What is the flaw in this if any?

https://pay.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/27tk65/quick_calculation_cost_of_bringing_the_bitcoin/

Suppose a person with old-coins wantto bring transaction processing to crawl by spending his bitcoins in creating max transactions, will that work?

Is this allowed?

https://blockchain.info/block-index/475455/0000000000000000052cb46227baeb2dc70ab51a554433262cf89378696903d9

Looks like a empty block mined with no transaction (except for the mining reward of 25 BTC)

Questions:
1. Why would a miner do this and not include any transaction missing the fees?
2. If everybody started doing this bitcoin will be mined but no transactions will occur, is it a flaw?

App.net will start accepting Bitcoin if 10 BTC is committed by February 20, 2014.
https://bitcoin.app.net/

App.net also created a project called backer (https://backer.app.net/) which is for crowd-funding of features.

I see people debating Bitcoin is not useful, not user friendly and get distracted by price movement but think it this way, what it will be in 19 years.
Today 19 years ago Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released and we haven't yet released Bitcoin 1.0
https://twitter.com/History_Pics/status/412315576565235713/photo/1

Have any body emailed IRS for guidance related to bitcoins?

I did and got a cryptic reply
"Reclassified 12/9, not a capital asset, see Bitcoin using search on IRWeb, Fincen, port0012, HGK"

Will some expert try to decipher it?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23519-commercial-quantum-computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html

The D-Wave hardware is designed to solve a particular kind of optimisation problem: minimising the solution of a complicated equation by choosing the values of certain variables. It sounds esoteric, but the problem crops up in many practical applications, such as image recognition and machine learning.

McGeoch and her colleague Cong Wang of Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, ran the problem on a D-Wave Two computer, which has 439 qubits formed from superconducting niobium loops. They also tried to solve the problem using three leading algorithms running on a high-end desktop computer. The D-Wave machine turned out to be around 3600 times faster than the best conventional algorithm.

Is block-chain currently compressed in someway while storing, it may not be possible if data is almost random but I think because all the transaction are between limited address out of a HUGE set, at-least that part can be compressed

I want to understand what would have been repercussions of forking if miners were not persuaded to go back to version 0.7, either 0.7 fork would have been bigger as is the case now or 0.8 branch would have taken precedence in that case 0.7 orphan blocks would have been retried, so what was the big loss in that case?

Interest in buying has reached peak level seen only last time when it crashed
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22sell%20bitcoins%22%2C%20%22buy%20bitcoins%22&cmpt=q

William Weber is being prosecuted for running a Tor exit

http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/6283/raided-for-running-a-tor-exit-accepting-donations-for-legal-expenses

beauty of bitcoin is that anybody from anywhere can donate to him without being implicated or even if all his accounts are frozen

Has this already been posted here?

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

Abstract. The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global
payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but
in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme,
and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction
graph. In this paper we answer for the rst time a variety of interesting
questions about the typical behavior of account owners, how they acquire
and how they spend their Bitcoins, the balance of Bitcoins they keep
in their accounts, and how they move Bitcoins between their various
accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated
all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all
of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place
in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried
to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge
structures in the transaction graph.