Not even close.  First of all to prove liable/slander (at least in the US) the person making the statement has to KNOWINGLY make a false statement.  The mere fact that the statement is false is not sufficient.  So if someone posted some faked screenshots/records/scanned docs showing Pirate selling the deposited coins and transferring money to a bank account in the cayman islands AND it turned out to be false AND you could prove the person posting it knew it was false (faked it himself) AND that statement caused a loss AND you could prove the loss was directly related to the false statement (coincidence is not correlation under the law either) AND you suffered a loss you would have a case.

Even then it would be very hard to prove and win and the damages likely would be far beyond anything the defendant could be paid so almost certainly the judge would reduce them.

Another way to look at it is IF you run a business that is 100% legit but it utterly indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme then guess what .... the risk that it will be confused with a ponzi scheme and you may suffer a lack of liquidity as a result is a business risk.  A risk that both the operator of the business and the investors should have considered.   Lets assume Pirate operation was 100% legit.  Could he have done anything to mitigate that risk?  Transparency?  Delayed withdrawals?  Working with a smaller pool of high net worth investors?  Since he chose NOT to take steps to mitigate that risk factor and the "investors" decided to ignore that risk factor any losses are solely the fault of the operator and investors.

Exactly.  Bitcoin is a platform.  GernMiester obviously never played with creative toys as a kid.  It is like saying nobody will ever use the internet.  Do you know how hard it is to manually create TCP/IP packets. 

I guess that makes it ppnos.  Pay per not orphaned shared.

Sure but that substantially increases the cost.  True cost is much higher than $1M per TH/s when you consider infrastructure, labor, security, insurance, electricity, etc.  Lets say $2M per TH/s. A 90% attack today would cost ~$200M take almost 20 days to hash a re-org that deep (plus setup time) and the attacker risks ASIC being released skyrocketing the "good difficulty" in the meantime.  A massive amount of money to risk for the tiny economy that is Bitcoin.  

In the future when attacking Bitcoin may be worth $100M it couldn't be done with $100M it would require billions. It creates an interesting risk vs reward dynamic.   The cost rises as Bitcoin gets larger but it may not get larger so spending a huge sum now to avoid an even larger sum in the future may be a poor bet.  A bet that costs millions.  

Nice.  I am pretty sure at least some pools prioritize based on fee using custom code.  In analyzing DeepBit blocks I am fairly certain they are doing some prioritization other than pure priority.  It will be good to have it in the reference client though.  That gives all miners and pools the ability to do similar prioritization without a lot of reinventing the wheel.

However correct me if I am wrong even if when your pull is integrated in future versions the mandatory fee on low priority tx will remain.  Right?  It exist to prevent denial of service or spam attacks.  A fee market place won't negate that (at least not for a while). 

Last time before I give up forever.  As I pointed out the mandatory fee (which isn't required on all tx just low priority ones) was lowered to the current 0.0005 when BTC was $20.  Considering lowering it to 0.0001 when BTC is sustainably >$100 probably makes sense.  That keeps the fee below 1 US cent.

However the point you seem to be missing (over and over and over across multiple threads) is that the mandatory fee doesn't determine the actual fee.  

1) Mandatory fee is only required on low priority transactions.  Simply wait long enough and you could pay 0 BTC on your $1USD equivelent tx.  Tada.  The mandatory fee being 0.0005 or 0.0001 doesn't really matter if you don't pay it.

2) Users are paying fees HIGHER than the mandatory fee.  Gavin change suggested above will only accelerate that.  Transaction volume increasing will only accelerate that.  There is finite space in a block and tx processing does require some amount of real cost.  It is entirely possible the mandatory fee could be cut to a single satoshi or removed completely and you STILL would have to pay a much larger fee simply due to competition (or wait days or weeks for your free tx to finally get processed).

Well they certainly couldn't start today and cause a re-org that deep with only 51% control.  Sure they could have started 6 months ago but that means the 51% attack occurred 6 months ago not today.  Still that wasn't Blinken's understanding or post.  He seemed to indicate miners "vote" on tx and can choose to alter them.  Taking a tx from A->B and making it A->C where the attacker does not control the private key for A. 

