I think you're underestimating the power of having all transactions connecting any two addresses permanently recorded in the blockchain.

If a malicious agent just threw up a list of unrelated addresses, and somehow they got added to the main list... they'll eventually be ignored anyway when they don't connect to the core group of addresses within a certain range of blocks.

And if the thief gets lazy or stupid ("Screw it, let's just consolidate all these coins to one address to make moving them to cold storage easier,") then the addresses that aren't related become immediately obvious: they're the ones not being sent to 1MyBTCThiefAddress. Even something a bit more subtle than that can result in useful information. All it's going to take is one send, even accidental, to one address with a public identity who's willing to help to shake up the whole game.



That sounds like a good opening to voice a couple of my concerns about the whole process:

1) That there will be some attempt to "taint" or "mark" the funds. IMO, this is both morally objectionable, and just a bad idea on a number of levels. If the thief is caught, and is somehow made to return the coins still in his possession, fine. But any coins spent to others not involved with this or knowledgeable of it should NOT be sought after.

2) If the number of coins that moved through that wallet is at all close to accurate, it represents a disturbing amount of money. Enough that my hope that this can be resolved peacefully is almost gone... once the thief is caught, then what? What if most of the coins have already been spent? I suspect bloodshed may come of this; not that "Tom Williams" facing that bothers me, what bothers me is what the consequences of such actions would be, both for those engaged, and for the image of Bitcoin overall.

Food for thought.

Grrr! You tease!

I really need to observe several instances of average, non-mathlete Joe Blows discussing such calculations in metric in real life, without the aid of pen-and-paper or some device, to see the frequency and types of errors commonly made.

While I expect the error rate to be somewhat less, I suspect it's not as close to zero as we're being lead to believe.

Well, considering the machine never has to store private keys, even high-schoolers shouldn't be able to do too much damage with it.


(Famous last words.)

I'm not fearful; rather, I'd prefer a crash of sorts so I can continue stocking up cheaply.

Truth be told, I'm fearful the price will keep going up and up before I can fully invest.

Which sounds like he made the post, locked the thread, moved it, and I (and others) just happened to read it before the unlock.

If that's what happened, then it makes a lot more sense.

You made an important point here: "Gold miners mine more gold when prices go up."

But they do so by expending more effort and resources to mine more.

The equivalent, in the world of bitcoin mining, would be to apply more processing power to mining when prices go up, giving themselves a bigger cut of the block rewards.

And still, the point remains: the supply of bitcoins for sale at any point is as flexible as any other commodity (more than some others, really.) Even with all miners selling all coins ASAP, there are still 8 million bitcoins in existence; that's potentially about 22K bitcoins per day if sold off throughout the course of the year, far more than the miners produce.

So there's really no need to worry--some of these reserves will join the public market supply if the price rises enough, just like with gold, wheat, etc.

This. I don't see a problem with that subforum anymore than "Politics & Society" or "Off-Topic." It has a purpose; people being legitimately abusive should be dealt with regardless of where they are posting.

Really, I don't see why "coin wars" have to exist at all. Do all alternate cryptocurrencies have to be scams? Don't the ideas behind some have merit? Isn't the very spirit of Bitcoin about open-source, innovation, competition, and taking things in new directions? Why would someone who supports Bitcoin possibly want to suppress that, unless for personal reasons, or in a misguided belief that the concept of alt coins is always wrong/bad/evil/whatever?

Better to contain posts in the appropriate place, and manage the abusive ones there, rather than having the threads containing those posts pop up in "Bitcoin Discussion" or "Development."

The thread is unlocked now, and the post labeling the thread "inappropriate" has been removed.

I was reading that thread, then got to the end and thought, "Inappropriate? Wha..?"

I checked up at the top to see which forum the thread was in. It was in "Off-Topic."

Considering the nature of the thread... that just doesn't look good. I find it disturbing that my (unimportant) opinions of the situation are beginning to be developed more from the reactions to discussion rather than to actual dialog.

You're thinking of the total in existence.

But what's important is the supply for sale. That's what "supply" means in an economic sense. Just because an average of 7200 BTC are mined daily doesn't mean all those bitcoins will always be thrown onto the market. Miners have the option of holding onto and/or spending their bitcoins rather than putting them up for sale on the exchanges. Also, holders of bitcoins have the option of throwing their previously-purchased coins back onto the market for sale.

