Firstly, this is not a suggestion to change the 21Million limit, the generation reward rate/fees or to 'invalidate' old coins that haven't moved in years!

Perhaps this idea sort of belongs in 'Development and Technical Discussion' - but It's light on tech stuff and is also somewhat economics/political/general discussion related.   
Mods - file it where ye will.

In various discussions people express concern at large losses of BTC from the system, as well as the difficulty of determining whether in fact the BTC are truly lost and might actually reappear suddenly - thus providing a sudden money-supply shock.
e.g http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1638/what-could-be-the-consequences-of-many-bitcoins-being-lost-out-of-circulation-if

It seems there's a certain asymmetry in concern, in that people aren't quite so worried if their bitcoins suddenly become more valuable due to reduced supply, but are quite fearful of the idea that old huge wallets could suddenly come online, devaluing holdings and discouraging further investment flow into bitcoin.

I'm dead set against 'invalidating' coins that haven't moved in years - as in future
a) we don't know what the average lifespan of a human may be
b) People sometimes get locked up for decades for political reasons - this shouldn't result in automatic loss of their bitcoin assets.

My proposal is that the system simply place a rate limit on how quickly old unmoved coins can be spent.  This would be proportional to whatever is the recent value of transactions occurring per block.  (or proportional to the total reward/fees per block)

The idea is not to cause any particular slow down for spending some small stash that comes online after 50+yrs because some grandson finally worked out a byzantine puzzle in a will..  but if the stash is both old  and *large relative to the current size of the bitcoin economy*, then it will only be valid for the miners to include spends from this stash at some sensible rate relative to recent transaction history.

I'm assuming here that it's not technically too difficult to track the larger chunk of change while allowing only small chunks to be spent off it.
This wouldn't perhaps be easy to do if the old 'lost' wallet was made up of a vast number of tiny amounts rather than one consolidated amount - but hopefully even then it may be possible to automatically apply some rate limiting.


Combined with tools that watch for activity on long-inactive coins - this would mean that even if some previously-assumed-lost multi-million BTC address suddenly showed as an input to a transaction - there need be no fear that the whole amount would be entering the economy in one hit.
For the purposes of estimating the total money supply at any particular time - a lot of old unmoved amounts could be in many cases chopped out of consideration because they would be known to only be capable of coming into the economy at a certain maximum rate.


I'd be interested in people's thoughts on the feasibility and desirability of this.
(and I'm hoping that this will also help kill the oft resurfacing idea of 'invalidating' old unmoved coins)
Apologies if this particular idea has been suggested - please point me to discussion if you know of it.

Despite the japanese name of the bitcoin founder.. uptake in Japan so far seems pretty weak.

This site appears to have only just sprung up and claims to be "Japan's first mining pool"
https://www.bitcoin.ne.jp/


They also have a japanese dub of the famous bitcoin video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/bitcoinnejp#p/a/u/1/cXZOe3X6iYQ

'About bloody time' was my first thought.  How can such a high tech nation, with such an apparent love for the quirky, as well as being producers of sci-fi/anime/games  - be so slow to pick up on a concept as cool and revolutionary as bitcoin?

 
That the site is in English suggests it's still a case of bitcoin being 'introduced' to japan as opposed to interest catching on naturally.
Can any Japanese speakers comment on the general interest regarding bitcoin in Japan?

http://mrmoneyhustler.blogspot.com/   (+ video linked in the article)

I'm not sure which website he's actually talking about - but this is one reason why the way journalists report on Bitcoin can have a big effect on the spread and uptake of this currency.  The 'Any publicity is good publicity' maxim might work as far as getting a fair number of end users - but if businesses are scared of it for PR reasons, it's not much good.

It looks like betabeat (http://www.betabeat.com/)  has removed the bitcoin icon and link on their frontpage to bitcoin stories.

Also recently - the jupiterbroadcasting guys who do the TechSNAP videos mentioned they may drop their 'Bitcoin Blaster' section of the show if there wasn't much happening.

I guess bitcoin is getting a bit boring for some in the tech media. 
Ah well - with the run of mostly bad press bitcoin has had in the past few months, maybe 'boring' is a good thing and we can enjoy some relative price stability!

Job Vacancy : Hiring CEO, Lead Software Engineer, Lead Web Dev for Bitcoin Successor (financial district)

Investors hiring CEO, Lead Software Engineer, Lead Web Developer for Bitcoin successor.

2011-09-16

http://www.jobcareerdb.com/2011/job-vacancy-hiring-ceo-lead-software-engineer-lead-web-dev-for-bitcoin-successor-financial-district.html

While we do plan on making our investment back, StealthCoin is more important to us on a social/philosophical level. We love Bitcoin but we don’t see the long-term technical viability of it as it exists today.

