The only problem is what happens to people who have bitcoin stashes they can't access for long periods of time? If you have bitcoins hiding away for, say, ~30 years, and everyone else switches over to the new BTC2 or what have you during that time, won't your coins be left on an old, unused defunct blockchain that nobody even keeps anymore?

Don't you just love the fact that Bitcoin isn't just theory but it's an actual real ongoing experiment which is going disprove all these ridiculous fallacies and meet these boneheads who believe in them with reality?  

Nevertheless, what it really shows is that socially sovereign currencies are viable, and could be created as a tool of the countereconomy, though this may require a different ruleset for its functioning. so that true 'social' peer to peer values can be integrated in the design of future 'post-Bitcoin' currencies.

I'll probably go to this conference. Sounds great.

Regarding topics and speakers I'd love some meaningfull discussion of debt-money in relation to bitcoin. In particular, because of the recent tend of exchanges offering redeemable codes (i.e. promise-to-pay bitcoin) -supposedly backed by real bitcoins (for now).

The parallels between this and the early gold standard strike me as highly problematic. For instance, the bitcoin protocol might limit the bitcoins to 21 million, but there is no limit to the amount of promise-to-pay codes issued on top of the real bitcoins. (fractional reserve)

Why is this good -or bad- and how will this effect the future of bitcoin?

But the money is trifling amounts, like, fractions of cents...which is why it's ok. If it was anything more, it'd be a bank and a destroyer-of-anonymity to some extent.

Bitcoins are just encrypted codes, you own them and nobody can take them from you.
And because there is an agreement to limit their number to 21,000,000 you can't lose them through inflation as well.

A useful function of Stratum would be to pass around those endorsing signatures so that a client can quickly determine which is the most recent pre-compiled "block chain digest" that enjoys the overwhelming majority of community support.

I used my Phone-a-Friend and Ask the Audience, and I'm locking in BIP 16 as my Final Answer (follow the link if you don't get the stale pop culture reference).

The rich already have their swiss bank accounts, tax consultancy services, good investment opportunities etc. Bitcoin offers nothing for them.

Don't be sad-- it hasn't been wasted at all. Most of the work was making multisignature transactions work properly, the OP_EVAL part was a small amount of code (which becomes an even smaller amount of code under the new PayToScriptHash scheme, which is one of the reasons I like it).

And re: new cycle of coding/testing/etc taking 3 more months:  I'm going to propose slipping the schedule by two weeks, which means a "network is fully validating the new transaction types" of Feb 15 instead of Feb 1.

OT's latest version (with smart contracts) comes with a sample script that does a two-way trade between Alice and Bob. Arbitrated escrow isn't much more -- I'll work up a script tonight and check it into github. (This was on my list for today already, in fact.)  Here's what I'm thinking:

The existing sample script takes X units of currency A from Alice and Y units of currency B from Bob. If both are successful, then it gives Alice's money to Bob, and gives Bob's money to Alice. (They are atomic, success or failure.)

The new contract will introduce a third party: the arbitrator. This will be a real escrow contract, which assumes there is some offline sale happening (ex. You are sending a guitar to someone in another state...) The contract must include the precondition and the postcondition. After the parties have signed the contract and activated it, X funds from Alice will be stashed inside the contract for 30 days, and then automatically transferred to Bob. If, during that 30 day period, Alice decides that Bob has not shipped her the guitar, she can trigger the dispute clause, which sends notices to Bob and the Arbitrator. She must send her evidence when she does this. After this, the funds will remain stashed in the contract for another 7 days, awaiting a Decision from the Arbitrator. If the arbitrator does not respond in X days, then the money goes back to Alice automatically. Otherwise the arbitrator may trigger a clause deciding the matter one way or the other. Some arbitration fee will be listed in the contract, along with any additional fee should Dispute() be triggered. There will also be clauses allowing the arbitrator to query Bob and Alice for additional information. Calling these will add a day or two to the 7 day timeout period.

You will be able to test the contract on your own machine, or use the OT test server to play around with it. If you have any thoughts on the above, please let me know so I can work them into the script.

-FT

Ripple denominated in Bitcoin. Settle your debts with actual coin, or transfer your debt via a credit you have with a mutual friend.

Beautiful.