Yeah, that's the same guide I was looking at and it all seems simple enough. I guess I'll make my Radio Shack trip on the way home then.

I've been mining on a few PCs around the house, but so far every GPU I've mined on actually has a monitor plugged into it. I just got a third video card for my quad-PCIe motherboard but don't have a third monitor. Are dummy plugs required on Win7 with the latest CCC/OpenCL/Drivers? They seem easy enough to build, I just want to know if I should plan for a trip to Radio Shack before my new card arrives.

Thanks!

Of all the sites to accept bitcoin thus far, I think I'm most excited about this one 

I agree, but it seems to be a requirement if you ask some of the previous posters. I think that money and currencies are what we decide them to be, not what a dictionary or government tells us they are. Isn't that part of the appeal of bitcoin, really? That we're choosing how to run our financial world instead of a government, bank, etc?

Bitcoin is only currency if you consider the internet to be a sovereign entity... Which I do... Then again I'm kind of an odd guy so...

Realistically it's more like a very specialized form of stock. I imagine each bitcoin to be a "share" of stock in the bitcoin movement. It's backed by the same thing stocks are backed by: faith in the behavior of those running the show. In this case the "show" is bring run partially by an automated system, which we're trusting is secure, and partially by the value created within the bitcoin community, striving to see it as an accepted commodity.

At the end of the day, it's really just a stupidly semantic argument. If I go to a faire and buy ride tickets, which I then exchange for goods and services, I would personally consider those tickets to be the "currency" of the fair. I think the dictionary definitions no longer match common usage for this term and we're wasting time nitpicking over semantics that we could be using to build the community.

I have a scientist friend who corrects people who say "I have a theory" to "No, you have a hypothesis" constantly. Not only is it annoying and semantic but it's arrogant of the scientific community. When 99% of people are using the word "theory" one way and 1% are insisting the majority is wrong, who is the one who really needs to change their phrasing? The same applies to economists and the Oxford English dictionary arguing over words like "currency" or "money." Words are not a product of dictionaries, they are a product of human use. If the use changes, the meaning of the word changes. Dictionaries do not have the right to decide what a word means, their job is to report on what we believe a word means.

You wouldn't be able to double spend. If it were that easy people would be backing up and restoring their wallets sans crash and double-spending like crazy. Your wallet.dat holds the keys you are allowed to sign with, which are essentially account numbers. The transactions themselves are stored in the block chain, which is updated upon restart of the client. If you attempt to send bitcoins that you no longer have it will fail because every client in the distributed network will have a copy of the blockchain in which you've already spent that money.

For the first time, possibly ever, I almost wish I didn't live in Vegas. I tried convincing my fiancee to drive to SF for her chiro appointments but to no avail.

So awesome of you to join the club! Thanks!

There's a post here:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=369.220
taking a survey about the preferred unicode character for BTC. The current front-runner is ฿ although technically, that's already the symbol for the Thai Baht unit of currency. 2nd place seems to be Ⓑ with ¤ running a distant third.

Of course this is all assuming that twitter supports unicode - never had a reason to test but i'm pretty sure it does... At least it *should*

Honestly from a security standpoint this wouldn't be as difficult as most people seem to imagine. Those terminals you swipe your credit card on at the grocery store do 99% of the processing themselves. There is a server in a back room that handles a little formatting and communication, but if you enter a PIN number for example, the PIN is 3DES encrypted before it ever leaves the device. These devices have layer upon layer of security and it's quite hard to get anything like a keylogger into one of them. In some cases the devices are designed to physically destroy vital components if you so much as open the case. Side note: the little glass capsules full of nasty chemicals are pretty easy to break so sometimes picking up a pinpad and slamming it on the counter is enough to pop them and destroy it.

Long story short I'm not talking about a software-on-pc solution where the merchant actually handles your keys, I'm talking about an embedded device solution where your keys are placed in a temporary wallet (held in RAM never stored) and used to send a payment once only. Even if we were talking software-on-PC or software-on-smartphone as long as the IDs were never stored on disk the threat is still negligible. The biggest threat to a system like this would be keylogging and I've got a suggestion for that too.

