Nice.  Hopefully it has a snowball effect.  The friend probably right now is either considering Bitcoins or is at the very least has a positive image of it.

As someone else pointed out hopefully we will see something like this from Lews.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/10/02/i-was-wrong-about-bitcoin/

I would also hope he has setup bitpay to hold at least some % in coins.  Bitpay makes it very easy you can keep 0% to 100% in Bitcoins so someone who is not sold on Bitcoin long term (like Lews maybe) could convert say 90% to fiat and hold 10% as a reserve.  10% of Bitcoin donations is unlikely to material affect his finances but if Bitcoin appreciates in value well it could be a nice hedge.

IS this a typo?  It would seem to indicate you have no BTC.

If the average holder would prefer 3.5% over 5% wouldn't it make sense they would prefer 0% over 3.5%?  There already is a much more widely adopted 0% coin.  Of course the very idea the foundation can choose the demurage = inflation rate is kinda scary right?

Why not just change the name of the foundation to the federal reserve, pass laws making freicoin legal tender and you have just re-invented the current broken system.

Not true.  You can accept PayPal just understand the limits.  Don't accept PayPal from a buyer you don't know or trust.

Why would PayPal do that.  Fraud doesn't cost them anything. The merchant pays.  Making PayPal easy has made it the number one processor on the internet.  PayPal gets all the benefits, merchants pay all the costs.

Now think about this logically if you are PayPal (and making tens of millions a dollars a year in profit for your shareholders) why the hell would you change anything?

Sticky in the currency exchange forum (not sure what this post has to do with trading)


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14632.0

The OP post seems to come from a naive belief that this is some unique or rare situation.  It is very easy to reverse these types of payments and thus you will attract scammers.  The roi of this type of theft is insanely high.  The idea that they will all be caught and then it will be safe to use ebay/PayPal is just naive.  There are thousands and thousands of scammers, if they were all busted there would be thousands more to take their places.  Some scam with their own accounts, some hack accounts, some just buy stolen/hacked PayPal accounts by the hundreds for negligible cost.

Thanks for not disappointing!

I will be willing to escrow this one for free (just curious on what the next excuse is).

Smart guy.  My guess is he won't be willing to do escrow and will just "need" you to send first as a gift.  Lots of excuses and, maybe he agrees to have only do half first ($170 scam is better than nothing).

I wouldn't have said anything but it annoyed me that to perpetuate the "need" for his scam he made a false claim about FC4B.  We are currently are out of PayPal but the turnaround isn't 24 hours.

I think some of these distinctions are academic.  The reality is Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime.  I have long believe (that dozens of other revolutionary technology) we are on a decade long timeline to mainstream usage.

random vs deterministic - nobody will care.  By the time Bitcoin becomes mainstream 99.99999999% of wallets will be deterministic.   It would be like classifying computers are binary or trinary.  Who asks if their Dell laptop is a binary computer?  Who worries that the flash game might not work unless they can verify it wasn't written for trinary based machine language? Nobody.  Except for extremely small niches (by technically savy professionals) all wallets will be deterministic.  The risk of losing funds due to out of date or corrupted backup is simply too high for random wallets.  They will fall out of favor like floppy disks.

encrypted vs plaintext "I want to be robbed because I have too much money" - once again nobody will care.  This is money we are talking about.  The fact that there are wallets which are incapable of encryption simply shows Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime.  I would hope and pray this oversight will be long since corrected before Bitcoin becomes even close to mainstream.  Also encrypted is not understand by most people.   "Password protection to keep your funds safe" = sufficient for mainstream users.

Many of the rest of the terms aren't "wallets" they are "features of a wallet".  

watching wallet?  No such thing.  It is simply confusing.  A wallet is something you use to hold money/value.  It would be like calling an ATM receipt a watching "wallet".   Someone up thread nailed it.   There is no such thing as a watching wallet; there are "wallet watchers"!.  It isn't a type of wallet it is a tool, utility, feature of a wallet (or maybe someday ALL wallets).

linked wallet?   Most people will simply see this as a "double key/login/authorization" and understand it is for security.  They won't want to even begin to understand how the phone is actually part of the wallet and the keys from both the wallet and phone need to be both used to produce the valid multi-sig transactions ..... ZZZZZZ ..... ZZZZZ ..... ZZZZ.  Using terminology that users already understand like 2FA or even more simplistically something like "asks for confirmation from your phone".

" .... for even more security xyz wallet will get confirmation of all spending right from your mobile phone.  See this video demo.  [demo of guy spending 100 BTC on his laptop then getting a security confirmation on his phone to authorize or deny]

TL/DR nerds like to classify things, users like to see FEATURES.

Example of a wallet advertisement circa 2020
xyz wallet supports ...
* password protection to keep your funds safe.
* ability to print your own money from any inkjet or laser printer (offline paper key generation and auto transfer).
* supports usb PIN pad to defeat malware and hackers.
* approve or deny all transactions right from your phone.
* daily spending limits.
* remote wallet monitoring ... great for parents.
* optional bitcoin escrow & recovery system (never lose funds again).

