Uh 60 day timecode for ~5 * $12.40 = $62?  vs half that anywhere else?

The belief that C# (and Java) is god awful slow is simply an urban legend.  Maybe that was true in .NET 0.9b but it hasn't been true for a while now.  

Obviously it is impossible to boil down an entire language (and all compiler implementations, and all possible source codes, and all possible implementation skills down to a single number however)....
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programs-are-fastest.php


Execution time's normalized to 1.00 for C++ execution time.   Sure Java, C#, and Javascript are slower but they aren't magnitudes slower and to cut a 36 year brute force search down to say 1 month you are talking about needing MORE than 2 magnitudes in performance increase. 

JIT compilers have come a long way.   C++ compilers have also come along way too.  C++ essnetially adds no overhead to writing native C.  Remember there is a skill factor to consider.  Compilers essentially are a skill normalizer.  Maybe one person in twenty can write better C code than a C++ compiler but then again if that person contributed to C++ compiler enhancement that knowledge is then shared.   




scrypt was simply intended to be very slow.  Even if the C# implementation is poorly written (or compiled) it is unlikely one can expect to gain 100x increase in performance by just switching languages.  There is a reason why fastcash4bitcoins uses bcrypt.  bcrypt is a similar algorithm.  scrypt is even more memory hard however we still use bcrypt simply because it has been around longer.  Anyone taking simple SHA hash of a password is just making the job of an attacker a couple MILLION times easier (no not an exaggeration).

There are two possible vulnerabilities:
a) dictionary attacks (to include dictionary substitution attacks), weak password is still weak even with scrypt. 
b) precomputation attacks (if the algorithm doesn't have some salt value then given enough time a group of hackers could build a distributed database of ALL 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10... char passwords).

Have you see the rates for those payment processors?  They are in the 10% to 20% with all chargebacks deducted and most require a hold of some % of funds for 90 days (a chargeback reserve).

I would say those stop gap payment processors face stiff competition (i.e. an extinction level event) from bitcoin if/when it ever reaches critical mass.  A site like Party Poker or Pokerstars could save a hundred million dollars a year (and no that isn't an exaggeration) simply by having a low cost, high speed irreversible payment method.  Hell BitInstant's ~5% fee is downright "free" compared to the costs that gaming sites currently pay.   A gaming site could offer to double the fee for customers (i.e. we will cover BitInstant's fee plus give you a bonus 5%) and still come out way ahead given the irreversible nature. 


Also that doesn't include things like your "trusted" payment processor disappearing with the money.  In the Full Tilt Poker case it came out that two of FTP processors simply stole the money.  The link below is for one which stole $42 million (and IIRC there was another "smaller" theft which involved something like $20M more). 

http://betting.betfair.com/poker/poker-news/full-tilt-poker-robbed-by-payment-processor-010911.html

Despite these costs online gaming is hugely profitable because the average drop (% of funds deposited which end up in the house's pocket) is something like 50% to 60%+. 

Still the potential to cut out the largest two costs (payment processor and fraud losses) is something no business is going to ignore for long.  There still is that huge chicken and egg problem.  Accepting Bitcoin does little good if almost nobody has them.  There is no reason for someone to have them if nobody accepts them.  That problem is slowly solving itself.  

I think you misunderstood my point.  The central bank CAN't print that much money, not without causing massive economic chaos.  Think about multi-year financing (like for construction).  What interest rate do you put on a 30yr mortgage when inflation could be 50% annually.  The simplistic answer is just make it a comfortable risk premium like say 5% in real terms making the rate 55%.  However 50% is just a wild ass guestimate.  What if inflation is 70% for a decade and the borrow decides to pay the note off with increasingly worthless currency they are flooded with?  Oops you (as the lender) took massive risk and lost 50% of your principal (in real terms).  The reverse is also true.  Someone with a 50% mortgage would be betting their income will be rising 50% in nominal terms.  What if the central bank tightens.  Suddenly the interest payment overwhelm the borrower.   Now apply that kind of chaos to all aspects of society from public works (can you imagine floating a muni-bond in a 50% inflation environment) to retirement (try not to outlive your savings.  You only got $20 trillion yen?  Hope you don't live too long).

Simply put no modern economy is going to function with that level of monetary expansion.


TL/DR version:
Premise 1 - Interest rates will rise unless central bank continues to ease
Premise 2 - Japan debt is so high relative to GDP and there is so little outside demand for its debt that to ease would require 50%+ annual monetary expansion
Premise 3-  The central bank will be unable to monetize all Japan's debt.

Thus rate will rise as that supply comes flooding into limited demand.  Higher rate = higher demand and an equilibrium will be reached.


