I received the princely sum of 1 satoshi from this account recently.  What is the purpose of these tiny transactions?  20000 satoshis for three such transactions to random addresses is going to add up pretty quickly, so it seems unlikely that they're intended to bloat the blockchain.

Is there a simple way to query participants for their view on the blockchain and detect disagreement, other than running multiple clients?

[Edit]

Is it simply that no one involved looks at the blockchain?

Edit: Never mind, found an answer.

If a security flaw is found in a blockchain client or protocol and a fast fix is needed, is there a fast way for developers to push a revised client out there?  For that matter, what is the earliest version of the canonical bitcoin client that will work on the current network, and how is that enforced?  I saw that Ixcoin had a mandatory update recently; in what sense was it mandatory?

Just came across this rule:

The 50 BTC reward for [an] orphan block will be lost, which is why a network-enforced 100-block maturation time for generations exists.

  Makes sense.  First time I'd seen this rule, and I was just wondering whether there are any systematic descriptions of the protocol which mention this.  I didn't come across it in the wiki's description of the protocol specification or rules, and I'm wondering what else I might read to get as comprehensive an understanding as possible.  (Other than the code, of course.  I know I have to be reading that, too.  Incidentally, where is the code in the Satoshi client and pybtcengine which implements this rule?)

• A while back, BitcoinExpress threatened NameCoin with some kind of attack.  I would like to know the details of the attack.  A pointer to a thread describing them would probably do, at least as a start.
• JohnDoe implied that there are plans to use NameCoin to make human-useable names for tor services.  Has there been any progress towards this?

I get the impression that bitcoin's current implementation has since moved on, but I am curious about the original intent behind the OP_CODESEPARATOR opcode. 

More generally,is there a forum or document where early design decisions like this are discussed?  (I realize it's unlikely, but it's just possible I've missed it and it would be so useful to have.)

What are the coolest exploits you've seen against bitcoin or related crypto-currencies?  Cool vulnerabilities which were plugged before they were exploited are interesting too.

I was reading On Bitcoin and Red Balloons (discussed briefly in this forum's Notable press hits thread).  I have only skimmed it so far, but found their game-theoretic reasoning a little confusing.  Suppose Alice sends me a transaction she's had with Bob.  I propagate it to others, and we create a chain of signatures as we pass it between each other.  Everyone in the chain gets a part of the fee when it's included in a block.  That's all fine.  But the claim that it's sybil-proof is unclear to me.  What is to stop me, an early member of the chain, from making a chain of bogus addresses in addition to the ones from legitimate propagation, and solving a block with the final address in the bogus chain?  Then every bogus address I made gets a part of the reward.  What is the duplication-free strategy which dominates this, from my perspective?

As others discussed in the "notable press hits" thread, it's also unclear to me that incentives are actually needed to induce widespread propagation of transactions.  As long as it's baked into most clients, it's not going to be worth cheating on this issue, is it?  Bandwidth is cheap, after all.

Have been reading it a lot lately, and keep running into DNS problems.  A local copy would be good.  Can spider it, if need be.

There's a lot of work, ingenuity and computational resources devoted to computation of the hashes which lie at the core of the bitcoin proof-of-work protection.  I do not wish to criticize that, I understand its value.  But I would be interested to hear your fantasies of what you would do with those resources if they could be turned to arbitrary computations.  Would you devote the cycles to Folding/SETI@Home, sell them to people trying to crack password hashes, try to train a machine-learning algorithm to predict stock market prices?  Go wild, I'd really like to hear people's favorite suggestions. 

It would be nice if there were a way to exclude a subforum or three from the unread topics and updated topics.   Is there any way to do this?  Pointers to greasemonkey scripts along these lines are also welcome.

Hi, all.  A couple of basic questions.  I built and ran the litecoind client yesterday.  It appears that I found a block:

Code:

met% ~/alien/litecoin/src/litecoind getbalance
50.00000000
met% ~/alien/litecoin/src/litecoind listsinceblock 0
{
    "transactions" : [
        {
            "account" : "",
            "category" : "generate",
            "amount" : 50.00000000,
            "confirmations" : 1701,
            "txid" : "0d8f72a852aa00ef1fd93fbe55f309fda37bcdd11d8a5955b9fbf74e164cf201",
            "time" : 1318524478
        }
    ],
    "lastblock" : "93c1660173f00a6ad58c103f07747fd0f11eac2cfe1bc1553e6ffbdd1747cca6"
}
met%

  This page seems to be the block referred to in the above transaction list.  However, the "To address", "LRWpZ2hSgqAJctnhyKhc5Br94F11nR7H6J", doesn't match anything I seem to be able to pull out of litecoind.  The command "litecoind getaddressesbyaccount ''" returns a different string.  What is the relationship between these strings?

I'd be grateful for pointers to the following:

• Good discussions of the specific security threats posed by the currently disabled Script operands and the prospects for enabling them in the future.
• Good discussions of extensions to the scripting language, their utility, the security threats they pose, and the prospects for their future implementation.
• Good discussions of how and why to implement the currently disabled operands.
• Good discussions of the speed of adoption of updated clients and mining software.

I just wanted to respond to this comment: 

...the most fun thing from this is that the best way to profit from it is not participating in it

...actually, that's probably not true.  The best way to profit is probably to max out the margin on bitcoinica, then manipulate the MtGox market.  It's just a question of whether you can time your trade on bitcoinica and MtGox so that bitcoinica doesn't get a chance to respond.

I'd like to buy a rig, preferably something like 4x5850.  Where could I buy such a thing?  I'm in Central NY, USA.

I can't post to the relevant forum, because my account's too new.  I'd appreciate it if someone with the right to do so would make a post pointing back here.