The developers and in fact the entire community have failed you and lots of other people. This and the investment scams are the two biggest problems facing Bitcoin right now.

I agree, and yet that's what happens. Such is the absurdity of Ponzi schemes and the way they turn large numbers of otherwise intelligent people into irrational morons.

Why wouldn't this apply equally to everyone who deposited money with Pirate? If we can assume that every reasonable person must have known it was a scam, then everyone who deposited money with Pirate was paying Pirate to steal money from others and give it to them.

Ponzi schemes make people irrational. Scammers know how to exploit that. I want people to learn a lesson rather than punishing them for being human.

In principle you can do it either way. If you're pulling from a mining pool, they expect you to try every nonce and may consider it abusive if you only try some of them.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if it seriously mystifies you how to increment a hexadecimal number, you have no business writing this kind of code. This is like asking how to add one to seven because "seven" contains a 'v'. How you choose to write a number to communicate with others has nothing to do with how you manipulate it internally. Whether I tell you the number is "seven", "7" or ". . . . . . .", you add one to it the same way. If this is at all mystifying to you, you really should start out with some *much* simpler coding tasks.

The same way you compare, say, 571 to 541. You start with the most significant unit and if they're the same, you keep going to less and less significant units until you find a difference. (The hundreds are the same, so try the tens. The tens are different, so the one with the higher tens place is bigger.) Same idea.

You have to try billions of nonces. Anything not dependent on the nonce should be done just once. You take over right where the nonce comes in, so you don't need anything processed prior to that. You're not going to go hashing all those things that never change for each of your 4 billion nonces. That would be awful.

That's a really silly blog post. The only meat to their complaint is that the letter includes both Github and Rackspace and the only thing they have in common is that Rackspace hosts Github. But the letter didn't claim any more than that. Rackspace, at least arguably, offers Github to the public. Rackspace profits from Github. Rackspace has the ability to police its customer's use of its services.

Weak sauce. At least cite the patent.

You don't need any of these but the nonce. The client will process these for you. And you have to find the nonce, if there is one, by trial and error.

You don't know how to add one to a number? Seriously?

You don't know how to compare two numbers to see which is greater?

The hash must be lower than the target.

When I get back what Castro took from my family in Cuba and when the Indians get back what the Europeans took from them in the United States, then I'll entertain your historic justice argument. Otherwise, I'd prefer to deal with the present reality.

A VAT is the least economically disruptive tax scheme I know of. But it's still pretty awful as a sole means of financing a welfare state. One of the biggest problems is that it dumps the entire compliance cost of the tax system on a fairly narrow subset of people. This is truly hellish on small business owners and makes it very hard for them to compete with larger businesses that have lower tax compliance costs.

I used to own a small retail business and I can tell you sales tax collection horror stories. For example, one month our payment to the State of California just didn't go through. The State said they just didn't get the payment and we must have entered something wrong. Our bank said the State rejected the payment though they processed it correctly. The upshot was that the State charged us various fines, penalties, and interest for not making the sales tax payment on time. It effectively wiped out the profits for that month. Now imagine instead of one of the two taxes that fund State and local government, it was the *only* tax that funded Federal and State governments. Ouchies.

The idea is that someone trying to overload the network will find his coins getting newer and newer while someone trying to get a legitimate transaction through will find his coins getting older and older. This will quickly allow the legitimate user to beat out the attacker and make it very hard for an attacker to clog out legitimate transactions for very long. This tradeoff reduces the average transaction fee a legitimate transaction needs to pay.

The point is that if government is funded primarily on land taxes, then land consumption will be distorted. So some rich guy will live on the land at a loss rather than a factory using it at a profit. That may be revenue neutral for the government, but it's definitely not neutral on its effect on the economy.

An ideal tax wouldn't significantly change how people live or how goods are manufactured. A tax on land alone would cause massive such changes. Huge amounts of innovation would senselessly go to minimizing land use just as it now goes to income tax avoidance strategies. Industrial processes that use less, or cheaper, land would be senselessly favored over superior processes that require more, or more expensive, land. Taxing one single good or type of good is pretty much the worst tax in terms of harm done to the economy per unit of revenue raised.

Download the client. Run the client. Let it download the block chain. Issue it a "getwork" RPC request. You now need to do a double SHA-256 using every possible 32-bit nonce, all 2^32 of them. Should you find a nonce that produces a hash less than the target, report that back to the client using a "getwork" RPC as soon as possible.