Longer term I see only three possible "outs" for Japan
A) Integrate.  Ditch 5,000+ years of xenophobia, open ports to (young) immigrants in an attempt to get some meaningful gowth in real (adjusted for inflation) terms.  The bad news is old habits are hard to break.
B) Implode.  Become the Greece of Asia.  The bad news is the limited natural resources and bad demographics mean the road out is going to be bad.  Maybe they emerge as Vietnam 2.0 in three or so decades.
C) Expand.  War looked like a good idea in 1939 maybe it will again in 20x9.  Restore the pan-pacific empire via military expansion.  Natural resources, wealth, land is available for those able to take it.  The bad news is China has a four decade head start and hasn't quite forgotten the atrocities of the last world war.

US Spending is out of control but that is an obviously false statement.  In 2012 interest on the debt is~$350 billion.   Income taxes is ~$1,700 billion.  If you add in social security (which is just another tax IMHO) it is more like $2,600 billion.

To the OP, the value of a fiat currency comes from (among other things) where it is accepted.   The IRS is no different in that respect that Bass Pro shop.  Both accept USD and those both add value to USD.  However the IRS is pretty huge.  It "accepts" > $2.0 trillion a year.   When you consider US GDP (which is ~100% USD transactions) is $15.0 trillion the IRS "accepting" USD is a pretty significant source of demand.   Downstream since the US govt only accepts payments in USD then any spending by the US Govt will also only be in USD and any entity which looks to engage in commerce with the federal govt will be creating demand (forced or otherwise) for the currency.  So while the IRS may not be special it certainly is large.

TL/DR saying the IRS isn't special would be like someone on news that Amazon started accepting Bitcoins saying "Amazon isn't special they are just a merchant like any other".

Yes.  It really isn't syncing though.  When the client loads the wallet.dat it uses the blockchain to find any unspent outptuts sent to any address in the wallet.  It them sums up the value of all the unspent outputs and displays that as the "available balance".   The client doesn't know the wallet.dat is an "old backup".  Any wallet, any time it compares the addresses in the wallet to the blockchain, locates all the unpsent outputs, and totals their value.

The issue with "old" backups is that you may have received coins at an address (and thus private key) which is NOT in the backup.  If the address & private key are not in the backup well there is no way to recover those funds.  The limit is technically 100 NEW addresses however everytime you SENT (not receive) coins you use a new address as change so you can think of it as 100 transactions.

Once again (and hopefully for the last time) this is 100% INCORRECT.

USPS does insure bullion .... BUT ONLY IF SENT BY REGISTERED MAIL.

USPS "normal" (i.e. not registered) mail - Bullion NOT covered (well technically it is to a max of $15).
USPS registered mail - Bullion insured up to the declared value or a max of $25,000
FedEx - Bullion NOT covered.*
UPS - Bullion NOT covered.*

http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/usps/request.do?create=kb:USPSFAQ&view()=c%5Bc_usps04233%5D&varset(source)=sourceType:embedded#Can

Then again you are right insurance is usually not worth it.  Properly packaged the loss rate in mail is very low, much lower than the insurance premium.  Then again if someone is shipping say $20K they may not be able to afford a single $20K loss even knowing the odds are in their favor.  For most purchases (single gold coin, or a tube of silver coins) it usually doesn't make sense to insure it.


*Note both FedEx and UPS offer a special precious metals insurance programs which is only available to registered and bonded companies dealing with precious metals (mints, dealers, coin shops, auction houses, etc).  The average consumer can't purchase this coverage at any time or for any price so for all intents and purposes of this thread they aren't covered.  The standard FedEx and UPS insurance policies specifically (by name) exclude bullion.  Period.  They will not cover it.

I don't think you should be using another company name, logo, and likeness without their permission.  Especially not in a manner which seems to be confusing people.

The short term network hashrate is always volatile.  A change of 3TH/s, 5TH/s, or even 10TH/s isn't particularly meaningful.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png

Now if over the next 3 days the 3 day moving average increases by more than say ~2TH/s you might have something other than just noise.

$0.10 an hour would be generous.  At current difficulty, block subisidy, and exchange rate $0.10 per week (using $5 in electricity) might be more likely.*


*Note this was SWAG but honestly any reward would be so insanely low as to be insignificant.

Whew civil war averted.  We likely should immortalize some quotes for the historians on this day where we so narrowly avoided outright conflict.

Author unknown - first cite shortly after block 210,000

Author unknown - first cite shortly after block 210,000

Author unknown - first cite shortly after block 210,000

Author unknown - first cite shortly after block 210,000


Historical Footnotes:
*A score is 20 years so a micro score would be 20/1000 = 0.02 years.
** "network of networks" is old timey speak for the intertubes.

Um you do know you look stupid right?  

The bolded portions are hints.

