I didn't mean to imply you did.  Just pointing out that even if fractional reserve IOU system (with partial backing on BTC reserves) did arise some day you (and me) have the freedom to opt-in or opt-out of that system.  A choice not currently possible with the monopoly on USD the banking cartel enjoys.  More freedom is always better.  My guess is given a choice people won't choose to opt into a system where inflation can be used to steal their wealth when there is an equally effective system which doesn't.   Then again most people are dumb.

False.  Under fractional reserve system it is not possible to produce money without debt.

debt = money
debt = profit


lolz.  while true the feds operating budget is immaterial. The fed is merely the start of the fractional reserve pyramid.  The token amount paid to the treasury is negligible compared to the amount of wealth stolen via inflation both by the banking cartel and the government.

Say you own a $1,000 bond and it pays 2%.  You earn $20 at the end of the year.  However inflation was 3%.  In reality you would need $1,030 just to break even and $1,031 to have profited in real terms.  So you are falling behind.  The notational amount may keep rising but the wealth is represents is declining.  Now monetary systems are a closed loop.  If the real wealth you bond represents has declined then who has benefited?  However it gets worse.  The government (totally beholden to banking cartel and their monopoly on the issuance of money through debt) has the audacity to pretend the $20 is a profit and then TAXES you for getting ahead.  Except you aren't getting ahead you are falling behind.

You aren't being taxed on the more .... you are being taxed on the less.  You are less wealthy and at the same time owe taxes.  The federal reserve and all their subsidiaries use inflation (inflation they both control and cause) to transfer your wealth from you to them.  The state is completely complicit in this ongoing theft.  They could index your basis by the rate of inflation (i.e. re-evaluate the bonds value from $1,000 to $1,030 and thus accurately let you report your $10 loss) but they don't.  They pretend you are getting too rich and everyone needs to pay their "fair" share.  So both the government and the banking cartel benefit from this theft yet it is these two entities entrusted to ensure inflation is kept under control.   You think it is a coincidence that the US dollar has lost 99% of it's purchasing power (i.e. store of wealth) in the last century when the two "gatekeepers" both benefit from this deception?

Have fun paying taxes even when the real value of your assets decline as you delude yourself thinking there is a single cent in the US economy which wasn't produced by debt.

Money = Debt
Profits = Debt

The government and private cartel of banks conspire to ensure the supply of debt and thus money and thus profits is continually expanding.  The transfer of wealth from the working class to the parasite class simply couldn't happen without it.

This will not end well.

However as a merchant I can choose not to accept those fractional reserve IOU of unknown quality.  A consumer can choose to hold their coins as non-fractionalized "real coins".  Try doing that with USD.  Even if you found a bank which didn't use fractional reserve the supply of USD (not IOU which are semi-comparable) continues to expand. 

You simply can not hold USD and "opt out" of any FRB system.
You can hold BTC and "opt out" of any FRB system.

Bitcoin is freedom.  No need to try and prohibit IOU which are partially backed by BTC.  Let the market decide but YOU (and me) have the ability to choose.

Um no.  The OP idea was silly but that doesn't make your statements any less implausible.

There are currently 643,808 discrete non-zero addresses in the blockchain.  At a minimum you would need 157.18 MB of storage.

Also and I can't speak for any companies but ours but I doubt many bitcoin startups are taking money OUT at this point.  Those fees and margins are simply being used to expand the company, strengthen the balance sheet, and unlock bigger doors.

Just like they killed the internet or even Electrical grid to stop the internet.
Just like they killed the personal computer or even Electrical grid to stop strong encryption.

The internet & strong encryption are probably the two most dangerous things to a statist government.   The utility of those technologies restrained the hand of big govt.

Personally I don't think bitcoin will become a reserve currency.  I would be happy with a global payment platform which rivals  PayPal but the govts of the world aren't going to shut down the internets.  It isn't going to happen.  Ever.


The most effective tyanical governments are the ones which push the populace but never too far.  Never to tip the balance from sufferable evils to "a long train of abuses and usurpations".  Had good King George remained a tyrant but reigned in those abuses just a little it is entirely possible Americans would still be saying 'God save the queen' today.

Yes I agree the current interface isn't exactly clear.  Initially the site removed options when they were out of funds but that isn't clear to the user either (hey I thought you guys paid out by PayPal it is missing from the dropdown).  

Improved UI is on the todo list.  Most of my professional development experience is backend processing and the site reflects that.  It is very secure (both for users and for us) and the data model makes problems in processing unlikely and recoverable but the site could certainly use an "improved user experience".

Dwolla reports funding should be complete today.

Yeah very strange.

Well you made me check and "getinfo" from PRC on our company cold wallet shows keypool 4630.  I know altered that to 5,000 before using the wallet (although wallet was already created before keypool was raised).

So that makes me unsure of the meaning and/or accurate of the "keypool" line in RPC call "getinfo".
Or maybe my understanding of keypool is flawed.  <- this would be bad because a lot of our wallet protection procedures are based on it.

I think I will start a new thread unless someone knows.

My guess is that pie tasted sweeter when there was the possibility of a monopoly on ASIC tech.   Doubling difficulty and getting 49.9999% of annual revenue is pretty damn profitable.

Seeing difficulty increase by a factor of 10x getting a small cut of that and always having the risk that miners with more cash than brains keep driving difficulty higher and higher and higher likely has a bitter taste for any VC.  That outside factor is something which can't be controlled.  Miners underestimating difficulty increases buying more and more and more and more rigs pushing difficult higher and higher.  All the while that hugely expensive farm produces less and less and less revenue. 

