Just change:
in the main.h file on your client to:
You'll also have to change:
To:
In the rpc.cpp file.

Now your max coins are 50,000,000.  Of course, you need to do this to everyone's client.  The question isn't why can't we, the question is why should we?

Very little of the cargo lost at sea is ever recovered:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles02/article1070.shtml

The fact that the gold still exists is no different from the fact that the Bitcoins still exist.  They're both just very, very difficult to actually recover.

While there may be, why bother?  This one is working quite well.  In fact, people coming to Bitcoins today have a better experience then those that came on Thursday of last week, because they can enter the market at a lower price.  No one is saying it can't be done, we're arguing that it isn't a problem.


The "artificial limit" issue has been dealt with.  Move the decimal.  This has the same impact to the economy as a stock split, we've been using those for a very long time, and they allow for predictable growth of the commodity.  Bitcoin can use the same philosophy and just issue a "split" by having the entire network move the decimal one place to the right.  Now there are 210,000,000 coins in the network.


This is different from an IPO stock how?  You seem hung up on this concept of "fair", but have not shown why the current system is unfair.  You can get "your hands on" whatever size of the Bitcoin market you are able to afford at a given point in time.  

The best way to ensure a "fair" environment is to Mine solo.  I assume you're doing so?  That way your hashing power cannot become "corrupted".


How did you replace my client?  I'm under no compulsion to upgrade my client.  Also the client source is open.  You can have it inspected to make sure that this "overtaking" isn't present in the code before you run it.  All of the clients are backwards compatible.  So you could still be running the very first client if you so chose.  This isn't Microsoft or Apple, this is an open source project.  Review away.

I actually think removing all the transaction fees in the client is a bad idea for consumers.  Here's the reason:

If the fee isn't hard coded into the client, then the consumer using the client will probably set it to 0 not understanding how Bitcoins really works.  Those transaction fees are paid to the miners in the block that they are confirming.  Transactions with higher fees are given priority for confirmation over transactions without fees.  So, if the average consumer sets their transaction fee to 0, their transaction will have low priority to be confirmed, they will wait and wait for their transaction to be confirmed and get frustrated with Bitcoins as a result.

Hardcoding the fee allows for those new consumers to actually be handled with some expediency, thus giving them a more positive outcome.

Everyone agrees the fee needed to be lowered when Bitcoins were $30.  Now they're back to $10 again, do we raise it again?  (Obviously not)  We just let the fee be hardcoded at the new 0.005 rate and see how it stabilizes. 

You don't get stability from making lots of changes in a short period of time.

You can't destroy bitcoins either.  You can only lose them.  Ask the Spanish if they ever lost gold...


You don't need to reprint bitcoins, they still exist, they are simply lost to the person who owned them.  This is no different from gold.  It's also no different from paper currency.  Paper currency wears out, is reprinted, and put back into circulation.  In a perfect world, worn out currency is found at the US Treasury and taken out of circulation, and newly printed money put back out in its place.

However, if you have $1000 in cash and it is all lost in a house fire and there are no pieces left unburned, and you don't have insurance, then you've lost that money and it is removed from the economy.  When the US Treasury prints more money, they don't send it to you to replace the currency you lost in a fire.  Same with bitcoins.  You lose them, they're gone, to you.

I agree.  Throughout time, the early adopters took the risks and if successful, reaped the rewards.

Guess what else isn't "fairly distributed":
Facebook stock.
LinkedIn stock.
Apple stock.
Gold.
The US Dollar.

All of them are, and will continue to be, distributed based on your ability to generate new ideas, and wealth.  You can buy gold, it's just expensive.  You can earn dollars, it just requires work.

How is that ANY different than Bitcoins?  Yep, the first people that mined them got them cheap and easy.  The founders of Apple also got all that Apple Stock to themselves.  That's so unfair.   

You're supposed to give every entity you do business with a different address.  As such, the only transaction history they have is the history of that address, which today they have anyhow.

Can they see that you also sent coins from that address to another one?  Sure.  Does that tell them anything?  No.

A public address can be tied to you.
A private address (one that was never published or listed anywhere) cannot be tied to you irrefutably.

If someone sees coins going from a public address to a private address, that private address will be listed in the block chain as receiving the coins.

However, there's no way to tied that private address to you.  You could easily state that you were conducting a private transaction with a 3rd party who shared the address with you in private.

You can further obfuscate your private address by sending between your private addresses multiple times to multiple private addresses.

Sure, these show up in the block chain, but they cannot be tied to a single individual indisputably.  You have to rely on guess work.