You seem to be using the word loose incorrectly.   Your didn't loose your bitcoins in the sense they fell out of your pocket they lost in the sense they were destroyed (or more correctly access to them was permanently and irrevocably destroyed).

You have $1,000 in your pocket and it falls out of the street - money gets a new owner (if someone picks it up).
You have a 100 BTC in a wallet on a thumb drive and it falls out on the street - money gets a new owner (if someone picks it up).

You have $1,000 in your house when it catches fire and burns to the ground - money lost forever.
You have 100 BTC in a wallet in the same house - money lost forever.

Those would be the equal comparisons.  Note that there is nothing to recover destroyed physical currency (like in a house fire).  You can't "back it up", make a copy for safe storage, etc.  However you can do that with a Bitcoin wallet.

There isn't.  If you could recover your lost coins then anyone could "recover" anyone's "not so lost" coins.  The currency would have no tangibility, no value.  

The only way to recover the lost coins is to recover the destroyed private keys.  It may be possible if to recover them even from a failed disk.  There are low level tools which can recover raw data from drives even if the partition is corrupt.  Going even more extreme there are data recovery specialists who can recover data from drives which have physically failed although the cost is likely higher than the value of the lost private keys.

Not just the address, the private key.  You could dump the private key and address, and construct something nice for re-importing at a later date and then format and print the entire thing  or you could just go here:
https://www.bitaddress.org

(note all code is done client side, you can inspect the javascript and if ultra paranoid, save a copy of the page and use it offline)

Happy halving day everyone.  In 30 or 40 years you can tell all those next generation Bitcoin developers that you have been using Bitcoin so long that when you started blocks had a 50 BTC reward.


It is kinda weird seeing blocks with a 25 BTC subsidy though ...

Your incorrect about "can't".    The bitcoind can be modified to allow any tx to be pruned.   The merkle tree structure allows the rest of the block to remain.  A pruned block isn't "corrupt" the merkle tree root hash is still valid and all other tx in the block can be validated.   The purpose of this is to allow spent tx to be pruned from blocks (search for "ultraprune").  It could be used for other reasons.  A change in any one node won't disrupt the network.  If other nodes ask for that full block my node will indicate it doesn't have it.  If other nodes ask for that tx my node will indicate it doesn't have it.  The only issue is I wouldn't be able to validate tx using that "child porn" tx as an input.  Fine.  I won't be accepting those coins anyways. 

Still I doubt it will be an issue.  Govt don't need excuses they just make them up.  I am sure someone in the world someone who has some connection to terrorism (or drugs cough cough) has used Bitcoin at least once.  That can be spun as "Bitcoin supports terrorism". 


There is no such thing as "plain format".  If you mean it will be an actual jpeg including all header information which can be extracted bit for bit from the .dat and opened in an application which can view jpeg without any modification well that is simply false.  There are constraints on tx format.

You do know there are 3 inputs to profitability for a miner
a) exchange rate
b) difficulty
c) miner's cost

You do realize it is impossible for difficulty to both remain too high for profitability AND miners quick because it is unprofitable.  The market will find no equilibrium.  It always has.  Price was 1/4th of what it is now less than a year ago and (some) miners were profitable.   Price could go to $20,000 USD:BTC and many GPU miners would be unprofitable (if 4th generation aSICs drove difficulty to 40 billion by then).

Probably nothing.  If it became a problem someone would likely release a patch to the client or standalone utility which would prune the tx from a user's local copy of the blockchain.  Of course I doubt it would even go that far.  Most child pornography laws specify what is considered an image.  A non-viewable binary representation of an image likely doesn't qualify.

I mean if it did then one could for example write a piece of software which takes uses a ebook copy of the Bible (or insert random book here) as input and based on instructions in the software display an image depicting child abuse.   Would that make the Bible (or insert random book here) child pornography?

why not run your rig from a usb drive (or SSD if you need the capacity although I can't see why)?  No moving parts means it really shouldn't care hold cold it gets (within reason).

Your right it doesn't.  It is commonly proposed by low post count members who think they know how to "fix" Bitcoin after a couple hours of reading/learning.   It would actually be a huge blow to the valuation of Bitcoin.  A cornerstone of Bitcoin is that transactions are irrevocable.  Irrevocable means irrevocable not "kinda irrevocable".  While nobody directly benefits from this recirculations plenty of people directly lose.  Imagine going to prison wrongfully accuse of a crime for 20+ years.  Everything except your brainwallet has been seized by the state.  You get out with your brainwallet intact only to find your irrevocable wealth has been revoked by the protocol because you didn't make a transaction in the last x years/blocks.    Not only is there is direct loss of wealth but the very concept undermines the credibility of the system and thus the value of Bitcoin.

On a more meta level one needs to think what backs Bitcoin.  It is "backed" by its utility.  The irrevocability of transactions is part of that utility and thus value.