I don't think you understand, I want it for free!

There's no fundamental need for every single node to store the whole blockchain. That's what happens at the moment, however if the blockchain gets so large that this becomes unfeasable, then new clients can be written that allow some nodes to only have a small subset of the blockchain to fulfil their needs, and a smaller number of supernodes can deal with the whole blockchain.

That's quite true, and I think the subject is misleading. However, I do think this is a very good guide for decreasing the probability of your bitcoins being stolen.

The needs of the masses are already met by existing payment methods (cash, credit/debit cards, Paypal etc). Bitcoin is more complex than these methods which hill hamper adoption and it's only useful in niche circumstances (anonymous transfers, micropayments with little fees).

LOL, you have to be quick round here!

I have DiRT 2 on my wishlist too!

I remember in the early days, eBay had a motto along the lines of "people are basically honest". For some reason they don't seem to use that motto any more 

I agree with you about actual loss. One of the good things about lending from here is that you are doing it with real people and not faceless corporations. Real people get the interest and it's a direct one to one relationship. It's not a mass of shareholders that profit without even knowing who you are.

Return it for a refund. I had a card do this once and I got it replaced under warranty (I actually got an upgrade because the retailer didn't have my card in stock)

It's quite sad that people do this. It makes it harder for genuine, honest people to get a loan. It's hard to establish trust in a virtual world.

Brilliant! Thaks for the tip! 

Okay, thanks. I'm using the rescan command. It's on 66000 blocks at the moment, so I guess I have to wait a bit. Does this process use up a lot of bandwidth do you know? I'm on a limited ADSL package.

Yup, me too.

That confused me when I first used the messaging system. I looked in my outbox and there was no message in there, so I thought it hadn't been sent. So I ended up sending it again!

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit and I'm trying to resore a wallet using a backed up wallet.dat but it doesn't seem to be working, can anyone help?

Here's what I did

I installed a fresh copy of the Bitcoin app from www.bitcoin.org, ran it once, then closed it down
I deleted everything in the AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin folder
I copied wallet.dat to AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin folder
I started up Bitcoin again

It shows all my past transactions, but they all show "0/unconfirmed" and it shows my wallet balance as 0.00

What am I doing wrong? How can I recover my bitcoins from the backup?

No, it was pumping billions of dollars in. Gamblers outside the US were using US companies to gamble online, thus pumping money in to the US economy.

Thanks kokjo.

Sorry shyone, my bad. I actually use bitcoincharts quite a bit, but only for the market summary. I never realised they had charts, that's why I didn't click on it in the Google listing! Familiarity breeds contempt

GLBSE looks very interesting. How safe is it? Is it well established? How runs it?

I'd be grateful if I could be whitelisted. I've been using Bitcoin for a while now and am very interested by the opportunity that the currency presents. I've been learning about it and have been lurking these forums for a while, waiting until I have more knowledge before deciding to join in the discussion.

There are some threads outside of the newbie forum that I am very interested in participating in, so I'd be very grateful if I could be whitelisted so that I can post there.

I think it will always be a niece market to some extent. It's never going to become a mainstream payment method for Joe Public. However, there's still massive opportunity for increased adoption. Right now Bitcoin really is a geeky thing. Nobody outside techie circles has heard of it. It's slowly starting to permeate the mainstream financial news and as press coverage increases, we can expect much more growth as investors with a penchant for high risk / high gain investments put their money into it.

Yup, I have quite a bit to learn I think.

I guess it's an investment and there's risks with any investment. Unfortunately my graphics card isn't very powerful (nVidia GTX 460) and I have to sell my computer anyway right now because of cash flow problems

I think next month when I get some money I will invest in some hardware for mining and see how it goes. It'll be a good learning experience if nothing else!

That's the defence that was used for p2p file sharing when it first emerged. People said it could be used legitimately and shouldn't be restricted just because of the illegitimate users. I think Bitcoin probably has more legitimate uses than Napster did (for example) which counts in its favour, but I think there'll be difficulty persuading the public at large that Bitcoin is legitimate especially when the media will undoubtably be whipping up a storm about Bitcoin being used for drug pushers and child pornographers.

I think the problem long term is that governments will try and destabilise it. They're scared of its potential for tax evasion and money laundering and will use their vast resources to destabilise to currency.