That THE thing I would like to see :  a trust network for buying or selling stockshares with bitcoins.

Here is how it would work.

People would own conventionnal stockholding accounts on conventionnal banks.

But those people would not be the real owners of these stocks.   Real ownership will be managed on a encrypted network, whether it is centralized or not.

When a dividend is detached, the conventionnal account holder is supposed to transfer the corresponding amount, after conversion into bitcoin, to the "real" owner, who is identified only by a bitcoin address.

The amounts between conventionnal accounts should be adjusted (using conventionnal bank transfer), so that the amount per owner is as low as possible, in order to avoid excessive taxation.

Utlimately, the number of participants would be large enough so that the amount for each account would be small enough not to induce any taxation on income.

I kind of fear the 210,000 block.  As you know at this time the reward will half from 50 to 25.  I'm not sure the behavior of miners is predictable.  I wonder if weird things could happen at this moment.

Anyway, why not just use a more continous formula ?  I mean if we want to simulate extraction of a commodity, all we need is a geometric progression, right ?

So, say N(i) is the remaining number of btc to be extracted at block number i.

The reward is then r(i) = N(i) - N(i+1)

We then need A such that :  r(i) = A * N(i)

Of course, we have N(0) = 21,000,000 = \sum r(i)  and N(i+1) = (1-A)* N(i)

We need to chose A so that we can switch smoothly from the current situation (r(i) = 50 BTC) to the coninuous sytem.

Let's say we do the change at block 100,000.   At this point 5 million bitcoins will have been extracted.     That leaves 16 millions.

N(1e5) = 16e6

So :   A = 50/16e6 = 3.125e-6

Then r(100,000 + i) = 3.125e-6 * (1-3.125e-6)^i * 16,000,000


So the generation is a continuous function of the block number.

My market webpage is back in business.  I removed many of previous order, because too much water has flown under the bridge.

There is no reason why I should only sell metal there :  so I changed the presentation to say that it is a place where you can exchange bitcoins against pretty much anything that can be sent via postal mail.  This includes bank notes.

http://grondilu.freeshell.org

I don't use the GUI anymore.  I use only the headless client.

I think it would be much easier to integrate bitcoin in linux distributions if there was no gui.

And I think it would be good for bitcoin if it could be directly available through package repositories of main linux distributions.

Wouldn't it be great if debian users could just "apt-get install bitcoin" ?

** Edit.  THIS AUCTION IS CLOSED NOW.  See end of thread. **

Here is an other auction for a 1g mini gold bar (see attached photo).

Price will include postal fees to wherever in the world.  No starting price.

DO NOT BID IF YOU DON'T REALLY INTEND TO BUY THE BAR.  Payment will be required before the bar is sent anyway, so there is no point making a fake bid.

The auction will end at block number 95,000.  At this time, I will lock this thread and thus end the auction.

I may lock it a bit earlier and continue the auction on IRC if I see several people interested.

Do not PM to post your bid.  Just put it in this thread, so that others can see what's happening.

I mean : the higher the difficulty gets, the more people are using bitcoins, right ?

I know that it may also be seen as a result of the increase of computing power of commercial machines, but I doubt it is that significant.

So :  can I consider the difficulty as a good indicator of bitcoin's popularity ?

Check this out : http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

I know that one of the good things whith bitcoins, is that you don't need a complex code into your website in order to accept donations.  Basically all you need is to display a bitcoin address.

However, I wonder if using a single fixed unique address is a good idea.  Because it could allow anyone, including the tax-humgry government, to know exactly how many bitcoins you have received.

I'm not concerned about this, because I don't maintain any website.  But I might be in the future.  Therefore I'd like to suggest to publish a small CGI script that would create a new bitcoin-address for every visitor who would like to make donation.

I suck a CGI programming, but at least I know that any programming language can be used to do that.  So I guess a simple "bitcoind getnewaddress SOMELABEL" could be used, where SOMELABEL would be any string the donator would like to enter.