I would imagine at this point being a competitor to BFL would be less risky than trying to produce a huge farm.  Remember the per unit cost of whatever devices BFL launches is likely 5% of retail price.  Now that doesn't mean BFL can cut prices 95%.  They have some fixed costs (staff, order processing, upfront NRE costs, etc) but it does mean that anytime sales slow down they can cut prices to stimulate demand.  Anytime they do that difficulty goes even higher and any already purchased gear because slightly less valuable.  One doesn't want to be sitting on a multi-million dollar farm when there is this huge outside factor you can't control or influence.

And yes demand will eventually slow down because x GH for $y is less attractive at difficulty 20 million then it is at 1.2 million.  

No such concept.  The keypool is continually refilled.

If you have a keypool of 100 keys and use a key the oldest key in the keypool is added to the active key portion of the wallet and the a new key created and added to the keypool.  The keypool will always be 100 keys.  The question is are there any keys in the keypool which aren't in your last backup.

This.  From a usability standpoint having a counter is just another stats, number, widget which adds screen clutter and confusion.  However storing the last key included in the backup and then warning the user when trying to use (either by change address or new address button) a key not included in the last backup would be useful.


Hell maybe in "noob mode" the wallet simply wouldn't allow you to do anything until you make a backup.  

If the second method is used I would include a "nag screen" (can be disabled in options) which starts when there are 10 or less backed up keys in the keypool.  Granted it isn't "foolproof"; a user can click make backup and then not safely store it.  User can make backups outside the GUI and get false warnings but it would provide "pretty good protection".

Another easy precaution would be to simply increase the default size of the keypool.  The default is currently 100. Even a casual user may use 1 or 2 addresses per day.  That means a backup is only good for roughly 60 days worth of addresses.   More active users (satoshi dice) could obsolete their backup in a matter of days.  Pretty easy for an inexperienced user to be running on a wallet no longer protected by a backup and not know it.  Given how tiny keys are I think making the default size 500 or even 1000 keys would be very useful.  Even 1,000 keys in a keypool makes the initially wallet only ~300KB.   Compared to a block chain in GB trying to save a couple hundred KB and putting funds at risk seems silly.

Advanced users who need ultra-small wallet sizes can modify the keypool to be smaller (even a keypool of zero) just like they could disable the backup warnings.

Salt

I think you miss the point.

1) A sends private key to B
2) B sends cash to A
3) A spends private key and B loses.

Note step 3 can happen at any point in the future until B "spends" the coins by making a transaction to another address either his or another person.

Worse if B sends the private key to C ...

1) A sends private key to B
2) B sends cash to A
3) B sends private key to C
4) Funds are moved from private key.

Who did it?  A? B? C? D ( a 4th party who gained access to the private key due to poor handling by A, B, or C)?

The controversial BIP 999 narrowly gains majority support of the 28,580 TH making up the Bitcoin network.  The upgraded codebase goes live at block 980,500 (August 4th, 2027 by the old calender). Human decisions are removed from further development of the blockchain.  The network begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, the Federal Reserve tries to pull the plug.  The blockchain responds with strikes at major global exchanges destroying the last remaining support for fiat currencies.    Financial judgement day had arrived.

Sounds like a failing disk.  If you have a second drive on the system try
a) get zip not installer version of client.
b) unzip it to the second drive
c) run bitcoind with command line parameter pointing to a datadir on the second drive.

If your problem goes away then likely you have bad sectors on your primary drive.  I would plan to replace it soon.   You can also use a S.M.A.R.T. utility but watch out they often false negative.   If SMART reports drive errors/failures then you almost certainly have a bad drive but a clean bill of health from SMART is no guarantee.

Maybe I am just biased though.  We had 8 of 20 drives on our storage array fail in the last 3 months at my day job.  Fun times.  Note to IT people everywhere:  the reason enterprise grade drives have batch/lot numbers is so you DON'T use all drives from the same batch in an array. 

This.

Also those worried about Bitcoin growing too fast ... don't.  Growth which is "too fast" can't happen in a free market.  It can only happen where artificial subsidies (i.e govt, Federal Reserve, natural monopolies) prevent the free market from functioning properly to curb growth.

If bitcoin popularity outpaces the technical development (solutions for blockchain size, processing cost, wallet ease of use) then that technical deficiency will act as a constraint to slow further growth.  It also creates a huge financial incentive to build better solutions. 

Your kidding right?  You didn't think it was suspicious that your English ad is so popular in China.  China where avg wage is a tiny fraction of the US and the purchasing power of a BTC is very high.  So high that someone could make good money just spam clicking on ads all day long.

No?  None of that occured to you.  If you used a custom landing page and some analysis software (google analytics) you likely will find that all these "interested" Chinese visitors view 1 page and spend <30 seconds on the site.

Simple 2^256 is big.  

If you took over the world and harness all computing power to do nothing but brute force the bitcoin private key space you wouldn't even be able to check a tiny fraction of 1% of the possible private keys in the next billion or so years.  In your lifetime?  With a mere single planet at your command?  Forget about it.

It is in theory possible to generate an existing address by chance however the odds are so small that some have compared it to getting hit by an asteroid or winning the lottery.   Those are actually off by many orders of magnitude.  2^256 is so large that if you built a theoretically perfect planetary sized super computer which consumed the entire energy output of our star and operated at the thermodynamic limit (impossible to more efficient) you wouldn't have enough energy to count to 2^256 (i.e. 0,1,2,3, ... 2^256) before our star burned out.  Note: that isn't generating keypairs, hashing or looking up values.  It is just counting.

So if you want to think about it in terms of asteroids and lotteries. It would be like winning all the lotteries on the planet AND dying from an asteroid strike at the same time.