I think the idea of the main page is to inform newbies that don't know anything about bitcoin - we used to be part of that. Between the "RALLY!!!" vs "CRASH!!!" spam and the draconian newbie whitelisting rules we don't really fulfill that obligation any more...

... it's the "what is bitcoin" video from http://www.weusecoins.com/

Yeah I wouldn't want to be in on it at the beginning - though they DO have a fixed block # they intend to release at and I might mine up a few NMC before that block # hits - I expect the sudden influx of attention to do interesting things to the value of NMC and there might be a few spikes in the midst of all that volatility to take advantage of. There are also a couple exchanges in the works that are paying more attention to NMC so this might be the look of things to come.

You obviously did not read the post I linked.

A while back in this forum someone discussed submitting the same hashes to multiple pools and how if they accepted hashes they hadn't sent a getwork for it'd be considered a security vulnerability. There's sort of a similar thing with alternate blockchains like namecoin. Namecoin, at least, is talking about modifying their client so that when miners submit hashes to bitcoind they can submit the exact same hashes to namecoind thus allowing existing mining clients to mine both networks simultaneously at full speed. Essentially they noticed they weren't getting a hell of a lot of namecoin miners except when difficulty changed and it briefly became more popular, so they're changing the way NMC works to allow us to mine namecoins at no cost aside from setting up a merged mining proxy.

tl;dr: namecoin is making it possible to submit the same hashes to both networks so you can mine NMC at no additional cost.

Indeed - how about a couple moving averages and a daily median price on a log scale (with trendline for added effect)?

If you're using the latest guiminer you should have the option to use the phoenix miner; phatk kernel gives you some good improvements over the old poclbm kernel.

The non-technical version: create a new phoenix miner and use these flags:

-k phatk VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP=false AGGRESSION=11

Of course if you're using this computer for anything other than mining you'll want to set AGGRESSION to something a bit more sane, like say 7

As fascinating as hopping namecoin pools sounds, I'm looking forward to merged mining a bit more: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=29074

Why pick an arbitrary block so far in the future to change namecoind? Why not work until development is through then just give a fair amount of notice that clients will need to be upgraded before date x or blocks might get rejected? Better yet just pick a block much closer to actual release date. 24k is a long way off...

I got one.

Oh, and only in Iowa would they actually name a street after a crop-destroying pest:

When I entered the bitcoinverse I looked things over and saw two options: mine or speculate.

Now I've got a fair economic background/education and I probably could have done pretty well for myself as a speculator, but my technical side is MUCH stronger so I went with the position that better suited my skills. I sell some of my coins, I hold others and I even do a bit of speculative trading with a few. After amortized cost of hardware and electricity, I've paid under $5 for each BTC mined, which is a pretty good bargain compared even to the currently low/stagnant market prices.

Mining is nothing more than a method for the more technical among us to obtain BTC at a fraction of market value and if more people looked at it in this light rather than as an effortless source of income, the markets would probably be much better off.

Invite only beta right now.

Yeah, I wanted in too 

Pure silver weighs 10.49 g/cm^3 - since the ability to measure weight and volume should be within anyone's reach, it shouldn't be all that hard to not get scammed... Archimedes' principle folks, read your science/history because you never know when it'll come in handy.

Even if you don't have the density of silver/gold/whatever memorized, just measure a "known good" sample against the suspect. If you're going to buy "x ounces" of something and you don't trust the dealer 100% you should have a scale with you anyway - just add a method for measuring volume (calipers and math work just as well as a graduated cylinder and water).

I always have had a soft spot for game theory, math and crypto - always seemed like an odd combination of interests until there was bitcoin 

Sure, this makes those on this forum nervous - it makes me nervous too. It's the same sort of nervous as headlines like "Microsoft buys Skype" or "Novell buys SuSE" (for those that remember pre-Novell SuSE) but for the mainstream this means the same thing that those previous headlines mean: "someone big thinks this is good."

While we might scowl at the giants of mainstream economics, most of the world still views them like father figures and keep money in the banks they run. For former execs of a big important name like Citi to take an interest in bitcoin and namecoin helps to legitimize it in the public view.

If you don't like or trust them then don't use the exchange, you have plenty of other options - but for the bitcoin community this looks and feels like mainstream backing and I think it will help with some of our PR problems. Now if we could just sort out this usability problem...

Indeed. Charts can be quite useful and we CAN pull a lot of good information from them, but it's always important to remember that, above all, charts are just a way of looking at data and the data does not drive itself. Data is driven by behavior and to understand the market - to really truly understand it - you need to understand the behavior. I've linked to charts in the past to back up my optimism but those charts merely represent the data which is the result of the behaviors that actually drive my optimism. Charts only show data and they can be manipulated to see whatever you want to see; only when they are used to express an underlying truth are they useful.

could we add bitpit? They claim blocks 136636 and 136630 recently if that helps. Are you tracking by generated addresses or json stats or what?

Also, Ozco.in claims 136805 and 136729 recently, listed as unknown on your site.

MtRed and ArsBitcoin are both claiming 136791, error or scam?

People HAVE been marked as scammers for publicly refusing to fulfill their end of a bargain in exactly such a manner (see: bitmole).

Regardless of what this guy may have said or done if he paid you you are legally obligated to either ship him what he HAS paid for or return his funds. If you think this has damaged your reputation in a manner that has any fiscal value then you can certainly take it up in a court of law like anyone else who is defamed/slandered, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the transaction itself.

Back on the original topic, I've got something small but hopefully meaningful to add: There are teenagers graduating high school today who have been taught more advanced science than I learned in college. In the next generation or two, there will probably be sixth graders with a more thorough and correct understanding of the atom than my college chem professor - not because they're brilliant but just because they're lucky to be educated in a time when we understand more.

Some day we will discover something truly devastating and there will be no way to hide it. In the past governments controlled nuclear technology by controlling the knowledge: most folks just didn't have the skills or technology to build something like this. Today they control the technology by controlling the fuel: weapons-grade plutonium is pretty damn hard to get your hands on (at least for the average Joe). Some day we'll move past fission and on to fusion. Unlike fission, fusion doesn't require special unstable heavy versions of already-rare elements - you can do it with that most abundant of all elements, hydrogen. At first, the knowledge will be the barrier; few will know how to kickstart a fusion reaction, it will be the realm of the scientific elite and the governments who can afford to pay them. We will make both generators and bombs, because that's what we humans do with new tech. It won't be long, though, before the knowledge is no barrier - information has a way of slipping free given enough time - and what is to stop people from destroying each other then?

It's an arms race of sorts, except the reward isn't national pride or oil - the reward is the continued survival of our species. If science continues unhindered in its current direction, we will some day have a technology that can utterly destroy our entire planet at low cost and high availability. We have to be ready to deal with that knowledge when it comes; not as individuals or nations but as an entire species - we must prepare for a world where every 12 year old can kill everything that lives. Hopefully we're up to the task.

I've heard it said that people tend to fall into normally distributed curves, with the early adopters being in the lower 15.8% (1 standard deviation below median or more), the majority who wait for the tech to be proven within the +/- 1 standard deviation "majority" portion of the curve and the upper 15.8% being the die-hards who are just now getting on the internet (+2 standard deviations would be the 2% or so who still use rotary phones).

So in short, the real tipping point is when you can interview 100 people on the internet (people on the street aren't guaranteed to be part of the 2.1 billion internet users out of 6.8 billion overall people) and 16 of them (or more) will say they use bitcoin.