You've found the one weakness all scammers have: their utter inability to lie about who they are when signing up for domain names.

The Internet came out in the early 1980s while the web came out in 1991. You were really ahead of your time there! Quite impressive!

What if they don't think that a free Cloudflare account will protect their IP address because they're not utterly incompetent and unknowledgeable? What if they think that open proxies, Tor, or VPNs will protect their IP address?

That's all great as long as one person doesn't run multiple pools.

The difference is that regular currency exchanges that actually hold others' money will have insurance so that that money isn't actually lost. Bitcoin exchanges get hacked and no one gets their money back.

Telling people that their fears are justified about the riskiness of using bitcoin is a way to reassure them that they're right.

Though the article is correct with the obvious point that everyone can't create an alt-coin and strike it rich, the problem with that part of the article is that network effects empirically don't ensure that one currency dominates others. Even if you ignore the non-US currencies doing rather well because you think fiat currencies aren't relevant to the discussion, the 'competition' between gold and silver didn't have a victor either. Even fully-electronic payment systems have big competitors like Visa and Mastercard. That's not to say that network effects won't possibly make one currency dominant or eliminate a huge number of contenders. It's just to say that there's probably going to be room for Litecoin and some others.

The flawed reasoning comes because he wants to support a certain flawed conclusion:
This leads to him saying such things as:
Since the conclusion puts people into collectives, the reasoning will as well. That flaw appears throughout the article:
This isn't just a semantic point. He repeatedly implies that he divines the unified motives of entire collectives:
Since the conclusion of the article is that the nonbelievers have sinned so badly that we should punish them to the extent that we literally scorn and shun them, apparently the market leads to really, really bad and horribly immoral things. You know, like supporting alt-coins.

From the New York Times, "U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement":

How do you know that a majority of hashing power accepting no-fee transactions is going to be working with one plan to attack bitcoin, rather than preserving the value of their existing bitcoins (which would be worth less after such an attack) or preserving their bitcoin-based business or helping out because they like using bitcoin and would be inconvenienced if it lost credibility or something else? Or the same sorts of things with people paying fees.

Also, what if bitcoin clients included some code to use the processor and graphics card in such a way that they didn't use any more power (by avoiding stepping up the frequency or whatever) in order to hash? You could get a lot of hashing power that way, and some lucky people would randomly get some fees in their accounts.

There are some decent arguments supporting their accepting bitcoins, including those that involve automatic conversions to US dollars or whatever, but I don't think the original post is a very good argument, unless you already agree with it.


Well, here's Wikimedia's stated mission:
There's nothing in there that even begins to suggest that bitcoin would be accepted by them.

What about their mission statement suggests that they're against control at all and for openness in anything but educational content they themselves provide?

They don't approve of freedom of expression, as you can see by all their policies preventing certain expressions, but even if they 'approved' of freedom of expression with money, why would they have to accept all forms of money rather than the kinds they freely chose based on whatever criteria they wanted?

The arguments also seem dishonest. The arguer isn't actually asking for every new currency that someone comes up with to be accepted by Wikipedia, but the argument is asking for that, as implied by the freedom of expression with money argument. Why would only one open currency be sufficient to satisfy that argument? Why couldn't everyone argue the same for their currency?

I get a different impression. As the EFF put it:
This is directly what is being asked above: that Wikipedia not only accept bitcoins but that they do it through support of the ideological tenets above. Why should they?

It can vary. Slush recently made some changes to his mining pool that reduce the need for communication to much lower levels if you change your settings:
Maybe other pools have this as well.

Since we're going by common usage, no one says that the US Dollar is backed by its anticounterfeiting technology, even though according to the same reasoning, that limits its supply and supports its price. This is not even close to a common use. Why would we say that for bitcoins? The only way we could is if we're going against common usage.

Even ignoring that, speaking of guaranteeing scarcity, mining doesn't guarantee scarcity, since the 21 million limit is there regardless of the ability to rescind transactions, which is what mining actually tries to prevent.

How can you tell if a post has been edited?

I put a proposal for that in a new thread.

I'd like to propose saying 'block submitter' to refer specifically to a miner that actually submits new blocks. This is better than 'miner', since that also alludes to people who mine through pools and don't submit any blocks themselves.

This would avoid some of the potential confusion I noticed in a message about the recent unanticipated hardfork:

It will never, ever matter which blocks can be generated in regard to forking.

What matters is what blocks are accepted and what blocks are rejected. If this is consistent, no forks will happen. If this is inconsistent, a block accepted by one but rejected by the other is very likely to cause a fork if the ones that accept have the majority of hashing power. The ones that reject will then be permanently split off.

With bank accounts, consistency in transactions is far more important than avoiding minor bugs in implementing the specifications that don't affect the consistency or correctness of the transactions. This is why they made the decision to switch the mining pools to 0.7 for now. This gives the vast majority of hashing power to a universally-consistent chain.

They can set a date and time for everyone to switch to accepting 0.7-incompatible blocks. Then we'll again be consistent (as far as this problem), though people will be out of luck if a fork happens, until they upgrade.

But the thing is they'd set a date to switch over what block-producers will accept, not what they produce.

People end up on whichever fork is longest and the mining pools will outpower anything else, leaving you on the right fork...as long as you can accept what the mining pools put out.

If you use a 0.7 client, that'll work only until the mining pools switch to 0.8, produce another incompatible block, and leave you on the wrong fork.

If you use a 0.8 client, that'll work now and after the switchover.

So, if you're not submitting newly-mined blocks, you should use 0.8.

This is incorrect. The reason the fork happened is because the 0.8 clients accepted blocks that the 0.7 clients rejected. They kept on going based on that block and the 0.7 clients kept on going based on other blocks.

It doesn't matter if 0.8.1 doesn't produce incompatible blocks because solo miners are currently and will continue to use 0.8.0, which might produce those blocks (this is even if we assume that 0.7 can't produce those blocks). Then, all those 0.8.1 clients will accept the incompatible blocks and will fork from the 0.7 clients once again.

If you want to avoid forks like this, you need to ensure an acceptably-large majority of clients accept and reject the same set of blocks. I think this is best done by a scheduled hard fork, but I haven't thought too hard about it.

If you're talking to regular users, it doesn't make sense to talk about 'miners' in a way that implicitly doesn't include people who mine through pools, who obviously don't need to do anything since the pool operator will handle that.

I'll take it! Thanks

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I think some will be taken down due to power and maintenance eventually costing more than income, especially for the larger units.

One way is to try different miners, like cgminer and bfgminer. GUIminer should be able to use them instead of its own miner, allowing you to use it to manage things.

You can get their options by running them on the command line with --help.

One of the nice things about the ASICs is how little power they draw. I think the Jalapeno uses something like 4.5 watts. That means it takes about 9+1/4 days to use a kilowatt-hour, and a kilowatt-hour is pretty cheap. They're definitely going to help with the power costs.