I sent $100 cash to Morpheus to convert into MtGox $, but it never arrived.  I mailed it from a public mail box, so it wasn't stolen out of mine.

I can't think of a time that I've ever had first-class mail get lost before.

I sent cash in the mail to trade for bitcoins.  It's been over a week so far.

How long should I wait before I conclude that I've been ripped off and post a negative review?

I saw a post saying that for 50BTC you could encode something like 300K into the chain (encoded in the to address, the coin would be lost since those addresses don't actually exist).  Then just about everyone running the software would be felons.

I was thinking that this is a possible way the government could "take out" Bitcoin.

Here's my idea...

A trusted 3rd party (like Mt Gox) would generate a block to be hashed, and send the part to be hashed to a whole bunch of different users, who generate hashes for the block.

If a winning one is found, it would be sent back to the server, which would claim the block.  The BTC would be distributed among users based on how much computation they do.

The 3rd party would of course take a cut for providing the service.

I don't know if it would be possible for the users to "cheat" by either taking the "winning" hash and claiming the block themselves, or by pretending to run hashes while actually not doing so.  The latter could be solved by making the client send the lowest hash from each batch, and occasionally double-checking and kicking out any cheaters.

So, would it be possible for a client to do hashes without having sufficient information to claim the block when a winning hash is found?

Of course the 3rd party could cheat, but if a user generated winning hash which ended up somewhere else besides the "pool", the user could find out and warn others that the 3rd party is cheating.

It seems that many people (including myself) dislike the idea that GPU's run BitCoin so much faster than a regular computer.  But think of it this way:  If the hash algorithm was designed so that it had to run on a CPU, then the only way to really make it faster would be with expensive custom hardware.  But with SHA2 and the proliferation of $300 graphics cards that can do 1,000,000 khash/sec, it'll be easy for the average joe to pump out custom-hardware-level speed.

Right now you need to be a bit of a hacker to get it going, but I bet in a few months there will be easy-to-download binaries.

The graphics card companies put so much effort into the design of these things that I think it's unlikely that custom hardware will be that much faster as to cost-effective.  Using SHA2 may actually spread generation more evenly and thus be a good thing.

Custom hardware would make it cheaper per Ghash/sec (or else there would be no point), but if it costs everyone the same, then the advantage will go to the hobbiest who already has the hardware for games and uses the excess heat to heat their home instead of paying for aircon to remove it from the building.

Since server farms usually don't have high-end graphics cards (if any at all) it's another advantage for the "little guy".

I'd like to be able to print something out to put in my safe-deposit box in case my hard drive crashes or my house burns down or whatever.  I realize it would be a pain to type it all back in, but it would only be for emergency use.  It would also need to be kept secret or someone could steal the money.

It would be sort of like a bearer bond.

Is there some easy to do this already?

Will BitCoin be first adopted by the underground, black markets, criminals, money launderers, etc.?  After all, the only people who will bother with the complexity (besides us crypto-nerds) are those who can profit from it.  I think this will be a good thing, as it will help the currency to be established.

The one thing I'm most worried about is that someone (or some company) will develop some kind of proprietary hashing hardware and monopolize all new currency creation (like DeBeers with diamonds).  This might be solved by a break in the chain to change the hash function to something more resistant to specialized hardware.

I really like the idea of bitcoin, I think it will be looked back on like the invention of the light bulb.

But, I don't seem to have a good way to get some bitcoins.  I have .05 from the faucet, and I appreciate that, but I'd like to get a larger amount.

I'm running the generator on my computer, but the calculator says it will take on average several months to generate a single block, and the difficulty will probably keep going up so I'll never get one.

I wanted to buy some from Mt. Gox, so I signed up there, and then I have to sign up for Liberty Reserve to fund it.  Then it turns out the only way I can do that is through ANOTHER third party, who only wants to accept money from other "internet currencies" which are only available from internet currency exchangers.  In other words, if I want to pay in USD, there seems to be absolutely no starting point to get it into the system.

There are people offering to sell bitcoins for cash in the mail, but who knows what they'll do if the exchange rate varies while it's in the mail.

It's extremely frustrating.

You know what would be cool, is if the proof-of-work did more than just waste electricity.  For example, if it did something like protein folding simulations or SETI.  If you're trading BitCoins for CPU cycles, it might as well be doing something useful.

It would actually create value, instead of just wasting energy like it currently does.  It would make money flow into the system for actual work.1

Otherwise, if this takes off, it seems like it will just be a big waste of energy.  Aren't we already short enough on energy?

I have a 6-core Mac Pro running OSX 10.6.4.  I started the client with the -4way switch which is supposed to make it twice as fast (or half as fast if your processor doesn't have that feature), but it's still getting about 6khash/s.

I changed into the right directory and started it with:

$ ./bitcoin -4way &

What am I doing wrong?