Trolling is a useful skill; just because amateurs / dabblers have on occassion given it a bad name is not really a great reason to try to apply the term as an insult with a broad brush.

Controversial / innovative ideas can benefit greatly from skilled trolls.

Unfortunately the more skillful the troller the less likely it is that their work will be credited as actually constituting trolling.

-MarkM- (According to NetMarketingForum's forum system I am only a *minor* troll so my work might on occassion be credi{|ta}ble.)

Okay so lets have each nation whip up its own bitcoin app on its own favourite port. Now which's such digital currency looks best?

Would that be more about their implementation / code / mining infrastructure than about their current currency?

Or would their current relative position in the list based on current currencies simply port over to the digital form?

-MarkM-

You forgot to include "yes: I bought USD".

-MarkM- (All your USD is how much bitcoin)

Bitcoin in 7 words for g6m3rz:

"All your bitcoin are belong to you"

As adoption increases, additional possibilities include:

"All your customers are got bitcoin"

"All your supply are accept bitcoin"

"All your need are accept bitcoin"

"All your competitor are accept bitcoin"

"All your bitcoin are doubled already"

"All your USD is how much bitcoin?"

-MarkM-

Yeah well I am not exactly suggesting gov't can't hide stuff from the people if they put their mind to it!

-MarkM- (Government by open accounting advocates for open accounting advocates!)

Thank you. That is what I originally thought.

One could see how much bitcoin had been sent to the IRS's official income tax submissions account, and each some span of time - day, week, month, whatever - the mint could put all their bitcoins into their Bitcoin Reserve We Mint Money Based On account, for example.

We wouldn't know the Black Ops Account contains *all* the funds available for Black Ops, but we could know the FBI did have at least X amount of weekly operating budget on hand at the start of the week.

I'd figure you don't want them to find some billionaire's account no one knows belongs to the billionaire and claim that is the missing paperclips fund account so you'd have some kind of tell the address first then put the bitcoins in it system, like maybe a jury of 12 peers of the realm each holding 1/12 of a private key to the treasury is each going to be issued their part of the key of account {accountid}, then 15 minutes later (to allow for network latency) X amount of national funds will be sent to the account.

Problems like oops stupid clerk moved wrong megabillion are good as they tell us what more we should think about.

(And maybe hint how much pressure bitcoin or a similar currency could come under to somehow "reverse" transactions. Maybe as simple as well just have the recipient send it back duh?)

-MarkM- (Its true, I don't know how many peta or terra million a megabillion is! (Due to I'm not getting a percent of it...))

What is 'leet for "What's your bitcoin address?"

Then too what is 'leet for "huh? whaddayamean you don't got one? I thought you were 'leet?!"

-MarkM- (Not as cutesey as nano's "I can haas bitcoin nao?" but wth.)

Hmm, thanks. I somehow had the impression the miners know the money payload (amount of coins being transferred) as well as knowing the fee portion of the transaction. I guess if even they don't know how much money each transaction to an account is putting in the account this whole thing is an even more amazing feat than I had so far realised.

-MarkM-

A lot of what one hears about BitCoin seems to focus on the privacy and anonymity possibilities.

But the other side of the coin is the transparency.

Instead of wondering how many bitcoins some department or other has in their BitCoi account, everyone can simply see for themselves provided it is known which account that department's bitcoins are held in...

-MarkM- ("Banking by the people, for the people!")

If you are bigger than the market, isn't that your own doing or at lesat your own choice?

If you want the market $40,000 larger so it can accomodate your upcoming $40,000 transaction can't you tell your buyer you won't sell until you see $40,000 worth of bitcoin appear in a bitcoin account they specify to you before transfering into it? With you telling them some least significant digits to "sign" the amoujnt with to help ensure it's not some random arrival of money in some random account they decided to specify to you?

It is up to you whether to first buy enough bitcoins to offer on the market to make the market large enough or simply to watch the market price increase as the customer tries to bid enough to buy $40,000 worth...

-MarkM-

Quote: "Any country with low government debt."

Someone on IRC calculated how much each so far existing bitcoin would be worth if the entire U.S. national debt were put into bitcoins.

But it seems to me they did not account for the incremental rise in the value of bitcoins during any actual process of putting that more than fourteen trillion dollars into the bitcoin economy.

Maybe whichever borrows the most to put into bitcoins would be the winner, and able to pay back all the debts easily once they have won?

-MarkM-

See how complicated a simple sequence of heads and tails can get?

Quote: "I'll give 1 BTC to the individual that shows me how to extract these private keys."

Well it certainly wasn't me, all I did was zoom in on the part of davout's reference that indicated which command one would most want to download from that page. One would still have to peruse the page all over again trying to figure out where exactly that command is hidden.

-MarkM-

Quote "Interesting, why do you expect this?"

Surely it is obvious? Currently Americans are riding the BitCoin wave, shortly the Chinese will catch on and get into a who can buy more bitcoin race with the Americans, then the CHF people will realise they'll look like idiots if they don't get in too; meanwhile the Japanese might exercise inscrutability.

-MarkM-

It certainly seems to make sense to have the next term (or even couple of terms or conceivably/dubiously next few terms) already out there right in front of them long before the time comes that they'll actually want/need to use them.

If they've been seeing millibitcoin day after day and maybe wondering what the heck it means and why is it even mentioned by the time an entire week or month goes by and bitcoins have increased in value yet another hundredfold, maybe by then they might have actually googled the word or something.

-MarkM- (Mind you I haven't actually checked that the first results for the term aren't porn sites or anything like that...)

If you want live what you tell them to do as you tell it video that tends to cost by the minute. How into shoes are you?

-MarkM-

But she looks like she could be over 18! I thought you said you do illegal stuff?

I doubt this would be a venue that would appreciate such a proof, I'm "just sayin'",
not askin'.

Nice porn site though. You from netpond dot com at all?

-MarkM-

Just in case the target page of the link davout provided
was at all confusing or inconcise, one might zero in on the
readme portion of it, to find:

Examples:

Print out  wallet keys and transactions:
  dbdump.py --wallet --wallet-tx

-MarkM- (Of course I don't actually know if that refers to private keys or only public keys. One can hope, though.)

Many.

For example you could use "heads" to represent zeroes and "tails" to represent ones, use a bunch of coins to thus represent the bits of your wallet, photograph the resulting arrays of coins, and print out the photos on your laser-printer.

Or you could even use a representation that some machines might find a little easier to read(*) than the above suggestion.

-MarkM- (Google "optical character recognition" maybe?)

(*) or even to write...

But if someone steals four billion paperclipchips backed by real paperclips, who else would enforce it?

You surely aren't suggesting I'd refuse to honour the stolen chips, are you?

-MrkM-

It is simple to mechanically at computer speed change strings in ways that are very easy for a human looking at the site to see that they have been changed.

They can be made to be green blinking text if they have been successfully converted to the translation system, for example.

That might well be much easier to look at and see it has been done to all the strings than looking at simply translations from one human language to another.

-MarkM-