His point was the fiscal cliff involves tax increases and spending cuts.  There is nothing in the "fiscal cliff" which would result in increased printing.  The FED may (continue to) increase printing but that has nothing to do with the fiscal cliff.

Coinbase uses ACH, the same method Dwolla uses.  Ever had funds sent to Dwolla clear on the same day?  3-5 business days is standard for ACH.

Agreed smartassery wasn't useful or necessary.  Still I take issue with the bolded point.  It seems you are still looking at each element in isolation.  No you can't brute force a 12 digit password with your GPU farm is key stretching is done.  Say bcrypt w/ workload of 12 or pbkdf2 with 100,000 iterations.  Each of these key stretching methods add roughly 16 bits of entropy.  So say you could brute force a single SHA-256 hash of a random 8 digit password in a day.  By using key stretching it would take substantially longer.  Instead of a single SHA-256 hash per password it is now 100,000 hashes per password so the 50% time is now measured in decades not days.  

The key point is that using all 5 elements (a,b,c,d AND e) together can make brute forcing a password computationally infeasible.  Only doing part of it is insecure.   Sure a longer password is better but a 12 digit password on a list of previously cracked/leaked passwords is far less secure than an 8 digit one which needs to be exhaustively brute forced.

TL/DR version:
You can't exhaustively brute force* a properly salted 8 digit password which has been hashed using bcrypt(12) or pbkdf2(100000).  

* brute force being an exhaustive search of all possible combinations.  This would exclude dictionary based attacks as the password is not found on any list of weak/compromised/cracked passwords.

Are you sure you aren't infected with a virus?

Are you just pool mining or are you also running a local bitcoin client?

If it is mining only the activity they describe isn't mining.    Pool mining isn't p2p, pool mining doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, pool mining doesn't connect to multiple machines, pool mining doesn't use IRC.

So you sell @ 50% and buy at >100%.  Where does the profit come from?  Oh yeah the scamming.  My bad.

Except every other central bank is trying to do the same thing.  I mean it is zero sum.   Manipulating currency doesn't generate wealth.  Increased productivity produces wealth.  All these central bank games do is rearrange the slices of the pie, usually to the benefit of the ultra rich (forget 1% more like 0.0001%) at the expense of the entire rest of the planet.   Parasitic class for the win.  Remember "money" is simply an accounting system.  If inflation is causing you to "lose" (harder to make ends meet, erodes your savings, etc) then it is causing someone else to "win".

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild

What are you talking about?  How about your learn more and stop making stupid assumptions.  OFAC (well technically SDN) is a database.    You (or anyone on the planet) can download a copy.   You can then QUERY the database LOCALLY.    If you (yes YOU) download a copy of the database and query your name how exactly would the government "know" what you queried?  Magical gubbermint gnomes?

TL/DR version
Step 1) Download the SDN http://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt
Step 2) Open it up in a text editor and search for your name?
Step 3) (something involving gubbermint gnomes)
Step 4) Gubbermint magically knows what you search for?

Be honest you have no idea what you are talking to and simply spreading FUD.  Troll on brother.

One thing to keep in mind is that ASICs introduce a new variable... hardware pricing.   While they have large upfront costs the per unit cost is far lower than current retail price.  So if/when new sales flatline (and difficulty stagnates) ASIC sellers can drop prices significantly.   Sell the same unit for 50% of current price and suddenly it looks very profitable and sales start to pour back in (and in time difficulty takes another leg up).  Months later the same stagnation occurs and one can cut prices again and again and again.  After selling the same units at 3 or 4 price points the profits can be rolled into an improved design at a smaller manufacturing process and the same process starts all over.

We didn't see that "much" with GPU.  Yeah as 5000 series hit end of life there were some "sales" and closeouts which resulted in lower hardware cost (MH/$) and then later buying used GPU lowered it further but the frequency of such price revisions and the magnitude was much less than you can expect from ASICs.

If US inflates 5% and the EU central bank inflates 5% then everything else being equal the exchange rate shouldn't change.
If the US hyperinflates 50% and the EU central bank hyperinflates 50% then everything else being equal the exchange rate shouldn't change.

However you can't (at least yet) hyperinflate the gold supply (or the corn supply, or the oil supply, etc) so when failing central banks try to out compete each other in "inflation wars" the effect will be seen in the prices of commodities not in inter-currency exchange rates.

