interesting factiod:  according to this poll:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4407.0

... i am the oldest person here, at 59.

faith?  nope.

but i'll tell ya, i've missed a few boats in my life (caught some too) - and this Bitcoin thing just has that feel.  it's the kind of thing i don't want to look back on and realize that it was yet another biggie i didn't see coming.

so call it a hunch, if you like.

besides, i'm a geek.  it doesn't take much of an excuse to get me screwing around with hardware and software...

i think it depends on your OS.  windows or linux?

ebay used to care about sellers.  it made sense, since that's where all their money came (and still comes) from.

they never got a dime from buyers.  still don't, AFAIK.

nowadays they kiss buyer butt.  sellers can't even leave neg feedback for bad buyers.  i really don't get it - but i don't have to; i just don't sell there anymore.

makes no sense to me at all.

oh yes - i'm very well aware that anonymity is optional.

but - for me, anyway - i think a low profile is good, until we see how the first legal and/or political challenges shake out.

YMMV.  i went through the sixties and am now going through the craziness of the oughts/teens: and frankly, i have little confidence in the political institutions of even the best of the western democracies.  the trouble with people who have power is that they are the same people who want it.

reckon i'll keep my head down for now...

"anonymous"

i don't think that word means what you think it means...

i don't see much luck for the existing power structure in regulation.

on the IP side, even the deepest packet inspection will only reveal that SHA-256 is being used... for something.  i suppose a huge push could be made to ban effective encryption world-wide - but that's been tried, and didn't work out so well.  open source is a powerful thing.

on the mining pool side, yes - it would be possible to tax the BTC pools using transaction fees:  for those pool operators who caved to those demands rather than ended their operations.  but you could only tax a BTC once.  after it got out into the wild it would become untaxable.

as far as putting enough hashing power into the network to take it over?  i dunno.  governments move slowly.  right now, BTC is a tiny thing that is only beginning to be noticed.  but already a third of all available BTC have been mined: by the time a government coalition - even moving at lightning speed (for them) - got their shit together, block rewards will be down to 25BTC at least.  the hashing power of the private network will be so huge that taking it over for a paltry billion dollars or so (assuming BTC goes up to 10/DollarUS by then) won't look so good to the folks who calculate the expenditure of political capital for the maintenance of government power.

if nothing happens by the time the block reward goes down to 25BTC, i think it's too late to regulate.

actually, the mining process is the act of using the hashing power of the entire network to crack the private keys of everyone who holds Bitcoin - in descending order of the magnitude of their holdings.

well... didn't you ever wonder about that?

42 is *always* the answer.

...and don't forget your towel. 

oh vladimir, you wonderful russian: masters of language you are - even unconsciously.

it's genie back into the lamp.

but 'ginny' works, as a (/an implied) subset of "horse back into the barn".

robert heinlein would have approved.  as would his wife...

there's nothing like a solid, multi-order pun.

+42 (the answer...)

ah, sorry - you need a mac person...  seems to work just fine on macs tough, if you set it up right.

sorry - OpenCL, not CLI...

by the way, the best overall destructions i've run across are here:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3356.0

post #3, by humble.  there are newish caveats relating to new versions of CLI and the Catalyst drivers, but...

"I can't find instructions anywhere, and I've looked extensively on this forum and the wiki."

...humble pretty much covers it.

hmm... conf should be good.

so in a terminal you run: ./bitcoind [from the bitcoin directory - skip the GUI; go with the daemon]

and then: *******@minty64 ~/DiabloMiner/Diablo-D3-DiabloMiner-d758eef $ ./DiabloMiner-Linux.sh -w 128 -f 1 -u ******* -p ********

?

i'm assuming your mvn install on DiabloMiner went ok?

apt-get?  what are your repositories?  i think to start with, i'd stick with the ati downloads, after purging everything related to the OS-installed versions of fglrx, radeon, & etc.

but yes - it's more fundamental than your drivers.

what motherboard are you using?  what other hardware is hung on it?  what linux OS?

post your bitcoin.conf file (redact passwords...).  that's probably your issue.

This is how money works...

Maybe if there was a serial number attached to every 0.000001 BTC? 

My suspicion is that by the time the reward drops from 50 to 25, Bitcoin will either be dead - or very, *very* robust.

If the latter, then 25 BTC will convert (to any currency) at a /much/ higher rate than it does now.  So if 25 BTC will then be worth more than 50 is now, I don't believe there will be any fewer miners - probably more.

And... Moore's Law... mining hardware will be cheaper by then.

I agree - and note that the difficulty level in 'mining' (read: growing) them never changes.

On that note... I've been reading a lot on this forum about people who want to change the difficulty level, or introduce inflation, or in some other way deflate the value of Bitcoin held by early adopters in order to - theoretically - make the system 'more fair' for late adopters (of which, incidentally, I am one).  Bunk.

It's working just as it should.

The early adopters clearly have a position to defend - and so they actually act as agents for Satoshi, in maintaining the system as originally conceived.  It seems unlikely the early birds will hoard (as is commonly believed), as their perception of the value of Bitcoin was forged when Bitcoin had none, and they have much more to spend.

A devilishly and admirably clever human, that Satoshi...