Overstock has just sent this email to over 41 millions people in the US! Can you think about a better ad? In the link, the FULL article!

http://www.overstock.com/80786/static.html?ehid=EF916438FE97B21EE040010A249C4B4A

Dear Valued Customer,
Enclosed, please find the Wired Magazine article, "Meet Patrick Byrne: Bitcoin Messiah, CEO of Overstock, Scourge of Wall Street". It concerns the decade-long battle Overstock has waged to expose Wall Street mischief.
The backstory is as follows: Overstock went public in 2002. Between 2002 and 2005 I found myself mingling with various Wall Street bankers, hedge funds, and journalists, and began to form an impression (and hear) of unsavory activity. I made it my hobby to study it, and in 2005 I went public about what I had learned. For several years thereafter, the New York financial press derided and distorted my claims, often to the point of appearing to engage in a cover-up. When in 2008 what I had been saying became indisputable, Wall Street went silent about this episode. The enclosed Wired article recounts that history, and explains how it is related to Overstock's recent decision to accept Bitcoin.
I understand that you may not be interested in tales of corruption in Wall Street and Washington, DC, and if so, please simply enjoy the coupon above. However, if you read this piece from Wired, which effectively ends a cover-up regarding the Battle of Overstock versus Wall Street, I think you will understand why I chose to share this article with 41.7 million of my closest friends.
Your humble servant,
Patrick M. Byrne, CEO
"Scourge of Wall Street"

I think they are talking about faucet type websites.  My assumption is that they would like to be able to filter out those incentive driven sites to make sure their ads are being seen by people who might actually be interested in paying for products/services.

Even as someone who runs a faucet that uses your site to advertise, I see value in this, since I might eventually place ads on sites that aren't faucets and it would be nice to make sure I'm getting meaningful views.

Edit:  I realize that we decide where we want ads to be displayed, but I guess for lazy people it might be nice to not have to visit every site we're thinking about placing an ad on.

I've been thinking about a way to mitigate lending risk through an expanding web of m-of-n transactions and historical analysis. I think it will work, but will still require collateral. Why not offer collateral to be used by someone that needs it? If you have a time-share, a sports car, or maybe a boat, it can be lent out to someone that is part of a collateralized lending web of trust. This is similar to other ideas out there, but the main difference is that removes some of the trust. Open Transactions might be a good way to implement this.

Step 1. Install Ubuntu on your USB drive or create a ubuntu live CD
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto

Step 2. Boot into Ubuntu

Step 3. Go to https://www.bitaddress.org/ and click "GitHub Repository".  It will take you to https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org Click the "Download ZIP" link to download the source code for bitaddress.org

Step 4. Disconnect from the internet

Step 5. Extract the zip file (its in your download's folder). Open the folder and open the index.html file.

Step 6. Generate random entropy by mouse movements.

Step 7. Generate BIP38 encrypted paper wallets from the "Paper Wallet" tab. Create as many as you need, print them out on paper. Copy the encrypted private keys to thumb drives if you want to. Then reboot the computer.

Hi Gang,

I have 2 Bitcoin that I need to store securely, it doesn't have to be tinfoil hat proof just safe....

I have 1 Laptop and 2 USB sticks that I can use... I am semi noob at this so I need help

Any advice?...

So...
BTC will remain decentralised. We need to find a method to regulate it to an extent which will only expand its use and acceptance.

BTC is here to stay... We just need to find a way of improving it!

Any suggestions?

P.S I'm half asleep so I haven't managed to include all aspects and give either argument to its full. My sincere apologies.

My question is, what if all of a sudden a big crisis occurs like a dollar collapse and millions will buy bitcoin all at once.
Can the current bitcoin infrastructure handle the sudden amount of transactions?
I fear that bitcoin will collapse because people will see that it takes months to do a simple transaction because of the overload.

So to handle the overload we will need to increase block size limit, but will it be healthy/possible to increase block size limit in a few orders of magnitudes, in a short period of time, without ruining the decentralization of bitcoin?

I am afraid that we need our lousy economy to last a few more years until bitcoin is strong enough.

Sure, why not?

1) Multi-coin wallet clients will finally be released into the wild, though they may be more centralized approaches than would be ideal for security and privacy. Alt-coin prices will soar.

2) Exchanges will largely be replaced by p2p and ATMs. ATMs will run their own federated exchanges, solely using current market price. Various trading options may still exist to speculate, but I see them becoming toys for the ultra-wealthy only.

3) Bitcoin-like networks will see significant, though maybe not widespread, use as a notary system, competing with email and un-notarized paper as the de facto way to record mundane p2p contracts.

4) Node centralization will become a major concern, both due to bandwidth/connection bottlenecks and security and privacy risks, and we'll probably be trying to figure out a solution to this well after negative events occur due to the issue. The Bitcoin Foundation or similar may be sending out free physical blockchain copies to anyone who asks.

5) Widespread, explicit discounts by companies for users paying in BTC. 3-5%, at least.

6) Bitpay will eat everyone's breakfast, possibly becoming The Crypto Company if the payment processing space isn't adequately competed in. Bitpay will have the money to finally implement some of the more ambitious ideas like hybrid crypto-fiat debit cards. Bitpay will be largely responsible for the crypto revolution, I believe.

7) Increased skepticism and outright opposition by government officials, and lobbyists for existing infrastructure explicitly attempting to undermine cryptocurrency. We'll see more major markets ban bitcoin transactions and exchanges outright.

8 ) Fracturing of QT project, and eventual decay into irrelevancy as developers move on to other clients and are not competently replaced. Formal organization of protocol development which will look like various protocol alliances we see in other industries... for better or worse, the protocol's fate will be in the hands of relevant corporations. This may end up being a defining moment, possibly causing exodus from Bitcoin itself into other coins with separate protocols.

9) Heavy development in the mixing/anonymization sector of cryptocurrency. All major clients will support cheaper, heavily-mixed transactions.

10) BTC price = $2500-6000 (nobody will use "bitcoin" to price bitcoin, with ksat being the most common unit of measurement)
10a) $10-1000 if major fracturing occurs due to ideological dispute over protocol development

It would be almost trivial to implement— just bundle it, if nothing else. But I suspect the ship has already sailed for this.

We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to.  The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool— who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't— who has a financial interest to the tune of— say— >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people— including you— overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.

Never mind that the question of parties with large hashpower using it to harm other Bitcoin users is not hypothetical, as its recently been done— achieved huge profits in the process— and seems to have resulted in no negative consequences for the involved pool, just a lot of victim blaming, and some months delayed promises that the responsible parties have been sacked.

Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.

In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.

If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread— then I think progress could be made. Otherwise?  ::shrugs::

[I don't even intend to suggest intentional misconduct due to the monetary interest, only: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."]

For instance, would running behind Tor protect me?