It's sad to think that this code is probably going to rot somewhere, when it could be put to good use.

Maybe the community could pool money to open-source it?

That would be a great project indeed, unfortunately I don't have the time or energy to do it myself. But if somebody does it, I will definitely use it and promote it.

You can't trade bets, right? If not, it's not as good as a prediction market, because the trading rate directly gives you a real-time estimate of the probability of the event.

Is there a generalist bitcoin prediction market somewhere? Prediction markets are an awesome way to aggregate information, and seem like a perfect match for bitcoin. There used to be something called BitcoinFuture, but it seems dead. Any other projects?

Thanks!

Just to be clear, this is a perfectly acceptable answer to me! I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.

Well, I suppose you've given it a lot of thought already. But I still have a hard time believing downloading the block chain and creating an index requires all that disk hammering. On my computer, the .bitcoin directory is 1.6GB big. It's big, but not that big. It even fits in the memory of most computers! How can building it require hammering the disk for hours?

Thanks for your answer. I do have version 0.6x

I wonder if the database commits are simply too close to each other? The blockchain is public information and can always be redownloaded in the even of a crash, there is really no reason to write to the disk several times per second to secure it.

I'm using bitcoin-qt on Arch linux, and catching up from a long time ago. I've noticed that the hard disk is working very hard all the time. It seems pretty fishy to me, since I'm downloading from a pretty slow DSL line, the disk should be working far less than that. What is going on?

Thanks for the answer. And it does seem like a lot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_DSA

I've been thinking, since all transactions are public, the balance associated with all public addresses is known. So an attacker could in theory concentrate all his computing power to try to find the private key associated to a single wealthy address.

How much computing power would be needed?

Check out the mt. gox one instead, with more trades, I think it is easier to understand:

http://sd-12155.dedibox.fr/~joel/btc/mtgox.png

I also have this new one, which is probably harder to understand but more useful as it automatically groups nearby trades:

http://sd-12155.dedibox.fr/~joel/btc/mtgox2.png

You need to zip it along with all the other files in the archive and create a new .gadget file. Other than that, no, there is nothing special to do. But the windows gadget system is very buggy, so you could be out of luck, sorry :-/

Thanks. My price is 100 millies or 0.1 BTC. Do you agree?

Unfortunately this other paper doesn't have the particular detail I'm interested in 

I got what I wanted, this offer is no longer open


100 millies to the first person to send me the PDF of the following paper:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811909006168

thanks!

I'm glad!

The problem as far as I understand it is that miners get to decide whether they include a transaction in a block, and they can decide this entirely arbitraly. Of course, transaction fees should be an incentive to include transactions in their block, but nothing forces them to do so.

@BTCrow : you need to document yourself before posting...

Use mine instead

http://sd-12155.dedibox.fr/~joel/btc/tradehill.png

Not that flat actually

Also, one added benefit of this change would be that it would probably reduce the load of the server, which seems to be a bit overwhelmed