As Lollaskates pointed out, this isn't a Bitcoin problem, it's a marketing one.

Try "20 mil footlongs!" where mil is short for millibitcoin(s)/mBTC.  The market may prefer "millies", "millibits", or "bitmil" instead but a popular name for the unit will emerge.

I maintain that BTC has been a horrible unit almost all year and have only used it myself to explain what mBTC means.  Indeed people seemed to be much happier with the BTC unit in early 2010 than they are today which suggests that even uBTC would be friendlier than BTC at this point.

You can tell this isn't the speculation board; the price forecasts are good.

I think that the search algorithm is just a bit complicated and you've uncovered one of its warts.

Try searching for "casascius" (with the quotes).  At ebay.co.uk there are no real hits for casascius but, without quotes, the search algorithm drops me on the results for cassius, whereas with quotes, the algorithm tries a worldwide search (giving me 22 hits).  At ebay.com I have no problem.

The "0 results found for ..." message could probably be worded better.

It'll be a while before the universe achieves heat death (assuming things go that way).  One should be able to crack all the current addresses through brute force by calculating just one address per year with oodles of time to spare.

Thank you kindly.  20mBTC tip sent.

Feature request:

A function taking as input an amount of BTC and returning the rank an address holding said amount would have.

The Xinwen Lianbo appearance is probably having a significant effect.

Note in particular the Chinese Wikipedia Bitcoin page traffic for the last 90 days (taken from page 4 of the above linked thread)

I've never owned a smart phone and have been using Bitcoin since July 2010.

They start with a wild assertion and build from there.  If you want to get at the root of their misunderstanding, ask them to defend this point.

Perhaps they are focusing on the first use of a bitcoin (as it is spent by the miner) but are ignoring later uses of the same bitcoin which require negligible energy.


You might also ask them how their energy company paradox compares to oil companies which, bizarrely enough, sell their oil to gold mining companies rather than mining the gold themselves.  How could a profitable gold mining company possibly acquire enough gold to fully compensate the oil providers?


They've clearly made a number of false assumption about what Bitcoin is and how it works.  At least this one is simple enough to dispel.

Ow!

I've read a lot of dumb stuff this past month but this made me actually cringe to the point of pain!

@zakolivers.  Could you add:
"CAUTION:  Extreme author stupidity.  Reading can lead to self-harm."
to your post.

Thanks.

One must weigh the probability of forgetting vital data against the probability of having your paper backup read by someone that knows what it means.

For me, memorising the private key was the only way to go.

The safest place for you will depend on your circumstances.

I don't follow.

Why would the hashrate affect the distribution?

If the nonce is simply incremented until a block is found then why wouldn't the least significant bytes be uniformly distributed?

At first I was thinking there may be some link between this and the fact that Bitcoin addresses are given in Base58.  However, this doesn't explain the gap, the distribution, or the fact that a byte value of 58 itself appears frequently.

Curious indeed.

The idea of embedding a message seems plausible, particularly given the newspaper headline easter egg.  I doubt there will be any plain-text messages as the distribution among the frequent bytes is too uniform.  However, it might be worth seeing bytes 0 through 9 appear in adjacent block more than one would expect (clumps suggesting multi-digit numbers).

Edit:

On second thought, the lumps of 10, gap of 9, unusual bytes of 19 and 58, all suggest something unintentional to me.  Given Satoshi's attention to detail when it comes to privacy it seems unlikely that he'd embed messages across essentially all of his blocks.  A link to something about gray codes that would explain the gap would be appreciated.

It seems that Douglas Jackson has a very poor understanding of Bitcoin.

He's made the assumption that a currency must have an issuer.  He also assumes that the difference between "real" and "virtual" money is in the attitude of the issuer towards the financial liability of issuance.

Many here would argue that the difference between "real" and "virtual" money is in the existence of an issuer, where gold and bitcoin have a real value that derive from their properties, not an artificial one based on promises.

A market rate of more than 71 USD/BTC suggests that the market finds a future value of 1000 USD/BTC more likely than one of 5 USD/BTC.  An investor that finds 5 USD/BTC more believable than 1000 USD/BTC should want to sell.

The volume-weighted average of the reasonably functional BTC-USD exchanges would be more instructive.  Including Mt. Gox (i.e. assuming that 1 Mt. Gox USD has a value equal to that of 1 USD) in a calculation of "BitcoinAverage" is misleading.

There you go Rassah.  You're doing well in the non-voter segment.

I don't typically vote either but only because the costs of doing so vastly outweigh the benefits.  I don't think that applies here as I expect voting will be as easy as posting to a forum and the total number of voters will be low enough that each individual vote will have non-negligible value.

Rassah: A candidate for the people's representative at the Bitcoin Foundation.
Campaign strategy: Troll bitcointalk.org days before the election and publicly note the staggering mindlessness of the majority of its users.

Thanks guys for the thorough replies.

When the USD was on the gold standard, did it have intrinsic value?