...which will make it more profitable to generate bitcoins again, so round and round we go.

If anyone feels like preparing the graphs, it would be interesting to see bitcoin price plotted against the forum stats: new topics, new posts, new members and most online.

Suppose you want to export all your generated coins to another wallet, while keeping them pristine (i.e. without a transaction history).

Lots of people lost their internet access, as various methods of access went down and up. But landlines kept working, didn't they? At a pinch, major Bitcoin merchants could dialup to an overseas ISP in a crisis if they needed to.

But there's a big difference between losing internet access (even if a whole country loses it), and retaining access within a country but being partitioned from the rest of the world.

That alphabet is "all over Google" because it's the one that Flickr uses. But if you search for "base 58" bitcoin then the correct variation will be "all over Google".

Better still, ask the source code for the authoritative answer:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/base58.h

Another thought. If currencies are easy to create, the scarcity or currencies is not there, but people will still consider "quality of currency".

Probably the "hardest to create" currency will be perceived as having the highest quality (if all else is equal). If Bitcoin already has a huge proof of work behind it, it's going to become increasingly difficult for any new currency to catch up with the proof of work and match Bitcoin's difficulty of creation.

The "scarcity of currencies" is an interesting concept, but it's amenable to the marketplace.

If bitcoin is a good currency, those who are using Bitcoin have nothing to fear from anyone who starts up a competitive but inferior currency.

Even if the competitive currency is roughly equivalent, Bitcoin has first-mover advantage and won't easily be shaken from its position.

But if the competitive currency is significantly and unambiguously better then, yes, Bitcoin will lose value. This would be painful for those who had adopted Bitcoin, but in the long run it means we get an even better currency.

I think Bitcoin is "good enough" that it will not be unseated by an upstart. I'm not worried. But I still won't spend all my money buying bitcoins.

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On a slightly different angle, consider that gold has not been unseated from its monetary role, even though there are an almost limitless number of other things that could replace it.

If gold became unusable as a store of value, e.g. due to a cheap way being found to extract the gold atoms that are in seawater), we could use other metals, or rare old postage stamps, or dinosaur bone fragments, etc. But hardly anyone is doing that now, even though those things have value.

Security firms review closed source software all the time (e.g. viruses), but it involves reverse engineering, takes a huge amount of time, and costs a lot of money.

For most people it won't be possible to avoid running at least some closed source software that has access to wallet.dat. Even on Linux, few people are running a "whiter than white" distribution. Most people have at least some closed source drivers and codecs on their system.

Effectively securing wallet.dat is really difficult for the non-technical Bitcoin user.

Firstly, most people think a total severance is practically impossible. There would have to be no radio communication link, nor wire or optical fiber link, nor sneakernet or avian carrier link. It's hard to imagine a disaster that would disable every last link.

If the network does get severed for a few days, then later rejoined, one of the block chains will be accepted by the majority and the other block chain will be rejected. The transactions on the rejected block chain are temporarily lost, but will normally be re-broadcast and eventually incorporated into the accepted block chain.

Any coins generated on the rejected block chain during the separation will be lost forever, even if they have been spent to someone else in the meantime.

This forum doesn't send any emails (despite hints to the contrary in the user interface). You'll need to find other ways to follow it (e.g. by the "Recent Unread Posts" link).

A symbol like this needs to be suitable for handwriting, like the "@" sign, but it's hard to do this with "b". Try it and you'll see what I mean.

It's pretty hard to test a closed-source application. It might work perfectly, but might contain code that changes its behavior at some future date.

You can test more thoroughly by disassembling the binary and working out what it does, but that's seriously time-consuming and wouldn't be practical for apps like this one.

As it happens, this one did (accidentally) include the source code. So a business could have charged a fee to certify it as safe or unsafe.

I hear this all the time, but I don't understand it.

There's a free exchange market between dollars and Euros. So if Iran sells oil for dollars and immediately exchanges those for Euros, how is that any different from Iran selling oil for Euros directly? (Apart from the currency exchange costs, of course).

Lobby your government to remove the restrictions on small businesses starting up a bank, and you'll soon see innovative banking models built around the needs of bitcoiners. It will happen anyway, but it will take longer in the current regulatory environment (which is designed to protect the big players at the expense of the public, while being sold to the public as the opposite).

An expansionary phase is inevitable with the bootstrapping of any new currency. There's no other way to do it.

A fairly safe assumption is that the growth in the number of users will exceed the monetary inflation during the early "bootstrapping" years. There is controlled and fairly predictable monetary inflation, but probably not price inflation.

This reminds me of a few months ago when the total value of the generated bitcoins first passed $1 million. Some guy commented that even his uncle's house was worth more than $1 million.

The total value is now $5 million. I guess that guy's uncle's house might even be worth $5 million. It just shows how tiny the whole bitcoin economy is, relative to its potential. It has a long way to go yet.

I think the biggest boost to Bitcoin's value will come when inflation starts to skyrocket and the "man in the street" gets scared for his financial future.

Your scheme doesn't protect against someone else generating the same key at a later time, so it doesn't guarantee uniqueness.

Indeed.

David, look at it this way. On the one hand, there is a possibility that someone could hack one bitcoin address if everyone in the world tried for a trillion years. On the other hand, just today someone lost bitcoins because of a backup tool that stole his bitcoin wallet.

Which is the bigger threat to bitcoin's success?

The other problem with banning "illegal goods" will arise if Bitcoin itself becomes illegal. But in the meantime, I think Sirius' policy is workable.

Exactly. The system must be probabalistic because there is no central key store. But so what?

If quantum computing becomes practical, we can switch to quantum keys and spend our existing wallets to one of those newfangled keys.

Suppose each of the 7 billion people in the world has 1000 unspent addresses. On average you would need to try more than 10³⁵ addresses to find each spendable one. Suppose you can check a million addresses per second, this is going to take you more than 10²¹ years.

If everyone in the world is trying to crack this at the same time, it will still take around 10¹² years. And when someone finally cracks it, after paying the electricity bill for 10¹² years, they might be disappointed to find that the key unlocks just 0.05 BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. Even if it's ten million bitcoins, it's not going to pay the electricity bill for 7 billion computers running for a trillion years.