I went and got new PC how would i put linux on it?
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I would recommend just putting Linux on the old machine instead of throwing it away. If you are paranoid, you may want to make it an offline machine with no network access.

I think my advice would be to sell between 1/3 to 1/4 to replace the FIAT taken from savings.

While his would be at a loss, the woman complaining in the reddit post clearly sees it as a very speculative investment (at best). You would then negotiate an allowance to do "dollar cost averaging".

Oh and try to diversify your interests a bit. People tire of hearing about Bitcoin. (Ask me how I know.)

Turing-completeness is a non-starter.

The Bitcoin scripts were deliberately designed to not be Turing complete.

I have to admit, the 28 minute (thorough) block propagation time (for 20MB block) mentioned earlier does seem realistic to me. That works out to about 14 hops with each node spending 2 minutes on block verification. Edit: Forgot to add: Turing completeness, even with cycle limits, will obviously increase block verification time.

This lends credence to LaudaM's contention that the blocks will not fill up immediately. Though, I have seen it argued that the large miners will have an incentive to push smaller miners out with large blocks (filled with garbage if need be).


Because a change like this has to be planned months in advance. During the next bubble it will be too late to meaningfully accommodate the increased transaction volume. I suppose that may be the point: to temper speculation with high fees. The difficulty is that the institutions pushing the next bubble have the ability to print their own money.

For merged mining, the relevant coin has to accept that having a parent header is "just as good" as being the parent. I doubt either MPcoin or Gavincoin will be modified to be merge-mineable.

Edit: it would be interesting if they were both modified to be merge-minable.

If you buy up Bitcoin before the fork, then don't move it (keeping it in cold-storage (ie: off-exchange)), you get to "bet" on both forks at once.

The risk comes when you take up mircea_popescu on his "buy gavincoin at 25% off" offer. Edit: no takers so far.

Presumably, if you need to spend Bitcoin while waiting on the sidelines, You can buy some at an exchange, then spend immediately: assuming both your exchanger and retailer are using the same fork.

Edit: tvbcof has been bringing up an interesting question: how will SPV wallets react to all this. I think it is worth investigation. I suspect SPV clients will try to look at the block the transaction is included in, which means size is important. If a forking block is buried and not examined, the SPV client will probably side with the fork with the most hash-power.

Incidentally, that is how consensus is achieved in Bitcoin: the fork with the most hash-power wins.

For my calculation above, I was assuming the blocks would be about 20x larger. Since the current blocks are about 35% full, we are talking about 5-7MB blocks in the above scenario. I don't claim to know exactly how long it would take for blocks to get to that size. However, a rule of thumb is that information expands to fill the available space. That is to say, making the block-size larger does encourage more transaction. If I had to guess, I would say we can expect the first full 20MB block within 5 years.

I also would not be surprised if Bitcoin transaction growth grows faster than common Internet bandwidth: at least in the near term.

• About 15 years ago, I was on 56Kbps down, 30kbps up dial-up. (~10GB bandwidth cap, with less than 1-3GB of usage expected) (not really comparable).
• About 10 years ago I was on 3Mbps down, 640kbps up ADSL. 70GB cap.
• About 5 years ago, I was on 6Mbps down, 1Mbps up ADSL/VDSL. 100GB cap
• Now I am on 25Mbps down, 2.5Mbps up Cable. 250GB cap.
• If the rough trend continues, I will be on 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up in 5 years. 500-750GB cap.

Disclaimer: those numbers are not terribly consistent. The underlying technology and even price has changed over the years.

Sounds like if you have enough disk-space/bandwidth, your coins should show up.

Mulitbit saves wallet creation dates so that it only has to care about blocks after that date for computing your balance.

You may find more help in this sub-forum: Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Development & Technical Discussion > Alternative clients > MultiBit

I suspected Bank or Government shill over the "2Mbits down is a crappy connection anyway" confusion.

If your goal is not to burn time, then you should be more careful with your reading comprehension.

Here you go:
List of Bitcoin Hostile (and friendly) Banks

Two years is not a long time. As far as I can tell, the issues are still exactly the same.

As mentioned up-thread, by current ISP is now offering new users less bandwidth than they did two years ago. One major reason is that they are rolling out "free" wireless access points that are obviously not garnering as many new users as they had hoped. (The cheapest Internet plan is $50/month, while the average cell phone plan in Canada is about $40/month)

I am thinking that staying with 1MB blocks would not be a horrible outcome. As it is, Bitcoin is not secure for the average user in part because privacy is very fragile.

Coinjoin helps, but I have my doubts that it will ever be used for the majority of transactions. The only Bitcoin wallet that I am aware of that tries to use coinjoin by default is the highly experimental Darkwallet (not to be confused with Darkcoin)

One of the "scamcoins" (general term for alts mainly designed to enrich the developer) actually came out with some strong privacy features in order to hide an 80% pre-mine. Seriously, the white-paper on https://cryptonote.org/ is worth the read.