See this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12862.0

I'm a computer security person, and I don't trust myself to keep a significant amount of money in Bitcoins. It's just too difficult to balance making sure you can always access the coins no matter what might go wrong with making sure others can never access them no matter what might go wrong.

The problem with a land tax is that it promotes highly inefficient land usage. For example, if 100% of taxation were in the form of land taxes, products that required very little land to produce would be much less expensive than products that require a lot of land. A race to use less and less land could result in higher and higher tax rates leading to a vast waste of resources. Funding a sizeable government 100% with a land tax is a very bad idea and would result in massive economic inefficiency and distortion.

Ask yourself this question: If you could pay only half as much in taxes as you pay now, would you be willing to live in half as much space? I think most people would say yes. But as people do that, the tax base would go down, forcing the rate up, making the problem even worse.

Typically, this is what a user would want. The reason you opt to encrypt the wallet is to prevent someone from being able to get your coins without knowing the key to decrypt the wallet. It is generally understood that your coins are only assuredly protected if you backup your wallet after your last transaction.

However, I 100% firmly believe that non-deterministic wallets should be abandoned entirely as a failed experiment. Perhaps they should be left as an option with clear warnings about their problems.

People keep losing their money and it's getting ridiculous. One of the biggest problems with Bitcoin is it's damn near impossible to use it safely.

There are several ways to get around these "guarantees". For example, they could simply discontinue them -- the guarantee refers to the price, not the offer. Stock Generation had several similar guarantees, and they managed to get around all but one of them. Even if you think these guarantees are solid, as you point out they still permit them to take most of your money -- 75% simply by ending them.

Best of luck suing them. As I've pointed out over and over until I'm blue in the face, they never claimed your investment couldn't become worthless overnight simply because they decided to drop its value to zero. This is a Stock Generation style scam where the value of your investment is purely up to their whim. They raise the price arbitrarily to induce you to keep investing and reserve the right to reduce the price to zero any time they choose and keep all your money. This is what they *say* they'll do. And you guys still give them your money.

Yes, that's how every economy works. Everyone works for everyone else and everyone profits.

If you worry about this scenario, then a guaranteed basic income isn't the solution. If you can't exchange your basic income for food, what good would a basic income do you? I can't imagine any realistic situation in which people would need to worry about this, but if we ever get anywhere close to it, I'm sure the superior technology we'll have in that far distant future will make possible a solution you and I could never even dream of.

That's a big problem, IMO.

We have no idea why he asked for that information. I think the most likely scenario was that it was simply a stalling tactic. Since no payments were made even for PPT operators who complied, it's unlikely he ever intended to make payments.

First, it wouldn't remove those obligations. Pirate's belief to the contrary, if he had one, is mistaken. And it wouldn't be to Pirate's advantage except in the unlikely scenario where you repays a PPT operator, the PPT operator fails to repay the depositor, and that depositor goes after Pirate.

If the PPT operator is honest, the funds are only doubled. The tripling is locked on the books of the PPT operator.

Say I deposit 100 BTC with a PPT operator. I get a 100PPT coupon. The PPT operator deposits the 100 with Pirate. He gets a 100Pirate coupon. Pirate now gets the 100 BTC and circulates it. I have a 100PPT coupon I can circulate. Pirate has 100 BTC he can circulate. But the 100Pirate 'coupon' cannot circulate as the PPT operator must hold it so that he can pay to me any funds he gets from Pirate. In order for my 100PPT coupon to exist, the PPT operator must hold a 100Pirate coupon, so that's locked. It works the same way with banks and dollars and it's why loans double money rather than tripling it.

For what it's worth, I'm now personally convinced that BurtW was himself convinced that Pirate was not running a Ponzi scheme or similar scam. He's actually a good example of why I think most PPT operators deserve a "free pass" for the Pirate fiasco.

That may be bad business, but assuming it was actually hacked, that's not a scam. (Unless the contracts prohibits it.)

If a company raises more funds than it can spend, it should pay a dividend. However, if this affirmatively mislead investors into thinking the company was making a profit, that's a problem. (Were there statements accompanying these dividends?)

What were the funds raised supposed to do? Hire a programmer to work on it? Do we know if anyone was hired?

Each case alone seems pretty weak to me. However, all of them together combined with the lack of communication might be a different story.