This is actually a good idea. If I had hundreds of thousands of dollars of BTC savings I would love to have it spread out into a multisig transaction with signatures from a few various parties required (eg. a 3-out-of-5 between my brainwallet, my offline paper wallet, my friend and some kind of "bank").

Except that you can accomplish the exact same thing by just sending the BTC to a cold storage address and taking it out when you need it.

Another option I've seen is to create a transaction of, say, 100 BTC going from you to you, with a 0.00001 BTC input from the merchant, with a lock time, and then every time you make a purchase you and the merchant together release a new version of that transaction that sends some of the money to the merchant instead. If the merchant disappears, when the lock time hits you just get the rest of your money back, and neither you nor the merchant can unilaterally replace the transaction with another one - you have to both agree to do it.

Problem with that is the Acceptbit doesn't have an API (as least back when I looked at it it didn't), so it's hard to work with. If someone could write a simple address generator that just takes in a master public key it would be nice (I might end up doing that myself at some point).

The problem is that you would need an Electrum server on the testnet as well, so it's not something you can do by yourself.

Have you considered just going to any free Bitcoin site and using that to get very small amounts to play with?

So, basically, you want to use Usenet as the equivalent of an Electrum server?

The key distinction between high-school math and the math used in cryptography is that cryptography is discrete. That is, in high school math your answer could be 8.56, 8.57, 8.565, 8.564, etc, with infinite granularity between any two values. You also have continuity, which means that you can find always find some distance such that within that distance for the inputs the outputs are always within a certain (arbitrarily small) range. Thus, even if you algebraic efforts fail, you can always apply methods like Newtonian approximation and get an answer in the end.

Discrete math is different. Consider the following problem:

Find integers x and y such that 120x - 23y = 1.

How would you solve that? With "normal" methods, you can't. It looks like an underdetermined system (and it is), and the requirement to have integers means that you can't just do the old trick of fixing a random x and finding y to match it. You do not get the benefits of continuity because there is no granularity. The answer is (-9,47), but in order to do that you need to do a series of reduction steps in the form of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm

Now, consider a second problem:

Find integer x such that the last ten digits of 3^x are 3147595467

This one is harder. You have to use tricks like the Chinese Remainder Theorem, and even then a lot of computational effort is required.

Now for the really hard problem:

Find integers x,y such that x * y = 8340368351292114898806993735182512787836108384416112375142633921308502660867470 5717333990587055137541907379907772161559852062233059312453755072535705574833391 32157327857301030605921850352045823680907

We have some shortcuts to help you here, but even then the problem is currently just on the fringes of computability. Add a few more digits and it becomes intractable. The reason is that the hardness of the problem does not come from simplifying a complex equation or finding roots to a polynomial; rather, it comes from the fact that the answers have to be integers, and so you're dealing with a world that is discrete. Thus, you can easily find many instances where the expression x*y - n, where n is the above number, come very very close to zero, but those cases are all useless in helping you find the (unique up to swapping x and y and negating both) solution to the above expression.

Interestingly enough, I've heard other people make the exact opposite argument - that we should use currencies like USD, EUR, gold, silver, etc for long-term savings because their value is far less volatile, and BTC as a way of facilitating efficient transactions between them all.

We could see other cryptocurrencies arise though. I'm a fan of Chaumian blind-coin myself, as it has far stronger anonymity properties, but it needs a centralized provider to operate, so we would need to have a few separate competing such currencies floating around to get a measure of decentralization through the free market. Once everything is done in crypto-currency it becomes easy to stick transactions between multiple crypto-currencies together, do trust-free atomic exchange and stuff like that, and use the best currency for each purpose.

Here's a script that lets you split a private key into N parts, of which any K can be used to reconstitute the original, where you pick the N and K when splitting.

https://github.com/vbuterin/btckeysplit

The thing is that you missed one obvious choice: paying the bitcoins to the forum/email site/whatever itself. That may actually be the best option of all, as there is an argument that the reason why sites are so eager to infringe upon our privacy is that advertising revenue is the only revenue they have, and so if we can convince users to pay a 15 cent fee to the website for setting up an account we may end up fixing not just the spam problem, but also the privacy problem at the same time.

If we do not want to do that, I would prefer if there could be some way to dual-use your mining spending - that is, make your Bitcoin passport out of a transaction fee that you are spending anyway to make a given transaction go faster. Then, the rate could be increased significantly, and the only users that would have to actually pay anything extra are those creating multiple passports, with normal users spending nothing extra at all.

GDP is actually quite useless IMO, even not taking into account arguments that an economy that "produces" less may still be better because it may have much more leisure time or non-monetary activity. Once you think about it, the reason why is quite obvious. Over the very long term, where busts and booms and structural shifts become irrelevant, what does the GDP ultimately track? The answer is simple: inflation. If you take the modern economy, and substitute computers and high-tech biomedical devices and all our other 21st century goodies with all their 18th century equivalents, chances are the GDP will still be something close to the exact same $15 trillion - what is being traded for the money will simply change. But if you keep the modern economy and pass a law that doubles the money supply every year for ten years, by 2023 the GDP is going to be at least $15 quadrillion, if not rapidly approaching infinity.

