The metric of how many bites they get.  Each got exactly one response.  Yours


MS is a big company with a lot of products and a lot of coders.  I'm sure that some coders and the code they write are top notch, and (clearly) some are not.  But it's mostly closed source so who knows?  I use MS products only minimally and find it hard to care very much these days...a function of getting older no doubt.


Fair enough.

Seems more or less equivalent to the last one by your metrics.

I suspect that the scripting engine is one of the more complex bits by it's nature, but such an idea is nothing new in computer science.  From what I understand the whole system is neither terribly complex by many measures nor especially well written originally, and the author(s) leveraged much of the more challenging cryptographic implementations from the open source community (as they should.)  Furthermore, much of the basic ideas of Bitcoin originated a decade and a half or more out of (or describe within) the cypherpunks community which someone pointed out on some thread here some months ago.

Of course I don't know who wrote it.  My guesstimate is that it was one person who was multi-talented and quite bright, but I see nothing so special that it would take a team of people or anything like that.  I don't mean to belittle his (or her or their) work in my above statements since at the end of the day he/she/they actually _did_ it and got it out there and here we are today.

Actually no.  Doing that job right would require _way_ more time and _way_ more skill than I have.  I simply did some minor porting for the platform I prefer for secure work.  I also rely heavily on smarter people to do the heavy lifting.  And as I've mentioned before, Bitcoin is interesting enough on enough levels that it gets more than it's share of critical analysis.  Or at least did at one time.

The main reason I wanted the source code was so that I could pick and choose when to compile a snapshot and so that I could adopt whatever patches I felt an inclination to adopt.  When I'm in the mood I do follow the commits and peruse the deltas.

I got interested sometime at the end of 2010 or begining of 2011.  Even downloaded the source code (which is a prerequisite for most any software I'm interested in and think I may need to trust.)  The driving force was a desire to help fund something I thought was worthwhile.  Maybe wikileaks, but I don't fully remember.

Alas, my attention shifted to finding and buying some property which finished up in like June 2011, then I got re-interested Bitcoin.  By the time if figured out the ins and outs of obtaining Bitcoin it was down to around $16 from it's $32 highs.

Thankfully we all got another chance to get our foots in the door on the way down to $2, and I inserted my foot and a portion of my lower leg.  More than I anticipated.

Not sure what a 'DCA' is and am to lazy to look, but I suspect from the context it is the break even point.  For me it's around $6/BTC.  Looking forward to hearing from my dear friend cypherdoc on this (but would fully understand his or anyone else's reluctance to share such details as it is not a good idea to do so for any number of reasons.)

This I doubt would be as significant a problem as you suggest although it would certainly have some influence.

For one, working on code covertly is vastly easier than running a business of any volume covertly.  People who have a hope of making a worthwhile contribution to something like Bitcoin would have close to zero trouble doing so anonymously.

For two, a robust government attack on something like Bitcoin would be such a blatant display of fascism that it would likely stir the ire of a lot of highly intelligent people.  If might even increase the level of interest from highly talented technical people...like when so many people left Europe for New Mexico to work on a nuclear bomb on behalf of a government which they felt was the most promising at the time.

It is true that there is some utility in knowing who Gavin is and being able to meet him in person if desired and that may be lost but the loss would be completely understandable in the face of an organized legal attack.

I don't think that the US would take this action unless they ('we' in my case) were pretty serious about stopping it as much as possible.  In that case we'd probably leverage our position of global leadership and the rest of the world would for the most part snap to.  "If you're not with us, your with the terrorists."...haven't you heard?  That's the advantage of having the rest of the world being either our toadies (e.g., Australia...our "Sheriff in the South" <snicker>) or are intimidated and cowed.  In the case of Iran and the sanctions, for instance, many countries actually desperately need their oil.  Noting this (and thus the extreme difficulty in fully exercising our will on them because of it) we grant by our graciousness special exemptions to anyone who would be forced to break our rules that is.  In the case of Bitcoin I would bet that it would be the opposite in that most governments would welcome the excuse to clamp down.

