Except for all the people who'll probably end up dying in the collapse. It's hardly going to be better for them.

Sorry. Quite a few of my friends and family can't afford to hedge against such an event. While I know it's coming, and while I've done my best to hedge myself and warn others, I'm acutely aware that I'm probably going to fare much better than most of the people I'm close to. It's frustrating and a little frightening to imagine what things will look like when the sh*t hits the fan.  

Please, don't do that. Wikileaks might have some bad press in USA, but they're seen as heros in the rest of the world (for example, a recent survey shown recently that Julian Assange is the third most reputated "international leader" for Spanish people). Just be neutral, it's not bitcoin's role to endorse or condemn Wikileaks. If bitcoin.org condemns Wikieaks, it'll be EPIC FAIL for bitcoin reputation in many places all over the world.

HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO YELL THIS???

Of COURSE you shouldn't use floats internally (unless you are doing something trivial like adding up items in a shopping cart).

We are talking about the JSON-RPC api.  Which is an api for communicating between bitcoin and other applications, in which all values are turned into strings.

So:  what are the best practices in the banking world for representing monetary values in strings?

Binary floating-point arithmetic is at its best when it is simply being used to measure real-world quantities over a wide range of scales (such as the orbital period of a moon around Saturn or the mass of a proton), and at its worst when it is expected to model the interactions of quantities expressed as decimal strings that are expected to be exact. An example of the latter case is financial calculations. For this reason, financial software tends not to use a binary floating-point number representation.[7] The "decimal" data type of the C# and Python programming languages, and the IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating-point standard, are designed to avoid the problems of binary floating-point representations when applied to human-entered exact decimal values, and make the arithmetic always behave as expected when numbers are printed in decimal.

If this change was made, any code using the API must first determine the API version, and then handle numbers in two different ways. No thanks.

Because it changes the data format of every number in every RPC call.

Thus creating a new, second parallel API, conditionally present or absent?  Ugh, no thanks.

But for the typical PHP website that is just going to add up 10 items in a shopping cart using plain-old PHP Numbers will be just fine.   I don't see PayPal recommending that PHP users of it's APIs install GMP.  Recommending that any website dealing with bitcoins compile genjix' fork and use GMP is a really good way to ensure that nobody accepts bitcoins.

Actually, as long as you make sure all your IEEE compliance options are turned on...

Steel, aluminum, etc.

Pay him all the cash already you stingy cunts! Do you know how much effort has gone into that quality video?

He's gone beyond what was expected IMO. Too many people offering bounties on these forums and then not paying up after/changing their terms.

Go watch http://weusecoins.com


If you guys like it, I am willing to release the animation bounty prize in the escrow account that contains 8000ish BTC, especially if noagendamarket and bytemaster agrees. (I will need to talk to them in case the escrow agents disagree)

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5137.msg74898#new

I posted a poll.

Yeah, but my goal is to create a sustainable medium of exchange, not get rich into the stratosphere by mining coins and having them go up in value exponentially.

There is nothing wrong with a coin being worth 2 cents if that's it's value as determined by uninhibited supply and demand.

First, it's not the inflation method.  I am not calling for perma inflation.  Just a corrective action to deal with the disparity between 25% of the coins being out there for a community that is only less than 0.1% arrived, a disparity that can be exploited the same way scammers exploit a pump-n-dump penny stock.

Second, the most obvious sign I'd point to is how the price of the BTC jumps and falls with such little volume.  What held BTC over the dollar mark temporarily was volume well under 100kBTC, or less than 2% of the entire circulation.

The next most obvious sign is the thinness of the market.  If 0.1% of the BTC gets sold on the open market today, the value crashes to nothing, and the person doing the selling walks away with all the money on the market.  The disparity provides an opportunity for the holders of the 5M+ BTC to do that repeatedly - or as is more likely to happen - incrementally so it's not so obvious.  Not a good thing for longevity and, under such circumstances, certainly not a better place to put wealth than Bernanke Bucks.

The value of the BTC today is more tightly bound to how much it is being hoarded - an artificially scarce supply - rather than the true demand versus supply if it weren't manipulated.  This is part of why I have encouraged so much mining - to grease the free market a little, by putting bitcoins in the hands of people who are more likely tol move or sell them, and less in the hands of those who collectively have millions of them stashed away.

If fewer people were holding tightly to BTC in hopes of getting an outrageous return, more BTC would be flowing freely in the market.  The end result I would expect would be a much lower BTC price, but a far more consistent one.