I think slush has done a great job getting the pool up and running but it is now fee-based and not donation-based.

(A 2% minimum donation is no longer a donation but now a fee since it is compulsory).

People who think they should get services for nothing should wake up to the real world, bitcoins are not free to create that's why they are worth something.

Slush is providing a valuable service and is well within his rights to charge for it, I hope he gets rich.

If you can do better set up another pool and run it for donations or fees or however you like.

Downloads took at jump at end of last week ... 3,600 on Friday ... ramping or a blip?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/stats/timeline

How does Alice know which coins are the same ones that were sent previously?

Do you mean send the same amount from the same address in her wallet?

Good job on some worthwhile calcs.

I'm not clear on this bit here,

where is the incentive for somebody to fund building of such rig? Is it the transaction fees that will accrue or will this sit on the front end of mining rig?

What stage is it at exactly?

When it comes to protecting  people's private money in a wider marketplace there will be no rules period. Let alone a "well-defined set" of them.

Attack it and see if it should really be worthy of trading at parity with the fed. res funny money ... else it also is just funny money.

Around the mid-1800's in San Fran mining town you could get a clam chowder for 5 cents
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpioneer.html#provisionprices

In Zimbabwe recently they were trading trillions for pints of milk (before it collapsed completely) ...
... decimal divisions are arbitrary ... people will pay X number of something's if that is what is familiar.

... at which point the bitcoins will be worth less because of the exposed security breach, kind of no-skin-in-the-game bet? 

Put the prize up in a currency outside the system, like gold grams, and you'll have a bonafide incentive.

What doesn't kill it will make it stronger ... if word on the street was that Anonymous, NSA, Chinee Govt. attacked bitcoin and it didn't blink I think the value would appreciate after that.

As the man said if it fails it wasn't meant to be but we would know what not to do for the next one ... Evolution is bitch like that, only the strongest survive but also means cryptocoins are unstoppable since if not this time, then the next or the one after or the one after ... eventually a P2P cryptocoin will succeed, probably many of different flavours.

Millibitcoins
Microbitcoins
Nanobitcoins
Picobitcoins

I don't see an issue ... maybe just a small advantage for the scientifically literate who understand what the those things actually mean.

Bitcoin cent is kind of a mouthful ... centibitcoins or bitcents?

then it could get messy but still decipherful ... millibitcents, microbitcents, etc ... trying to know what terminology people will use for their monetary divisions or numbering is futile. Look at the UK billion and the US billion ... and how many people on the street even understand what a billion is .... they hear it but  ....?

I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive as you seem to be implying and someone was saying further back up.

Are you saying there is logical reason that if you decentralize you preclude privacy? Couldn't the central authority in Chaum's scheme be replaced with the network itself?

So David Chaum's Digicash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash and blind signature  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature techniques have been mentioned further back in the thread already.

I don't think it has been made clear why you could not (or would not) incorporate the blind signature technology into Bitcoin.

Did I miss something here?

Lol. Go to the dark side Luke, buy ruthenium.

Maybe the next cryptocoinage will have a silver icon and the network will making them in the 15:1 ratio that silver:gold appears to gravitate towards .... i.e. 315 million silverbitcoins!

Addresses are unlimited and not attributable to a physical person so wouldn't that be like trying to trace quicksilver running through a horsehair cushion? Single bitcoins remain whole for how many transactions exactly? .... or as a SA once said, trying to "pick fly-shit out of spilled pepper."

So I'd said 99.99% anonymity which is pretty good for a digital transaction.

- anonymous, secure, free electronic transactions
- limited supply (i.e. cannot be printed out of thin air), not controlled by banks

There is also the consideration that in the future, wealthy pools of bitcoins, who maybe be sitting on an equivalent value by then to thousands of tons of gold, have a vested in interest in protecting their bitcoin nominal wealth by contributing compute power to the network.

It seems self-referential but that is where the incentives commonly lie also in banking and finance ... it is in the nature of money.

The megabanks are explicitly global in nature now and have been covertly for much longer. When they went bust in 2007 credit market seizure the taxpayers of the world were put on the hook on the order of 10 trillion dollars when national debt was created to bail them out, see Fed. Res. balance sheet for details.  Since there is no way out of the global fiat-digital currency scam and paying taxes into the corrupted system where megabank banksters are raping it out the top, one is as good (and culpable) as the other. An alternative credit digital currency like bitcoin comes along and the whole fiat debt puffball could collapse in favour of unencumbered digital crypto-currencies.

Actually, after the megabanks dissolve into smoking piles of crappy over-clocked IBM hardware and dilettante quants in suits jump out of windows taking corrupt national govt.s pollies with them .... I was thinking more like a "Snowcrash" crossed with "Cryptonomicon" post crypto-currency war type of world ...

Yes, a crypto-currency has real (objective) value, at a minimum the asset cost of the computational power backing the network plus energy costs to run and 'mine' the encrypted transaction blocks.

In the future, not as far off as you might think given the state of failed monetary systems around the globe, I'm seeing hedge funds in the Cayman's with FPGAs lining up to join the crypto-currency networks. And medium-size rogue banks in Panama or Switzerland putting Cray XMT  http://www.cray.com/products/XMT.aspx
size machines onto the network ... think big guys this is gonna blow your minds!

Financial companies already have this kind of hardware at their disposal and once they get the concept they'll be coming .... then there'll be the dying megabanks and cronys at NSA trying to bring it down by bringing there big-iron guns on-line but just adding to the compute power, it's gonna get crazy.

Bitcoin will have competitors, clones, other P2P crypto-currencies but it doesn't matter. They will all tend towards the cost of computational power on the network that backs them, plus some premium based on perceived trustworthiness, brand recognition and other intangibles. At the moment Bitcoin has huge head start in terms of both computational power and recognition, trustworthiness.

There will be others, but that's all good. The more crypto-currency networks the less chance the statist, scumbag banksters will have of bringing money under their control again. This is the beginning of the end of over 200 years of domination by these evil bastards and their fiat currency bullshit. Megabanks and the central bank models are threatened to the core of their failed premises by this concept. It is going to be great entertainment to watch them fall, ringside side you have here fellas. Congrats on all who got it this far, you have been midwives to something unique in human history that will remembered for the ages.

Celebrate, we have a bonfide people's money again! (but bitcoin is not money for legal purposes of course  )

Yeah, I see that now (noob).  But was actually wondering if it is possible to get a PROOF OF WORK RESULT for an unsuccessful block, i.e. one not credited to the pool, does that sense?