I have lived in Albuquerque for 13 years. I have yet to meet a "meth-head".

The people of Albuquerque are just like the people I have encountered elsewhere. Some good, some bad.

He left some pamphlets and business cards. There was no mention of Mt. Gox.

http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/morning-edition/2014/04/bitcoin-atm-bites-the-dust.html

I live in Albuquerque, and went to the smoking bar mentioned in the article last weekend to check out the Bitcoin ATM, but it was already gone.

It is unfortunate that it didn't last long here.  It seems to me that smoking bars would be really off-putting for most people.  Heck, as a non-smoker, I was even hesitant to go there, although my curiosity finally won out.  When I went, there were three bouncers at the door checking IDs. When I asked them about the Bitcoin ATM, they laughed and said that it was gone because Bitcoin went bankrupt. 

Not to be pedantic, but the article is wrong.  The Albuquerque Bitcoin ATM was the first in the USA, but not in the world.  The first was set up in Canada.

That looks more like a llama to me. 

FYI:

I just received this e-mail (I X-ed out the specifics):

-------------------------

Hello XXXXXXXX…
 
I just did what you advised me to do but the problem remains the same : importing the private key is not working…. drives me nuts!
Last time I checked blockchain.info ( https://blockchain.info/address/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ) there was still XXXXXXX BTC ! But no way my bitcoinqt client loads the key so I am stuck with those BTCs.
 
 
Thanks for offering your help with this. Here is my wallet.dat with the password xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. If you need anything else let me know.
If you can load the key please send the BTCs to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 
This would help me so much. Thanks XXXXXXX!
 
XXXXXXX

-------------------------

Google provided me a warning:

"Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people's personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don't click links or reply with personal information."

So, Google is apparently aware it is a phishing attack. Since not everyone uses Google, though, I thought I would post a warning about it here.

If you receive this e-mail, DO NOT CLICK THE LINKS!!! Delete it immediately.

I received an e-mail from Mt. Gox indicating they had negotiated to double their SEPA withdrawl limits.

From the e-mail:


I was wondering if anyone has any insight as to what this actually means in terms of actual withdrawls, and whether it has any impact at all on U.S. dollar transfers. Does anyone here have any news to report in this regard?

The value didn't change. Only the price did.

I think we passed redicioulius a while back.  I'd say we're well into ludicrolicious. 

My God! You're right! Why didn't I think of this before?

It is obviously a brilliant and nefarious plan devised by an evil mastermind: Destroy bitcoin by making it succeed faster than we ever dreamed possible!

Since the media is making bitcoin out to be the currency of the dark underworld, why don't we fully embrace that mystique and lightheartedly adopt XXX as the official code?

Not to be pedantic, but that's not a minotaur. That's a satyr: a creature that is half man and half goat. And, yes, satyrs are well known for their libidinous appetites.

This is very generous, Casascius.  Thanks!

I'm not seeing a license file anywhere. What license is the source code released under?

Wow.  Gavin said there would be a big announcement in September.  I gotta admit, though, I didn't think he had it in him.

No, it isn't.

You forget that Bitcoins are only divisible down to 8 decimal places. When the reward gets small enough, dividing it by 1.000003466 is equivalent to dividing by 1.00000. In other words, the reward would stop getting smaller and the eventual number of Bitcoins generated would no longer be limited to 21 million(ish).

On the other hand, on any binary computer, division by 2 is identical to performing a right bit-shift. For example, the bit pattern for 50 Bitcoins is represented in binary as:

0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0011 1000 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

The bit pattern for 25 Bitcoins is represented as

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 1001 1100 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Note that the only difference is that there is one less zero on the right and one more zero on the left. Thus, the bits have been moved, or shifted, over by one place.

A right bit-shift always guarantees that the output is smaller than the input.  Because of this, when the reward is 1 satoshi:

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001

and it is time to lower it further, the code will perform a right bit-shift on that value, which will result in a reward of zero:

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Thus, no more Bitcoins will ever be generated. This is no mistake. Satoshi knew what he was doing.

I live in Albuquerque.

I don't have any bitcoin businesses at the moment. I'm mainly just speculating. I did try and start a bitcoin mining company with some fellow software developers at work, but it ended up falling apart before it got very far.  Although I haven't made any moves toward starting another business yet, I have to admit that I think about selling games for bitcoins from time to time. (I'm an amateur game designer - you can check out some of my stuff at http://legendaryquest.com, if you care about such things.)

I would be interested in getting together with fellow New Mexican bitcoiners to discuss all the exciting possibilities that bitcoin presents.

I agree that we should have more than one mascot for the Bitcoin Project, to emphasize its distributed nature. I propose that these should be Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodsman, and Scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.



If you haven't read the original book, you can download it from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55 .

