Why not just have a maximum fee of 0.001 BTC for every transaction? Why should "dust" be charged any differently to "bullion"?

I propose this notation, with something like a dropdown menu "UNIT OF BTC TO SEND". It would be easier than counting zeros if someday 1 BTC = 1000 USD and I want to send 1 cent , 0.00001 BTC

1 BTC = 10 dBTC (deci bitcoin) = 100 cBTC (centiBTC) = 1000 mBTC (miliBTC) = 10E-6 µBTC

Who cares if the gold bars are real or fake?

I had often heard the conspiracy theories, but I had never realised there were so many aspects of the gold market that don't make sense.

It’s one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.

But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.

A recent discovery — in October of 2009 — has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the “big money” brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox — the US Treasury gold — that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an “m”) of gold bars are fake!

I'm afraid it's a bit early though.

(probably berried in the desert or in a forest)

What an awesome thread!  You guys have a ton of great ideas.  Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?  It's kind of like an anonymous amazon.com.  I don't think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff.  They basically use bitcoin and tor to broker anonymous transactions.  It's at http://tydgccykixpbu6uz.onion.  Those not familiar with Tor can go to silkroad420.wordpress.com for instructions on how to access the .onion site.

Let me know what you guys think

Who would want to sell stuff for a currency which is likely to rise in the long term? Oh yeah, everyone. So the two sides to this equation work in opposite directions.

The SHA-1 hashes are already listed on the front page, which can be accessed with HTTPS.

Yes, but the releases should just be PGP signed by Satoshi. Then there's no chance of third-party contamination.

Relying on HTTPS allows every certificate authority and their sub-authorities to break the authentication, even though bitcoin.org is self-signed. HTTPS should not be used for important authentication problems.

The more difficult (computationally) it is to solve a block, the harder it is to come up with an alternate block chain in a closed network.

Thus more computers to the network are always welcome as each new addition brings more integrity to the block chain. What I think is scary, though, is that there are people who join BitCoin for the sole purpose of generating coins, the oppurtunity to generate free money is always captivating. Understandably, the cost for generating coins against the electricity consumed to do so is actually counter productive.

After a while this would mean that the average joe who joined for free money will no longer be driven by this incentive, and think: "Forget this, why generate coins? What's the point?" So they go offline, and gradually more and more people drop off the list of contributors to making the block chain maintain its difficulty, making the difficulty easier again with smaller communities.

I suppose people, upon hearing that the difficulty lowered, would be brought back to BitCoin to try to beat a "second BitCoin rush"

All in all, difficulty is good defence against the block chain attackers.

It might be profitable if the $10,000/hour figure is correct. The attacker could clean out every Bitcoin-accepting site in existence, which is enough to make even several hours of attack time profitable.