Only this aberrant transaction and coins generated after it in the block chain will be removed. All other transactions will continue to exist.


It's included.

This could be a serious problem. Bitcoin's printblock also shows it:

It's only different because you are capable of sending to a public key instead of a hash, since the full public key is in your wallet. Normally you don't have the full public key, so you must send it to a hash. There's no technical reason why you couldn't send self-transactions to a hash -- Bitcoin just doesn't. You don't need to extend the protocol at all to deal with this (the confirmation stuff you mentioned isn't necessary).

Transfers to yourself are the same as transfers by IP address, so it was probably thought that this type of transfer would "blend in". No one uses IP transfers, though. (And no one should because they're insecure.)

Not much anonymity would be gained if this was fixed. You can't do proper "internal mixing" unless you have the ability to choose which coins you want to send to yourself.

Most transactions are not "rolled back" when two chains recombine. Transactions in the shorter chain get put back into the transaction pool, and will eventually appear in a block. Generations would normally be the only transactions removed, which is why they are treated specially.

Blocks are used to verify transactions. For example, Bitcoin Market requires two confirmations. If a block takes two hours to make, then it would take four hours to put Bitcoins into Bitcoin Market. This would not be good.

When people start adding transaction fees, the value of the current block will steadily rise until it is solved. If this gets very high, everyone will attempt to "win the jackpot". The market will solve the problem.

Botnets will probably be supporting Bitcoin in the future, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

Don't send coins from one address to a different one on the same computer. This actually reduces your anonymity because it combines several different coins (some of which, such as generations, might be pretty anonymous). It's also obvious what you're doing because Bitcoin makes a special transaction when you send coins to yourself: it includes the full public key for the destination instead of the hashed public key used in normal transactions.

Right now, the best way to make your balance anonymous is to use MyBitcoin through Tor. MyBitcoin (presumably) pools all of its customers' balances, so it acts a bit like one of the external mixing services I described in the OP. However, unless they modified Bitcoin, they keep logs of every transaction, so they could identify you if they had to. It's like using a web proxy that keeps logs.

If I really wanted to make an anonymous transaction, this is what I would do:
- Send entire transaction amount to a new MyBitcoin account as a lump sum.
- Set up a brand new (empty) Bitcoin installation using Tor.
- Every day, withdraw 5% of the transaction amount to the new installation. Bonus points: add some randomization to the amount of Bitcoins you withdraw and the time between doing it.
- Finally, send the transaction from the new installation

I doubt you'll ever be traced after doing this unless you're doing something really illegal. If you want more anonymity, you can:
- Send fewer coins from MyBitcoin to your new installation over a longer period of time.
- Also add Vekja (another service like MyBitcoin). This is like chaining encrypted proxies: both will need to be compromised for you to be identified.

MyBitcoin and Vekja don't act like "true" external mixing services because they don't try to mix balances. If you're transferring a lot of money in this way, you're likely to get back most of your own coins, which would greatly reduce your anonymity.

That should be capitalized because you are referring to the Bitcoin network. Similarly, "Just Google it" is capitalized when referring specifically to the Google search engine.

These rules are all very trivial and unimportant, of course, but following all of English's ridiculous capitalization rules is a bit of a hobby of mine.  

I am inclined to expand on the adjective usage and use "x Bitcoins." However, the FAQ uses, "1,300,000 bitcoins." If the FAQ is an official source of information, then I would always copy its usage. The FAQ also uses, "new Bitcoins," though, which seems a bit contradictory. Satoshi has used both ways on the forum.

There is precedence for your usage: the Costa Rican colón is based on someone's name, but is written in lowercase. Costa Rica is a Spanish-speaking country, though, so maybe this one example was only inherited from their non-English usage. Do you know of an actual grammar rule for this case? I looked through the Chicago Manual of Style, but I could not find any rules for a case like this.

Hopefully Satoshi or sirius-m will say which usage is correct. Until then, I think I'll use "[0-9]+ bitcoins" as the only lowercase usage of the word.

1) Yes. I've been constantly generating since around January.

2) Yes.

4) Yes. Many.

