Yes I know that Satoshi did not put a limit on blocks, I was there back then. But you have to understand that back then things were much different. It was not until the MtGox fiasco where Bitcoin crashed from 30USD to 2USD when we all realized Bitcoin was finally getting traction. Before that it was a theoretical project between few people, and did not need these scaling issues to be considered.

We are here now, today, with a problem, and increasing the blocksize 20 TIMES over WILL kill nodes and WILL irrevocably destroy Bitcoin.

Gavin and Hearns proposal for increasing the blocksize to 20MB is the ultimate way to destroy Bitcoin. For anyone that has the need to follow a "leader" and refuses to understand what the outcome of increasing the blocksize is, please read on.

Increasing the blocksize to 20MB does not solve anything in the long term. Neither Gavin nor Hearn can answer what they will do if the blocksize needs to be raised beyond 20MB at a later stage. Right now, what we are getting is a lazy fix, when we dont even need it.

Gavin has been screaming about the blocksize is reaching is maxiumum and that we need to increase the size of the blocks. Why we need to raise it TWENTY FOLD is not something Gavin can answer. Neither can he answer what he will do when 20MB becomes to little again. Raising it to 200MB?

Another huge problem about raising the block size is that the current amount of nodes we are having will start dropping even faster. People have been pointing out how we have lost nodes in the recently. Everyone agrees that this is because the blocksize is becoming too large. Now we are voting to increase the blocksize 20 times more?

I have actually followed this for quite a while now. When are you guys attending a conference next in Europe?

NorthPayments, a leading provider of online payment solutions, will be the first European Payment Gateway to accept payments via Bitcoin. The UK-based company has started a strategic partnership with BitcoinPaygate and adds Bitcoin to over 220 easy and secure payment options that are available to merchants.

http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2015/04/22/726994/10130138/en/NorthPayments-a-leading-payment-processor-in-the-UK-collaborate-with-BitcoinPayGate-com-to-introduce-an-alternative-payment-option-for-customers.html

I would not be so sure of the repayment. I mean, repaying the fist part is possible, but I dont even think they are capable financially of repaying the second part though. In a way it seems more sane to let them go, but at the same time that sounds chaotic and insane.

Going to be an interesting week for certain.

We have €448m to the International Monetary Fund is due this Thursday (April 9th).

Then we have public sector wages and pensions, €1.7b in social security payments made by the state (April 14th).

Then we have a €200m loan repayment to the IMF (May 1st).

Now correct me if I am wrong, but if Greece cant pay any of these 3 bills we are talking about the first "western modern" country to be technically in default. If they resort back to the Drachma, it will be one of the most worthless currencies on the planet.

What I cant really figure out is the outcome, both worldwide financially against the Euro, and obviously against Bitcoin. Will we see BTC as safe heaven? Something tells me only a little, because the average Greek is not highly IT literate, but I could be wrong here.

Give me your thoughts people, as this goes down in about 3 days from now!

An interesting read here: http://new.euro-med.dk/20141215-putins-confident-putin-to-nationalize-rothschilds-central-bank-and-purge-collaborators-with-west-war-till-one-side-collapses-inevitable.php

This is what Bitcoin will eventually face.

People dont care how things work, as long as they work. Nobody has time to specialize in each and every field the world has to offer. Heck, people in general dont specialize in anything anyway. The payment industry, and the Bitcoin industry is what is going to bring Bitcoin to the masses, not the other way around. Bitcoin should not be more than "yet another number on my screen" for the avarage user. Just forget the silly dream of teaching everyone about it.

From a quick glance I cant gather if they utilize sending a Bitcoin dust payment to an address or not. Do you know? If they do, it wouldn be good as the dust can quickly run into billions.

EDIT: Nevermind, they use a local merkle tree and gather multiple values in one batch and hash that. I guess we either get sidechains or we keep getting these "solutions" to data storage.

What I find interesting is how Satoshi seems to have reached a conclusion on the fixed parameters of Bitcoin.

The deflation and halving of block reward, coupled with fixed amount of resource, made it stand out to more than just a PoW, blockchain based cryptographic system. It was actually a monetary system with rules in place from day one. Probably why it caught on this fast, as it could somewhat be explained in layman terms.

You imply that Satoshi neither relied on hashcash and b-money as example for what became known as Bitcoin, right? That makes his invention of Bitcoin even harder to understand, since he is not relying on historical solutions that could have led to Bitcoin.

But to answer your question, no, I did not hear about hashcash before I heard about Bitcoin. I think that is because Bitcoin, vs other solutions solved everything needed for a decentral monetary system in "one go".

Will installing BitcoinD require to re-download the entire blockchain, or does it "know"?

Are there any complications installing BitcoinD when Bitcoin-qt is already installed? I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and wanted to know if it gives any problems to have both installed on the same machine.

I wanted to install BitcoinD in order to play around with some of the RPC commands via Python.

The reference client is not ment to be user friendly. Remember, this is a protocol, not a mom and pop application. It is being developed for developers in my point of view.

But I assume this is subject to change if some "mayor" breakthroughs are to happen? Do you happen to have more info on where the most active sidechain development is happening? For myself this is quite important, as we as a company need to follow the Bitcoin core dev and related possible future core dev closely, in order to prepare the third party services on top of things.

I find this way more interesting to be used for storing third party data that can later be verified.

What I still dont get from this post is if the data stored and timestamped can be "big".

For example, if I wanted to store 10000 sessions per second, would it even be possible via the blockchain hash? For the sake of the conversation, lets say these are orders on a very large web store, and I want to store the price + time of the order of an item.

Just one question. Does it allow for overview of accounts and wallets connected to accounts?

I can easily see this being used vs a GUI if it can track accounts. Basically the RPC command known as " getaccountaddress " and "  getaccount " and " getaddressesbyaccount " and most importantly " getbalance  [account] [minconf=1]  " .

It would be by far the best tracker to track multiple accounts and values and movement of coins for a wallet service, or at least offer a different perspective.

So we have Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, but I read about a number of other proofs out there. Just cant find them and was hoping someone would have a list to more proofs or a comparison review somewhere of different proofs. I want to dig into the subject a bit more and see what I can possibly think of from that.

This is quite cool. Very nice explanation on that url and nice find by OP

Yes I did, but we solved it. The problem was: The libraries was not sending the data in binary format, but in a text format. Our dev redid everything manually without using the library and send it as binary. That worked.