Re: paper wallets : if you leave them with other people, shouldn't you encrypt them? At one point I had a copy of a paper wallet I stored remotely, and I manually encrypted the key. My nerdy solution was to take the ANSI codes of the characters of the privkey and add the ANSI codes for characters from a password I chose to each character. Password looped because it wasn't as long as the key. Printed out the resulting sequence of numbers along with an explanation of how the addding worked. Didn't encrypt the first character of the privkey since that's a known number and would slightly weaken the security.

You can probably come up with something simpler...

Trouble is, stability increases utility, which increases value.

The only thing the current subsidised cost-per-transaction shows is that the vast majority of mining profits come from block rewards, with hashrate mainly supported by a steep appreciation in BTC valuation and, presumably, an expectation of similar price trends to continue into the future. The current subsidy-corrected tx cost has hardly anything to do with actual network usage, and is ridiculously high no matter what the optimal use case for BTC ends up being. Unless you can propose a use case where 10% demurrage of wealth yearly is acceptable.

Of course, no true gentleman would go around discussing things as crass as money in the first place.

I don't have time to for a proper reply right now, so I'll just settle for two points : 
-If the miners decide transactions you call abuse make sense for them to include in blocks, why does this bother  you?
-of your numbered points, #2 is obviously wrong. Security in this context is measured as cost to attack vs. potential profit, yes?It follows that as BTC valuation, and therefore the value stored on the network, goes up, you must correspondingly increase spending, in fiat terms, on mining to maintain the same level of security. By this view, it's the BTC cost of mining that is relevant.

A nudge to get investors to take riskier bets than they otherwise would.

Tx validation becomes more energy-efficient.

I'm confused. I thought you previously argued for small blocks and not worrying about scaling so much? Isn't it kind of clear that at 3-ish tx per second, Bitcoin won't be used for small payments like this as the fees will have to grow rather a lot higher than they are now?

Currently the (subsidized) cost per tx is about 7 USD. It's pretty clear miners are being paid too much at the moment, their income will have to come down in the future for Bitcoin to be viable. So if you assume the cost comes down from 10% of value stored annually to 2% or so, the cost per tx is still 1.4 USD, and that's extrapolating from the current situation where there's not that much competition for blockspace. Now, you can still cram some more tx into 1 MB blocks than we currently have, but then again that should also create competition for tx inclusion, so more tx currently is more likely to raise fees than lower them.

If tx per second doesn't rise and you can still send 1 USD cheaper than PayPal in a few years time, that means hardly anyone actually uses Bitcoin.

Government adoption of BTC seems unlikely enough without considering Satoshi's coins. But for anyone using Bitcoin, the way things are now is about the worst possible, given the initial condition of Satoshi having mined a huge stash in the early days.

What we could have:
-Satoshi is still around, doesn't say what he intends to do with the coins.
-Satoshi says he intends never to use them
-Satoshi says he does intend to use them, and outlines how
-Satoshi starts dumping his coins
-Satoshi destroys his coins in a provable fashion

and what we have now:
-Someone who may or may not be Satoshi may or may not control the coins, and may or may not do something that may or may not be hugely disruptive with them.

Uncertainty is the problem here. It can't get much more uncertain than it is now.

doge up over 90% in the last 24 hours. Totally sustainable growth, I'm sure.

Don't amateurs mainly hash for pools? It seems hard to believe there's any significant hashrate operated by hobbyists who actually run their own bitcoind for mining.

No-one, since there is no such thing currently. You can push transactions out with whatever fee you wish, including 0. Wallets will usually recommend a fee though, how that fee is decided is presumably decided by the developers of the wallet in question. Miners, in turn, choose what fees, if any, they require for their services. You might say it's a fee market.

I'd say we don't know if it's high or not, and protocol decisions shouldn't be made based on opinions on market pricing. Low-fee transactions aren't any better a design goal than high-fee transactions if reaching that goal requires developers to start intervening in free price discovery.

What I'm getting at: Better efficiency is a great goal, and would lead to a lower unit price for transactions, obviously. Trying to fix prices outside the market is a bad goal.

Hardly. The potential gain for Bitfinex would have been ([stop execution price] - [average buy price for position closed]) * 6 BTC. Since matthecat says he was looking to scalp a move on the order of 10 usd, I think it's pretty clear we're talking a maximum of a few hundred USD at the very most here.

You realize, matthecat, that what you're saying is that Bitfinex has painted a bullseye on you, specifically. Obviously there are bigger fish to fry out there if they're stop-hunting on their own exchange. Surely even when you got stopped out, there must have been bigger orders that could have gotten the same treatment. So why did they go after you?

Is it that you have the mark of death on you? Or is it that you're just seeing things that aren't there?

Wait, miners can choose for themselves what kinds of transactions and how many of them they deem economical to include in blocks??

Sorry. I'm having a hard time avoiding the snark in me here. I guess I see why this has all blown up so badly... If only belittling others could be used to secure the blockchain!

This. TX volume is relevant to speculation, total output not so much.

Maybe this was sarcasm, I'd have to read more from the previous discussion to tell.

In case it's not: It shouldn't be surprising mining is becoming more centralized, seeing as Bitcoin appears to have been designed with that expectation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

" The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."
('generating' being what mining was called way back,)

So yeah. From that, it seems if you want highly decentralized mining, you should take a hard look at whether Bitcoin is suitable to your purposes.

I read the Reddit thread, and was left unable to decide whether the Chinese source was a factual account or biased spin. I can't verify for myself since I don't unfortunately read Chinese.

Wirdum's tweet seems more clear but who is this guy? Is this someone who goes out of their way to check their sources or someone who posts firsts, asks questions later?

Excuse me for being skeptical here, but how many times have we gotten worked up about what "China" is doing here only to find out later nothing much happened after all?

The answer to your question of attacking one of the chains seems to be valid, still.