Forensically, unless I can get a hold of your wallet.dat, I cannot prove that the addresses in question are yours.  

I'd be more worried about someone writing a virus for Windows that just emails the attacker your wallet.dat file, deleting it from the local hard drive as it goes.  Then the attacker has your coins, you don't.

Still for sale at the current BTC rates.

Did you mention HOW the current block-chain would be taken over?

The only way this can happen is for a single individual (or group in collusion) to own more than 50% of the hashing power of the network, as that is the only way that forged blocks can be added to the legitimate block chain.

Even if that happens, it only gives you the power to double-spend your coins, as you can put new transactions in the block and then verify them yourself.

However, you have to also then decide which is more profitable, double spending your own coins, or making more, as with 51% of the hashing power of the network, you're also reaping 51% of the bitcoins being produced by adding legitimate blocks to the block chain if you stay legitimate.

Forged blocks can also be identified by the community by looking at previous blocks and showing that the coins were in fact spent twice.  That will invalidate your impartial status, and will most likely result in the loss of miners to your pool, which will drop it below 50% of the hashing power of the network.

Also, new pools will also constantly come online, offering better reward methods to miners, which will result in miners leaving more established pools, thus further distributing the hashing power of the network.

By making the suggestion to have the "work" being done be more "useful", you have essentially shown that you haven't taken the time to read and learn about *what* is actually being done by the mining rigs.

The problem is that the "work" is actually calculating the hashes in order to find a block, above a certain difficulty, that can be added to the block chain.  In order to plug into another parallel computing project, you'd have to find a way to make it still add to the Bitcoin block chain in order to continue to verify the transactions in those blocks. 

That would most likely require the parallel computing project to work with the Bitcoin project and divvy up the work for the project so that we solve a block for them, they solve a block for us. 

Unfortunately, they're probably not going to cooperate, and it would mess with the Bitcoin economy, because now you're artificially changing the time it takes to find blocks.  Not to mention all of the work it will take to make the protocols and "work units" interoperable.

It's just not practical.  Mining takes resources, because it's supposed to take resources.  Mining isn't supposed to be "free".

Unfortunately, there is no "they" that can change it.  It's built into the protocol and the clients.
You can't easily "tune" it to make changes to the global environment, nor would you want to, as you'd open yourself up for abuse.

Still for sale at the current BTC rates...

Well, of course today it's only a $530 used iPad.  Guess you just has to wait a week to buy.

I'd love to help moderate.  I've got "lots" of posts, even though I'm relatively new to the scene, I think I'd be a great addition to assist with newcomers.  I've also been trying to "report to moderator" some of the more egregious Troll posts here, so I apologize if I created a lot of work for you.

I applaud your acting swiftly to get this issue under control and prevent the boards from becoming flooded with haters.

Everything about it is fine for starting, however, if you're going to want to add additional graphics cards, you'll need a bigger PSU.

Otherwise, you lucked out, because you picked a decent mining video card in that ATI.

No, it's natural.  It is still a limited resource and follows the EXACT SAME availability curve as bitcoins.
Lots available and coming into the market at first, then it gets harder and harder to find, and more expensive to find, until it eventually flatlines and only trickles into the market.

There will be a point at which no more gold can be found.  The only difference is that we can predict when this will happen with bitcoins and we cannot predict when it will happen with Gold.

So, if no one knew that there was a limit on the number of bitcoins, would we still be having this conversation?

Oh yea, that limit will not be reached for another 22 years.  Why don't we get there and see where we are, rather than predicting we're not going to make it because someday we'll be there.

No one serious is using an nVidia to mine.  There's no point, nVidia's blow at mining compared to ATI cards of the same cost.

SHA256 is an Integer operation, which ATI cards excel at doing.
nVidia cards are better at floating point operations, which mapping polygons on a screen requires lots of...

Basically, neither of those cards are great at mining.

I have to second that request.

The problem is you don't want to stifle the legitimate newcomers to Bitcoin, because we want the community to grow.  However, with anything that garners attention, you get scammers and trolls.

We could also use some additional moderators to get rid of Reported posts.

Here's a few mods that may help:

Here's a mod that could be added to allow moderators to dock post count for spam posts (reported).
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1007

This one would allow members to ignore other members:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2118

This one would allow "Time Online" to measure a Member's Rank, instead of just Post Count.  This could be VERY useful, because it would force new users to read and be involved, but they wouldn't be able to post until they had been on the boards long enough:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1915

Any CPU that will boot your MoBo is fine, mining rigs don't use the CPU much.