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More to the point of the OP, though, I think a clamp-down is possible and that it would severely limit the number of participants in the economy and also the number and nature of transactions they perform.  This could take the strain off Bitcoin in terms of block chain bloat and induce engineering efforts toward hardening the solution against various kinds of anti-use attacks.  It may not even really effect the fiat/BTC ratios that much and may even send them higher faster.

As is speculation!  $12/BTC happens to mark roughly the point where I've doubled my speculative investment (were I to cash out at least...and I've zero inclination to do so.)

FWIW, $60/BTC is where I declare victory on my gamble.  At around $100/BTC is where I sell a little to recoup the funds I input.  In the $1000's/BTC I start spending them for things I want.

I continue to consider the most likely outcome for my speculative investment in Bitcoin to be total loss, but less and less so as time goes by.

Even that attitude might be a turn-off to some.  A lot of people (including myself to some extent) have a certain amount of empathy for the poor fuckers who would be caught up in a collapse, and it is insufficient (although imho somewhat accurate) to blame their fate on their own stupidity and/or laziness.  I'm personally am not swayed by an argument that I could be a super great guy by sharing any wealth I may have accumulated in part because in the back of my mind I have some suspicion that if the rubber met the road, there is a limit to how much of this I might actually do.

Additionally there are a lot of people who are of an age where they are either gaining some benefit from the status quo (esp, social security, pensions, etc) or are within earshot of doing so.  No matter what their feelings about the sad state of our financial systems and society, somewhere in the subconscious of most normal people is the hope that they'll be able to capitalize one the benefits of the current system...or at least not live out their golden years on a diet of cat food.

That would be a message which would resonate with me personally and likely others as well.  It has the advantage of also being probably fairly tenable and a downright good idea for protection oneself.

She's busy with some travel opportunity which just came up, but I bet I can speak accurately for her.  She'd probably be least turned off by the one she saw.  She's has a visceral negative reaction to conflict, force, etc or general displays of 'power'.  So even though she detests the current banking system, she'll not be responsive to the idea of 'fighting' or 'destroying' it or whatever.  This is one area where she and I differ and it might be associated with gender differences to some extent.

A mechanism which could separate me from some of my physical under a severe downturn situation could be that I'm bargain hunting for other assets or services.  While I've diversified some ('all in' from 2002->2010-ish) I am still probably a bit heavy in PM's but that's because very little has come along which shares some of the more important counter-party risk aspects of physical PM's.  Bitcoin is one of the few.

I didn't get the sense that the business itself had anything to do with Bitcoin (like accepting them in trade for java or whatever) but it may have.  I think it was more that it is kind of a open place which allows various people with various interests to do stuff (like pin up posters.)  But I was not there.  If I have occasion patronize the place I'll find out more.

Both my mom and I would probably be more drawn to and swayed by a poster which was clearly pumped out on a home printer than a big professional looking one FWIW.  Again, we may be atypical in this respect however.

She says yes, it was the last one (as of this morning) on that page.

I applaud your efforts here and it's more than I've ever done, but I must say that I lean heavily toward the thought patterns of whoever is responsible for the 'official-ish' Bitcoin site (Gornick's link above) and there seem to be some notable opposites between your posters and those suggestions.

For me, the most effective campaign would be one which specifically does not make any significant claims other than that the Bitcoin solution is different than our current solutions, interesting, and legitimate.

Like my mother, I also may not be completely typical of mainstream consumers, but, again OTOH, I'm not sure that that mainstream consumers are group who are likely to be drawn to Bitcoin no matter what the marketeering.  And if they are they could probably be turned around by a story or two in the MSM about Silk Road or whatever.

Seems to me that the answer depends a great deal on the definitions of 'success' and 'failure', though it sounds like success to you means that you won't lose your savings.

To me the most likely cause of failure (in my definition of it) would be, paradoxically, 'success'.  I say that because I can see no other way to cope with the load but to significantly change the nature of the solution to one with has some ugly parallels to today's system of banking.  That is to say, the 'peers' are by necessity powerful and well situated entities who have the ability to exploit the users...and thus they probably will.

My fallback hope for Bitcoin is simply that I get unbelievably rich from them.  The most like 'failure' here is that Bitcoin is ignored by 'the powers that be'.  If Bitcoin is molested by said then I suspect it will both limit the solution's availability and drive the solution into hiding and hardening.  That would (I theorize) extend it's lifetime in something like the current form and the increase the value to those who find such a solution useful...and I believe there are many entities who fall into that category.

