It is easily possible and actually recommended to use addresses as "transaction identifiers" instead of Tx hashes - so addresses are only used once, ever. That way the UTXO set would be equal to the "addresses with balance" set.

Something that might be hard to emulate with ledger systems would be different colored coins in one single address for example:
1 cCoin Satoshi representing 1 share of ASICMINER, 1 cCoin Satoshi representing 1 share of TradeFortessBTC.
If 1 Satoshi gets transferred off now, which one was it? Currently one can loot at the outputs used, with a ledger not so much.

My understanding of accounting is that you take finalized transactions and store them in a certain format.
Bitcoin however can deal with transactions that are not finalized, might never be finalized, depend on external events to be finalized, stay in limbo until one of the participants moves, depend on several parties to collude... and that's just the current functionality that is considered standard (there's much more possible with nonstandard scripts).

It seems to me (using a maybe bad analogy) similar to complain about web sites because they are breaking typography rules developed over the centuries when typesetting books and anything else to read - there are no chapter markings, "quotes" are a misused term all over the place and a title page often is done in a way that would make Mr. Gutenberg cringe!

Ufasoft coin uses this same feature.

There were some ideas about using them for Bitmessage too but it seems that this is not easily possible there.

Private keys in a wallet are quite sufficient proof that someone actually controls the funds on a certain address.

Problem ist, dass der OP vermutlich nicht deutsch kann und daher Google translate oder so verwendet hat. Ein deutscher Text hilft ihm da wohl wenig.

Eher ~2133... Der Graph auf Wikipedia steht noch lange nicht bei 21 Millionen an, und alle 4 Jahre verringert sich der Abstand um die Hälfte.

That only holds if scrypt actually HAS the attributes you assume it has (e.g. uniformity). It might be that scrypt mining actually results in a skewed set of hashes/nonces, so in that case it might be smarter to start in group B, then do group G and so on.

A sample of 1000 nonces might be too small though, it would be interesting to see the distribution along the whole LTC chain so far.

I doubt there is a "issue more XRP" button/switch in the server interface, so that is quite unlikely. I am willing to bet ("real" block chain issued) Bitcoins on this by the way!
Closing down would be far more of a risk, though volume is so low at the moment that I'd wonder under which warrant authorities would close down a start-up that might eventually be used in the distant future to launder money?

Bitcoin != accounting system.

If you find that the software "ledger" for example violates GAAP, please feel free to call them names and whatnot. A subset of the possibilities of Bitcoin can be made GAAP compliant and I even agree that using this as a kind of "standard" way of handling things might have made it easier in the beginning. Bitcoin can however do things (and is intended to do them!) that cannot be covered by an accounting system. This is by design and won't change without good reasons. "Because accountants can't process that using GAAP" is not a good reason imho.

Just because the most used bitcoin client exposes unspent transactions spendable by a certain private key as "account" does NOT mean that this has to be an account in the sense of accounting at all!

As it was also suggested to you in the German forum section: Please read about the inner workings and goals of Bitcoin before coming up with criticism, especially about a certain implementation like bitcoin-qt.

You can create a GAAP bitcoin client probably, but it likely won't support all features of Bitcoin. If you want a stricter set of features to implement GAAP in a cryptocurrency you're free to fork Bitcoin and present your work as an alternative currency - if it really works out well there, it is not impossible that this might be implemented in Bitcoin itself too. I do not believe that e.g. Multisig is really considered in any GAAP.

Accounting is intended to work well WITH money, not to BE money in my opinion.

My personal guess is ~1-2 weeks after MtGox announces they actually have a usable trading engine. It should (TM) come up soon (TM).
Once it is actually possible to trade there even if there are a few dozen other people trading at the same time I guess we'll see higher leverages as well. 1:5, 1:7.5 and 1:10 should be possible imho.

Also it would be great to see Bitfinex partner up with even more exchanges out there, though it seems hard to find ones that are not currently down, might get problems with FinCen etc.
Maybe Tradehill 2.0?

'Tis going to be an interesting summer!

I would keep it uncompressed for the time being - it would be great by the way if bitcoin-qt would delete the file after a successful import automatically, I'm sure that some still keep it around unnecessarily. I see the issues with it suddenly "disappearing" but I guess the benefit of not wasting space outweighs it.

I don't care if I seed now ~4.5 GB or ~3 GB, as long as compression doesn't change the file size really significantly (meaning 5 instead of 50 or 500 GB) I rather consider it a burden than helping. There are download sources for compressed blockchain files already on the web anyways.

With 0.8.2 around the corner, can we expect a new check point + torrent file by the way?

http://news.orf.at/stories/2184544/2175395/

...interessiert vielleicht den einen oder anderen hier.

Für Nichtösterreicher: ORF ist der staatliche Rundfunk in Österreich

For those who wonder: 0.05% daily is very close to 18% APR uncompounded.

Please clarify "some time" to redeem bonds or at least give an upper bound, in the case of GIPPT "some time" was about half a year or more...

