I don't think this will be as straightforward as you may expect. Although an incoming payment (to a receiving address) can be linked to an account, from that point onwards the account balances have no connection to specific private keys.

Therefore the phrase "an account's private keys" doesn't have any meaning in the current implementation.

Maybe he got spooked by what happened to Julian Assange, and has changed his persona.

Whoever pays for the forum hosting, makes the rules. We are guests in his forum. Other people can (and will) open fora with different rules. How can this be controversial?

Talkinrock has a great idea: vinyls of the gold-coin image.

These could be used for viral marketing. Flood an area with them (on billboards, shop windows etc), then people will become curious and will start talking about these mysterious "B" coins. Then, when someone works it out, the news will spread by word of mouth like wildfire.

You can always skip the spray paint and use the stencil for reverse graffiti!

I wonder what would happen if the value of Bitcoins rises so quickly that someone's MtGox balance increases in value by more than $1000 per day. They will never be able to get the value out!

The analogous problem would be if you needed to pay interest on the generated bundles of 50 BTC. Eventually the interest payments on each bundle would exceed 50 BTC and the system would collapse (for lack of coins with which to pay the interest).

It's not an issue for regular Bitcoin loans, because the money doesn't enter or leave the Bitcoin economy, it just transfers to different people. You could charge 100 BTC interest on every 50 BTC loan, and the system would not collapse, no matter how many such loans you made (provided the loans didn't all mature at the same instant of time).

OpenCL HOWTO FOR FEDORA 14 LINUX

Here are some notes which may be useful to anyone who wishes to mine for bitcoins on Fedora 14 Linux. It's simpler than the instructions I posted for Fedora 12, because Bitcoin now supports the 'getwork' call and therefore doesn't need to be recompiled.

===

Check your software versions, and upgrade as necessary. The gcc compiler needs to be 4.x (for PyOpenCL), and Python needs to be 2.4 or newer (again, for PyOpenCL), but not Python 3.x.


You need to have either the full kernel source, or the kernel headers (because the ATI GPU driver is installed by compiling a kernel module). You also need the Python headers.


===

Update your display driver.

I followed the instructions from here:
http://gofedora.com/how-to-install-ati-catalyst-fglrx-98-drivers-fedora-11/
except that I used the version 11.1 11.2 of the ATI Catalyst Display Driver for Linux x86 from here:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.42&lang=English

Supposedly some of the installation steps are no longer needed with version 11.1, but I wasn't completely certain which ones, so I did them all anyway.

===

Get the ATI Stream SDK v2.1 (NOT any later version, according to brocktice), from here: http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/pages/ATIStreamSDK-Archive.aspx

You need two downloads from that page: the Linux SDK (32-bit or 64-bit according to your version of Linux), plus icd-registration.tgz

Untar the SDK anywhere convenient. Add these lines to your .bash_profile file (in your login directory):


These pathnames will vary slightly if you have a 32-bit Fedora installation.

Move icd-registration.tgz into your root directory and (as root) untar it from there. It puts some essential config files into /etc.

If you like, follow the documentation that is included in the SDK to compile the examples. Execute ati-stream-sdk-v2.1-lnx64/samples/opencl/bin/x86_64/CLInfo to check that things are working and that your GPU card is detected.

===

Install the Python OpenCL module (PyOpenCL). Broadly, follow the instructions here:
http://wiki.tiker.net/PyOpenCL/Installation/Linux

However, in step 2 I couldn't install the Numpy dependency this way. Instead I ran "System | Administration | Add/Remove Software", then searched for numpy and installed it.

In step 3, the OpenCL headers and libraries weren't found, so I had to use the longer configure.py example and provide explicit paths.

I don't think the "Boost C++" libraries are required for this version of PyOpenCL.

===

Install the JSON-RPC module for Python. This was straightforward using the instructions here:
http://json-rpc.org/wiki/python-json-rpc

===

Go to m0mchil's Git repository:
https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm

Click the "Download" button. Download and unpack these files anywhere convenient. Change poclbm.py to executable and check that it's working:


===

If you don't already have a file bitcoin.conf in your ~/.bitcoin directory, create one and put a username and password in it:


Go back to the bitcoin/bin/64 directory and start bitcoin in rpc server mode:


Go to the directory where you built poclbm.py and run it:


It will tell you which devices it can see. Choose the one that's not your CPU, and add that one to the command line with the "-d" switch:


Watch the khash/s figures with sweet delight, and enjoy the few moments before the roar of your GPU fan starts up.

Many thanks to m0mchil and the many others who have offered code or helpful tips.

(PS: If you upgrade your kernel, the ATI driver might hang on startup. If this happens, boot into runlevel 3, delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf , reboot and reinstall the ATI driver.)

Do you mean: "The central bank lends out money, then gets back the same amount plus interest. Where does the interest come from?"

It comes from an ongoing increase in the amount of money lent out by the central bank. This, of course, causes monetary inflation. The system can be regarded as lossless if we record the value of money at time "t+1" as less than the value of money at time "t". Then we get:

(P + I)issued [valued at time 't'] + (P + I)collected [valued at time 't+1"] = 0

Or, the amount owing by an insolvent bank could be written off:

(P + I)issued + (P + I)collected + (P+I)written-off = 0

Same for me.

If the time comes when it has becme impractical for a (non-well-paid) individual to process the block chain, this can only be because Bitcoin has become wildly successful, and that will have opened up millions of new niches for the Bitcoin hobbyist. Really cool things that haven't even been though of yet.

There is a perfect income opportunity for businesses that custom-assemble PCs.

The more reputable ones "burn in" these systems for 48 hours to check that everything is working properly. The "new" way to "burn in" a PC is to have it mining for those 48 hours. Suddenly the cut-throat custom PC business became more profitable!

+1 for miscegenation (I'm learning so many new words at this forum):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HHT_V294Co

If we could properly understand why the market settled on a particular price, then we would have enough knowledge that centrally planned economies would be successful. The 20th century answered that question dramatically.

A market aggregates the desires and value judgements of everyone who participates in the market. Unless you fully know all of those, you can't know why the market price is what it is.

So just decide what a bitcoin is worth to you, and buy or sell accordingly.

Any country with low government debt. There are even countries that have no debt and own sovereign wealth funds too.

If I wanted to hold fiat, I would consider Australian dollars. Central bank interest rates are not artificially low, at 4.5%. Government debt is tiny compared to the USA and Europe. There is plenty of land, and plenty of natural resources, for the population.

However, as is inevitably the case, the market has already priced this into the exchange rates, and the Australian dollar has risen enormously in recent years.

When the pool finds a block, it could pay out only for shares that were found in the last time "t", where "t" is 43% of 10 minutes (I think).

Because this is a sliding window, there is never an incentive for a miner to leave the pool at any particular time.

Yes. And it's easy to have multiple wallets for paper money, and it's cumbersome and error-prone to have multiple wallets for bitcoin.

Bitcoin's answer is that the "second spend" is the one that doesn't make it into the block chain accepted by the majority. Read Satoshi's paper to see how this works.

There are lots of things wrong with this.

Splitting the payment 50:50? So if I pay someone some bitcoins, any time I want I can take 50% of them back by spending them again?

Destroying the coins? If someone has already spent the coins twice, the spender is the one laughing and only the recipients lose if the coins are destroyed.

In any case I doubt there's a practical way to implement it. If the majority of the network knows about the double-spend attempt, it has rejected the second spend anyway. If the majority of the network doesn't know about the double-spend attempt, it can't do anything in response to it.

The "No, never" option should really say "Not yet".