The price of everything fluctuates.  One reason that Bitcoins appear unstable is because your frame of reference is (probably) a different currency, such as the US dollar.  Another reason that Bitcoin appear unstable is because they have a small market capitalization (i.e. the total exchange value of all of the bitcoins together) relative to those other currencies that they exchange with.  The latter effect will diminish as the Bitcoin-using economy grows, but will never completely vanish.  The previous effect is actually an illusion caused by perspectives.  For example, once upon a time the US $ was backed by, and therefore held a fixed exchange rate with gold.  Gold is money, currencies are just widely accepted coupons.  If you take an ounce of gold as your fixed perspective, the relative value of every fiat currency on earth has been pretty volitile over the past decade.  Not as volitile as Bitcoins, but Bitcoins are a fiscal experiment that isn't even five whole years old yet, and doesn't yet have a user base even as large as the Monegasque franc.

Okay, I've downloaded a new client to my iMac and it's presently catching up to the blockchain. But I see that the vanilla client still doesn't have a means of importing or merging an external wallet.dat file.  I see this as a kinda important feature.  It seems to have the ability to export addresses, but not the ability to import them; and even then I don't think that's quite the same as the ability to split or merge a wallet.  While I can take this new client's fresh wallet.dat and discard it, I have at least 4 old wallet.dat files that I really should merge together into a current wallet.  I have no idea how to do such a thing.

Also, what do I need to do next?  Do I just replace the fresh wallet.dat with the old one, and then restart?  Or do I need to do more to get it to rescan the blockchain?  Where is the data directory on an iMac, I'm an old GNU/Linux fan and even though the internal code are similar, nothing seems to end up in the right place.

I recently cleaned out my safety deposit box, and found an old thumbdrive inside it.  It was inside an envelope that was marked "bitcoin drive, cold storage" in my own handwriting.  The file descriptor says that the wallet.dat file was saved in October of 2011, so it predates the native wallet encryption.  I need to install it into a new client (I have an Imac) so that I can send whatever may be on it to my new addresses.  Does anyone have some recommendations?  Has anyone already done this, and have some warnings for me?  I'm afraid of downloading an old client version to install it into, because I know that it would be exposed during the bootstrapping process.

A local copy of the blockchain isn't particularly useful, either.  We are well past the point of diminishing returns on the 'multiple copies keeps data safe' method.

Guys, if you think that he's doing it wrong, then do it yourself.  Otherwise leave him be to make his own discoveries.

If, by "full" you mean one that can mine/hash, it's not worthwhile.

Not anymore.


The report button.


We could, but no, that wouldn't be proper.

Hmm, I don't think that you quite understand what a wifi bridge actually is.  It is not a mesh node.  Still, it's an interesting idea.  Wifi sucks for mesh work, though.

You have a point here, but I was talking about your claim that using bitcoins in commerce online has not become any easier.  My own experiences notwithstanding, it's provablely easier for a layman to use bitcoin today than it was when I joined this forum.


Closer to 80%.


I doubt it.  I value bitcoin for what it makes possible, not for what it makes easy. It's the job of vendors to make bying from them easy.

Sure, but Unicorn Piss doesn't have any trade value, nor does it have a decent security model that would lead to it ever haveing a trade value.  Bitcoin does, and you know that.  While it's possible that Bitcoin could still fall flat on it's face and never amount to anything, it has the potential for great things.  Moreso now that a US federal judge has declared that Bitcoin is, indeed, money just last week.  Now the Senate financial oversite committiee is rushing to get information from their usual suspects about how to 'regulate' bitcoin, an implicit admission that bitcoin isn't going to go away anytime soon.  Also, that pirate40 is likely to spend quite a while as roomies with Bernie Madoff.  I hcan honestly say that I, personally, was never a big enough sucker to be taken by his scheme.

