Nah, I'm looking at blockexplorer directly and the last Generation was Block 164634 two days ago.

Haven't received a payout for two days. Is this just another block drought or is something wrong with my setup?
I'm seeing 156GH/s so I'm not on the split chain.

Just sold a key to likuidxd, who offered - completely unprompted - to send payment first. Smooth transaction, would trade again!

I still don't see why we need to hack the protocol to support multisig at all.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA, where the public key is a known point multiplied by an integer private key. Generating a multisig address is as simple as generating two independent addresses, the second using the first one's public key as the known point. Such a combined address can be supported by today's clients, while only being accessible to someone who knows both private keys.

This fight between BIP16 and BIP17 isn't just a barn-painting argument, it's a barn-painting argument over a barn that's already painted.

Glad you're satisfied. Thanks for a smooth transaction!

Thanks!

From the website:I am selling gift codes for the "full package" - World of Goo included - for 0.6 BTC each. This is below what you would pay in USD. I'll be allocating my payment as a 100% donation to Child's Play.

If you have good trading rep on this forum, I'm willing to send first and take payment once the gift codes are received. For people with zero rep (like me), we can use any reputable escrow service.

It took me a while to fully process this claim, because at first glance it seemed to me like it might not work out.

If the money supply is constant (M = 21 Million BTC, forever and ever) then each Bitcoin will have an intrinsic value of something like V/M, where V is the total value of all the "stuff" being exchanged in the Bitcoin economy. Any "good investment" is, in essence, putting your money behind some attempt to create new V - which claims that, with a certain capital C, you can create a certain value dV. If you invest, that's the rate of return you'll get - dV/C. Whereas, if you just bury your money in the ground, you'll get... the total increase of value the entire economy has produced, divided by your share of the money. So at first glance
you have dV/C versus (avg dV/C * V)/V, which means that unless you can invest in something better than the average investment, it'd be better to just hoard.

But really, not every ounce of value in the economy is being used to generate more value; if it was, there'd be no point! Rather, some is being used as capital, and some is being consumed - the kind of things whose value is in feeding people, maintaining the places they stay, protecting them, and making them happy. So as long as your investment isn't worse than average by a factor of (V/C), I think the math works out.

Huh. That's pretty neat, actually.

I really, really don't like this. If the private key to an address with "lost" BTC can be broken, so can the private key to an address with held BTC - money being used today, with an unambiguous owner. If you're basing your hopes on someone breaking the underlying cryptographic problems that make Bitcoin work...

Hmm. The problem is that at the moment, Bitcoin's exchange rate is highly variable. Nobody can actually tell whether the money supply is growing faster or slower than the economy. If they did, you wouldn't have arguments on this very board about what the "fundamental" value of 1BTC is.

In real-world economies, you don't normally see that kind of volatility. I suspect that this has to do with a combination of (1) real-world economies' sizes being easier to determine, thanks to taxes and import/export laws and so forth, and (2) the immaturity of the economy making it harder to derive a "fundamental" BTC price from the market price (the significant percentage of Mt. Gox volume coming from Bitcoinica speaks to the degree to which speculation is ruling the exchanges right now).

But the upshot is that whether or not people would choose to save instead of spend if they know their money will appreciate, they can't know that in Bitcoin today. Their money may or may not appreciate on the short-term scale. Maybe tomorrow the price of Bitcoin goes up to $10! Maybe it goes back down to $3! There's no confidence in Bitcoin prices except in those people who "believe it will succeed", who are looking 10 years down the line (too far for Keynesian theories of hoarding to apply, whether or not Keynesian economics accurately describes reality). So the current economic growth doesn't really work as a counterexample when talking about how the Bitcoin economy will behave when it "matures".

It'd be better to talk about the examples of emerging economies in the real world. But I'm not familiar enough with the topic to provide good examples there.

As someone who only understands the Bitcoin algorithm on a high level, I want to get a better understanding of what multi-sig is for.

My impression is that the feature involves the creation of an address with two private keys, each generated by a party who doesn't have to know the other one. In other words, an address where both key-generators would have to be compromised for the coins at that address to be compromised.

My impression was also that ECDSA already has that feature, based on some kind of magic where you multiply Party 1's private key and Party 2's public key (and vice versa). I remember Mike Caldwell (the Casascius guy) talking about this method with whoever runs Printbills as a possible means of adding confidence in the security of the Bitcoins backing a piece of physical currency.

Was one of these impressions incorrect? Does that magic of multiplying ECDSA keys not work really, or is there something else that these BIPs do that justifies a change in the protocol?

As metaphors on this forum go, I find the idea of a "secret rocket launch" to be one of the most distinct.

Anyway, we'll see; I'd like to see the price go up, even if I won't be able to help much.

My guess is that the miner is counting as "accepted" everything that meets Difficulty 1 (the usual share difficulty for pools), even though an actual share on p2pool is harder than Difficulty 1. The same thing happens with the FPGA miner I use.

I think you'll see a lot of bot action making bogus decisions based on the "latest price", and once that noise dies down you'd see limit asks slowly trickle in at various prices.

Volatility would be high for a good span of time after that, with one side of the order book being so thin. I don't think I could say where we'd stabilize (although I suspect it'd still be <10$).

From what I understand, it's automatically adjusted in the same way as any blockchain difficulty - just with the "network size" being the total hashpower on p2pool, and the target frequency being 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

My understanding from previous posts is that the old code was prone to splitting the share blockchain due to some bug. A fix was pushed to GIT, but some incompatibility between the fixed and unfixed versions meant that the share blockchain split one more time and then stuck that way.

I'm pretty sure it is affecting payouts, though; the whole point of the share blockchain is to decide who gets payed. So people who mined before the split got paid for those shares twice, and people who mined after the split are only getting payed by whatever branch they're on.

But that's just my impression from the talk in this thread. I'm not a developer either.

This one paid out for me.

I have not assigned an address using -a; the log seemed to indicate that during startup p2pool automatically asked my bitcoin-qt for a wallet address to use and has been using that one (said address shows up in my address list in the GUI as well).

Was that the mistake? Is that address not really being used here?

I've been using GIT p2pool since I started trying it out a couple days ago, and updated again when the announcement went out to make sure we were running latest.

See, the problem is that not only do I not see anything on QT, but I don't see my mining address in the payout section of the block either.

I have a couple dozen shares but didn't see a cent from the payout here. Is that expected?