i think what Hangers might be saying is that without bitcoins he wouldn't have earned any bitcoins.  very meta.  very correct.  +1

reopen a few of the difficulty bets and leave betting open for longer. think "bitpick 6" timeframe. i think this serves a better bitcoin social good than betting on sports (which always seems to be available).  many of us are looking for a hedge tool or a speculator's tool when-- if widely used-- will dampen the volatility in dealing with bitcoins.

miners out there must be able to invest their capital for longer periods of time, but fluctuations in difficulty make the investment too volatile.  eg what if difficulty doesn't go anywhere by Jan 2011?  if they could hedge their exposure to difficulty by betting against increases, more miners would join the game for longer periods of time.

of course in that case, most of the action on the difficulty betting will be hedges for difficulties to be Over X amount.  i guess your sportsbook will determine if there are any Under bettors out there.

why did you choose to close the year-end wager?  i'm interested in betting on this, plus I think it represents a nice hedge for bitcoin miners.

my two myoobitz-- i think the cart is well ahead of the horse in this discussion. 

0.089 ebay USD/BTC vs 0.089 mtgox USD/BTC.

To any arbitrageur lurking in the forums.  If you have a USD balance within Mtgox, i think you should

1) sell 1000 ebay bitcoins and collect 89 ebay dollars today
2) invest 89 dollars today in an interest bearing account for 180 days
3) use 89 of your non-withdrawable-for-180-days mtgox dollars to buy 1000 bitcoins

The interest rates in this arbitrage may be low, but the idea is the same: mtgox dollars are not withdrawable, so mtgox bitcoins should be trading at a premium to regular bitcoins.  If mtgox dollars suddenly are withdrawable via paypal or a new solution, then mtgox bitcoins should trade at the same price as regular bitcoins.  Or more accurately, if expectations shift to reflect that mtgox dollars will be immediately withdrawable, then mtgox bitcoins should trade at the same price as regular bitcoins.

can you reduce the precision of the exchange rate to only a few decimal places?  tip sent.

"I get my paypal money from doing tarot card readings on the phone"

ahh-- so you're the one using paypal to steal people's money.

i'm sorry, i wasn't very clear.  As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million, I would like to know why Satoshi chose to call for an end to generation of bitcoins rather than continue generating a smaller and smaller amount.  I would think that we should asymptotically approach 21 million rather than just stop at 20,986,000 or whatever that number is.  Seems like 500 years from now there still should be generation of bitcoins, no matter how small the generations appear to us today.

1) if you entered the agreement with me right now, yes, i would sell 10,000 BTC for $6,000 at the time of the 100,000th block no matter what the price Mtgox (or any other exchange) showed at the time of the 100,000th block.

2) you would have to trust your counterparty to have the bitcoins at the time of the 100,000th block (this goes back to "perfect bitcoin credit" assumption in the original post).  I know of no good escrow service as of right now, so counterparty risk is certainly something to factor in.  also keep in mind my original post requests a market in only 1,000 BTC.

If bitcoins were infinitely divisible, why would you choose to cease generation of bitcoins at any point?

I will sell you 10,000 BTC for $6,000 on the date of the 100,000 block if you wish.

I would rather call this a forward rate agreement than a future.

Currently Mtgox is showing a spot currency exchange rate of .064 $/BTC.  I don't think that this will be the rate at the 100,000th block.  I don't think anyone else believes this, either.  So let's start with the easy question:

when will the 100,000th block occur, roughly?

Trust is never binary.

A trusts B 99% of the time
A trusts C 99% of the time
B trusts D 99% of the time
C trusts D 99% of the time
Do we know if B trusts C and vice versa?
If not then

A trusts D = min(AB*BD,AC*CD) = 0.99 * 0.99 = 0.9801

i am .0605 bid on mtgox for 15,000 if anyone wants the arbitrage

Consider a bitcoin release in the future where a block can only be generated by proof-of-murder.  difficulty increases logarithmically, so this seems reasonable. 

Bitcoin Faucet 2.0 it sounds like.  i'm in.

reviving this post.  anyone want to try creating the article in Russian? Пожалуйста, создайте статью.  or maybe that catalan speaker is around and he can start an article.  wikipedia articles are key to credibility, so i'm not letting this go.  and where are the french?  the swiss?  the germans?  let's go, people.

I'm not asking him to do it, he said he could do it.  he already declined the bet and put the issue to bed.

And yes, i am .03 bid for 1,000,000 bitcoins.

i appreciate your unwillingness to step into that pile of legal dogpoo.  i love the TAABL as it is.  i'm just looking for a market solution to the answer "how many dollars does it cost to generate a bitcoin?" and i think the type of lottery i'm describing would answer it.

the host of the lottery i'm suggesting would offer, say, 1,000 of his own BTC.  doesn't matter where the host got it from.  he's just the host.  tickets would be sold in dollars to willing customers.  the host could even require that a minimum number of tickets, or revenue in USD for that matter, be generated before continuing with the lottery.

Consider this-- bitcoin generation (the classic kind) is a lottery of sorts where the price of the ticket is the fixed cost of the hardware and software plus the electricity to generate X khash/sec.  Currently this price is measured in dollars and the winner of the "lottery" is rewarded in 50 bitcoins.

I know it's not in the spirit of bitcoinery (?), but what about designing a real lottery similar to TAABL where tickets are bought using dollars and the winner of the lottery is rewarded in bitcoins?  

If I'm thinking about this correctly, if you designed the rules of the jackpot correctly, the price of tickets for a 50 BTC payout should converge toward the cost of generating a block minus the edge paid to the house.