Well throwing money at a new bitcoin-competitor is a strange sort of love for bitcoin.

I guess it's to be expected that we'd have not just the amateur alternative-chain attempts we've seen so far, but some backed by people with a bit of funding.
Every man and his dog thinks he can do better it seems (or just wants control). Most likely they'll just fall at the same hurdles the other alt currencies have hit.


Another posting here, where they mention they are 'too busy with our current  obligations to tackle this project ourselves' but will be 'providing plenty of guidance to the core team'.   uhuh. But they haven't been too busy to understand the deep technical issues involved in securing and scaling such a currency? Colour me skeptical.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/13706/hiring-lead-web-developer-bitcoin-successor-stealthcoin

$1328 / 1660ft² - Prime Office/R&D Space, Rent is $1,328. We also accept Bitcoins! (santa clara)
2011-08-26
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/off/2567939575.html

Things are getting interesting when things like this pop up..   Is someone in the forums here behind this one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI8LUrnK_GQ

The audio on this is horrible.
Is there a better version anywhere.. or a transcript?

Mt.Gox, The World’s Largest Bitcoin Exchange to Acquire Bitomat.pl, Compensate Loss Of Bitcoins
https://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20110811.html


This is just awesome news.

I'd prefer there were many independent exchanges rather than too much consolidation - but kudos to Mt Gox nonetheless!

Although a web host is not going to just hand over control of an account to some 3rd party - it occurs to me that they might accept some money to maintain a backup.

If we have a way of identifying which account the server was using - we might be able to pool a few bitcoin together to ask them to ensure a snapshot of some sort is maintained while we try to establish contact with 'Tom Williams' or whatever his real name is.

Even if leaseweb can just give us a statement indicating that the account and/or backup still exists - it would be a step forward.

I don't want to just approach them myself just now - as I don't have the necessary information, and I don't know if others have already been in contact with leaseweb.


Has anyone already approached leaseweb about the mybitcoin account?

And now for my latest butt-snaffled prediction...

The last 10 Million bitcoins will be at least 90% mined by Chinese (mainly students) using high end GPUs that cost them about 1/4 of what the rest of the world pays for them.


I guess I have to wait til about 2013 to see if this prediction starts to look like it's on track.. but by 2030 you'll all see how right I am. Just you wait!!

I suspect the Indians will go for a late run to grab a decent slice of the last 3 million,
and the African continent will go for a quick jog in 2032 to snap up some scraps of the last million.
(Some parts of Africa managed to skip some of the shoddier mobile technology and jump straight to the good stuff - with any luck they'll skip to some decent GPUs and seriously jump in to the fray a lot earlier than I predict. You know those Nigerian guys at least are hungry for it!)

I've just discovered, by looking at the new notice on the bitbills.com home page, that they were using mybitcoin for their transactions.

This annoys the hell out of me.  I saw the various concerns/issues people were having with mybitcoin - and chose not to use the service.
I don't recall seeing any indication that mybitcoin was an intermediary when purchasing my bitbills.

I really hope the delay in my order is not due to this - as I ordered a couple of weeks ago.

As far as I'm concerned - my purchase was directly with bitbills - and I consider it their responsibility to provide me with a BTC deposit address that they have control over.
Once the blockchain has reported my deposit to the address they supplied - then I've fulfilled my part of the transaction with them.

It seems the flow-on effects from this mybitcoin fiasco may be larger than I first expected.

 


EDIT: As far as I can tell, this is little more than an inconvenience for BitBills - and once they have their new ordering solution in place it's business as usual. My order came through just fine

(Well this is the speculation section..  I assume I don't need much more than a twinge in my big toe as evidence)

Sal Khan of khanacademy.org has been doing some videos on inflation, deflation, velocity of money, banking etc over the past weeks.

e.g http://www.khanacademy.org/video/deflationary-spiral?playlist=Finance

I feel sure* he's winding up for a big bitcoin exposé  any time now...  let's hope it's a positive one!
(or at least nicely balanced and neutral as his stuff generally appears to be)

Oh what a joy it would be ... people arriving on these forums already economically literate!


*for some extremely speculative value of 'sure'

Now this is a fantastic idea for a currency!

Ok.. not exactly bitcoin related - but at least it'll get the masses thinking about different forms of currency  

Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuEdGgCj3VA
(edit: more direct trailer link - http://youtube.com/watch?v=7tZb2EU8NNw )

http://www.intimemovie.com/

Google have their own spiffy video regarding online payments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEOWbIqQdE

So *we* here all see the benefits of a decentralized system like bitcoin - but will the consumers and merchants?