TL/DR:
"If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. " is a 100% false statement.

Still if are really worried about a 25,000 block re-org then don't accept coins unless the unspent output is prior to the last checkpoint.  Speaking of that what is the last checkpoint.

What is gold backed by?

Backing is a simplistic concept.  The United States dollar is backed by the economic and military power of the United States.  How effective of a backing that is doesn't really matter is it backed by something.  Likewise Bitcoin is "backed" by something.  It gains value from the utility created by the network (secure, fast, decentralized transactions).  Is that "backing" worth $14? Well the market is saying right now it is.   Maybe you think it is worth more or less but it is backed by something.  If you think that isn't true I would gladly sell you 28 quadrillion D&T coins for a mere couple thousand of your Bitcoins.  Since they are both backed by nothing obviously that is an amazing deal.


The difference between fiat and bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with a simplistic concept of "backing". Fiat means BY DECREE.  The government issues money BY DECREE.  Money you have absolutely no control over.  You may get a promotion and 20% pay raise this year only to have the government over issue currency such that your "higher" pay actually means you are poorer in real time (adjusted for inflation).  If the FED prints an extra $1 trillion what can you do about it?  Nothing.  The currency is issued by DECREE.  The govt mandates it existance and you suffer any ills from that centralized control. 

What makes Bitcoin different than fiat is ... it isn't fiat.  It isn't issued by decree.  You can't force anyone to accept Bitcoin.  If they do it is by choice.  Nobody control Bitcoin.  Nobody can choose to alter the rate of inflation (to their benefit and the detriment of others).

Note I sidestepped the entire argument of which is better, just pointing out bitcoin IS different than fiat currencies and the reason has nothing to do with "backing".

Once again.  The mandatory fee will likely be completely irrelevant in the future.  It isn't designed for revenue.  Never was, never will be.  Competition will cause users to pay a much much higher fee for fast processing than the mandatory fee (which is only designed to mark denial of service attacks prohibitively expensive).

Case in point even now satoshi dice pays a tx fee roughly 5x higher than the mandatory fee and they pay it on tx which don't even require the mandatory fee.  In the future it won't matter much if the mandatory fee is 0.0005 btc but your client advised you that to have a good chance of being include in the next 20 blocks will require a fee of 10x that. 

There is nothing wrong with using PBKDF2 (a solid multi-round algorithm which can use SHA-256 among other hashes).  However most users attempting to roll their own multi-round SHA function will likely create vulnerabilities.  First they will under estimate how fast SHA-256 is.  100 rounds or even 1,000 rounds is worthless.  For brute force resistance one needs hundreds of thousands of rounds.  Second they likely will introduce vulnerabilities like creating intra-round collisions.    They may underestimate the need for salt or the size of the salt.  They may try to do things like derive the salt from low entropy sources, etc.  The advantages of PBKDF2, bcrypt, and scrypt is they are end to end solutions.   password in -> solid multi-round cryptography -> hash out.

PBKDF2 (using SHA-256) is well tested and a good alternative to bcrypt, but bcrypt has an advantage of limiting attacker's hardware advantage.   Even a single round of bcrypt (blowfish) is roughly 1,000x slower than a single SHA-256 hash and bcrypt doesn't optimize well on GPUs.  The average GPU is in the ballpark of ~100x as fast as the average CPU when it comes to SHA-256 hashing but only ~5x as fast with bcrypt.  Since most servers are using CPU picking an algorithm which is optimized for GPU doesn't aid the server any but it certainly does aid the attacker. bcrypt creates a more level playing field and that hurts the attacker.

That being said nothing wrong with PBKDF2 as an alternative to bcrypt. My post was more about single round SHA-256.

Brute force attacks are done against the db.  No server side code is going to stop that.  Honestly password878 is likely strong enough against an attacker trying to login as you.  Of course no attacker tries to login as you.



That isn't the purpose of salt.  Salt isn't a secret salt accomplishes two things.