5) Generating is still profitable, even on my ancient computers. Bitcoin uses $0.25 per day in electricity, but I will make on average $0.60 in Bitcoins per day (and I actually value Bitcoins more than the market price). Even if it wasn't profitable, I need a running bitcoind, and I might as well have it helping the network.

"Bitcoin" should always be capitalized, as it is a proper noun.


I would say "appreciates", but this might be a difference between US/UK English.


I would say "efforts".


Spelling: neutrality.
Internet needs to be capitalized.
(Also, I for one am opposed to net neutrality legislation.)


The system is called Bitcoin, not Bitcoins.


In addition to many other useful properties, Bitcoin has extremely low transaction fees and is hard to produce and fake.

systems

which are often...


Members of the Bitcoin community have recognized the interest worldwide governments have in keeping their monetary monopoly. Their resulting actions could be a possible threat to the growing Bitcoin economy.

As such,

would like to donate some of our goods -- cryptocurrency bitcoins -- to you.

Combined, this is X Bitcoins, which are worth X USD in total.


The EFF is free to convert the Bitcoins to other currencies, buy goods and services with the Bitcoins, or simply do nothing with them at all. The members of the Bitcoin community hope that the EFF will put the donation to good use.

It's done as a right bitwise shift (of a 64-bit integer). The reward will go from 0.00000001 to 0. Then no more coins will be created. The maximum number of coins is 20,999,999.9769.

If Satoshi starts enforcing a maximum transaction fee (as he's mentioned) and the limit is too low, no one who is generating for profit will "upgrade".

Changing any parameters in a way that reduces profit for generators would have the same result, I think.


I agree. The current economics are perfect, and it would be very difficult for anyone (even Satoshi) to make a major change.

The decision-making process of the future will be dominated by the organizations that provide the backbone of block generation. If they don't like a change in the code, they'll refuse to upgrade but will still keep 50%+ of the CPU power. A major dispute between bitcoin.org and the backbone would lead to a serious fork.

There isn't. Good idea, though -- there would be a single change address in almost all cases.

Transactions are usually from many different addresses (maybe hundreds), so you can't show them in the "all transactions" list.

Returning a payment to one of these addresses would be confusing, since they would see a payment going to an address they created for some one-time thing months ago or whatever. They'd have no way of knowing it was from you. The client could be modified to detect this, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" is an alias, since he speaks perfect English and I haven't seen anything else from him (though I haven't really looked).

Here's my attempt at "how Bitcoin works". It might be better just to skip the complex block chain system.

Bitcoin transfers are very simple: the software announces that you are transferring coins from your "account" to someone else. To prove that you actually own that account, you create a "digital signature" using a special mathematical algorithm. The signing algorithm used in Bitcoin is a US government standard that is considered completely secure.

Digital signing alone might allow someone to send the same coins twice, so Bitcoin uses a unique "block chain" mechanism to securely record the order of transactions. A subset of Bitcoin users have their software configured to constantly compete against all other such users to solve a very difficult computational problem. Whoever solves the problem first publishes a "block" of data containing all recent transactions. Blocks also include (what amounts to) a copy of the last block, which makes a "chain" of all blocks ever created.

Changing anything in a block invalidates the computational problem that allowed the block to be created: an attacker would have to re-do the problem of that block to make any changes. Plus, since the next block has a copy of the block (and that block appears in the next block, etc.) and only the longest chain of blocks is considered valid, an attacker would also have to re-do all future blocks in the block chain, as well. And they'd have to do all of this faster than the rest of the network, since legitimate clients only add new blocks onto the longest chain.

I think you "simplified" too much. There are a few cases where you lied about something when first talking about it, then changed it a little later; this is very confusing.

Don't try to explain how public-key cryptography works. Just say what its properties are.


Change this to, "Every user stores (1) their personal public private key pairs...". Using "wallet" at this point is just confusing.

"Dealing with Dishonesty" explains the effects of the block chain OK, but you skip incentives. Also, generating nodes don't "work together" -- they're all working on their own separate problems and competing for the winning block. The block chain is the real innovation of Bitcoin, so I would devote a lot of time to that topic.