In another respect I believe that success of Bitcoin will be in demonstrating proof of concept and providing inspiration to a variety of similar solutions and I think that Bitcoin has probably already achieved this goal.  Time will tell.

I'll just mention this in case the person responsible is reading things and/or others are doing similar promotion.  I was chatting with my mother today and the conversation turned to Bitcoin (I couldn't help bragging about being in the black for a change )

Mom said that she had been in a coffee shop in St. Johns (which is a suburb-like-thing of Portland Oregon) and saw some Bitcoin posters.  Her take was that they seemed a little light on technical detail and a seemed to promote Bitcoin as a little to 'ultimate solution-ish' and things just didn't really seem right with it to her.  In other words, her take from the posters was that it had some smell of scammyness.

My mom is fairly bright and although she's not very technical was able to understand the basics of how the block chain is secured after I explained how hashing works (a year ago.)  She is also fairly keen to scams and does not get sucked into them very easily.  She may not be a perfectly typical target for 'consumers', but on the other hand, she shares my suspicion and disgust at the state of mainstream financial system exploitation so she may be typical of people who would have a hope of catching an interest in the solution.

Ya, questionable.  I've not been able to feel compfortable with any particular measure of this.


This! ...captures my attention.  Very interesting in-and-of itself, and also because I don't know what the 'right' answer might be, and also what on earth I would do if I were king no matter what the 'right' answer may be...which makes me damn glad I'll never be king.  I'm pretty sure I could come up with a legitimate argument to go an any number of directions.

For sure (really!)  I actually believe and have believed from day one that Bitcoin (or something) should be a 'guerilla currency' and that there would be a high value (non-monetarily speaking, so forgive the pun) in the existence such a thing.  Simply having it, and having it be credible, may be enough to ensure that it never really need be deployed in anger.

I must point out though that a crypto-currency for widespread use by the masses will have plenty of thorny technical issues to overcome (chiefly simple scaling) and that needing to also fit though the cracks of a police state security scheme could be quite unwelcome.  The two goals may be to complex an engineering challenge to really be workable.  At least for the mid-term future.

If (and it's a fairly big 'if') Bitcoin is attacked on a multi-national level I don't expect that it will die but rather simply freeze for a time while the 'good guys' get their bearings...which could take some time depending on the level of preperation.  That would suck mostly 1/2 of a handful of people who had active transactions underway.

The US government would have to go through a considerable legal fight to run a gulag system in which they (or lamentably, 'we') maim various people...including ones who are completely innocent of anything remotely threatening.

Similarly, it would be quite a legal stretch for the US government to have legal justification kill US citizens anywhere on the face of the earth (including within our boarders) and without oversight from the justice department.

Similarly, trolling through vast seas of personal data would be completely antithetical to the fundamentals of our founding principles.

Or, on the other hand, are these things such a stretch after all???

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FWIW and on a tangent, I hypothesis that a fair part of the Bill of Rights has actually been nullified by an order which is a state secret about a decade ago and that the action itself is a state secret.  This hypothesis can explain a lot of mysterious actions and behaviors and I've yet to be able to invalidate it.  Admittedly invalidation is kind of a game/trick like thing due to the 'state secret' aspect, but I assure the reader that this was unintentional in formation of the hypothesis.

I'm someone who actually has used a modem and degraded POTS line in the recent memory.  That might help to explain my agitation over uncontrolled block chain bloat.

As it happens, I also have a better than average exposure to backbone network topologies and various filtering techniques.  This make me paranoid that it may be possible to disrupt just about any network traffic deamed in need of disruption...up to and including all unrecognized encrypted traffic.  It would be difficult on various fronts (technical, political, economic) but theoretically possible and in a sufficient 'emergency' populations will tolorate a fair amount of pain.

I doubt that any Bitcoin-like system could cope with the challenges which could be thrown at it with complete grace.  But I also believe that if Bitcoin is not at least considering some of the potential challenges and the considerations are factoring into core implementation decisions then Bitcoin itself makes a quantum shift in terms of it's potential (in my mind at least.)