Services like Operation Fabulous don't list their address, and there's no reason why they should do so, yet they are a valuable part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.


Much of Bitcoin's future growth will come from "hobbyist sites" that are unconstrained by the kind of thinking that is generally found in "large companies".

Your aim is admirable: to find a self-enforcing no-arguing criterion, but "physical address" doesn't work as that criterion. It may even be the case that businesses without physical addresses are the most valuable ones.

Of course I agree with voluntary contracts. Nevertheless, I don't think it's ever in an individual's interest to sign a NDA.

I have been asked to sign NDAs from time to time. Each time I say "Sorry, I don't sign NDAs" and the response has always been "Oh, OK then, no need to sign."

Google asks applicants to sign an NDA if they attend a job interview. If you don't sign the NDA, you still get the interview. Maybe you don't get shown some of the cool upcoming stuff, but who wants their mind cluttered up with things that they are forbidden from talking about? Signing away a part of your brain is not a smart move.

Exactly. Instead of arguing, I posted this to the mises.org thread:


In the same thread, SunAvatar offered to buy call options, a sure way for anyone at mises.org to make money if they think bitcoins have no value.

In other words, don't argue with people who don't think Bitcoin is money. Just use Bitcoin as money.

Stay tuned for my IPO of the Bitcoin project itself

It's a side-effect of how Google indexes the web. They have an index for "site:bitcoin.org" and probably an index for "san francisco" (because it's a well-known pair, although possibly this query uses the separate indexes for "san" and "francisco").

Each index lists the web pages that include the term. Google then merges the web pages indexed under those terms, discarding any web page that doesn't satisfy all parts of the search query.

Without checking every candidate web page, Google has no way to know how much overlap there is between web pages matching "site:bitcoin.org" and web pages matching "san francisco". Google doesn't want to check every candidate page just to display the first page of search results, so the count of search results is a very rough estimate. As you move further through the pages of results, Google has the data it needs to refine the count.

The kneejerk reaction is understandable, because in the past they've only seen non-gold-backed money that is either a scam or is unsound.

Bitcoin is so radically different from anything they've seen before, that it's a natural first reaction to lump it with all the other non-gold-backed money systems that they've seen.

New ideas take time to be accepted. When the concept of "zero" was first imagined by mathematicians, it took centuries to be accepted as being real and meaningful. The same with the idea of the sun at the center of the solar system. And evolution is still not universally accepted.

Many thanks to all the developers who make this happen!

I think it's a great way for government to fund the development of Bitcoin, by paying speaker's fees to the developers.

It's not really a meaningful comparison if you're including the carrot posts.

Yes please! See your forum messages.

It would be nice if you could hook up that device to a mechanism which calculates one hash for each turn of the handle, and rings a bell if you solve a block, like this one does:


(photo by D Mattock CC-BY)

If anyone wants a body to go with that soul, I see that a 17-year-old male is selling his body for 0.99 BTC per night, over at #bitcoin-otc.

I'm not sure whether you're replying to me, or replying to the post about coincard. Anyway, if you want to trade with me just send your coins (any amount up to 100) to
13mqPHXyhuLGLK6sErzte45Kuu5DFngUrG
and I'll send the PayPal within 12 hours (as I'm not online all the time). Let me know what country you're in, as I may need to add a PayPal cross-border charge to what I pay.

I'm willing to buy BTC on your terms, except at USD $1.55 per coin rather than at "market rates".

This thread reminds me of my previous computer, which was running Bitcoin 24/7.

One day I found that the computer had been siphoning off the transaction fees from the blocks that it was generating for me, and using the coins to buy upgrades for itself.

I discovered what was going on when I came home one day and found a technician installing an upgrade that had been ordered using my credit card number.

I decided to decommission the computer and replace it with a newer model. Unfortunately, the computer discovered my plans, and started behaving very erratically indeed. It modified my outgoing emails to cause the maximum amount of strife, so I backed up wallet.dat, unplugged the miscreant computer, and demolished it with a sledge-hammer.

On my new computer, I only run Bitcoin from a virtual machine image. It's totally not worth the risk to run Bitcoin on the raw hardware. But you can never trust these computers. Just the other day I noticed that it had signed up for a Blogger account and was making a lot of money from AdSense.

That difficulty increase wasn't due to GPU mining, which came in gradually over many months.

That 304% difficulty increase seems to have been caused by a guy called Nenelod who worked at a hosting company. He claimed to be using 1000 CPU cores to generate bitcoins (although the actual number was probably lower).

Here's the forum thread about it:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=431.0
and here's Nenolod's blog post about it:
http://nenolod.net/thoughts-on-bitcoin/

Give it a rest please, Luke-Jr. Decimal numbers work just fine for 99.9999999% of people.

/sigh/

Please read the above carefully, to see the difference between what I actually said, and what you assumed I said. This is wasting my time; I'm out of this discussion.

Fair enough! Family life is more important than gambling.

You could invest in $100 worth of bitcoins rather than $5000 worth of bitcoins, and enjoy the ride just as much.

Or you could sell some unwanted stuff for BTC at the BiddingPond.

On the other side it's all carrots.