As I mentioned in the other thread, Monero appears to be the generally-accepted community fork of this. Cryptonote-based currencies take advantage of something called "ring signatures" in order to allow you to automatically do coinjoin-like operations with an arbitrary number of addresses. Not only that, but transactions are automatically broken down into common units, so tracing by quantity is mostly pointless as well. Edit: "stealth address" appear to be implemented as well. And, most relevant to this discussion: the block-size automatically adjusts.

An extremely popular version of Bitcoin may well be a disaster for personal privacy: since the block-chain is public. Coinjoin operations can help, but are not really encouraged. It is easier to use a privacy-compromising "well known" address.

If the "masses" were moved to something like Monero instead, I have more faith that the privacy features would be used. MPcoin and Monero can co-exist as experiments in how block-size impacts both adoption and mining fees. Maybe the discussions from two years ago will turn out to be true. In that case, Monero will just be another payment system controlled by cartels. Maybe, the UN security council members will agree that "crypto-currencies" are of strategic importance akin to nuclear weapons. In that case, Monero and GavinCoin (20MB block Bitcoin) will be regulated out of existence. The more agile MPcoin (1MB block Bitcoin) would (hopefully) survive.

I recommend storing your private keys in two or more geographic locations.
Obviously each location increases the chance of physical compromise and theft.

I eventually hope to upgrade to m of n keys stored in 3 or more geographic locations.
If more than one key needs to be compromised. looking into Tamper-evident seals may be something you want to consider.

Video summary: if your are serious about tamper-evident seals, you should carefully check for tampering every time you break the seal.

Nope, that does explain Bitcoin. Each address represents around 2^96 possible private keys. It is believed to be computationally infeasible to generate a collision.

Memorable addresses have been tried and abandoned.

One Centralized solution is first bits.

However, you have to trust that website not to generate colliding addresses in order to prompt people to send funds to the wrong address. A more decentralized solution is Vanitygen, but you still have to be wary of potential collisions.

Because the Block-chain is public, it is best to avoid address re-use anyway. Best practice is to use a new address for each transaction. If your address is "well known", it is trivial to track your spends: even more so if your payments go to other "well known" addresses such as the laminated card used by your local coffee shop.

Coinjoin is meant to mitigate this (mostly a work in progress).

IIRC, my 3Ghz Pentium D machine used about 30 hours of CPU time (20 hours wall time) to process about 20GB of block-chain (Bitcoin 0.8.3 or something). That works out to about 2 minutes per 20MB of transactions. Now I am wondering what machine they tested on. Even if I am off by 10GB, that is still less than 5 minutes per 20MB.

My bitcoin node mostly had a dedicated connection to itself. I did not have a "soft cap": only a $5/GB penalty if I went over 300GB/month.



You were not the only one to wonder about specs. I think you can probably assume "Semi-modern Intel CPU with ~4 cores at ~3Ghz".

Those are "burstable" numbers, not average speeds based on data caps. Most of the world has a data cap of 250GB or less:
(250GB/month)/(30days/month)/(24hours/day)/(3600seconds/hour)*10bits/byte=965kbps averaged over the month.

In skimming the  article I linked, I saw that Japan's cap was the closest to the 2TB of potential data usage I mentioned in the other thread: allowing about 1TB/month.

My node had 5Mbps of burstable upload. However, to keep block propagation times down, I felt it was necessary to limit my blocks produced to 500kB. If blocks start approaching 20MB, I think any serious node will need at least 100Mbps of burstable upload bandwidth



For VPS, the bandwidth is not the problem. Your data center probably allows several providers to peer with each other: making your access cheaper. The problem with a VPS is that you will be asked to upgrade to a dedicated server if you use too much CPU time. How much CPU time does it take to verify a 20MB block?

About 6 minutes, 40 seconds.


Since you will be using more than half the CPU time, you will be asked to move to a dedicated server. I have found dedicated server hosting in Canada that allows 5TB of transfers for about $80/month. One reason I opted for the more expensive commercial Internet access is that I was able to plug Bitcoin hashers directly into the machine. I was not affected by the use of BGP to hijack my hahsers because my hashers were pointed at my own P2Pool instance in the same machine.

Even before the US started seizing domains, I have endeavored to keep my web-hosting outside the United States, where data is subject to the Patriot Act. Keeping my hosting in Canada also (ostensibly) means I don't have to worry about US law. (Some Tier 1 transit providers like CogentCo require Terms of Service language from web-hosts still requiring US law to be followed.) Staying in Canada means my bandwidth costs 10x as much. (Possibly due to the smaller population, but not certain.)

Edit: PS: I am laying out these numbers, not to argue against the fork, but to illustrate where the 1MB block proponents are coming from. I think 20MB blocks will be expensive, but necessary. The 1MB block supporters think that raising the block limit will simply kick the scaling problem down the road: while at the same time, making it harder to operate the network under the radar in the event of a crack-down.

You mis-interpreted my post. My point was with 20MB blocks, you will no longer be able to host a node on consumer Internet Plans. The important number was not the 2Mbps download, but the 4Mbps upload. BTW, to get those numbers, I simply multiplied my former node's bandwidth usage by 20.