1) Salt prevent precomputation attacks.  20,000 computer years is a long time right?  Well lets say your db is stolen today.  Well the strong passwords are safe for 20,000 years right?  What if attacker(s) started hashing passwords 20 years ago using 1,000 computers?  Without salt precomputation becomes a viable attacker.  Lookup tables for just about every algorithm would already exist and your password likely would be compromised before you even thought of it.   Even a password like "KJ#!Ks9d8k" would be instantly brute forced in "seconds" well technically not in seconds but the work can be done ahead of time so it would be compromised seconds after the db was compromised.

2) Salt prevents parallel attacks.  Say a password db has 10,000 records.  An attacker hashes password123.  Without salt they can compare it not against 1 record but against all 10,000.  1 hash = 10,000 attacks.  Ouch. With salt the hacker can hash password123 with the salt of record 1 but the resulting hash is only good for record 1.  To test "password123" against all 10,000 records requires 10,000 hashes.   Which is better security 1 hash = 10,000 attacks or 1 hash = 1 attack. 

Salt isn't a secret.  Salt is designed to limit the attacker to hash per attempted password per account in realtime.  Nothing more.

The wording of your question implies it hasn't already been done.  The fee was lowered to its current value when Bitcoin exceeded $20 USD per BTC.   At this point there is no reason to lower the fee further.  Maybe when 1 BTC = $100 then cutting the minimum fee by 80% would make it equivalent to the prior cut.

Still the min fee is likely going to be less and less important in the future.  I already pay about 5x the min fee (still a fraction of a cent).  The min fee doubling or being cut in half wouldn't change anything for me.

get away you filthy sellers.  it is mine.  

[watches powerlessly as sellers eat away at the wall]

1 confirm .... 2 confirms .... 3 confirms ..... 4 confirms .... 5 confirms ....  (crickets)

ATTENTION ALL MINERS:  HASH FASTER DAMMIT!!!!

Nice find.  The use of "fast hash" algorithms for password hashing has been a pet peeve of mine for some time.  GPUs simply make the problem a couple magnitudes faster.  As OpenCL capable hardware makes it way into lower end computers expect botnets to gain a magnitude more hashing power per node.

To anyone clinging to outdated ideas like using SHA-1 (or SHA-256/512, RIPEMD-160, etc) for storing passwords a simple question to ask yourself.  
Does your login server need to be able to process 4 billion logins per second?  No?  
Then why are you using a algorithm which allows the hacker to brute force at the rate of 4 billion attacks per second?  

Use an algorithm like bcrypt and pick a workload so that your login throughput is only say 20 logins per second (@ 10% cpu load).   That means the average CPU based attacker can attempt couple hundred attacks per second, and the average GPU a mere couple thousand attacker per second.  

Still?  No if we was part of the nuke program any material is on a need to know basis and property of the US government.  You do realize that the US Navy accepts "punks" right out of highschool into the nuclear propulsion school right?  It isn't like you need to be a scientist with a PHD.  Was he part of the nuke program?  I don't know.  Just pointing out it wouldn't be impossible for someone remember something from a textbook they no longer have because it is classified.

Also BTW he is correct the fission rate of a material does depend on the temperature among other things.  If a reactor gets too hot it becomes fission hostile.  Not all neutron strikes will cause fission, very few actually do and sustaining a chain reaction requires certain temps and speeds (neutron velocity).

Does netspend allows you to load it from ACH (Direct Deposit)?  If you login to your prepaid card's online account you may see an option for funding by ACH (Direct Deposit).  If you do we just need the routing #, account #, and bank name (may not be NetSpend).

My guess is he was part of US Navy nuclear propulsion program.  They do have some of the best practical application of nuclear theory textbooks and yes they all are classified.

Yeah that is the concept but integrating it into a web front end makes it more user friendly.

Kinda like the image-host equivalent for BTC prices.  A simple web form and you get cut & paste code for putting on a webpage or forum.

I say 20 years tops.  The "legalization/decriminalization/regulation" vs "continued failed war on drugs" have a significant age bias.  As the boomers start to die and their influence wanes policies will change.  I am not just talking about 18 year old stoners.  Even in the 20-40 year old, non users demographic there is a lot more support for realistic drug policies.