You seem to be confusing two things.  eGold (the currency) wasn't shutdown because it was a virtual currency.  e-gold ltd (the company) was shutdown because the operators failed to implement anti-money laundering procedures.  They violated existing laws related to money transmission and their shutdown had absolutely nothing to do with it being a virtual currency.  If they operated the same network using USD they still would have been shutdown.  Had e-gold ltd implemented AML procedures and complied with other laws it is entirely possible they would still be operating.  As a side note it looks like the operators were also embezzling as the amount of gold reserves was significantly less than the amount of eGold issued (a problem w/ centralized opaque currencies) but that wasn't discovered until after the fact.

It just so happens that the only issuer and redeemer of eGold was e-gold ltd and thus closing down the company killed the currency.

Could the US government declare bitcoin illegal?  Sure they can declare anything illegal.  They could declare forums illegal, or porn, or cars with more than 4 cylinders.  However no existing laws on the books make bitcoin illegal.  No existing laws on the books make buying and selling goods and services in bitcoins illegal.  The fact that a counterfeiter and a money launderer were charged isn't exactly the same thing as saying "virtual currencies are illegal therefore bitcoin is illegal".

Unlike e-gold even if the US did pass laws making decentralized currencies illegal the network would still be legal outside the US (you know that place called the entire rest of the world).  In e-gold case with the issuer being centralized it could be shutdown when it violated US law however bitcoin doesn't suffer that flaw.

Half is deceptive due to the nature of binary.

In the first half of the digits there are 2^128 possibilities.  Getting all zeroes is one of out 2^128 possibilities the chance of doing that is just as remote as brute forcing a 2^128 private key.  Given the number of hashes attempted so far the odds we would have found a hash with 32 zero prefix is about one in one million quadrillion. 

Counterfeiting doesn't only include making exact replicas of US money it also includes creatings notes & coins which may be MISTAKEN for us money.   This is why monopoly money for example is a different size, says play money, doesn't use US money terms, symbols, etc.

This is the coin he created.  Without knowing what it is what would you think it is?  If you paid a merchant in USD and received one of these back what would be your first reaction "cool new US coin" or "wait a second this is from that private currency I had no idea even existed"?  In the court case it was presented as evidence that merchants would be sold Liberty Dollars at a discount and encouraged to give them as change to USD without advising the customer of their nature.


The prosecutor proved that it was his intent to pass these coins off as US coinage and thus he was convicted of counterfeiting.  

You were already given the answer both in general terms and with the exact RPC call?  I mean kjj gave you exactly the answer you were asking for (even though it is advised not to use it)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122220.msg1322012#msg1322012

I am not debating your reasons.  You have no mechanism of validating the rate of production AND IF YOU COULD there is no need to use a crypto-currency.

If you know company X will always produce the proper amount of coins you can simply send and receive coins directly from company X and at a much lower transactional cost than using a blockchain.  If the issuer is trusted then you don't need a crypto-currency.  The ONLY PURPOSE of a crypto-currency is to replace a trusted issuer with a p2p network.

If the issuer is trust = no need for p2p network.
If the issuer is not trusted = no value in the worthless tokens it produces.

It seems you want to pretend all your assumptions are accurate (which they aren't) but lets pretend.

How would Joe Consumer know company ABC is only producing X coins backed by its production of widgets worth x?  He can't and that will lead to rampant debasement as companies (and other entities) simply print at will.   You have essentially decentralized the FED. The currency is still open to manipulation and debasement.  All the problems inherent in the FED are now manifested in a decentralized system where accountability is essentially impossible.  

Still I think you are missing the larger point.  cryto-currency (with the cost and complexity of the blockchain) is necessary in a model where you don't wan't/need to trust any third party.  In your scenario you need to trust the issuer.  If you need to trust the issuer you might as well centralize issuance of coins.  Transactions can be done more securely and with much lower overhead than a decentralized blockchain.

Take MtGox for example.  You could consider MtGox codes a form of decentralized currency.  Now the way they are designed now they aren't very fungible but imagine a system where via an API you could generate a code and break a code into smaller codes or combine multiple codes into a single code.   There would be no need for a blockchain.  If I sell you a widget and owe you $1 my wallet simply queries MtGox server taking an existing $100 code turning it into a $1 code & $99 code.  I safely store the $99 code and send you the $1 code.  You take that code query MtGox server and get a new $1 code.

