as mythical as the planet known as Earth so if Earth exists why not Hackers, maybe even on Earth...)

You can have your own entire bitcoin-type currency, all 21 million coins of it all to yourself, for only a few programmer-hours, maybe even less than one programmer-hour (if programmer knows exactly what to do and how to do it and is willing to sell time in blocks of a few hours or less), and many programmers still accept PayPal as far as I know.

So you have not in fact missed the gravy train, you have failed to buckle down and build it.

(If you think you'd simply be scamming people to make yourself into a billionaire though I suppose you might be doomed to not only missing gravy trains but failing to create gravy trains too.)

Canadian Digital Notes (CDN), United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB), Bitnickels (NKL) and others along those lines can still be had for as little as one CAD, GBP, or actually-made-of-nickel old U.S. nickel though I think, and some seem to think those are a buyer's market right now (as in, they doubt anyone will even buy any so aren't busy driving the price up so fast that you are about to miss the gravy train on those too...)

-MarkM-

P.S. if you think a bitcoin shortage will be a problem some day, get in on alternatives before that day comes!

All the more reason to be nice to them by introducing game-bitcoins, compared to which their fiat might actually seem at least for a while to have value, maybe even seemingly quite a bit of value.

(I am thinking not of prestigious Martian Botcoins, nor even major galactic currencies such as CDN and UKB, of course... But maybe for example the blockchain of the tiny Czech nation whose single city is on a predominately Martian planet might make USD look relatively valuable?)

-MarkM- (Unless, of course, the Czechs too try to somehow peg their currency to currencies on the "mythical" planet known as Earth...)