i would like to write a crypto related app for iOS and Droid.  Any suggestions?  There are loads of wallets and price checkers.  What would be a killer app?

You know, have the correct licenses, etc.  Just curious. 

Are there any?  BTC, LTC, ETH are the ones I might need.  Just to read addresses and send payments.

So, I was pondering ponzi/HYIP investment sites and came up with what I think is a provably fair and fully transparent game.  I was wondering if anyone else had had the idea before me and what you guys thought of it?

The idea is that the players pay x satoshis into an address.  Quite simply, once ten deposits have been made the contents of the address is divided among the players.  One gets 40%, one gets 30%, one gets 20% and the house gets 10%.  This gives you a roughly 3:10 chance of winning (and there is no reason for the house to cheat as they get their 10% whatever).  I am not a gambler, but I like those odds.  The groupings of 10 would be based on the order of the transactions in the block chain and the winners would be picked based on the last digits of the last 3(ish) transactions ids.  That would be fairly hard to fix from a players point of view.  If you think its rigged then just check the blockchain.

On the whole, it would be fairly easy to implement and be pretty scalable.  You could have games for bets of 100, 1000, 10000, 1000000, sats etc.  You could have time based games.  The pot is open for an hour and the winner is decided the same way but at greater odds.

What do you think?

Well, I have unwatched them but they still come up in my list of "new replies to your posts".  I am not watching anything at the moment so can someone delete all the ones I am still getting?

Would they need BTC?  With 1.3 billion potential users wouldn't that be enough?

The whole thing about making a payment and then having to wait while it processes means BTC will never take off in the shops.  It is bad enough when you pay by card and the handset takes 20 seconds before saying "Authorised", but having to wait half an hour?  You could get away with it for mail order as there are lots of delays built into that model.  

When you pay by card, there is a fee involved and the shops usually covers that.  Would the same work with a shop?  Buy an item for £100.  POS software says transaction is £99 plus £1 fee.  You would want the fee as high as you can manage (to reduce waiting) without eating into your profit margin.  Big stores could write it off.  Maybe BTC shops will say "buy now & collect later".

They forked BTC and made BCC.  This means I had some BCC I never paid for, so I just put it in an exchange and brought some BTC with it.  Now, I only had 0.3 BTC but there must be with loads who have a darn sight more and who got a LOT of BCC for nothing.  This raises some questions.

• Can it be good for the crypto economy if a load of money suddenly appears out of nowhere?
• How much BCC immediately got converted back into BTC?
• What's to stop people forking again, just to make a killing like this?

Was BCC good or bad in this respect?

Read a few stories recently of companies leaving Btc and going where the transactions are cheaper.  $2.5 may be ok if you are moving a couple of hundred (or thousand) dollars but if you are buying something for $20 then how quickly would a 20 cent transaction be sorted? 

Surely if we don't want greedy bankers taking over and Btc becoming the sole domain of dealers and gangsters, we should cap fees at 50 cents or something.  Then all transactions would be treated equally.  Hashing power would be spread over all transactions, not just the rich ones thereby eliminating delays.

Who else is cashing in before the fork wipes out Bitcoin?  I don't have much but will quit while I'm ahead.   

Blockchains don't really offer anything a bank would need.   

They have perfectly good ways of storing and processing transactions already.  With Btc addresses and transactions are publicly visible.  I don't want my bank account and details visible to the world.  Unless you had unique, one shot payment addresses, it would be simple to create a wiki mapping addresses onto organisations and eventually people.  Then there is processing.  Btc only works as it pays miners to verify transactions.  There is no way a bank would give over its processing to a third party that wasn't 100% legit.  Would it run all its miners/verification in house?  How do you explain the 51% threat to a bank?

The openness of block chains isn't really relevant to huge organisations. 

The first big spike was close to xmas/new year and the recent spike was the same.  Discuss?  It certainly isn't people doing their xmas shopping with bitcoin.  Is it publicity related?  Is it silk road (or equivalent) related?  Is it Chinese money giving customs related? 

Here is my theory.  The first big Btc boom coincided with two things, christmas and Silk Road.  I am sure lots of people were getting ready to party and Btc just happened to be the easiest way to order stuff from SR.  SR gets busted and no real big booms again.  Now its in the lead up to christmas again and the price is going up again.  Coincidence?  There are probably dark net sites somewhere causing the boom. 

So, they locked their main thread and their recovery thread.  I am still getting some sort of dust payment every now and again.

After a month in development and another month getting it past Apple, my block chain explorer app is now available.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blockchain-explorer/id953958125?ls=1&mt=8

You can search for blocks, addresses and transactions and then see where the Btc came from/went.  Then you can save them, email them, tweet them whatever.  The various bits of data are also colour coordinated for ease of use.

Have a look and let us know if you find any issues with it.

Did I mention IT IS FREE?

   

I am writing a block chain explorer app for the iPhone.  I want to pre load it with some of the more interesting addresses, transactions and blocks that are out there.  Which ones should I add? 

Genesis block for one.  What was the transaction id for THAT pizza?  Biggest transactions?  Any famous/richest addresses?

Thanks.

Is there an iPhone app like BlockChain.Info that lets you enter an address or transaction and explore all the related data?  I know some wallets show transactions but i wasn't sure how deep they go normally.

I know there are a dozen already but I want a nice little project I can do to get the feel of the new xcode/swift development environment for ios.  Also, the ones already on the market all look a bit old, not the nice sleek ios 7/8 look and feel.  

So apart from the user account, the workers and the blocks, should it do anything else?  Exchange rates, facebook/twitter, notifications, background updating, badges, QR codes, links to blockchain?

Do all the main pools offer the same sort of api?  should it work with different pools?

Thanks.

Just curious, if you had unlimited processing power, would it be easier to use it for mining or (after having found a nice public key) trying to work out the private key?  Presumably you could spam transactions with an infinite number of private keys and one of them would eventually work.  Is there any safeguards against this?

You can on reddit and sites like that.