Does anybody have any paper or video on Mike Maloney's opinion regarding Bitcoin? I'd be really interested in hearing that.

@casascius Those guys unwilling to pay $29 to secure thousands... facepalm for them. Do they even have a good reason?

@bluetrepidation I think JTAG is in the pinout of most (all?) microprocessors and FPGA's. JTAG is a debug port standard, different from USB which is general purpose. You can just buy a JTAG-USB adapter and live happily thereafter, though It wouldn't make sense to force one of these inside every PCB or IC; it would just take up space.

@nostromo429 there are FPGA kits with PCI and PCI-E connections, but these are only used when very large amounts of data need to flow between the FPGA and the PC. I think for Bitcoin mining, the USB speed would be plenty.

FPGA's are amazing, but can they build specialized enough hardware that beats the monstruous processing power of GPU's?

Haha, it's actually good to know it already exists. I want Bitcoins to prosper, no matter how Thanks for the info.

Hello guys,

This is my first post outside of the Newbies board, so I hope I'm not proposing something stupid, like addressing a non-existing issue.

From what I read about Bitcoin, I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard to track coins going from one address to another (with many addresses in-between, that is). This basically means that if a friend sends me coins to an address, he can then monitor where I spend that money. Similarly, the police could use Bitcoin trackability to create links between people trading money at Mtgox and using it to buy drugs on Silk Road.

What I propose, then, is to create a service that anyone could operate (thus it would be harder to stop them if someone wanted to). The service would work like this:

It has a single public address to which people can send BTC. But before someone sends it BTC, they tell the service the source address, the amount of BTC, and the destination address to send fresh coins to. The service remembers this, and once it has enough coins from different clients, it sends the destination addresses the coins, but mixing the sources. After that, the service immediately forgets about all requests.

The more people using the service, the more anonymous the coins become.

Weaknesses include services being monitored (i.e. not forgetting about requested transactions), and probably other stuff, but I have to go now. I'd like to know your opinions when I come back

Let me know what you think.

The Instawallet API (https://instawallet.org/static/api.html) must be a nice way to start testing Bitcoin games, huh? Really easy to start trading coins

I think I'll make something using NodeJS just to try it out. Anyone else here into server-side JavaScript?

Not the nyans, that's for sure.

@deejay then simply don't delete it. I assume you're having the same problem as quinnygoth?

You can move the folder somewhere else to see if the problem goes away, but please send the debug.log file  like kinlo said nevertheless so he can help you better.

I thought about images too, but now the warning went away (certificate is OK), and I checked that the page has images served over HTTP. So it must have been something else.

Seems like the problem is solved now, though. By the way, I noticed bitcoin.org serves as HTTP. Why? I think it should be HTTPS-only, considering it provides software that deals with money.

Guys, I just started seeing this warning on Chrome regarding the HTTPS connection to bitcointalk.org:

http://www.picamatic.com/view/8116068_bitcointalk_ssl_problem/

What could this be? Is anyone else also having the problem?

Hi, fork

I also wonder if there's a way to allow instant transactions without losing the properties of the Bitcoin network. At first it just seems impossible, because if it was possible, the network would probably do it already.

But on a second thought, the very fact that we don't want it to work globally, but only in a restricted network, is a property that we're losing (compared to the big Bitcoin network) and that may give way to the possibility of making instant transactions.

@TheGlobber, I'm sorry for any misunderstandings and appreciate your last post. It really looked sarcastic when you said you understood everything since we haven't really been much instructive because we just pointed you to the wiki.

It's not that we want to discard ideas like yours upfront, it's just that it is so conflicting with the established technology that we just don't know where to start. Bitcoins don't just attract smart computer geeks for nothing; it truly is complex, well-thought, and beautiful, and from what I could tell, it's being implemented quite well so far (there are unimplemented things, but what's implemented is doing a good job, AFAIK).

That aside, I agree with you that Bitcoin isn't just algorithm/software, and that a lot more thought should be put into making it appealing to end-users. I have noticed that weakness (nerd people have a hard time understanding what it means to be a simple user) for a while now, and I'd certainly like to devote a lot to that in the future, since I'm not guru enough to help with Bitcoin's core aspects, and I think I have good "tact" as a user.

An important thing is that Bitcoin is far from being capable of handling mass adoption (it's something we certainly don't want right now). For that reason, it doesn't *need* to be too user-friendly right now, although I really think we should be putting a lot more effort on that, so that we're ready sooner for the big show

Thanks, I didn't know I was such a power user. I'll take that as a compliment.

But you know what's funny? You could be one too, and understand why your solutions are not very feasible if only you took half an hour to read a little about the technology before giving away flawed opinions and flaming people trying to help you.

Yeah, you're not being disrespectful or offensive, you were being SUPER offensive from the very beginning (although I think DeathAndTaxes could've been more friendly too).

(Ps.: I don't mine and I don't know anybody who mines, before you go on saying I'm covering something up)

I agree the name "wallet" is misleading, but I think the idea is to make it more friendly to the average user. Not to mention, Bitcoin wallets aren't that far from normal wallets... I mean, somebody steals your wallet, somebody steals your money. You lose your wallet, you lose the money in it.

The only thing off is wallet clones, but people are used to that from credit card and cellphone frauds, which are equally hard to explain if you think about it. So I dunno.

In any case, the name wallet is already out in the wild, and, unfortunately, we could hardly change it if we had to, I think.

Seriously, @TheGlobber and @bithobo, we could keep discussing those things here, but I think it would be *much* more productive if you just read more about Bitcoin on the wiki. You're clearly lacking understanding of Bitcoins.

And what DeathAndTaxes said is true; miners aren't bloodsuckers like banks or something. They really have an important role in the Bitcoin network, which can't be easily replaced, much less simply removed. Trust me, this is NOT as simple as you guys might be thinking.

With all due respect, obviously. I'm also new, and I could potentially be saying something wrong, but I can clearly remember I got this info from a very trusted source: the wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/).

I think people dedicated to mining with powerful machines will probably beat a community of users who would probably kill the Bitcoin process to play games, or simply shutdown the computer. Not to mention the amount of people who would only use thin clients.

Moreover, AFAIK, once Bitcoins become popular, running fat clients will require monstruous amounts of processing power and bandwidth for the average user.

I like the idea of even coin distribution, but I think the network always does this the best it can.

@CliffordM, I have never played an exciting text-based game, though I'm sure it's possible to make one. I like the parallel world-style thematics (i.e. not our past, not our future; something completely unbound from our world, used only as an inspiration for the new one) better, if I'm to start suggesting anything.

What do you think?

@CliffordM, I don't know Python, but implementing the game as an SSH shell would be cool indeed. However, don't forget the client needs to send and receive BTC transactions, so a standard shell client wouldn't do it.

@all, I was thinking that in terms of values, the transactions would be really small, so they would probably need a fee to be accepted in the blockchain (I'm still a newbie here; I do but best to understand how BTC works, but I'm sure I'll say a lot of shit for a while, please be patient ).

Also, they wouldn't really happen in real-time (there's always a delay of at most 10 mins for a transfer to succeed, right?), which would suck. So I guess we would need to use virtual BTC in-game and make transactions in batches from time to time. Am I right?

@CliffordM, that would be a pretty fun proof-of-concept can you code?