Or vice-versa, if their gold bars get stolen then are their digital assets all of a sudden worth less?

From what I can tell, these bitgold people don't seem to get it that bitcoin is backed by mathematical scarcity, to toss in some minerals seems to undermine that.  That is, it either means that you're mining for free (because the value is actually in the gold, not the POW) or you're paying too much for your gold (because you have to do POW to keep the value of the digital asset, which you can spend + market rate to get the minerals).

But like all things, these qualities are gradient.  If bitcoin isn't able to handle some volume of transactions for some amount of quickness and cheapness then it's going to be useless for any purpose.  I think you're corrrect to take the mentality of "don't try to be all things to all people" or "focus on your strengths", etc; but again, if we focus on our strengths to the point of ignoring our weaknesses altogether then that's not really a winning strategy either.

One thing I saw from the "stress test" was that it's far to easy for a joker to backlog the network quite a bit.  Now, as you say, increasing the block size from 1MB to 2MB certainly wouldn't risk armageddon.  But I'd go further and say that if such a small change increases the price of perpetrating armageddon (ie, a stress-test scenario) by 100%, that may be a real gain in robustness for all bitcoin users.  What I'm trying to suggest is that it seems to me that the coinwallet people were able to pull off what they pulled off far too cheaply.  I think making that kind of manourver more expensive could be a real asset to the network.

I'd like to know more generally what's going on with the berkleydb ( 4.8 ).  I was building an altcoin (a bitcoin clone) on debian the other day and I also had to jump through some hoops.  I guess I'm looking for an answer to either of these complementary questions:

1) why does bitcoin-core (and clones) use a db that's not in the repos of standard distros?
2) why do standard distros not have this db?

Actually you can't ignore what the sellers say either.  If seller's won't sell for less than X and buyers won't pay more than Y and X > Y then nothing will get sold and the price will be unknown.  The price isn't what buyers are willing to pay or what sellers are willing to sell for, it's both.  The price is what actually happens when those two groups meet each other.

Did you happen to look at the size of the mempool at the moment you sent?  I'm pretty sure, based on the time in which you wrote "yesterday" that you actually missed the stress test by about 24 hours.  Nevertheless, even if you had been sending at the height of the congestion, obviously with a stochastic process your mileage may vary.  My experience, and yours, are merely anecdotal.  The big picture is what matters.

Depends on your client.  I read somewhere (maybe upthread here, I can't recall, there's been a bunch of similar discussions on this) that the latest Multibit allows the user to set the transaction fee to anywhere between 1kSat and 10kSat per KB.

@DarkHyudrA: I think that it would be very good to see clients looking at the size of mempool when suggesting a fee and allowing a user to change that based on the importance of a quick confirmation for the transaction at hand.  If I'm eating at a restaurant and paying to a coinbase address, I don't really care if it confirms in 10 minutes or tomorrow, the restaurant is going to get paid and coinbase will eventually my money.  But if I'm buying into a poker game that starts in an hour and I need 2 confirmations to the join the game, that's a completely different situation.

Looking more closely at what you said, I'm not sure that I actually disagree with you.  My point was sort of that if you were to look at the probability mass of Hero or Legendary as a propotion of all accounts then I'd suspect they aren't actually getting more common on that metric, or at least not very much more common.  And I'm thinking that if you had only one more rank (maybe two) that you'd see those proportions stabilize due to account loss/inactivity.  Maybe we agree then?

Sawdice, "enought" -> "enough".  FWIW, it's probably worth running your ad copy through a spell-checker (they're free and available everywhere!).  Spelling errors in large posters look embarrassing.

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I'm not sure that's completely true.  We have to assume that some accounts are abandoned, lost, etc.  You may be right that Theymos may add more ranks, but I think that as long as some group of people quit and never come back (at each rank) then successively harder ranks should become rarer and rarer.  At this moment a lot of the older ranks are merely here because they got started before more recent accounts.   But eventually, if you add enough ranks, the attrition rate should mean that you could have a top rank which had a stable portion against lower ranks merely because of the fact that some people are going to quit,lose their account, or die.

