This shouldn't be a practical problem with Bitcoin's 10-minute target block rate.

The pooled mining operators already have access to "lesser difficulty" solutions and could easily contribute those to the adjunct network, in return for whatever reward the adjunct network provides.

Yes. What I see happening is that the first batch of Bitcoin retailers will mostly be selling high-margin products where the volatility of Bitcoin from week-to-week is not such a problem.

Over time, the value of Bitcoin may become more stable. But even if it doesn't, things will get easier for retailers because they will be able to pay some of their suppliers using Bitcoin (which makes volatility much less relevant). No doubt there will also be enterprising bitcoiners who start providing hedging services tailored to the needs of retailers.

I would like to see a tool that could split one wallet into two. One of the new wallets would contain all generated coins, and the other new wallet would contain everything else.

Some decades ago I knew a guy who operated a pirate radio station. He attached a mailbox to the wall of a derelict house, and it worked perfectly for many years as an anonymous mailing address.

So, effectively, Belgian law requires any retailer who accepts Bitcoin as payment, to provide no-charge 7-day Bitcoin call options. The law is probably the same throughout the European Union.

Indeed Bitcoin may result in a much higher velocity of money than we are accustomed to. It's possible that, with Bitcoin, an employer could pay an employee every hour instead of every week (for example). And a store could pay their suppliers "item by item" instead of monthly.

But no matter how high the velocity of money, you still need a "float" so that you can buy a single item at once. The figures I used ($50 to $500) are just high enough that you could buy something like a TV or an air ticket from your wallet (rather than needing to use a credit card).

As I said though, it's "just playing with numbers". There are so many variables that no-one can predict accurately where the value of a bitcoin will end up.

For a miner to "get a free lunch" by mining another block chain simultaneously with Bitcoin, that other chain must be designed for this purpose, by incorporating an extra field that will make the hashing problem the same as the one being solved for the Bitcoin chain.

Also, if the other chain has a different difficulty level, you will get different numbers of blocks mined on the two chains.

The name of the project is Bitcoin (with initial capital), and the currency units are bitcoins (without initial capital).

It cancels out. Miners set their prices based on the average customer. If some customers are paying "unnecessarily large fees", the miners can still be profitable with some customers paying smaller fees than they would otherwise be required to pay.

OK, so let's play with some numbers on that basis.

Suppose that 21 million people around the world end up using Bitcoin. Each of them uses it for say 10% of their shopping. Suppose their Bitcoin "float" from paycheck-to-paycheck is $100. Then each Bitcoin will be worth $100.

Suppose that 2.1 million people end up using bitcoin, and each of them only uses it in a very small way (a float of value $50). Each bitcoin only needs to be worth $5 to support this. But if those people also use Bitcoin to stash away savings worth $5000, then each bitcoin needs to be worth $505.

Suppose that 210 million people end up using Bitcoin, with a float of $500 and savings of $10,000. Then each Bitcoin needs to be worth $105,000.

This is just playing with numbers. It's also possible that people will develop lots of forms of credit pegged to bitcoin (though not backed by it), and that will limit the upside to Bitcoin's value.

If the customer has both currencies, the customer prefers to get rid of InflataBucks instead of DeflataBucks. The retailer, on the other hand, prefers to receive DeflataBucks instead of InflataBucks.

The price of goods in each currency will therefore float to the point where the interests of the buyers and sellers are matched, whichever currency they use.

Joe can simply be told that "If your transactions are too slow to confirm, you can go to 'Settings' and increase the transaction fee that you pay, which might speed things up."

You have proposed to define the miner's fees in a structured way, but I don't think that will work in the real world. No matter how intricate you make your language, there will be miners that do things in a different way. Some miners might give preferential treatment to repeat customers (communicated somehow "out-of-band"), some miners might give a better deal to those who are members of the Bitcoin Mutual Aid Association, some miners might have different rates for days/nights/weekends, some miners might charge ten times as much for certain transaction types as a kind of economic ostracism, some miners might waive their fee for payments to well-known charitable donation addresses, some miners will charge different fees depending how long since the previous block was generated.

But a stable market will eventually develop, and a "rule of thumb" will gradually become apparent, such as "free transactions normally get into a block within 12 hours; a fee of 0.1 BTC is almost always enough to get into the next block; a fee of 0.01 BTC gets into the next block 50% of the time".

A "going rate" is an aggregation of individual experiences. It's not centrally decided (although a new Bitcoin installation might set a reasonable default).

Consider how one determines the "going rate" for a loaf of bread. It's the price one has discovered, from experience, to be sufficient to buy a loaf of bread of the desired quality.

So, if your transactions aren't always getting into the next block, you may wish to pay more. On the other hand, if money is tight and you don't mind waiting, you can set your fee lower. The market sorts it out.

The fee is not "hard-set", it's a user interface option in the client.

Yes we do want some transactions to be free. What I expect will happen is that the cheapskates will set their fee to zero, and jostle for the limited number of free transactions. Everyone else wants their transactions to clear quickly and will set their client to pay "the going rate".

I don't think there's a need to make it complicated.

Allow each client to set a "fee per kilobyte", which can be any amount including zero. Let the miners set whatever policy they like.

That's enough to get a competitive market. Anything else is too complicated for Average Joe to understand.

I'm not a Windows user, but I'd hazard a guess that there should be a space between D and C

Hard rules are compatible with anarchy when they are voluntarily accepted (because they are useful) instead of being enforced by violence. That's why Bitcoin can work.

Thank you, [mike]. That must have taken quite a while to put together.

I don't think the "Paying for alternative resources with BitCoins" explanation has been presented effectively in this forum before today.

I don't know. That's a bit like saying that big software projects will rarely if ever be developed as open source. And yet there are open-source operating systems, browsers, databases and webservers that can be freely copied without payment.

I think it's safe to say that without "intellectual property" laws, big-budget films will be funded, produced and distributed very differently from how they are today. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, I hope that you are right and I am wrong, because I'd rather have a hundred $700,000 films to choose from, than to have one $70,000,000 blockbuster to watch.

So? If enough people don't want that, they'll pool their mining with a pool operator who doesn't accept such transactions. If enough people find it useful, they'll mine with the operator of BloatPool. Not worth sweating about.