When you use a debit card and enter a PIN, the PIN is 3DES encrypted before ever leaving the pinpad. This encrypted PIN block is sent to your bank along with the rest of the transaction information where it is decrypted and compared. The key used for the encryption is specific to each pinpad and changes with each use. We could create a solution where the private key is never stored on the card at all but is instead held by some intermediate institution, similar to a bank. In this case the public key combined with the encrypted PIN serve to identify your "account" and they send the BTC on your behalf when they receive an authenticated request.

Of course to maintain the distributed nature of bitcoin there would need to be a large number of these "banks" which, given the release of the banking software into public domain, would be devastatingly simple to achieve. In theory you could even install the banking software on your home PC and be your own bank if so inclined. Think of it like MyBitcoin or MtGox except that they're connected to the major payment processors.

Did this get rolled into 0.3.21 and if not will the 0.3.20 patch still work?

Also, I'm assuming the .patch is linux-only which is fine for my home install, but I might want to export keys from the wallet on my work PC which (through no choice of my own) is a Win7 box. Anyone know if this is even possible in Windows at all?

I might have just answered my own question. The QR code on a bitbill appears to be a v4 code, which holds alphanumeric data, 67-144 characters worth. The private key QR code looks to be even smaller, but even assuming they're both full-size v4 QR codes that accounts for 134-228 characters maximum. A standard magstripe card can hold 79 characters on track 1, 40 on track 2 and 107 on track 3 for a total of 226 characters. Unless bitbills are using every last byte of that 228 possible characters we should be able to fit the same data on a standard credit card.

Of course I'd still like an official answer if one is available

Edit: We could also encrypt the private key with a pin. It would look and feel like a standard debit card.

While I agree that a smartcard would be better, it's not an issue of technological superiority, it's an issue of adoptability. Every merchant on the planet already has a card reader and most have some kind of customer-facing terminal that, with the right software, could simply be modified to process BTC without requiring expensive new hardware (and trust me it's expensive).

Edit: Also, I wasn't complaining about the network access, I was complaining about the currently available solutions for holding the keys necessary to actually spend/receive money. If only people with smartphones get to participate in BTC transactions out there in the real world, that's too small a percentage of the total populous.

Hi all,

One of the biggest concerns facing bitcoin right now is becoming user-friendly. While spending bitcoins from your smartphone certainly seems cool, they're still not so universal as to replace existing concepts or technologies like physical money or credit cards.

I know that there are "bitbills" floating around out there which use QR codes to hold the public/private keys but I was wondering if anyone had any input on a few of my more recent ideas.

Does anyone think there is a legitimate use for actual bit*coins*? It would be just as easy to print a QR code for the public key on one side of a coin-like object which is hollow and made of something just strong enough to hold up inside of a pocket. It could be snapped in half to retrieve the private key if one wanted to convert it to digital bitcoins. It would have an advantage of small size and portability over bitbills. We could also store the public key in an RFID module to allow confirmation of balance that doesn't degrade if something as fragile as a paper QR code becomes damaged.

Another, possibly much easier option would be to use small low-capacity flash drives to hold something like an individual wallet.dat file. With the right software it should be relatively easy to create a "plug and pay" system where you hand your memory stick to a cashier, he or she plugs it into the cash register and makes the transfer. For the truly untrusting there could be user-facing terminals where the customer could make the transfer and the cashier would simply confirm it. I can even see single-use hardware being made to handle person-to-person transactions; something with a 3G modem, small display and a couple of USB ports. Network providers could take a per-transaction fee automatically rather than charge a monthly access fee since the amount of traffic generated would be fairly small.

My last idea actually begins with a question. I'm a bit sketchy on the specifics, how many bits are there to both the public and private key for a bitcoin address? I ask because a normal credit card style magstripe holds about 210 bits per inch on tracks 1 and 3, 75 bits per inch on track 2 and is about 3 inches long, so with the right encoding you could fit 1,485 bits of data on a standard credit card. If that's enough to hold a key, then it may be viable to create a system that "feels" no different than standard credit card transactions to an end user.

