I disagree with this analogy.

Gold is a lousy currency, but for thousands of years it was the best humanity could come up with.

Bitcoin has the potential to be far superior to gold.

Why should Bitcoin delibarately copy the weaknesses of gold?

Difficulty adjustments should in theory have no effect on the exchange rate whatsoever because predictability approaches 100% the closer you get to the adjustment.

Finally some really clear charts.
Donation coming your way...

Yes you can, but in my undestanding, that offline wallet needs to have been online at least once, otherwise its public key(s) are not known to the bitcoin network. If you try to send money to a bitcoin address that has never been online you'll get an error message - try it.

Hence the need to copy only the public key to the online machine.

Good. More BTC for me then.  

On a more serious note, I wouldn't advise anyone to invest "big money" in bitcoin, even the modified version you propose.

*The security of bitcoin hasn't been thouroughly tested
*there hasn't been any peer review by cryptography/security experts
*critical mass hasn't been reached
*competition from other p2p cryptocurrencies
*the economy is still tiny (liquidation value of all BTC in existence is probably closer to 50,000 EUR than 500,000 EUR).
*danger of massive government crackdown
...

This project is in a very early stage and there are still many big hurdles to overcome.

For the time being, investing in Bitcoins should be seen as high risk investment or nothing more than a fun hobby.

The way I see it, there needs to be some sort of "official" or consensus set of parameters and rules that a block chain needs to obey.

Otherwise, if the only requirement for acceptance was chain length, someone could just arbitrarily change the rules, say, that 1000 coins are awarded instead of 50 every time a block is solved.

Right now, this "official" set of rules comes from satoshi, and you are quite right, if he changed the source code to his own personal advantage (and to the disadvantage of other users), he could probably manage to rip off a few people, simply because this is a very early stage in this project and most people automatically download from sourceforge as soon as a new version is realeased.

But that would be a one-off. People would no longer trust either satoshi or sourceforge, and some other consensus would soon emerge. After that, satoshi couldn't change the rules even if he wanted to.

Very good job. I think the B symbol would look even better without the serifa.

I am trying to set up a "savings account" where I can be 100% certain that the private key of a bitcoin address never comes in contact with the internet:

1. generate a private/public key pair while not connected to other peers, on an offline machine.
2. copy only the public key to the online machine.
3. connect to peers
4. receive payments
5. copy private key to online machine only to send a payment.

Is this doable?

If were are going to banish these words we have to replace the "coin" part in the name of this currency too.

"Bitproof" - "electronic unit of proof of work"

That would be enough to confuse most politicians and judges.

The problem is, it would also confuse most potential users,  who would then skip Bitcoin for other e-currencies that are easier to understand.

Will BTC fall under new regulations for electronic money when this Directive comes into effect?

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:267:0007:0017:EN:PDF


Bitcoin does not confer any kind of claim, whether on the "issuer" (be it an exchange or a miner), the developers, or any other Bitcoin user.  Neither it is issued on receipt of funds.

So it seems to me that BTC does not fulfil the directive's definition of "electronic money" and that legally it should be considered an electronic commodity.

However, if it does, this directive would imply that an amateur cannot legally mine Bitcoins!

The true value of all Bitcoins is less than marginal price * total amount. Has anybody tried to estimate that number?

If the hoarding was so strong we wouldn't see these kinds of volumes.

Thanks for sharing your experience. All this jurislation and regisdiction is making my head spin!  

I store my wealth in more than one wallet.dat. Encrypting your wallet.dat is a good move, but you can't get around the vulnerability that there is an unencrypted version of it sitting in the .bitcoin (or AppData) directory while bitcoin is running.  No firewall is 100% impermeable. Third party programs such as Adobe Flash can have security holes that allow hackers to bypass your firewall. Even if you delete and shred the plaintext wallet.dat, and keep only the encrypted backup, how can you be sure that the data doesn't remain hidden as a duplicate somewhere on the HD? or in memory? or in some cache? or in the antivirus quarantine? For ever second that your computer remains connected to the internet, you are exposing yourself to the risk of bittheft. That risk will only increase as Bitcoins become more valuable.