GDP indexed to CPI is a start, although CPIs tend to be very easy to politicize. Direct quality of life indices (eg. health, happiness, education, leisure, square feet housing per person) also have their weaknesses - failing a direct quality of life index may simply reflect a difference in preferences rather than any actual weakness in the underlying economy. If people don't care about one of the above variables (eg. hard working culture, anti-intellectualism, urbanism vs suburbanism, Achilles' attitude to fame vs longevity), then the score within that group will be quite low even though the wealth may be there to make everything trivially available for anyone who wants it. Ultimately I don't think there is anything close to an index that can say for sure if an economy is doing "well" or not. Targeted statistical measures like money supply inflation, disease mortality rate, etc, are all very useful for those who care about those specific variables, but the more general you get the less valuable the numbers become.

Look here, and scroll down to where you see the five issues side by side. Issues 4 and 5 were produced without Matthew's help, after he pseudo-voluntarily left the company and the community following his $250,000 bet. Issues 1, 2 and 3 were designed with his help (he didn't interfere much in the writing, though).

I think #3 especially provides a pretty good insight to the kind of personality that this guy had.

"Not to take sides, but I agree with Ashley's side absolutely"

Indeed.

Address: 1B4abbxq4u9H3wSfdVMQKLTN4hwNrNoGAy
Privkey: 5JwNgB82mbPAXuFEG6vH5NQqNFzHqmUUdsmriEoRRWjbUcnGZ8C
Address: 1NnK4w4Bcu7ZhF6qerTNCZNUnVDbZNSgay
Privkey: 5JKYm6Y7bHbRZQjFEpUjhnsL7vgsgnapx3VV3bHFkZtCB6UYevX
Address: 1Dd7oB3J2rxAkoyi1p1gnR3BywDPPqZgAY
Privkey: 5JnE8KcE3awJ6BkBNW4Hq2EAX5EtvHR6PgaHyGaYV5eFQytfrLS
Address: 1KrTy5aYqZtXcCCr4vWA4FoFUHzf7M2gay
Privkey: 5JK19N953E2KNFQXGcfJUYDKoF8zZpdGEZ3dAJbDk5KTELo2GTU

And also, there's no way to "sell" the private key to a given address. You have the privkey too, so the buyer would not risk accepting coins to that address as you can also spend them. You can sell the service of helping to generate a private key by using a setup based on elliptic curve math to generate the key together, so you don't have all the information needed to spend from the address while your customer does, but you would have to generate a new address to take advantage of that.

Indeed.

And the concept of peer to peer extends far beyond just computer network architecture. If you look at movements like 3D printing, peer to peer renting/lending, local farming and open source software you'll see that there's a growing change away from the centralized industrial mode of production of the 1950s to something much more distributed and horizontal. That's the true revolution that information technology was meant to bring, and sooner or later it will take over more aspects of our lives than we can fathom: workplace organization, governance, scientific research, medicine and education will all see serious changes in the decades to come.

Generally speaking, a 51%-like attack with any kind of virus is pretty much impossible. The majority, and soon overwhelming majority, of mining power these days is controlled by specialized mining computers, which are not running anything close to standard consumer web browsers, operating systems, etc. They're just sitting there interacting with other nodes through the Bitcoin and stratum protocols. Regardless of any kind of local damage that you might be able to pull off, the nodes are just going to keep on churning out proof of work, and when you get tired everyone else will simply pick back up on the main chain.

One idea I had to help mitigate this is that SatoshiDice could immediately re-send the output of any transaction that they receive to themselves with a fee, encouraging miners to quickly confirm both the new transaction and its parent over any conflicting transactions.

Two questions:

1. Can a transaction reference an unconfirmed transaction as an input? If so, can the two appear in the same block? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes to the first, but I'm not sure about the second.

2. Do miners actually work that way? Does a fee on a transaction also encourage miners to include its (possibly feeless and even non-standard/bloated) parent? If not, are there any obstacles / reasons not to implement such a strategy (with appropriate rules so you can't use one transaction to force miners to include 1000 bad ones, obviously)?

Feel free to swipe info/references from here:

http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-pirate-saga-and-so-it-ends/

"Giving tasks to X and Y" is the job description for pretty much all of the top 0.01% highest paid professionals in the world. And even besides this, Mihai was also responsible for setting up interviews, doing a significant share of the illustrative work himself, handling shipping (with his girlfriend), and much more.


Most of the items on that invoice were not "demanded" from you. We both expressed our disagreement with the 80.00/hour rate, and you simply continued on doing what you were going to do anyway as a matter of fiduciary duty as a director but charging for it.


Mihai never denied this. His whole point had been that his girlfriend deserves cash and/or equity because Vladimir's wife had already been paid cash/equity.


In September, when the situation around MNW was unfolding, Mihai and I both realized that we had been far too lax in terms of keeping tabs on what was going on, and all that Mihai tried to do was take back control. Following the MNW affair, Vladimir and his wife controlled 67% of the Board of Directors and had more shares than anyone else - even the founder of the company. Furthermore, Mihai noticed all of the various "IT" charges that had been billed. It was indeed a mistake on the part of both of us that we did not keep a close enough eye on how things were going and let all of that happen, but when he finally saw what was going on he simply tried to rectify the situation. The fact is, there are plenty of instances in small business where one partner tries to use various underhanded tactics to edge himself into a more favorable position versus the other, and Mihai's "paranoia" over the fact that one person had weaved his way into something close to de facto control over the entire company was hardly unreasonable. Claiming that anything but complete trust constitutes obstructionism, on the other hand, is - in fact, it's often listed as a classic warning sign in "how to detect that you're dealing with a scammer" pages. So that attitude was not exactly a good way of mitigating the problems that we had.

I personally won't comment on the finances; I'm fairly removed from the financial situation myself and I will leave it to other people in the company who are much more capable of stating the facts there than I am.