I'd appreciate if someone could post an example of such a script.

I am amazed by the number of people (most of them being newbies) who complain about how difficult it is to obtain some bitcoins.  Bitcoin is a money, so what did they expect  ?  Did they think they would just start the program and that bitcoin would just magically generate money ??   How valuable would be bitcoins in that case ??


It's perfectly normal that the casual user have difficulties generating any single bitcoin.  A casual user uses a very common machine, such as mine, a laptop with a Intel 1.6GHz processor.  Obviously, if it was easy to generate bitcoins with such a machine, then there would be something wrong with the whole cryptocurrency concept.  To me, it does make sense that only state-of-the-art machines can generate bitcoins.


Is that unfair ?  I don't think so.  Not at all.  Anyone who really wants to own bitcoins can just buy some.  There's nothing wrong if some effort is required to obtain something.  Whether this effort is technical (acquiring and running powerful machines) or financial.

EDIT:  This auction is closed.  See end of thread.


I launch an other auction for a 1g gold mini bullion this time (see attached picture).

Price will include postal fees to wherever in the world.  Payment will be required before sending.

No starting price.

DO NOT BID IF YOU DON'T REALLY INTEND TO BUY THE BAR.

Auction will end at block number 92,000.  At block 92,000, I will lock this thread.  I may lock it a bit earlier and organise a IRC auction just before the end, though.

I thought the target blocks creation rate was 6 blocks/hour.

On bitcoinwatch.com I see that it is usually 9 or more.

Is there something wrong about that ?

I sell some brand new Linux, Debian and FSF stickers for PC.  There is also one Tux keyholder for 50 BTC, and a Tux magnet for your fridge (40 BTC).  See attached photo.

The smallest ones are only 10 BTC.  This is BELOW my purchase price, but I don't care.  This is my way of contributing both to free software, and to bitcoins.

Price includes postal fees.  PM me your postal address and tell me the kind of stickers you want.  I'll send you a bitcoin address.

I will add some detailed photos on this thread if someone wants me to.

If this sell is a success, I'll buy more.  I bought all this at www.it2l.com, but this website is temporarily closed.

EDIT:  THIS AUCTION IS OVER.  See end of thread.



I launch an auction for a 5g pure gold mini bar (see attached photo).

You can post your bid on this thread.  Don't PM me :  others must be able to see what has been proposed.
This is an experiment, but it is for real :

DON'T PUT A BID IF YOU DON'T REALLY INTEND TO BUY THE BAR !

The bitcoin paiement will be required before I send the bar.  Therefore there
is no point for you to post a fake bid here.  You would just destroy your
reputation.

The auction will end when the 90,000th block will be published (it's funnier
than just using conventionnal time).

Postal fees will be included in the price.

When the block chain length reaches 90,000,  I will lock this topic and therefore will not accept any more bid.

In order to avoid future troubles with governments, I wonder if we should consider banishing a few words from the bitcoin website.

Those words would be "money", "currency", and maybe "commodity".

Bitcoin could be presented as a software which provides a "electronic unit for barter exchange", or something like that.  Maybe even the world "barter" should be avoided.  Then bitcoin would be a software that provides insurance into the limited amount of a virtual quantity, and into the security of its transfer via internet.

Edit.  Or maybe something like :

Bitcoin is a P2P network that uses cryptographic concepts in order to allow transfers of floating point values between nodes, while assuring that the overall aggregated amount is limited to 21 millions.

It's very common to denounce the "digging ditches" fallacy as an absurd way for keynesianists to try to improve work market by offering useless jobs.

I think there is also some kind of useless intellectual work which is used in current bureaucracies and technocracies.

I saw once a movie which was quite subversive, and was trying to question the very basic fondations of our societies.  In a scene, several friends were talking about theirs jobs during a dinner.  One of them was criticized for its job of physician, and for the huge amount of money he was "earning".  At some point, he said something like :

"During our youth, we studied hard to gain our diplomas.  It's normal that we now get a reward for that."

