They happen every couple years. Enjoy it.

I see in net.cpp where protocol messages are read in, and various places throughout the codebase where CTransaction objects are used, but I don't see where any CTransaction objects (or CMutableTransaction objs) are initially created.

What am I missing? How are the bytes read in from CNode::ReceiveMsgBytes() turned into CTransaction objects (for inclusion in the mempool, etc)?

Anyone have a hashrate chart from the halving and surrounding months? I know I've seen one, but can't seem to find anything at the moment...

http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/dpr-bitcoins/

We've now seen two incidents of massive sales of bitcoin that had the perhaps counter-intuitive effect of resulting in tremendous demand coming out of seemingly nowhere: The original ~30k silk road coins auction, where Tim Draper max-bid on all lots, and the ~30k BearWhale sell-wall that just built up buying-pressure at the ask and was fully eaten (with a nice bull pop afterwards).

It's a fascinating phenomenon, and I'm curious to see what happens with this current auction.

https://twitter.com/BloombergWest/status/440910474071535616

Seems like that last question is phrased to encourage the "MtGox made me much more negative on bitcoin" answer. Let's get the results to reflect an understanding that MtGox is not Bitcoin.

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-regarding-mtgox
http://www.circle.com/2014/02/24/joint-statement-regarding-insolvency-mt-gox/
http://blog.blockchain.info/2014/02/25/joint-statement/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kraken/comments/1yux6n/joint_statement_regarding_mt_gox/

Whatever happens in the short-term dealing with this mess, I'm happy this phase is concluding. Gox was a holdover from early bitcoin, where clearly incompetent people/operations handled massive amounts of customer funds, and we've been needing to get sharply over that phase for a while now. This does so rather dramatically. I look forward to bitcoin moving into the next phase of adoption driven by far more professional entities.

As a step in the right direction, people have been talking more and more about proof-of-reserves for bitcoin financial entities. I think that's a great way to go; we, as customers, should all be demanding that companies use bitcoin's unique features to push the envelope on transparency, bolstering the integrity of the bitcoin ecosystem directly, while also highlighting one of bitcoin's key strengths in contrast to the fiat financial system.

With the proliferation of non-technically differentiated alts these days, it seems like someone would've set up a pool with the express mission of 51%ing new/bad alts. Anything like that exist? Just curious.

I'm happy to see that Ben Lawsky does appear genuinely interested in making sure bitcoin isn't hampered by regulations to the point of stifling most innovation. That said, in his role as chief financial regulator for NY, he's going to be heavily leaning to the side of more regs to stamp out money laundering and so-forth, and will probably have the natural tendency to underweight the overall benefits to society of allowing free innovation. But it's encouraging that, like Senator Carper, he really does seem to get that there's something with great potential here, and he needs to be mindful of allowing it to develop and incentivizing virtual-currency businesses to set up shop in NY.

Other takeaway: Fred Wilson is great. He's quick to eloquently convey the greater vision and potential, the uniqueness and breakthrough-nature of bitcoin as a technology, and the historic context of bitcoin as a nascent revolutionary open-tech akin the internet in 1990. I think a lot of that did resonate with Lawsky.

As one might expect, regulators' general thinking on the topic, as evidenced from other members of the DFS team, is not terribly sophisticated. Right here on this forum we've beaten these issues to death for years. These guys are just starting to ask the basic questions; topics like "liquidity", "hoarding" vs incentive to spend, "pseudo-anonymity", "mining as an infrastructure", "Dr. Evil attack on mining" (ie, 51%), all mentioned by DFS team with little real understanding/nuance. This is going to take time.

I just hope in the meantime they take Fred's idea of a minimally-invasive regulatory on-ramp for startups to heart, and produce actionable regs fit for entrepreneurs soon.

Just wanted to give a shout out to RealCrypto.com. I placed an order there the other day and received my coins no problem; quick shipping, great packaging, etc. I also emailed with the operator of the site a bit, and he was very responsive and informative.

For the record, I have no involvement or stake in the site. Just figured that since I hadn't heard of them, and reputation is obviously important in the bitcoin world, I'd give them a +1 here for potential future customers.



[Edited to add info]

Or so I suspect, at least.

We've just seen large investments in US-based bitcoin companies by savvy VC firms. Circle and Coinbase are both saying that they're going to make bitcoin easier for people to acquire and use. I'm sure they'll be successful in that, but they're also probably targeting next-gen uses of the blockchain (see Naval Ravikant, Co-founder/CEO of Angellist's "The Internet of Money": http://startupboy.com/2013/11/07/bitcoin-the-internet-of-money/ ). Seeing some real apps along those lines will drive another wave of excitement, and convince yet another slice of the populace that bitcoin has merit and is here to stay.

