There is no reason beads on a metal string wouldn't last a millennium through fire, flood, locusts, revolution, and solar storm. But would bitcoin last through all that? Paper packs the most bang for the buck.

The silver coin was delivered State-side long ago, perfectly as planned, but it has only now arrived in Greenland with gifts. It's a beautifully mutilated piece. I wish there were more! I might turn it into a ring after all.

ditto

Did you just fuck up the pyramid, you douche?

Could you ask one question at a time?

I don't recall my rationale for this ingenious idea.

I think it was just to keep track of my various positions experiments, or in protest for my trailing stops not working, or ... I'm now setting my position on Mt. Gox and then moving coins and codes over to Bitcoinica for more leverage and stops. So far that's not working brilliantly either. Fortunately, I happen to always know the trend and future direction*, I just can't always get the maximas.

* except when I don't.

Oh shiznitz, did I fucznitz up the world's greatest pyramid?

I've wondered why/how anyone gets liquidated at all. People set a highly leveraged unprotected position and go on vacation (called sleep in the bitcoin world)?

The PGP Strong Set is the largest set of user keys for which ever member of the set is connected through a web of trust to every other member of the strong set. Who is a member?

• Sipa
• Keefe
• sneak
• theymos

Anyone else?

Who is Dayfall?

Your link is fishy, try this: http://eprint.iacr.org/

Also: http://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/


--- Andy Greenberg, Forbes

Are those checkpoints in the public block chain or in your implementation? perhaps you could briefly describe those check points?

These?
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/534

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

Interesting question, FreeMoney. Sunrise and sunset are measured from the penetration of the edge of the sun above and below the horizon, not the center of the sun, so day and night are not equal on the equator year round.

Also, according to my pen on napkin sketches, the sun rises slightly to the north south of the tropic of cancer when the northern hemisphere is in summer, and the sun rises slightly to the south north of the tropic of capricorn during northern winter.

So, my guess is that the equator is experiencing a summer solstice. In fact every where south of 23° N is experiencing sidereal diurnal winter. This leads me to some tropical paradoxes however. Please attack my logic. I've run out of space on my napkin.

Rest assured, it is in fact winter in Greenland, with 3 meters of snow and no direct sunlight for the past nine days.

Yes, one should always look for sustained volume within a price movement. In fact, lack thereof is a an excellent opportunity to take the contrarian position. It's just that those are impossible to discuss and certainly not chart before the reversal occurs.

In fact, this entire Christmas week has been a series of premature ejaculate spikes.

That was yes AND no, both to the second question, right?

If only for casual browsing, the Mt. Gox price rarely goes outside of the bitcoinica spread. Bitcoinica spread just expands like bollinger bands.




It's not just the guys on the wrong side of the trade who get screwed. Those who bet correctly get screwed out of winnings as well. During volatile spikes, the ask sky rockets, while the bid moves not a satoshi. If the price does not stabilize at the higher price, the spike occurs for the losers but not for the winners. The only winner is Bitcoinica.




Surely you are referring to Mt. Gox and not Bitcoinica?

That is not a feature of public key cryptography in general, but a feature of elliptic keys specifically. Elliptic keys have some remarkable properties, some of which might be considered negative side effects depending on your requirements, but one of the best features is their compact size to strength.



You could think of the private elliptic key as a master locking and unlocking key, while the public keys are locking only. But analogies aside, if you plan to play with the private keys, it's best to just know that the public key is easily obtained from the private key. Maybe you could imagine the private key contains the public key.

EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, while the discussion has been poetically correct thus far, I think the analogies should shift gears. We're really not 'locking' anything (well...), we're really 'signing'. It's based on the same technologies, with a few simple intermediate steps, but the analogies require some re-work.



I have certain philosophical issues with the local reference 'Satoshi' client, but rest assured you are already well ahead of the learning curve. The Satoshi client doesn't really let you do very much. It doesn't expose the guts of cryptography, so you're not likely to learn how bitcoin works by using the client, but on the other hand, you can't screw up too badly. I don't think much if any user testing has been performed, so the default user experience is something akin to a straight jacket.

When you send bitcoins, the client will collect one or more addresses that contain coins and send the total to one or two addresses. If the total coins in the set of sending addresses is exactly equal to the number of coins you want to send, then voila the total is sent to your destination. However, if the total sending coins is larger, the difference (spare change) is sent to a new address in your local wallet. If you did not have any spare addresses, the address, public, and private keys will be generated automatically.

This is supposed to increase security/anonymity, but I agree, all it really manages to do is confuse new users and increases the possibility of loss. On the bright side, your wallet generally always has a buffer pool of 100 extra pre-generated addresses. So, if you backed up last week and you have not made 100 transactions in the meantime, then your backup from last week is still good. If on the other hand, you sent 102 transactions since your last backup and your harddrive catches on fire and falls into a soup of acid, you'll likely lose the entirety of the change of your last few transactions.

There are some working experiments with a 'deterministic wallet', which can generate an infinite series of private keys from a single seed. I understand this works well, with different, but respected security implications. I expect we'll see smaller, safer, deterministic wallets in the near future. In the mean time, back up often. But I don't think you should be worried about using the Satoshi client. Your questions indicate that you're more advanced than the average user.

Yeah. Here's a magical analogy for public key cryptography: I generate a private key and numerous public unlocked treasure chests. I give these open treasure chests to all of my friends (it's easy to copy them). Whenever a friend wants to send me a message, they just put the message in my public treasure chest and close the lid. Now even they can not open it again. Only I, with my unique private key, can open the chest.

After I generated the public keys, I don't really need them any more, unless I want to send messages to myself. But no one needs the private key to lock a message. The private key is only required to open a message.


Factorial is correct if using a non-repeating permutation, such as the shuffled deck of cards or beads.

About 317 years with a single processor running at a billion checks per second.

But of course, machines will get faster and faster throughout that time, so I don't know, you could probably retrieve your bitcoins before you die.

I'm hoping the firstbits becomes the 'standard' address... thus I've wondered if the hash is really a necessary middle-abstraction. We can convert the public key to base36 and refer to the firstbits (or ~10 character prefix before confirmation). Of course, that's probably too late now.