I've had one generation with 20110204 on Fedora 14 Linux, with a 5870 card on SDK 2.1.

Even if you have only ever used one receiving address, the balance of your account will depend on multiple keys if you have made payments that return change (because those payments send the change to a new address).

Technically, you can find out the balance of an address, but it may not be as useful as you expect.

Somewhere over a thousand BTC. Bounties, fees for people who helped me with technical things, file downloads, advertising, pyramid scams, donations, exchange fees, tcatm's "hash for hire", etc.

Oh, and a fabulous Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar note that I'm going to frame. I think that's the only physical thing I've bought with BTC so far.

It's a long book, and the movie will need to omit a lot of it. So if you read the book first, you may be disappointed by the movie. Yet if you watch the movie first, the book will have so much more to offer when you read it.

Her previous novel, The Fountainhead, was about 60% the length and they tried to cram all of that into the movie. As a result, I found it disappointing because much of it was just talking too fast. But Atlas Shrugged is so long that they can't possibly try to fit it all into a movie.

An exploit was previously exposed in Bitcoin. The exploit was fixed, then the network selected and propagated the branch of the block chain that didn't suffer from the exploit. The value of bitcoins didn't appear to change as a result.

Anonymous might be very rough.

But OK David, if you or anyone else exposes a problem that could cause coin loss between now and the end of February, I'll pay a hundred bitcoins.

Here's how I think small amounts could be shown on the user interface, to minimise confusion:



The digits are grouped into milli-cents and micro-cents, and are shown smaller than the usual "bitcoins and bitcents".

The advantages of this scheme are that it preserves the familiar "dollar-and-cents" type notation with two digits after the decimal point, yet allows for all of the available precision to be displayed when needed. The groups of three digits help to make these amounts easier to read.

You don't even need to have your wallet online to receive a bitcoin. The signed transaction giving you the right to that coin gets sent to the whole network, so the network will know that the coin is yours to spend whenever you come back online. You only need access to the key at the time you spend the coin.

Yep, really. Two former giants battling to see who can make themselves irrelevant fastest.

A damn shame about Nokia. Nokia's N900 phone is a real Linux box with unrestricted root access, an X Terminal "out of the box", and even a control key on the keyboard. And it runs bitcoind very nicely. They apparently have one more Linux phone in the pipeline, then that's the end.

Enough talk.

The only sensible way forward is to:

1. Stop gambling
2. Do some work, or sell some stuff that you own
3. Start paying back people that you scammed

Once you start paying people back, you'll start to feel much better about yourself too.

At this point it would be more prudent to encourage individual white hat hackers to try to break it privately. I would contribute coin to that.

He's just one guy, you know. He might be travelling or something.

He has always been super-responsive in my experience. Also, he gives a strong impression of being in this business "for the long run" and looking after his business accordingly.

Cash transactions might make taxation impossible too. But in practise they don't.

No, sorry. There are only a fixed number of ads on each page.

But why not split your 900-word article into three 300-word articles? Just make sure that each part answers a question.

For example, if you have a 900-word article about "Why is Linux better than Windows?", split that into: "Why is Linux more secure than Windows?", "How do Linux office apps compare with their Windows equivalents?" and "Why do people write software for Linux when it is free?".

My N900 phone has a full Linux stack, so no problem.

Actually, there is a problem. Today Nokia announced that they're abandoning open source for Windows Mobile 7.

OK, let's say for the sake of the discussion that those figures are correct.

On that basis, the most favorable design decision would be to set the default fee to zero, but make it very easy for users to change the default so that people can push "real" transactions past the spam when attackers unleash a flood of transactions.

Casascius, let me return to your first post from this thread:


Wealth is not created by moving money through an exchange. Wealth is created in the productive economy outside of the exchange. (Well, actually the percentage fee charged by the exchange is part of the productive economy, but that's beside the point.) So it is not the case that a 10 cent change in the price changes the value of the whole Bitcoin economy.

What the exchange rate provides is an approximation of the perceived value of the items being traded. It's an approximation because it only reflects the value as perceived by those who are carrying out the exchange. Nevertheless, it's a data point that can be useful for some purposes.

In addition, the bitcoin exchange rate depends on what the traders think will be the future value of the productive bitcoin economy, based on the time preference of the individuals carrying out the trade.

So if the "real" value of the bitcoin economy doesn't come from the exchange, but is just approximately reflected by the exchange, where does it come from?

Sure, some of that value comes from people who are trading in bitcoin today. There are some people using Bitcoin to pay for ads, tips, servers, hosting, Amazon purchases, gambling, porn, auctions etc. But the level of direct trade is not enough to account for the bitcoin exchange rate.

There are also a lot of Bitcoin-related assets being created. Every piece of software written to handle bitcoin transactions; every new service being designed and implemented; every new idea being tried out; these things are all building assets that can provide a bitcoin income in the future. And that's where the rest of the value comes from.

No doubt 90% of the Bitcoin business assets that are now being created will eventually fail. But some of the remaining 10% may become spectacularly successful. It's a "wild west frontier zone" for people who want to try out new and interesting business models.

When someone trades bitcoins, they (perhaps subconsciously) take into account many factors including the current level of the bitcoin economy, the potential future level, the psychology of others, and their own psychology (e.g. time preference and adversity to risk).

Every trade has a buyer and seller. So every time someone buys bitcoins (because they guess that the bitcoins will be worth more to them than the dollars), someone else is selling bitcoins (because they guess that the dollars will be worth more to them than the bitcoins).

Therefore the rising price of bitcoin on the exchanges doesn't mean that Bitcoin is a "sure bet". It just means that for the two people conducting that trade the agreed price is somewhere between the two people's estimation of the value.

Well exactly. I don't know what you're imagining, but I just said "some retirement income", I didn't say I'd be able to retire on them alone. I also didn't say "major" investment; you made that up.

Sure, the price of a bitcoin varies a lot in the short term. So don't worry about the short term price, just look at the long term price trend.

There's no way to make the short term price more stable while Bitcoin is in its early phase. As you've pointed out, the short-term price fluctuations don't mean very much, so why worry about them?

Yes, that's fine for the productive sector, but it doesn't apply when the central bank issues money.

The reason it doesn't work is that there's no central bank equivalent of "A buys apples from B", i.e. "Central Bank buys things produced by the bank it lent the money to".

If the central bank creates a million dollars from nothing, lends it to a bank, and requires that the bank pay back a million dollars plus interest, then the money supply is reduced after the loan has been paid back with interest.

He argues this way: "Yes, obviously taxation is theft, but here are some reasons why it's good theft."