This is the wrong way of calculating things. The chance that Bitcoin will succeed must be calculated from the market price, not the other way around (unless you have access to insider information).

<span> tags have no spacing. A search engine that sees it as "X BTC" doesn't understand what <span> means.

Yes, in fact, that is the goal. It looks like a regular bitcoin symbol, but to search engines is more like XBTC.

Is there demand for a solution that will (hopefully) solve the problems below? I ask because I don't wish to bother the devs with an incomplete and useless proposal.

BIP RFC: A solution to the block size limit?
Changes
This solution requires several changes to the Bitcoin system:

• The block header has an additional field added to it: the size of the block.
• The algorithm for chain length is changed. See below for details.

Strengths
There are several strengths in this system.

• There is no need to increase the size of the block limit.
• Clients do not waste bandwidth downloading large blocks.
• Block sizes will be regulated through risk and reward, that is, by the market.

Weaknesses
There are several weaknesses in this system.

• A 51% attack is more dangerous, as miners have more control.
• A 51% attack may be easier to conduct, as the attacker could mine empty blocks.

Concepts
This solution relies on several properties of the Bitcoin system:

• The length of a chain can be determined through only the block headers.
• The block headers are of a fixed size.

He meant March 6, not February 6.

It's experiencing load because of an experiment the developers are conducting. You may need to wait around 10 blocks more than you usually would.

We probably won't break $32, or at least so I'm hoping. And I already have gone for it, thank you.

Was at $44 a while ago. Now at $42. Soon we'll reach $32.

When have we seen this before?

I wish people would stop making excuses. With every sudden rise is an equally sudden drop. Good luck to you bulls—you'll need it.

Citation needed.

People who know it for what it is do not fear it. There are several reasons for this:

• Bitcoin can be controlled. It is just like cash, subject to regulation as any other. See any large exchange for their AML policy. There is no reason Bitcoin can't be controlled.
• Bitcoin does not need to be controlled. There is no harm that can be done with Bitcoin. Buying drugs and evading taxes with Bitcoin are just as, if not more, dangerous and easy to detect as with cold, hard, cash.
• Control is not necessarily a good thing. There are many things that should not be controlled. That's why we have freedom of thought, conscience, expression, and association. People are not afraid of them. Like thought, conscience, and expression, financial freedom is beneficial, not detrimental, to society as a whole. Bitcoin decentralizes the banks, which have done little good for society. People fear banks, and Bitcoin helps save the day.

You are missing the point. If Bitcoin can only support a million people, no amount of fee will allow it to support a million and one. Limiting block space to keep the fee up is like limiting food production to keep food prices up.

The hard block limit is no different than, for example, a government-imposed food production ban to support farmers. Even farmers who want to produce more food, because they earn more that way (compare with miners earning more by ignoring the limit), cannot because of the restriction. And the people who eat, starve. Nobody benefits from this scenario.

What we should be doing instead is letting the market decide the fee. Make block space unlimited, but expensive to produce. There are a few ways of accomplishing this:

1. Pay-for-space. For every kB a block takes up, the miner loses a certain amount of reward. Even malicious miners lose this reward, as it doesn't go to anyone. The reward could be adjusted like difficulty, or some other method, to allow growth in the network. This ensures there is no limit to block size if it becomes necessary, and ensures the blockchain will not be too big, as there is significant financial cost in doing so.

2. Prioritize-small-blocks. Currently, block length and orphans are determined through sum of block difficulty. This could, through a hard fork, add a risk to making bigger blocks, as they are more likely to be orphaned. If transaction fees are high enough that this risk is manageable, then the block sizes will increase. The only problem with this approach is the increased threat of a 51% attack by someone mining empty blocks. Hopefully the financial incentive of mining full blocks will counteract that.

People complain about how low the transaction fees are. I like to pose them this question below. If this isn't an argument for killing the block size limit, I don't know what is.


There are so many elegant solutions to this block size problem. Keeping the current limit isn't one of them.

What happened here is not because of fairness, but rather because of strategy.

There are strategies in Peerbet that are almost guaranteed to lose one their money. These strategies effectively convert Peerbet to a low-rake lottery. One of the common ones is the proportional bet strategy, which many people subconsciously adopt.