This is a strange conception of economics.  It sounds that for him, a good salary is a right you earn once with some work, and that is perpetually yours after that.  As if intellectual superiority during youth could be a way to obtain a privilegde of being paid every day not for what has been done during this day, but for what was done a long time ago.

Knowledge is not a way to acquire the right not to comply to economic rules.  It is supposed to be a way to accomplish oneself, and hopefully to create wealth while doing so.

Sometimes it seems to me that intellectual elites think that there is just no way to earn one's life decently in a free market.  Therefore, they think they should organize a way to recognize each other by distinguishing smart young people, in order to give them the right to finance their way of life via taxation and thus by the use of public force.

Of course, this is absurd, because all this brain power is not used for what it is, but just as a way to obtain something that can very much be considered as a priviledge.  This is a waste of intellectual resource, but above all, a huge injustice.

PS.  Here in France, for instance, 56% of the GDP directly comes from state spending.   Some polls showed that 70% of young people would like to become a state employee.  And of course, but this is just an impression I've got, it seems to me that as in many countries in the world, the professions that are associated to social success are mostly those who are not related to economics reality (not complying to offer and demand, but to state subvention or direct funding) :  physicians, lawers, teachers and such.

I missed the name of the 1000nd member.  Too bad.

In a post, while talking about bitcoin, I wrote "the bitcoin".

If bitcoin is a currency, then we might talk about it as we do with other currencies.  Sometimes, we say "the U.S. dollar", or "the Euro", or "the japanese yen" or just "the dollar", "the yen" and so on...

Therefore, can we talk about "the bitcoin" ?

Here is an other game concept.  It can involve several players.

We are going to bet on the outcome of a dice, i.e. of the outcome of a random number from 0 to 5.

There are several possible bets, basically any combination of the ways you can place you money on the 5 numbers.

Thus, a example of a bet can be :

0: 0
1: 1BTC
2: 2BTC
3: 0
4: 0
5: 0

In this exemple, the player bets 1 bc on the 1, and 2 bc on the 2.  Such a bet can be noted (0 1 2 0 0 0).

Therefore we have a collection of bets  (bet_{i,j}) , where i=0..5 and j=0..N-1,  and N is the number of players.

Let's note k the outcome of the dice,  then the player n will receive the following amount :

G_n =  \sum_{i,j} bet_{i,j} * bet_{k,n}/\sum_j bet_{k, j}


In order to decide the outcome of the dice, each player thinks about a number, and computes a hash of a string beginning with this number.  The right part of the string should be some random characters.  Such a string could be :

324  jkncjknsdninusjiujzdujsqoiwqlwdxx

for instance.

Each player has to keep this string secret until everybody is ready.   Meanwhile, everybody shows the hash of their string, and the corresponding bet.


For instance a player who wants to bet 10 BTC on '4' would say this :

(0 0 0 0 10 0)
eb36f2f12cc6b586098a10c90493799872f55fcd4fae7b5a9bbc8dc44a2ba06c

Once everyone has placed his bet, everybody reveals his original string.

We then calculate the sum of all revealed numbers, modulo 6.


All losers should pay the winners in proportion of their bets, in order to comply to the G_n formula.  This means that a player x must pay to a player n the following amount :

bet_{i,x} * bet_{k,n}/\sum_j bet_{k, j}

A loser who refuses to pay will not be accepted for next games.

Ok ?



Let's try.  Here is my bet :

(0.01 0 0 0 0 0)
503d6a1b3c06f8d62f38e5ebc6cd6a658cf109372d3c5e89ac06cc047ea9a0d8

If you don't mind, I'll store my original string here, in encrypted form (I
don't want to store it on my disk where I could easily forget about it or
remove it).

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
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=pod8
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

Jes, estas esperantistoj kiuj uzas la bitcoinan monon !

Nu, almenaux estas mi

Mi kredas ke ankaux estas la arulo "kaja", sed li ne estas ofte cxi tie.

Gxis.