LaudaM is a respected person, but staff is not going to remove feedback from your account.  Their stated policy is that they don't get involved in such matters.  On my own account I have several feedbacks which are pure nonsense and there's nothing I can do about it.  A lot of members have nonsense feedback on their accounts.  The best you can do is try to get the person who left it to remove it,  barring that you can put your proof in a public place and link to it (as a reference, say, in a counter feedback on the person who left the nonsense).  Then anyone who sees what that person said about you will scroll down and see what you said about them and that you've posted proof that their claim isn't correct.

Good luck!

Most of the craziness went down yesterday.  I got caught in it and a standard transaction (with a standard fee) took 8 hours to confirm.  I read that these guys are planning on doing this again next Monday.  I, for one, will be avoiding sending transactions this next time and will enjoy it on the sidelines, with popcorn, where I should have been last time.

It's important to recall that the Navajo are now just code talkers from WW2 but a contemporary nation of people with rights.  It's really a shame that NAV is perpetrating more of the historical abuses of indigenous peoples by failing to recognize that the only people who have the right to call themselves Navajo (and to make money from this name) are the Navajo and anyone that they've contracted with for use of the name.  It's doubly a shame because the NAV team really wants to honor the Navajo, I think. But you can't honor someone by using their name without permission.

The thing is that people who do this aren't really going to last long at it.  Sooner or later someone is going to hit "quote" and then "WTF are all these images?" and then busted.  And then you're going to be in a lot of shit because you're clearly trying to game the system.  It's really pretty foolish, IMO.  I mean you may get away with this silliness for a little bit of time but in the long run it's clear that it's going to cost you a lot when you consider all you could have made by not getting negative trust and removed from the campaign and labelled as a cheater.

Any technique that relies on putting weird stuff into a post so that a bot will read it is going to fail in this way as soon as someone clicks the quote button.

I just checked and found out it's a Windows .exe file.  I guess there's two issues for me on that:

1) I don't run windows (GNU/Linux)
2) I almost never run precompiled binaries that don't also have source code available

So I'm guessing this isn't targeted at me   I had thought it was gonna run in a browser for some reason.  Let me know if you ever make a cross-platform version.

Cheers and good luck!

@DumbFruit,

I think I understand the metaphor you're using and your analysis of the costs of increased transactions to the network as a whole vs the costs to the user of a network which is very expensive to send transactions on.  However, I think you're being a little bit extreme and that it's quite possible that a lot of the problems could be eliminated by taking a middle way.  Why shouldn't block size increase a little bit?  Pruning technology should eliminate a lot of the costs to the network which are parallel to your blood swelling analogy.  If we can prune blocks and set a dynamic limit on block sizes such that a target confirmation time on a well-formed tranasaction with a "standard" fee is acheived on average, wouldn't this fit with the way we do things w.r.t. difficulty?  Other aspects of the network have these dynamic controls, it seems to me that block-size could do this as well and we'd be on the way to worrying about something else.

What could be more professional than simply sending your bets to a bet address and receiving the payout immediately with no issues?  I wish you'd say what you think is lacking in directbet.eu.  I admit that I'm not a "professional" sports gambler, but I've been more than satisfied.

Dude,

l=post.length();
if(l<75) alert("you don't get paid for this");

This is the way scripts work.  They aren't thinking, they're applying rules.  If you're focused on the rules and what you will or won't get paid for then you're probably missing the point and you're going to get banned for spamming silliness around the forum.   And FWIW, it looks like https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1097344.new#new is going to mean that there's going to be further checking so the crucial point is this: write normal things that you want say to other humans and don't sweat whether you get paid.  If you take that mentality, then you'll have fun and make a little money too.  If you start counting spaces in your posts to try to game the system, you're going to end up with negative reputation or worse (banned).

@ndnhc What's the deal with the avatar campaign?  I searched and the forum search didn't seem to be able to turn up the thread on it.  Link me?

Cheers!

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