The main site that I had in mind whaen I wrote that was this one...

http://muslimagorist.com/marketplace

Is it a scam?  Not to me, I got what I ordered.  Nor do I even know what a Shaniqua is.  I'll be the first to admit that Bitcoin really won't have arrived until I can buy stuff from walmart.com and have it shipped site-to-store, or buy more bitcoins at the customerservice desk, andI actually have said this in the past.  However, I think that day will come in some fashion or another.  In my home city, there is now a points based foodie network for buying foodstuffs at 'participating' resturants.  There are now over 50 such resturants in this network.  While they don't use bicoin for this, it'd be trivial to do so, or establish a bitcoin to foodie points exchange.  The old business models are dying, new ones are emerging.  I have always had the talent to foresee the near future of these kinds of things, and it has profited me well.  I'm far from the only one with this talent on this forum, and that is why we favor Bitcoin so much.  Again, not for what it does do now, or makes easy now; but for what it makes posssible later.  However, Crumbs, I do say we needs bears like yourself to keep us all in check.  You provide a valuable service with your presence here.

It's also one of the driving forces of the overlay network, Stratum...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55842.0

Why?  I've been doing the majority of my bitcoin transactions on my android phone for well over a year now.  The times that I have to type in the addresses (as opposed to just using the camera as a scanner) is somewhat annoying, but I'm confident some kind of standard will emerge there as well, in time.  It's certainly no more difficult to type in an address string to buy something online at some new to me website than it is to buy something online using bitcoin; and that's also bound to get easier once browser linked wallet clients become trustworthy.  I've been on commerce sites that buying with bitcoin was almost, but not quite "one click simple".  I've scanned QR codes right off my monitor, and never even fired up my destop bitcoin client.  In fact, my desktop client is hardly even used at all, these days.  I'd be just as well to move those funds into cold storage.  I'll admit that I still do the majority of my online buying using other methods than bitcoin, but that's likely to shift significantly if Amazon ever develops a payment method compatible with bitcoin. 

While this is true, bear in mind that this, also, is by design.  Off network transactions will occur as soon as they are cheaper than on network transactions, and can support a safe enough model that consumers can trust them for whatever it is that they are doing.  But then, such transactions don't contribute to the ongoing security of the blockchain, and thus don't contribute to the mining race.  So a market balance between on and off network transactions develop, above and beyond the market balance for the on network transaction fees.  The off-network market undercuts the demand for the high-security model of the on network transactions, and thus lowers the fee; all else being the same.

Try and get either Visa or the Federal Reserve to deliberately design a system wherein their competitors are on an immediate equal footing as themselves.

Your analysis is flawed.  The most "efficient" way to pay has nothing at all to do with the power consumption, but everything to do with the costs of using the system to the consumer doing the paying.  In this context, "efficient" means "cost effective".  There is no doubt at all that Bitcoin is orders of magnitude lower in system costs for the end user than Visa.  I don't even need to demostrate that one.  Bitcoin is also significantly lower than the same metric applied to paper currencies traded in hand, but that comparision needs a bit more explaination.

While bitcoin's total energy consumption seems high, it's also relatively easy to get a pretty reliable estimate of what the system costs to run.  The total costs of running a paper currency system are more difficult to estimate, in part, because so many of those costs are obscured from the users.  Most are paid for by inflation and/or taxes, so users don't bear those burdens anyway; some such costs include (but are not limited to) The costs of manufacturing the paper and printing the currency itself.  The costs of the beauracy required to administer the currency & regulate the banks.  The cost of enforcement of currency related crimes (i.e. counterfitting) that would otherwise be irrelevent under a cryptocurrency, plus all the associated court costs, prison costs, attorneys, and social costs of prosecution; and so on.  And to that, the costs of the people involved in the handling of said currencies (outside of the beauracy); for example, cashiers and managers who must be trusted with such funds and the labor time required to properly manage such funds for every retail store, compounded to every retail businees in the country with a cash machine.  Then there are the armored truck companies, banks and such institutuions that exist for the sole purpose of accumulating, protecting and accounting for other people's money.

And then account for the costs of heating and air conditioning the buildings all those institutions must maintain in order to comfortablely house and employ all those bankers.

