Wait a few minutes.

Sadly, this guy is missing a dictionary.  It is hard to take someone seriously when they use a word like "fiat" so often, and get it wrong nearly every time.

I would love to know where you are getting credit cards faster than you can download the blockchain.

The net total speed of the bitcoin network in FLOPS is exactly zero.  I'm not sure that anyone has ever bothered to measure or record the fastest integer system.  We kinda suspect that we might be it, but as far as I know, there is no official record.

I'm not sure that this will ever make it into the main client.  It just doesn't seem like a pressing issue for most people.

I'm working on a script to clean up my personal wallet, and it could maybe be adapted to something like this.

There are, sorta.  The antique pre-QT node that I run at home for my own amusement has been whining about potential DOS attacks for like a year now.

Just during startup, or always?

Doh!  Is there any compelling need to switch to version 5 of p2pool?  I just rolled out my stuff using version 4 and bitcoind-0.7.0 yesterday.

Free Software is open, but Open Source isn't necessarily Free.  And in the views of many people, starting with Stallman, the important part is the Free part, not the open part.

The term "arbitrary" has a long history in computing.  It is always understood to mean "no particular artificial limit", and not "infinite".  Computer science may be a branch of mathematics, but it is not a branch that cares about literal infinity.

Actually, he is the father of the Free Software movement.  You could say that Free Software spawned Open Source, and call him the grandfather of open source, which is sorta true.  But it also totally missed the point of everything he's been trying to say for the last couple of decades.

To be very clear, he doesn't give a crap about open source software, except when it is also Free Software, and the people that advocate OSS are doing the world a disservice by ignoring the most important stuff (freedom).

No thanks.  I already know how the protocol works: it uses discrete units.

Nothing stops a third party from keeping track of fractions of protocol units, but they can't be exchanged on the network.


Meh.  8 more bytes per output isn't a huge deal.  By the time one protocol unit is a meaningful amount of value, 8 bytes will really be nothing.

The field doesn't have "digits", it has bits.  It has 64 of them, so it can represent any value from 0 to 2⁶⁴-1.  But, because of other network rules, it will never be higher than:

00000000 00000111 01110101 11110000 01011001 11100100 00000000 10010000


The trickery in question has a name, tx.version.

The silliness of floating point here is up for debate.  I think that the simplicity of regular old binary math more than makes up for the 8 bytes per txout cost.

The width of the field is not the problem, the meaning is.  Hiding silly codes in the top few bits is just as much work as just making the field wider and changing the scaling factor.

And all of this talk of digits makes me sad.  The field is binary.  log₂2.1e15=~50.899 bits

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0016

Basically, the script is provided when the transaction is redeemed, rather than when it is created.  When the transaction is created, only the hash is provided so that they network can verify that the script provided at redemption is the right script.

It would require a protocol change because the protocol operates on discrete units of 1/100000000 BTC, often known informally as a satoshi.  A protocol change is not easy, but if we ever get to the point where 1 protocol unit is a meaningful amount of value, it can be done.

I would take it another step.

What we are doing is participating in a mass agreement on the rules of the system.  The name doesn't matter.  The software doesn't matter, except to the extent that it enforces the agreement as our agent.  What matters is the rules.  Even if some random new dude doesn't understand the implications of the rules, the most important parts of the ecosystem are currently in the hands of anarchists and libertarians, and they do understand the rules perfectly well, and they won't accept any silly changes.

Here is the hilarious part though.  Even if some people made their own client that allowed the 50 BTC subsidy to continue forever, it wouldn't matter a damn bit.  Even their clients would accept 25 BTC blocks as valid (the test is <= not ==), but the 25 BTC clients would not see the 50 BTC blocks as valid.  So, the whole network would still follow the correct rules, and the people mining for 50 BTC would get NOTHING.  Not even 50 BS-BTC to spend on their forked chain.  They would need to add another gratuitously incompatible change too, if they wanted to fork.

That is hard to answer, maybe impossible.

But the principle is the same.  The value of ethics is how much a person is willing to sell theirs for.  But remember, they are selling their ethics, not yours.  They are likely to violate your ethics for much less than they are willing to violate their own.

Of course not.

But, this is open source.  Anyone that wants to can edit it to remove the shift, and they can even distribute their changed version.  I don't expect that anyone would actually use it though, for many reasons.

Yes, but keep going.

There are not enough dollars to purchase the United States in a single transaction either.

An increase in value will likely happen while bitcoin is growing up, but what really needs to happen is for longer supply chains to operate with bitcoin.  If the dollar rises in value against foreign currencies by 10%, but don't see a 9% reduction in the prices of most things, because most things are insulated by many steps from foreign exchange.  Most bitcoin transactions are at most a step or two away from another currency, so swings in exchange rate have an immediate effect on prices.

The concept of value doesn't really have a fixed meaning outside of the moment of sale.

If you buy a bitcoin for $11.70, you are saying that at that instant, a bitcoin is worth not less than $11.70 to you.  And the seller is saying that a bitcoin is worth not more than $11.70 to him at that instant.

And both of those statements are really duals, they also tell you something about the relative valuations of dollars in the minds of the buyer and the seller.  This is because value is always relative, and always in flux.  Right now, dollars (Euros, Pounds, Yen, whatever) have the advantage that we think of value in those terms, by default, and out of habit and convenience.  Bitcoin has a lot of growing to do before it can take over that role as the default unit of account.