Edit: spelink

Exactly like my problem, also similar amounts...
The fact that they don't even react to the possibility to DOS their page just by using that Ripple hash form is worrying to me. Also over 1 week with absolutely NO reaction to the support ticket at all.

It is not even clear if the overhead in calculations etc. makes it worth to include any transactions besides the coinbase transaction... There are several blocks out there (also recent ones) that contain just a single transaction.

In the circlejerk scenario miners would just push around their own money to bloat blocks to the highest possible sizes, not paying any fees. As long as the reward per block is still as high, there is little incentive to include transactions actually - fees are laughable at best at the moment because inflation is still that high.

Yes, though there is also the theory around that blocks then would only be limited by bandwidth between the 51% on miners with the highest bandwidth, so this would lead to centralisation in the end game - all miners need to be in the same data center or else they have no chance of even catching up with the block chain.

I personally believe that this won't be the case (as users then also won't be able to actually use the system) but the "circlejerk endgame" is at least a possibility with unlimited block sizes.

With the 1 MB (and even 10 or 100 MB) block sizes, this is not very likely to occur though.

Falls es sich dann um 1-2 Sticks nicht ausgehen sollte, einfach melden, dann übernehme ich die (mit pers. Abholung).

The mining process itself is only dependent on the header, it looks the same with 1KB or 100TB of transactions.

There is probably a natural limit even if blocks could actually become really large (currently they can at max. be a bit less than 1 MB in size) as blocks will only survive if more than 50% of the hash rate in the network receives it before building a block on their own. If a block were 100TB in size, it might be valid and easy to mine, but it will probably still fail to be included in the longest chain, as other miners would probably find several blocks in the time it takes them to actually transfer this much data.

Transactions have several costs:
* They increase stales/idle time, as it takes longer to transmit the block to other miners
* They can expand the UTXO set, which is something that can not be pruned away from the chain
* They cost storage space + bandwidth + CPU time to process

Transactions on the other hand have 2 main benefits and 1 neutral point, that makes it worthwile including under certain circumstances:
* They can include fees, to ideally cover the costs
* They can combine inputs so they can also decrease the size of the UTXO set
and
* They actually enable the flow of bitcoins in the system and including transactions is one of the main things that users expect from miners

To answer your question:
Mining is not depending on block size, all miners are getting is an incomplete header and they are trying to find the missing piece ("nonce") to create a valid hash for it. There are certain things however that might disincentivize mining large blocks besides that.

Naja, so schlimm ist der Artikel nun auch wieder nicht - es ist eben schwer, das zu vereinfachen und dabei trotzdem korrekt zu bleiben.

Was ich bei Gesprächen über Bitcoin immer spannend finde: Irgendwie, egal wie ich anfange (und wenn es nur "Das ist digitales Geld im Internet, sowas wie PayPal" ist) kommt dann bald mal die Frage "Wer gibt das überhaupt heraus?" und wenn man dann sagt, "das wird genauso wie Euros aus dem Nichts erzeugt" kommt dann oft die Frage "Wieso gibt dann jemand dafür Geld aus?".

Die Skepsis (siehe auch Kommentare auf Golem bzgl. "kompliziertes Schneeballsystem") gegenüber allem, das nichtstaatliches Geld ist (oder daran gebunden ist, wie diverse Gutscheine), ist hoch.

Zum Thema illegale Blockchaindaten vs. Überweisungszweck:
Der Unterschied ist, dass den Überweisungszweck nur ein paar Banken und Geheimdienste zu Gesicht bekommen - die Daten in der Blockchain aber jeder Netzwerkteilnehmer. Da man davon ausgehen wird können, dass diese Daten da absichtlich gelandet sind und vermutlich nicht weiterversendet werden können, weil die Transaktionen gar nicht dafür gedacht sind, kann es sogar sehr wahrscheinlich sein, dass die in das UTXO Set fallen und nicht mal das Ausdünnen von alten Transaktionen hilft. Vermutlich wird es dann eben eventuell Patches für den Einzellfall geben, in dem diese Transaktion dann eben aus dem Block entfernt wird oder so und das dürfte ja auch ein paar Coins kosten, das zu senden. Trotzdem ist das durchaus ein erntzunehmendes und nicht leicht lösbares Problem im Gegensatz z.B. zu den mittlerweile 7 GB an Blöcken.

Jein, der Satz auf Seite 2 (http://www.golem.de/news/bitcoin-krypotografie-der-virtuellen-waehrung-1305-99305-2.html):
ist komplett falsch, die Difficulty ist in der Vergangenheit auch schon immer mal gefallen. Korrekt wäre:

Edit:
So wie's derzeit da steht, klingt das ja ziemlich blöd zu minen, da die Schwierigkeit ja "immer" zunimmt und man könnte ja auch annehmen, dass es dann irgendwann zusammenbricht, wenn kaum einer minen will weil dann keiner mehr Blöcke lösen kann und die immer schwerer werden.