My current ISP has reduced the speeds it is offering for consumer access. The fastest upload offered on a consumer plan is 3Mbps. Business plans have an option with 5Mbps of upload. (Experiments like 250Mbps down and 15Mbps up are being grandfathered)

Telus, the local phone company, is better with it's VDSL offerings. You can get 5 or 10Mbps of upload speed. For independent providers (using the same lines), like the one I was with, your maximum upload speed is 5Mbps. To get 10Mbps or more, you have to go to fibre, costing $$$$. VDSL and cable may technically be able to handle that, but the companies involved don't want to cannibalize their lucrative fibre offerings.


My overall point is that if we go ahead with this fork, we have to do it with the understanding that the era of running a full node on a consumer Internet connection will be over. Due to extra CPU overhead (due to transaction processing), the days of running on a VPS may be over as well.

Now, with 20MB, I expect dedicated hobbyists and small businesses will still be able to run a node, but it will be a considerable expense: hundreds if not thousands per month. Webhosting may be cheaper, but then you can't keep an eye on your box; or plug hashers directly into it.

This video explains the real reason he thinks Bitcoin won't work:
The Future of money is not Bitcoin

The video in the OP is just him jumping on (temporary) mining shut-downs as a chance to say "I told you so!".

The coming Bitcoin civil war is more likely to kill Bitcoin than 15 minute block intervals.

You need to do that if you want to contribute to the network. If you simply want a full node to relay and verify your own transactions, you don't have to.

I think this is the crux if the disagreement.

One side wants Bitcoin to scale. Meanwhile, the other side is saying:

They have a point: using garlic or onion routing at least triples your bandwidth usage. For small miners running full nodes, their Internet costs will likely exceed their power costs.

I believe that Bitcoin will become much more expensive to use in the future, precisely because it can not scale well. The debate is over how much we can scale the network without awkward centralization problems. I think the recent drop in price has actually promoted more decentralization, based on the Bitcoin hash-rate distribution (The huge operations can't pay their bills).

The "Gavincoin" advocates have been pointing out that "side-chains" are not really a solution to the scaling problem. It just means the average user has to deal with some kind of centralized exchange. I have noticed that the "MPcoin" proponents don't even try to dispute this: they really don't care as long as Bitcoin remains strong.

I firmly believe that if Bitcoin really takes off, it will mostly replace wire-transfers. VISA and Mastercard will still be common forms of payment. If you want to avoid credit cards for coffee, you will either have to resort to dirty FIAT, or use debit (implying you are still going to need a bank account). However, there is a problem: in it's current form, Bitcoin can not even scale to match wire transfers. I think a 20MB block limit will allow such use, while still making common 100µBTC fees too high for "frivolous" use.

The fees from mining will rise with the price of Bitcoin. Not only will the fees rise in dollar terms, but transaction volume has traditionally gone up every time Bitcoin gains wide attention. In the past there have been (successful) calls to reduce the recommended default fee when the price of Bitcoin rose. I think in the next price rise, we should resist calls to reduce the default fee. Perhaps instead, users can be educated on what a high-priority transaction is.
For example:
A 1BTC transaction becomes "high priority" within about a day. A 1mBTC transaction becomes "high priority" within about 3 years. The implication being, if you want your low-priority transaction included quickly, you should include the fee (even if it works out to $40 in fiat).

Warning: I have come to the conclusion that we can not simply ignore the "MPcoin" proponents. I also doubt that they will be persuaded a larger block-size is needed until "MPcoin" (forked or not) is run into the ground. One possible alternative is Monero, which automatically scales the block-size based on previous blocks. Monero has a complicated birth story...involving innovative scamcoins.

Make no mistake: the "Elite" can be effective when they want to be. Their leader,  Mircea Popescu, claims to have invented paywalls now used by the New York Times and other newspapers. Currently, they are in the process of producing a small, cheap "set it and forget it" box that will act as a full node on the "MPcoin" network. They plan to distribute upwards of 10,000 of these. They will be difficult to upgrade to "Gavincoin", and not necessarily due to technical reasons: but also due to inertia. Because they are not designed for easy upgrade-ability, they will likely run modified Bitcoin 0.5.x until they die. They will studiously ignore blocks larger than 1MB.

A competing "Gavincoin" box will need the OS and Bitcoind on separate media from the block-chain storage. The reason is cost: to store 5 years of full 20MB blocks will take about 5.3TB. 5 Years of full "MPcoin" blocks would take only about 262GB (+~30GB for the current chain). The "Gavincoin" solution in version 0.10.x is to start pruning old transactions. Reasonably safe if you go back at least a year (implying 1TB of storage), but is still strictly a reduction in security.

Edit: BTW, full 20MB blocks would have been a problem for my full node recently shut-down. 1MB blocks with 64 connections (+namecoin+P2Pool) were using about 100GB per month; out of a 300GB cap. I am not really aware of consumer-level Internet access that allows 2TB of transfers per month (even if the Head-line "burstable"  rate can technically handle it (about 2Mbps down, 4Mbps up)).