For example, imagine a hypothetical person with 1000 XBT to bet. He always bets 10% of his balance at 50/50 odds. You may expect him to have a 50/50 chance of being in the green. But let's examine the actual case.

After one bet, your expectation would be accurate.

But after two bets, it becomes clear that this isn't the case.

There's a short return to the mean at three bets:

But that is a short-lived return. If you noticed, the chances of each option is also a binomial coefficient. Now, we just need to model the median to determine what the most likely scenario is. For zero or one bet, the median is 1000 XBT. For two or three bets, it drops to 990 XBT. Because in theory betting with 1000 XBT is no different from betting with 990 XBT, we can now deduce that for every two bets, the median drops to 0.99× of what it was.

This means that starting with 1000 XBT, after 1000 bets, you should expect to be at ~6.57 XBT, effectively losing most of your money. So where did the "no house edge" go?

It turns out that this picture is not all bleak. The missing money is in the unlikely rewards. There is virtually no upper limit on the amount you can earn (the practical upper limit is that nobody will bet that high if you get lucky) if you win every game. But if you lose every game, you can lose at most 1000 XBT. This is where the lottery analogy comes in: you play a small amount, and you have the small chance to win a large amount.

There are, in fact, strategies that avoid this problem. Although they have far lower reward, the reward occurs often. However, when they are not rewarded, they can lose a significant amount of money; effectively reversing the lottery. Peerbet effectively lets you either play the lottery or run the lottery without a house edge, which is its greatest advantage. But you must educate yourself on probability theory before you take the plunge, or you will come up with an undesirable strategy.

Bitcoin does not support gambling, drugs, or tax evasion. That is a complete myth. I ran some numbers, and drugs and gambling combine for approximately 10% of the network. That's about as much as it is for regular fiat.

The people on Bitcointalk have an irrational fear of government, believing it to be more than what it is—an association of people help organize society. Yes, it is power-hungry; and yes, it makes mistakes—but there is zero reason to believe it will attack a currency that benefits its own people.

This is of course, patent nonsense.

Bitcoin's merit is in its decentralization. If the block size stays at its current level, it stands that only the current level of users can use it. The ~1000000 people who use Bitcoin today will serve as the centralizers of tomorrow's Bitcoin. That's still 7000 people per centralized authority.

Block size limit should be removed entirely and replaced with a "prefer-small-block" system.

The total number of Bitcoin ever created is worth 500 million USD. The total number that can be used is much lower. Because a single bitcoin is tied up for 6 confirmations after being sent, too many bitcoins transacted at once would actually exhaust the network—there simply is no longer the liquidity to transact so much.

To see this in action, try to buy a house with Litecoin. It's not possible, because the monetary base is too small.

You worry too much about government. No matter how many mistakes it makes, it still acts in public interest. Public interest is to embrace a new revolutionary financial technology, not to ban it.

Once again, we've passed an important milestone. It won't be long until we reach one billion USD.

To put the current cap in perspective, consider the following example.

Even if all Bitcoin were liquid (which is false, as some are hoarded and others are lost), Bitcoin's network can only support transferring 500 million USD every hour (as that is how long confirmations take). This means that if just one million people tried to buy something worth $500 each, the network would crumble. This is why we need to focus on increasing the monetary base, as that is healthier for the Bitcoin economy.

Many say that Bitcoin should develop its economy before price increases. However, they miss that the economy cannot develop without significant price increases. As a result, it seems that a gradual rise in prices is healthy for Bitcoin, not unhealthy.

The network isn't controlled by the miners. A hard fork the miners "refuse to accept" will have new miners that take their place.

That was mostly before any serious Bitcoin trading. We have no precedent to determine that this hashrate increase is the same as any other; for all we know, it is completely different.

Ubitex, Andrew Nollan, the Mt. Gox gaffé, and Bitscalper were technically all smaller, so I wouldn't say $12K is "immaterial". However, I risk saturating the list if I add too many of these smaller-scale thefts. What I'll do for now is hide these 4 thefts from the severity listing, and maintain the current 1000 BTC cutoff (which I hope to replace with a USD cutoff sometime in the future.