Thanks, casascius - the possibility kinda dawned on me a short while after sending.  I have 109k, and I see bitcoincharts says there are 120-ish-k blocks out there. So...I wait a short while and it should be here.

I kinda assumed there wasn't a full set, that maybe each sub-network could have trades the rest weren't aware of. Time to read some more, I guess.

Cheers,
Richard

I sent my own desktop wallet some Bitcoin from my mtGox account. It's been over 8 hours and I haven't seen anything. NBD, but it does add an element of excitement that isn't there with my normal bank account

So, a couple questions:
How would my bitcoin client know that the address it manages got paid, say, a month ago? Are all transactions going to be stored indefinitely out there in the ether?
How possible is it that a set of transactions could get 'lost'?

Since it's all distributed, the transactions have to find some way of getting to me from the origin nodes. Is there a routing mechanism that will guarantee that 'eventually' I'll get my payment?

Cheers,
Richard