Along the way, someone is going to solve the money-transmission licensing problem. The reason we don't have any solid US-based exchanges is due to state-by-state MTL requirements, and specifically, the surety-bond coverage requirements for businesses to obtain such licenses. Either Coinbase, Circle, or some new well-funded entity will go through the expensive work of getting the licenses, or start a fund/company that's knowledgeable about bitcoin and willing to underwrite the bond coverage. Solving this problem will lead to much better liquidity in the US, and allow for some of the next-gen services outlined above, as well as advanced trading and hedging.

That leads to the beginning of real integration with Wall St. It seems like they're *starting* to shift from completely mocking bitcoin to dipping their toes in the water. They need *much* better liquidity to do anything significant, but unleashing real US exchange platforms will make that possible. Additionally, vehicles like SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust are already proving popular, and that trend will continue. The potential issue of near/medium term regulatory uncertainty was removed with last month's senate hearings, and further financial integration and products will come as a result, in due time.

In any event, these things are all inter-related and tend to snowball. The hard parts of getting the ball rolling and reducing regulatory uncertainty have already happened.

China can do what they want; I think it's far more likely that the US ends up housing the most robust and sophisticated bitcoin ecosystem.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/401797786347114496

"We designed a new version of Zerocoin that reduces proof sizes by 98% and allows for direct anonymous payments that hide payment amount."

Says they'll release it as an alt in a few months.

With the current unconfirmed transaction pool size and the fact that blocks have been far from maxed out, I'd like do my part to incentivize full-block creation by dedicating my hash-power to the mining pool that includes the most transactions per block. Ideally, I'd love it if a pool would make an open commitment to including as many transactions as possible (within reason, of course).

So which pool? Have any pools come out with an explicit commitment to this? Is there an up-to-date resource to keep track of pool policies?


(mods: I didn't post this in mining because I think it has broader implications for the bitcoin economy as a whole, and more people need to think about these issues)

I'm looking for a resource to better understand how transaction fees are influencing the probability of being included in the next, n+1, n+2...etc block.

Something that spits out a sorted list of transaction fees for a given block would be great. Anything like that exist? If not, it'd obviously be easy enough to write against blockchain.info's API or similar; just don't want to re-invent the wheel.

That'd be fun.... How could shares of a Chinese company, denominated in a decentralized currency, be traded on an American stock exchange? :-)

.

Was >540 a few days ago. I haven't deleted anything. ?

I just received a number of emails saying that there was an attempt to log-in to my blockchain.info account (from IPs very far away from me). The email noted that someone may know my wallet identifier. No money has been moved, so I assume my PW is safe, but what are the possible ways someone other than myself can know my wallet identifier given that I've never posted it anywhere?

I signed up using my gmail account. Worked fine. I transferred some BTC in. Logged out.

Now I can't log back in. What's my user name? It's not my email address, apparently...

This past week, my godmother, my brother-in-law, and a friend from highschool have all asked me where to get bitcoins. They all originally heard of bitcoin through me, but now they've obviously been exposed to the hype in the past few weeks and are now of the "crap, he was right, I have to get in" mentality.

Contrast this to a couple friends I introduced bitcoin to last year, both of whom I had long technical/economic conversations with, and both of whom went and did their own research, and believe that bitcoin is a potential paradigm shift for reasons that they understand well.

The people who are coming to me now wanting me to buy them bitcoin probably couldn't explain the basics. They just have some rough sense of it being "digital gold" and look to the recent price run-up as proof.

Obviously unsophisticated people jumping on the bandwagon of something they don't fully understand *because* of a price-runup, is a big market-top red flag, but, FWIW, I'm not selling. Again, it's a long game, and I believe we're still extremely undervalued. Yes, we can easily get an insta 50%+ crash one day, but that day could be north of $200; I have no idea, hence the long-term hold.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting this; just interested in other people's experiences to try and get some rough sense of how many people have heard of bitcoin at this point.

While eating lunch at a restaurant today, I was wondering if a couple things have been done in bitcoin-land yet:


1) Loadable paper cash
As we were leaving the restaurant, we left a few bills on the table for the tip. Can we do this with bitcoin yet? I know there are a number of physical bill solutions, but it'd be nice to be able to load them with precise amounts quickly when needed. This essentially amounts to paper Casascius coins... Something with the pub address (and QR) visible, but the private key hidden via some tamper-evident seal.


2) Edible bitcoin
I heard of a place that sells a $1000 ice-cream sunday. Something about edible gold flakes in it or something (sounds sketchy, but that's beside the point). Anyways, that could be done with private keys. "Print" the key on chocolate flakes or something (delete any other copies, obv), then crumble and eat. This would be horrifically decadent, which is obviously the point for idiots who buy such things...