Ugh, there are just so many things to think about when it comes to securing Bitcoins.

I have invested some of my wealth in bitcoins. It's an amount I can afford to lose but it's still big enough that it would hurt if I lost it.

This has forced me to think carefully about how to backup up my wallet.dat files in a way that a) the chance of losing the data is very small and b) the chance that a third party can somehow gain access to that data is very small.

This proved trickier than I thought because a) and b) are somewhat conflicting. I was forced to learn the basics of cryptography and computer security in the process. (I strongly recommend even the non-geek Bitcoin user to read up on these topics as dauting as they may seem at first).

Thanks for your contribution - I've donated some BTC.

You forgot another key aspect of fluffy web 2.0-style design: Rounded edges.

Seriously, all those sharp 90-degree edges on bitcoin.org are probably scaring away whole legions of potential early adopters. I mean, somebody could poke their eye out!

On the other hand, web 2.0-design seems to be going out of fashion slowly. When the unashamedly pointy London Olympics logo was unveiled in 2007 it was ridiculed, in 2010 derision and outrage have made way for indifference, and I bet by the time the Olympics happen in 2012 people will say it was ahead of its time. Even the iphone has started becoming more angular again.  

The current Bitcoin community and the Bitcoin protocol are two distinct developments.  

The Bitcoin protocol is just a tool.

It just so happens that at this early stage it's been enthusiastically embraced by libertarians because it lends itself particularly well to further their goals.

But that doesn't mean that other communities will not discover Bitcoin as way to fulfil their particular needs.

There is no reason that multiple communities/philosophies cannot coexist, even if they use the same tool.

Some people on this forum have already self-identified as anarcho-communist.


The average Joe will trust whatever most of his friends use, or whatever is endorsed by mainstream media. He doesn't know or care who is behind Bitcoin. If the average Joe discovers that Bitcoin is more convenient to use than other e-currencies, the average Joe will start using Bitcoin.

Similar example: Jimmy Wales calls himself "Objectivist to the core". Does the average Wikipedia user care about this? Does the average Wikipedia user even know what an Objectivist is? Is a non-Ojectivist user discouraged from using Wikipedia because of this? No.

As for respecting the law, discussing the theory of illegal actions is not illegal in itself, otherwise crime novels would be illegal.



As I said, Bitcoin is just a tool.

If you think that the message on this website is too extreme for your customers, then why not do some PR work yourself, on your own Bitcoin-accepting website?

The more diverse the bitcoin economy, the better...

The discussions here are not so much about bypassing law but more about bypassing government.

I don't know if you have already noticed, but most people on this forum are some flavour of libertarian. They see Bitcoin as an ideal tool to achieve more independence from a coercive government, or even to make government obsolete altogether.  Ideological considerations are thus not completely unrelated with bitcoin.

Most libertarians will agree with you that a "moral common ground" exists, most will agree with you that courts of law are necessary, the only difference is that they think people who associate with one another should arrive at the moral common ground voluntarily, rather than having an arbitrary moralily forced upon them by a central authority.

The heroin store idea was more of a libertarian thought experiment than a serious proposal.

If somebody started discussing a CP store on this forum they would a) very quickly get a really bad reputation and b) probably get banned by the admins.

So why not the same reaction to somebody who discusses a heroin store? Because CP is coercive and selling heroin to adults isn't.

The 21 million is "only" a client limitation too. There is nothing stopping you from using a modified client where you change that parameter to 42 million. But then most of the network won't accept your payments anymore. For it to work you would need to convice the majoirity of users to switch to your client, and they are not likely to do this if their Bitcoins lose value as a result.

Increasing the divisibility, on the other hand, is something that would benefit all users in the situation that 1e-8 becomes too big, so if the developers introduce that modification it is very unlikely to be rejected by large numbers of users.