On mtgox it was a rolling 24hr volume and I think that has become standard with bitcoin volume info.

PM coming.

I would put some fraction of my coins in a thing like this. I think I have good security, but there is no reason for all my btc eggs to be in one basket, maybe I've overlooked something after all.

The api is up.

http://firstbits.com/api/?a=1kk5k

Can't promise it'll stay if it gets overused though, be gentle.

You could post bounties for kitten torturing and baby eating though.

Pray it gets delayed for the 9th time?

The thing that 'stops' fractional reserve backing is called 'going out of business'. The problem is that banks who would fail are magically saved with our money instead of failing and allowing more responsible banks to win customers. It's to the point now that you have to participate in the way overboard fractional reserve plus insurance scheme to get permission to operate at all.

Now to be clear, with BItcoin, you can have unbacked balances at a Bitcoin bank denominated in Bitcoin, but you can't actually have the extra Bitcoins in your client at the same time like you can in a dollar bank. The base money is strictly limited with Bitcoin, but not with the dollar. If dollar banks have to give people their dollars simultaneously they are printed.

Target is what matters and difficulty is it's inverse. I think difficulty is stored somewhere, but the precise meaning has actually changed over versions. For actual block checking you look to see if it's hash is below target, difficulty is not used for that.

That's right.

A reorg could cause problems. Likely the problem would be a simple "not found" at worst, but if screwing up people's firstbits was the point of the attack someone could slip a different one in earlier. This is not protected against now. One way would be not counting an address as "in" the chain until 6 or 10 blocks or something and refusing to return an address until then, probably better is a simple warning that the address is near the tip of the chain. Or even less obtrusive would be to watch for a reorg and only warn when one recently happened.

This is implemented.

http://firstbits.com/1kk5k

It's a real issue imo. Pool operators should have the right incentive to fix it, it's them who are going to get waterboarded until they give up the codes to change the blocks to work on.

I get that they don't want to give up the size and profits, but there are still things they could do. If you have good rep and software people will come to you and you can assign them to a subpool over which you don't have direct control, but can stop assigning people too if they suck (downtime, weird rules, etc). Subpool operators can take a slice of profit and give part to the main portal.

Oh, there is the set up where individuals set their own work. Iirc correctly that is a bulletproof system.

Will people prefer your product that breaks fast or mine that lasts longer?

If there was a way to stop convertibility to any particular thing it suggests something very wrong, but ignoring that, I do get some value from knowing I can get my local currency for them and so I would hold fewer if I couldn't. Otoh, other people might then undervalue them and I could get more for the same cost so maybe I would have extra.

edit: It really doesn't matter though since you could buy the easiest to convert stuff, it just adds a hassle.

Crystal ball or not they obviously don't know how long stuff takes them. Since they don't know they could stop saying that they do. The way they are doing it is worse than saying they just don't know.

You generally get the best price on the most active trading sites, the fees are negligible. With MtGox via Dwolla you are looking at 25 cents and 0.3% right now.

I think that's in the Patriot Act.

There is not AN exchange rate. Are you going to measure it relative to some currency that could die? What if all exchangers going from USD to BTC are murdered by the government and so ZLT exchanges are used? Likely in the future there will be regulated and unregulated exchanges with slightly different prices due to difficulty/risk of arbitrage. Or simply different prices because of different fees and methods of payment.

n/m

Can we get some price graphs on other things that people thought were money that turned out to be ponzi schemes? I'd like to compare.

A transaction isn't that sort of thing, it would be like "yellow submarine" by the Beatles not arriving. You could just send it again, it's a bit of data.