At any given time, between zero and all available bitcoins in existence can be for sale. That's as flexible as any other asset/resource/whatever.

My opinion, as a U.S. resident, on the imperial vs. metric thing:

Metric is superior for most modern uses, particularly technical processes, which are in abundance now. The resistance of construction workers to metric seems primarily due to inertia and sheer stubbornness.

That said, part of the resistance is innate, in that for simple, hands-on things, the human mind doesn't do well with base-10. As a species, humans have a superior number sense to animals, but we still have difficulty mentally manipulating more than several discrete units at a time without the aid of abstract supports like pen-and-paper, dividing the units into sub-groups, familiarity with a base-10 number system (read: being good at math), the incentive of needing to do complex multiplication/division, etc.

As sad as it is, over a century of universal government schooling in western society doesn't seem to have done very much in making the mathematically average-or-below human (the masses) good at math, never mind liking it enough to care about it beyond the immediate.

This is why phone numbers developed as they did: in the US, a base number of 7 digits, broken into a 3-digit, often-repeated portion and a generally-unique 4-digit portion. Add the 3-digit area code for rare cases.

It's also why most forms of coinage have units beyond dimes (0.1) and pennies (0.01). No matter how much societies may claim to love metric (despite having to be forced into it,) don't expect quarters and half-units to go away anytime soon on their own. Breaking things into halves, quarters, and sometimes even thirds is just always going to be easier for the human mind than breaking it into units of 0A... er, 1010... uh, that is, 10.


TL;DR - Metric is superior for most uses in modern society. But don't completely knock the imperial system (or other similar ones;) its emergence made sense, and it's still easier for many (most?) people to use. As annoying as that may be.


(I wonder if most of the controversy would have died out long ago if math textbooks simply made a point of drilling the concept of half, third, quarter and such, visualized "metrically," into students early on. One-half=0.5, one-third=0.333, one-quarter=0.25, etc. Yeah, you'd think coinage and simple familiarity would be enough, but... people hate math.)

I'd say their nature prevents it.

Governments being what they are, some of the key features of Bitcoin (privacy, decentralization, etc.) tend to conflict with their core traits. I doubt any government could resist making slight, then ultimately significant modifications: requiring registration (name, address, SSN) per private key and limiting their number, requiring blocks be verified by a central server, removing the 21M cap, and such.

Even if it was an unmolested clone, once the thing was released, who would use it? And without a supporting infrastructure in place, how could they force anyone to use it?

I don't expect competition from governments to be an issue for Bitcoin anytime soon, if ever.

Oh, please let it happen... I really need to stock up again. The kiddos will be getting a bit extra in their savings addresses.

You sure it wasn't exactly 68 bitcoins? Because I'm not seeing a spend of 58 BTC for some time after that (or before), but a spend of 68 BTC occurs here.

The "Remaining balance" has 9 decimal places of precision. Bitcoin only allows 8.

You shouldn't really need a button; all people need to know is the address, so you could just put that on your website.

It wouldn't hurt if you had a QR-code for the address next to it though. There are sites you can go to that'll generate the code for you: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/, http://goqr.me/, etc. You can take the pic they create and put it up on your site.

I can't hear it, but hey, I can see it (using Firefox!) And it's very cool.

This has always made me wonder why anyone would risk being cryonically frozen. After a while there's not much incentive in keeping your body frozen, or reviving you.

Yet another strange, unexpected problem Bitcoin could potentially solve.

Well, the reason change is sent to a different address is, from what I can tell, mostly for privacy. If all change always went back to the receiving address, and you know Alice has that address, you can be certain that all those spends are her spends. With change going to an unused address, you don't know for sure that anything after the first spend is hers. Some people don't mind, but for those that do, having to create and specify a new address for change is a bit user-unfriendly; the standard client just defaults to doing it automatically.

But the reason that change exists is just due to the way bitcoin is setup. I believe it has to do with creating an unbroken chain of transactions, with digital signing for verification along each step of the way. But I'm sure someone with a greater understanding of it can provide a better explanation....