Any input or other ideas?

Just got a response email from Intrade - and not the automated nameless kind either


Hope it pans out!

The fact that in the last 50 years we've done this:


Does little to undo the fact that in the last 10,000 we've done this:


While I certainly hope that the 50-year trend continues until we stabilize, that ten-millennium-long exponential trend seems hard to break. That said, nature will slow us down one way or another, I'd just prefer to do so of our own volition rather than begin dying of starvation.

I certainly do agree with the concept of bitcoin (or something like it) as a solution to a great deal of the problems of inequity. Bringing the third-world out of the slums and into educated modernity would certainly go a long way toward population control, since the third world tends to be the location of the highest birth rates. We would still have many problems to contend with, and overpopulation would not cease to be an issue, but an injection of wealth tends to lower infant mortality rates in a nation which tends to decrease birth rates - albeit after a delay during which the population explodes out of control.

Really I think the issue from a financial sense is that the markets are no longer directly driven by supply and demand. There is so much in this world that is post-scarcity that we continue to pay for without any valid reason. Why should I pay thousands of dollars to a college for knowledge? Knowledge is post-scarcity, I can learn on my own as long as I've got the drive and an internet connection. Helium, on the other hand, is so cheap that we use it to fill colorful balloons for parties, yet our stockpiles are rapidly depleting. If the market were allowed to determine the price of college, it would be free (or nearly so) and if the market were allowed to determine the price of helium, a single party balloon would be worth hundreds of dollars.

Because governments have been allowed to "incentivize" what we purchase and marketing firms have been allowed to lie to us about what is and is not rare (how uncommon are diamonds, really?) our concepts of value are grossly distorted. Bitcoin solves part of the problem by largely removing the ability of governments to interfere with our purchases in the forms of subsidies and tariffs but we also need to do something about the marketing and media that have us convinced that common things are rare and that rare things are of never-ending supply.

Fail to do anything about this limitation while we're figuring out how to colonize space (we're a ways off still) and WE will cease to exist.

It also means more food and fuel consumed. A finite number of resources cannot sustain any number of people indefinitely and if our use of the renewable resources outpaces the pace of their renewal, we drive them extinct; Food is a renewable resource with a given renewal rate.

As with everything else, though, some brilliant mind has already put it more succinctly than I ever could:

"It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation."
-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)

I was already extremely involved in technology and moderately involved in economics. I've always had an interest in the sciences, so to the extent that economics can be spoken of scientifically, I've been interested - the parts that can better be described as waving a dead chicken over your portfolio and hoping for profits... not so much.

What bitcoin HAS done for me is given me the economic incentive to start building the GPU cluster I've been wanting for a while. I figure if bitcoin goes well forever, I'll just keep on mining. If it ends up crashing, it will at least have paid for my shiny new cluster and I'll start building rainbow tables 

There are other problems here, too. Militant behavior is an extension of territorialism, which is really a method of birth control. In highly territorial species, animals cannot breed unless they have "ownership" of a territory, which they defend from outsiders at all costs. Even animals which are not individually territorial might be territorial as a group. What's important is that the territories are a finite resource which limit population growth. We humans have gone far beyond the need for territories, so why still enforce them?

Unfortunately, all the madness serves a purpose. If there were no wars, mobs etc and population growth continued at its current rate, the South American continent would be standing room only in about 500 years. People are not willing to control the birth rate and so the only means nature has to enforce a population limit is the death rate. If we stopped killing each other in wars we'd all die of starvation a generation or two later. Whether the origin of the death is from evolution or memetics, we should remember that these are both tools of nature, whose thumb we are constantly under.

If you truly wish to decrease the death rate, you have to do something about the birth rate first. I'll bet if we lowered the rate at which new humans were being spawned, mother nature would ease up on the rate at which we die, too. If you really want to do something to stop human violence, go pass out condoms. There need to be less of us - at least until we've got the whole "colonization of space" thing figured out...