There is no risk of reversibility or double spends.  Moving all that to a blockchain accomplishes nothing except a huge amount of cost/work. You have combined all the worst aspects of centralized currency with all the worst aspects of a cryptocurrency.

You can.  You can also disable that feature and you can lock that option down using group policies.  However slush has the right mindset.  Assume the user (or at least some of the users) is not technically competent and the host machine IS compromised (not that it might be or could in a minority of cases). 

Assume every single time the device is connected to a host it is done so by an average facebook users AND every single machine it connects to has been horribly compromised giving the attacker complete control of everything on the host.  If you can make it safe even then well you have a winner and likely will sell tens of thousands units (and if/when Bitcoin grows like millions).

Not that bad?  Space in a Class A depository like Citadel is 0.55% per year and that includes free shipping from APMEX.

0.55% in Class A bonded and insured depository
vs
10% in a anonymous broke kid from the intertubes

hmm that is a hard one.  

Your own rate just contradicted your claim that most loans here are "cheap".  40% would be above the usary rate in every single state and I am assuming your loan was for 1 month? if so then it wasn't 40% APR (already usurious) but more like 5,669% APR.   Had you decided to not repay the loan there is no legal collection you could persue.  Collecting all the info and signing all those illegal contracts would be useless unless your lender was willing to engage in some mob style collection procedures. 

TL/DR.  Anything above the usary limit (on an annualized basis) for the state the borrower resides in can't have a legal contract.  An illegal contract isn't worth a whole lot.

That type of graph is a CDF (continual distribution function).  It isn't saying what you think it is saying.  It isn't saying you will find a block on average every 2.4 days.  It is a continual distribution function.  It is backwards looking.  Say you mined a infinite number of blocks and recorded the amount of time each block took.  You would find that based on the values you used that 50% of them took longer than 2.4 days and 50% took less than 2.4 days.  You can't simply take 2.4 double it and say 100% of blocks will be found in 4.8 days.  Mining doesn't work that way.

Yes however (potential hash) < (target) it simple, easy (well relatively easy) to explain, and gets the job done.  There is no way to do it in a more difficult or complex manner.  You could for example look at some other characteristic of the blockhash (like the number of sequential same digits i.e. a hash containing 4444444444 is higher difficulty than one containing 999999999.  You gain nothing by doing that (or looking at the number of 8s) over simply comparing two hash values.

The choice to check if a hash is BELOW the target is arbitrary.  Satoshi could have just as easily decided to make valid hashes ABOVE the target.   

The target is simply a way to split the SHA-256 hash space into valid and invalid hashes.  The lower the target the fewer valid hashes there are and thus it will on average require more attempts to find a valid hash.

Forget cryptography for a second lets say you ran a store and wanted to give away 1 prize per day on average.  Right now you have roughly 20 customers one method you could use is to have a bucket with 1,000 numbers on it.  You could then daily publish the "magic number".  Each customer after a sale could draw one number from the bucket.  If it is smaller than the "magic number" then they win, otherwise they lose.  Now since you want to award on average one prize per day and you have roughly 20 customers per day you could start the magic number at 50.  (1/20*1000 = 50).  Note the magic number is arbitrary and depends on:
a) how often you want to award a prize (daily)
b) how many attempts will be made per unit of time (20 customers per day)
c) how many potential numbers there are (1,000)

If you used this system somedays you might award 4 or 5 prizes and some days you might award none.  You could even go weeks without awarding a prize but in the long run (say over a year) the average number of prizes awarded would be 1 per day. 

However what happens if the number of customers changes?  If you don't get 20 customers a day then your magic number is incorrect and your won't award prizes at the right frequency.  You could however once every two weeks look at all the sales in the last two weeks and divided by 14 to get the average customers per day.   You then could change the magic number to be = (numbers in the bucket) / (number of customers in prior two weeks / 14).

That is all Bitcoin is doing.   The goal of Bitcoin is that regardless of the amount of hashpower used one block will be found on average every ten minutes.  The protocol estimates the amount of haspower every 2016 blocks (by looking at how long it took) and adjusts the difficulty to make is easier or harder to find blocks in the future.