One of google's strengths is making things easy, which for the average merchant/consumer bitcoin is not.

Is bitcoin's success going to be less about the ideals of freedom and decentralization and more about the practical aspect of what payment system gets the most share of the mobile market?

Google need only add user-to-user payments, and suddenly, to a lot of people - it's all just one payment system vs another... convenience wins.

Will the fact that bitcoin is fundamentally different simply be lost on the general public?
Could a perceived edgy/underground/political nature of bitcoin work against it? 

If any centralized system can gain worldwide domination, it'll surely be google.  Bitcoin might have the edge as far as sneaking into China via the back door - but is it enough?

So maybe you think vegetta was nicely 'Kanged' (A verb to describe ownage by Jessy Kang) in the thread so kindly publicised via reddit.
( http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20984.0 )

The real travesty of people not taking good advice (which just happens to come from Jessy Kang again) has gone on in relative obscurity in the 'Newbies' area.

Take a look at some of her early posts regarding the Newbie restriction policy with regards to merchants:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?action=profile;u=21320;sa=showPosts;start=120

A tl;dr summary snipped from her copious writings might be:
'The current "newbie" policy is poorly conceived at best, and a potential disaster for the currency at worst. Even the use of the disparaging term "newbie" is hardly better than calling them "marks"...

Simply put, if you want people to join your club- you don't create new obstacles to put in their path.
'

But really - don't just tl;dr it - read it and weep - especially if you're a moderator or admin.

That topic deserves to be posted on reddit for their amusement - but really... can't we just fix it?  Please!?

The topic of bitcoin units seems to come up often around here - and particularly the perceived psychological impediment to dealing with fractions of a coin.

It occurs to me that in user interfaces, it might be handy to have some visual cues (eg in the form of coloured coin images) as to the sum involved in any particular transaction.
For example - any amount above 1BTC would be Gold (as per the common bitcoin coin logos)
An amount from 1 bitcent to less than 1BTC  - Silver
From 1 milli-bitcoin to less than 1 bitcent - Blue
from  1 micro-bitcoin to less than 1 milli-bitcoin Green  
0 to less than 1 micro-bitcoin  (ie satoshis)  Red

The pink and brown ones were just thrown in to make it clear how nano/pico fit in - perhaps for future use.
I liked the idea of 'pinkies' being a sub-satoshi unit (like the pinky finger)  and well..  brown for pico because it reminds me of those muddy coloured 1 and 2c pieces we used to have here in australia.

The colour scheme is primarily based on SI units milli,micro,nano..  except that bitcents and satoshis are interesting enough to warrant extra colour divides.
As a slight hint that silver(bitcents) and red(satoshis) are a little different - I've put the c & s on the right side of the corresponding coin image too.


Below is an outline of the scheme I had in mind.
I'm hoping something like this might be picked up as a standard across shopping carts, wallet software etc..
My apologies if something like this is already out there - I couldn't find it.
Feedback on whether my choice of colours is good/awful welcome.
Any GUI builders interested in incorporating this and helping evangelize it as a standard?

EDIT: to make this clearer, I'm not suggesting that a particular displayed amount would be shown multicoloured as it is in the image below.
That's just to show where the divisions lie and help people understand the units.


EDIT: changed satoshis from red to black - because satoshi is surely some sort of ninja.
oh.. and because it might help red-green colourblind people, and because some people are averse to rainbows.

As far as the psychological impediment to dealing in fractions of a bitcoin - I'm hoping that if there was a widely understood naming and colour scheme - that things such as the blue millicoin or  green uBTC would feel like tradable units in their own right  more than just some number with a bunch of leading zeroes.
It should theoretically help reduce errors, especially for newcomers to bitcoin.


Feel free to throw me a few greenies if you like the idea
svg version avail here: http://precisium.com.au/images/bitcoin/units/chart.svg
Thanks to bitboy for the svg version of the gold bitcoin. ( from http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1756.0)

Cheers,
Julz
1BxNJBTXrZqFjdtAh6cdanALxDddm6jxZa

When I first logged in to the mtgox claim site to see my account - I saw the balance from around the crash time.

Now I see funds that I deposited on the 20th have shown up in the account in USD

mtgox fees appear to be inaccurate.   I thought they charged 0.65%

Here is an example:

bought 2 BTC -  fee charged: 0.01300000 ฿TC
bought 1 BTC -  fee charged: 0.00600000 ฿TC   

They undercharged me on the 1BTC trade. (should have been 0.00650000  ฿TC)

I also saw some undercharging on USD values when selling.

So far these minor miscalulations work in the users favour - so I guess nobody is really complaining - but have mtgox said anything about this?
If they're not accurate in charging these fees.. what else are they not accurate in calculating?