How does the seller prove that it was him who sent the money? 

How does eBay verify the transaction?  The buyer could just claim the seller never sent anything.   This is what I was told was the reasoning behind selling digital codes for games.

I wish I could put stop orders on my BTCs.  Looks great man!

To each there own opinion, but I didn't read any news reports and don't think I'm an expert in BitCoins.  Thanks for the whitepaper link!  I did read up the wiki article when it was mentioned that people could be traced, but they didn't go into it in enough detail.  I'll see if it fits the concept of a group over taking the public logs by creating their own mining pools larger than what's currently out there.   By branching, I mean extending upon so that a new currency (or version of) is created on top of the old.  A poor choice of words on my part.

As for encryption, I haven't ran into any articles detailing how the current methods can be improved upon.  If you can provide me with links, that would be swell.

LOL.  Thanks for sharing.

Just a recommendation, let it be.  Don't reply or you are just giving him more info on you and you don't know what someone like that would do.

LOL!

1) Use pools like BTCGuild that let you create secondary accounts (wokrers) that utilize passwords that are different than your primary account.
2) Run miners in a sandbox using Sandboxie so that your computer can isolate anything the program does.
3) Store your BitCoins in an encrypted location.  There's a guide somewhere in the "New to Bitcoin" thread.

Huh?   If it *is* one individual who sold the majority of those BTCs then I wouldn't think he's ready to plung back in.  We'll see what it looks tomorrow, but 14k is a lot to replace back into the market.   I'm starting to think that the publicity that SR brought onto BTC may also bring in some of these sophisticated traders trying to make a quick buy, which can also cause this erratic behavior.  I think brokers need to put policies in place to keep this from happening, such as forcing large sales of BTCs to be sold over a period of time instead of all at once.  Then again the catch is this is how you get a government in place.

I don't think any company with multiple investors will accept Bitcoins as a payment option when they see the level of fluxuation in the BitCoin market.  You "pay" for a degree of stability with our current payment systems pegged to the dollar, but with BitCoins it would make things difficult in so many ways.

A grocery store, as an example, wouldn't need to update their prices on almost a daily basis.  That takes materials and wages to accomplish which is an expense most probably don't want to pay.

I don't think many of us would you want our paychecks to be paid in BitCoins.  If we could peg Bitcoins to oil prices and got gas stations to accept bitcoins, then we may have found a way to find stability in gas prices... but that sounds like science fiction to me.

I got a better one... bitcoin.awesome

Now if I can only get everyone in the world to use my DNS service.

I agree.  For one thing it relies on encryption and a public log.  Encryption can be broken and with bitcoins as is, you can't force new encryption standards on old bitcoins.  As for the public log, if someone branches from it or introduces their own log then we loose credibility of the currency.

Bitcoins is a good proof of concept, but I think the concept will be taken over and improved upon by companies who don't respect the same level of anonymity that Bitcoins and Tor promote.

You mean "Surrogate Currency," shadow sounds to cool for him to think of.   I don't think these old senators understand technology enough to realize that BitCoins and Silk Road really have nothing to do with each other.  If the fed was worried, then it would be taken on by a department by now and not discussed in this manner.  These morons are simply pandering to their constituency without full knowledge of what's what, which is normally a desperate attempt to feel relevant within government.

That's like saying what happens to money that is burnt?  The bitcoins will sit in that wallet indefinitely and the public will be burdened to always keep that record for the lifetime of the currency, but the benefit is that all of our coins are worth more.

I feel that bitcoins should have an expiration date imposed on them to encourage usage and discourage hording.

It's another layer that removes a degree of anonymity.  I fear that the longevity of bitcoins as a currency is finite with bitcoins not being future proof.  Eventually we'll have enough processing power to break the system and then the question becomes who can get enough money to exploit it first.  That's where the money is.

I don't like the idea of lifetime commission earned on other people's trades simply because it increases their costs which they have to pass onto all of us.  This may be a boon for MtGox, who I'll sign up with now.

Rumor has it that Silk Road will be up by the end of the week as they move their servers.   That is why even registered users are experiencing problems logging in.

I hear that a lot, but then I figure life came pretty easy to each one of us who is alive.

If anyone is feeling generous and has a spare account that they are willing to gift to me, please PM me to make my day.