"Daddy why are there so many scammers on the bitcoin forum?"

Simple.  It works.  $120 for about 10 minutes of "work".

Well

1) The chart doesn't break the fee amount down.  1 satoshi for a giant spammy piece of garbage going to lag your block and probably cause an orphan is more likely to be passed over than a free "normal" tx.

2) The chart doesn't break down required fees vs optional fees.  tx with required fees (paying the absolute min) tend to be "junk" for lack of a better word.

3) The reason why free tx are punched up above 10 BTC is that the min fee rules require 1 Bitcoin - Day to avoid being considered low priority and thus require a fee.  It would make sense that most large tx are not low priority (due to coin age rules) and thus don't need to include a fee.

TL/DR the chart is interesting but it needs a lot more stratification to draw any meaning.

Update:
Bank funds (and gold and silver) still available.
PayPal won't be available until 01/02/2013.
Dwolla won't be available until 01/03/2013.

Well to answer you direct question ...  Yes you can send coins from one address to another address in a wallet.  The network has no concepts of wallets.  Everything is an address and any coin can be sent to any address from any address (even itself).

However it likely isn't going to do what you want it to do.  You said the purpose is to keep balances straight.  When you send coins they are going to be sent from any address (the reference client doesn't provide ability to select the tx source) which means the balances are quickly going to get "messed up again".

For a zero day user I would say blockchain.info.  Bitcoin can be overwhelming as it is.  Blockchain.info plus something like BitInstant can allow a complete (as in "what is bitcoin) noob get up and running quickly.   Now the standard disclaimers apply, "trust nobody", use 2FA, make a backup of your blockchain.info wallet, and keep the volume low.  Still for someone looking to buy say 20 BTC tomorrow I don't see a reason to get more complicated.  20,000 BTC?  Ok well there is no fast and easy for that.

It is unlikely the 8000 series will provide significantly improved performance.  

You seem to not be getting the scale.  Average GPU might be 3MH/s per W and 1 MH/s per $.  This hasn't changed all that much since the 5000 series cards.  Some cards are slightly better, some worse but for example there is no GPU (current or future) which is 10 MH/s per W or 10 MH/s per $.  

The average ASCI is in the ballpark of 100MH/s to 1,000 MH/s per W and 20MH/s to 60 MH/s per $.  It isn't slightly better, it is the difference between a flintlock rifle and a minigun.  Lets say super optimisticly (and horribly naively) the 8000 series GPU are twice as efficient.  It isn't going to matter. It would be like 2 flintlock mustkets against a mini-gun. Even with free power it may takes years (potentially decades) to recoup the hardware cost (assuming the hardware lasts that long).

Interesting.

Also just to clarify LTC puts up a high barrier to such designs.  The "multiple" in terms of efficiency (hash/w and hash/$) over a GPU is much lower.  While a BTC ASIC may be 1000x more efficient as a GPU a LTC ASIC may only be 20x as efficient.    I doubt LTC will ever become large enough (we are talking about a valuation larger than BTC is now) to warrant that kind of investment. The total annual mining rewards are simply too small to make the risk worth it.

As dree12 pointed out you don't want to use nonces.  Super easy to game.  Would just require a miner program which skips certain undesirable nonces.

You could simply use the block hashes which if blocks are "difficult" to construct should be relatively psuedo-random.  It would be possible to game the output but that would require throwing away undesirable blocks.  Unlike nonces they have real value.

So you have a couple options.  The simplest would be to just use the x least significant digits of the various block hashes in the algorithm which determines the algorithm for the next block.

Once synced the CPU load is negligible (maybe 2% with the occasional burst up to 5%) for an average newish CPU.  It does use up to about 1GB of RAM.  You likely can get away with less but on a server with 16GB of RAM is quickly allocates up to about a gig and then holds there.  The I/O is really only bad in bootstrap mode, once synced the number of blocks is relatively low and thus the I/O load is spread out.   

Laptops are generally ill suited to run full nodes because their hard drives tend to .... "suck".  The bootstrapping process results in a lot of I/O.  Your CPU was idle a lot because it was waiting for that painfully slow laptop HDD to "catch up".  v0.8 is a step in the right direction and more improvements will happen overtime but you have to realize a node is a peer in a global banking network.  To be a full node is going to require some resources and that will only grow over time.  The client will get more efficient, the db better, and hardware will continually improve but on the other hand the daily tx volume will grow and the historical chain will just get longer.  In the short term if you really want to run bitcoind on a laptop you may find an upgrade to either an SSD or 8GB of ram and creating a ram disk will provide is substantial boost.

In 5-10 years I would say 90%+ of users will use some form of eWallet, lite client, or hybrid client.  The "full node" network will be made up of miners, merchants, and Bitcoin enthusiasts.  

Interested in a $0 MP.