And I haven't even touched on the transaction costs that consumers commonly bear directly; such as the gas and time required to travel to a bank on a regular basis to conduct their personal financial business, nor the costs and risks involved in distance commerce using paper based currencies, such as mail order scams or online scams.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, so no matter how the costs of any paper currency are officially paid for, the burden must eventually fall upon the consumers.  The finance industry in the US is now one of the largest industries recorded in the GDP, and by far the largest that does not actually produce a tangible product or offer a free market service of it's own.  If you take the slice of the GDP that is attributed to the finance industry, and that is how much the system costs overall.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/financial-sector-economy_n_1151058.html

Divide whatever number you decide upon there by the current number of American households, and you come up with the appproximate cost of the system for each household per year.  Not exact, mind you, because some people end up bearing more of the burden than others due to the high externalities of the system (by design), but it's a pretty good number since most of the burden falls upon the middle class anyway.  Once you've done that calculation to your own satisfaction, do an estimate concerning how many individual transactions that would actually be per year per household, right down to the candy bar at the corner store for little Jimmey.  That's going to be a pretty high number; but even assuming that all such transactions remained individual, near-time fee paying transactions on the blockchain (an unlikely assumption, but the worst case scenario for our Bitcoin) and times the current minimum fee.  (what is it now, roughly half a cent, right?)  See for yourself which would be cheaper for you individually, and for society collectively.

If any of you guys, who are reading this post without commenting, actually do pursue anything along these lines, please let me know.

I've recently moved, and have moved just beyond the current build-out range of the cable company.  I hate sat tv, sucks during a storm, which is one of the only times I watch tv.  Plus it's expensive.  I know that I need broadband Internet, for my homeschooled kids if nothing else.  So I manage to get broadband out there, to be installed this Friday.  Still, my wife complains that the smallest ones need distractions when the older kids are supposed to be studying.  We've been without tv since the move, and their all a bit ancy.  (personally, I don't really watch much tv anymore) So I do some research, and settle upon a Roku 3.  I do some more research, and discover that the devices support "private channels" that anyone can set up without prior approval from Roku, so long as they have a developer's account and a streaming server to use.  (Roku doesn't actually provide any content for the devices, all content is provided by others)  While many of these private channels are ad supported, or simply fly-by-night projects that die once the developer loses interest; my idea was that of a subscription model, paid for only in bitcoins.  If some talented coders here could put together a "Bitcoin Network" for the Roku, using legally accessible content (I read about one guy that created an unofficial Kahn Academy channel, since all of the Kahn Academy videos are copyleft), the developer could actually make a living maintaining the channel.  Or more than one developer in competition could actually make for some quality programming under the right conditions.  Alternatively, bitcoin supported ads such as Project Wonderful might be another model worth persuing.  Since I don't intend to do this myself, I grant this idea to the forum membership.  If you've got skills, and plenty of freetime, (unemployed coder, perhaps?) see if you can carve yourself out a real income doing this.  If nothing else, I'd like to know if it's possible to actually earn a living providing bitcoin accessible content.  That alone would be worth an article in Bitcoin Mag.

On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a teenaged entrepreneur!

He's a fraud because he's honest about it?  Rich Mayberry is pretty darn honest about it also, investing (and advising same) is a crapload easier than teaching middle schoolers economics.  Why the hell do you think that Schiff does it?  Moral obligations?

Well, Schiff is predominately an Austrian economist, but they don't always see things the same way either.  I've been following the predictions and blogs of both him & Mish for many years, approaching a decade now.  While Schiff has had some misses, Mish has been a freaking oracle.  I know for a fact that Mish has been aware of bitcoin for a number of years, because I pointed it out to him myself, but his first impression was just like mine, very skeptical.  I don't believe that he has ever commented on bitcoin.

While that is generally true, it's not absolutely true.  There have been some very real 'intentional communites' that have come together with only a common idea, and did fine.  Still, your opinion seems valid here, as any community with any staying power is certain to develop said blood relations over time, regardless of how they start out.


Once again, you have a strange notion of both "society" and of "collectivists", IMHO.

There certainly is, but they don't hang around a digital currency forum.