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is regarded as an allegory to our current Federal Reserve System. An extensive analysis can be found at http://freedom-school.com/the_wizard_of_oz.pdf .  In brief, here are some of the stronger points that suggest this allegory:

• “Oz” is the abbreviation for “ounce”, which is the unit of measure for gold bullion. At the time the book was written, the U.S. currency was on a gold standard.
• The yellow brick road again suggests the nearly endless stacks of bricks of gold held at Fort Knox, which back the U.S. currency.
• Dorothy's shoes in the original book were actually silver, not ruby. She walked on the yellow brick road via silver, which is what many of the coins of the day were made from.
• Emerald City is dazzling to behold, and green throughout. Even the sky is green when within the city as is the sunlight that streams from above. However, this is only because all visitors are forced to wear green spectacles when in the city. If you remove the spectacles, the city is revealed to look no different than any other city. The green of the city is taken to be analogous to the “greenbacks” which are the paper currency of the U.S. If you remove the ink, though, the bills are revealed to be nothing more than paper.
• The Wizard's palace is spectacular, and the Wizard himself is terrifying and daunting. Surely nobody can oppose him. However, the Wizard is actually just an ordinary person. He is a fraud pretending to be more imposing than he really is. The Wizard is considered to be an analogy to the Federal Reserve, who controls the U.S. money supply and answers to nobody. However, if people collectively did not have confidence in the dollar, its value would be exposed as pure fiction and the Federal Reserve's power would immediately fade.
  

These four main characters of the story, with their intelligence, heart, and courage, overthrew the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. In fact, before the Wizard fled after being exposed, he handed the rule of Oz to Scarecrow, since he was the most intelligent person in the land. As you can see in the illustration above from the original book, the Scarecrow sits on the throne of Oz.

Because of the analogy, and the near instant recognition that the general populace has of these characters, I can think of no better mascots to represent the spirit of Bitcoin.

That really sucks.

As a suggestion, based on your logo, perhaps the new name should be "Euler". That might be a tad esoteric for the masses, though.

Maybe "Citadel" or "Aegis" would work better.  At least those match the "Armory" theme relatively well.

This is an very cool idea!  Here are some rules for a potential game along these lines.

Rules for a BitCoin "BlockChain Letter" Game

Create a website and work it like "Feed-Ze-Birds".  People that are interested in promoting bitcoin can donate BTC to the website to "prime the pump".

1) Player obtains a dollar bill with a "Bitcoin Blockchain Letter" website address on it.

2) He goes to the website to see what it is all about.  If he is interested in playing, he logs in and specifies the serial # of the dollar bill that he encountered.

3) Player writes web site address on any number of dollar bills and notes the serial numbers of each.

4) Players then registers the serial numbers of the dollar bills he tagged, and provides a password for each. (The password can be the same for all of the bills he registers,but it doesn't have to be). The site remembers both the passwords and the serial numbers. Each dollar bill can be registered only once.

5) The combination of password + serial number is used to generate a public/private key bitcoin address, which the website provides to the player. So, only the site itself and the initial registree have the information necessary to obtain any bitcoins associated with that address.

6) Once per month, all BTC are collected from all registered addresses.  (This is to keep the bitcoins from being permanenly lost for no good reason).  These collected bitcoins, along with any new donations, are spread out evenly across all registered bills.

7) When a players finally "gets the point" of bitcoin, they are encouraged to donate 1 BTC to each of 10 bills further up the chain of registered bills.  This will indirectly "prime the pump" if they are not collected by the end of the month by the person that initially registered them.

I see the confusion.  I apparently used a poor choice of words to express myself before. 

I understand that there is not really a permanent "brand" on the bitcoin transactions.  I was using the term "brand" to signify a chain of government signatures, and didn't explain myself well enough.  Let me drop the term "brand", and make another stab at explaining what I was driving at.

Suppose we have a transaction that requires two signatures, A and B, where each signature is held by different individuals: person(A) and person(B).  Each of those individuals has veto-power over spending the bitcoins represented by the transaction.  Because of that, either individual can impose whatever restrictions he wants before agreeing to sign.  One possible draconian restriction that person(A) could insist on is the requirement that the coins be sent only to transactions that person(A) can sign.  If person(B) doesn't like that, tough.  Person(A) doesn't have to sign if his conditions aren't met.  Of course, if person(A) doesn't have sufficient protection, person(B) can just beat the hell out of person(A) to force him to sign.

Because of this, an entity that has signed a multisig transaction can potentially leverage his veto-power to gain leverage on subsequent transactions.  In the hands of a government, that leverage can be very strong.  That is all I'm saying.

In any case, I believe that Gavin answered my basic question about this, when he said that multisig transactions do actually allow for the possibility of this happening, even though he thinks it to be unlikely to ever happen.  I am satisfied with that and don't need to belabor the point any further.

Yes.  There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.  This point I concede.