Of course I agree with you, but 0.001 would be a workable default for now.

As I understand it, fees work like this:

• The client offers a maximum fee.
• The generator can choose to process the transaction or not. If it processes the transaction, it can charge any fee between zero and the limit specified by the client.
• The block must be accepted by the majority of the network for the fee payment to "stick".

Feel free to set me straight if there's more to it than that.

I don't think this is needed (contrary to what I suggested previously).

If a transaction uses more than 2 decimal places, show them all. For everything else, show 2 decimal places. The "Send Coins" dialog already doesn't use any specific number of places.

For ease of use, I would suggest that decimals after the first two are shown smaller. This keeps it intuitive for new users, because the main digits are more like "bitdollars and bitcents".

Of course, the fee structure would need to be adjusted in the client. There's no point allowing people to send 0.001 BTC if it's going to cost them 0.01 BTC with the fees.

Why not just have a maximum fee of 0.001 BTC for every transaction? Why should "dust" be charged any differently to "bullion"?

GoogCoin or ZyngaCoin would never have similar principles to bitcoin. Organizations like Google wouldn't see a problem with their currency being centrally controlled. Something like Bitcoin can only arise from the bottom-up, not from the top-down.

Google or Zynga could maybe succeed with the launch of a currency, but even for them it wouldn't be easy. In the UK, many people still remember the collapse of internet currencies such as Flooz and Beenz.

But then you have to write the passwords down, which kind of defeats the purpose. Sure, you can store them encrypted on your computer, but what about when you are travelling?

I use a fairly strong basic password, plus a rule to modify it for each site. This just gives me two things to remember: the password and the rule. The rule is not straightforward to apply, but I can do it in my head if I have to.

The only thing that messes this up is the occasional site that has some stupid password rule (e.g. no punctuation allowed).

This has the advantage that you can easily buy a large quantity without needing to enter lots of different bids.

Suppose there are asks at 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9, each offering to sell 10 BTC. You want to buy 50 BTC, and each BTC is worth 0.95 to you. You simply bid for 50 BTC at 0.95, and the system matches them up: you buy 10 at 0.6, 10 at 0.7, 10 at 0.8, 10 at 0.9, and your bid for the remaining ten at 0.95 stays on the order book.

If it didn't work that way, you'd end up paying 0.95 for all of the coins that you buy. No-one would want that, so they would need to enter separate bids at 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 and 0.95.

At this time, yes, every bitcoin app downloads its own copy of the full block chain.

This is not absolutely necessary. Several levels of optimization are available; it's just a "simple matter of programming".

In the future, big nodes (e.g. those operated by exchangers) will download the whole block chain, but the "average joe" will run a "bitcoin lite" that just downloads the data needed to support his own use of bitcoin.

Calculate your BTC income and expenditure. The difference between them is your BTC profit. Calculate your dollar income and expenditure. The difference between them is your dollar profit. On the last day of your tax year, work out the dollar-equivalent of your BTC profit, using a market rate (e.g. MtGox). Declare the total profit in dollars (most countries have a box near the end of the tax form for "other income").

The only problem is that you will need to pay tax to the government.

Don't forget to keep records of all your costs, including electricity for your computer, and heating/lighting for your home office.

When your business grows much bigger, you can afford to pay an accountant to tell you whether there are more profitable ways to structure your business. But at this point, your need is to get the business established.

Consider Vladimir's 1GHhash/sec contract at £1203 per 3 months. That's £13.22 or $21.36 per day. According to the generation calculator, you can expect to generate 45 BTC per day. Therefore, if you can sell your generated BTC for $0.48 or more, you are winning. At the current price (say, $0.65), you would make a profit of $7.89 per day.

Of course the generation difficulty is likely to increase every 10 days or so, and you will generate fewer coins per day as time goes on. If the price of bitcoins rises fast enough, the venture will continue to be profitable. Otherwise, it becomes a losing proposition. There is certainly a risk, but right now the numbers add up.

One reason to consider this service is if you want to generate, but don't want the noise in your house.

A question for people here: Did everyone who has the "united" transaction have a MtGox account name that is also a Forum username? Because it's easy enough to get a list of Forum names.

I have the "united" transaction, and my MtGox account name also happens to be a Forum username (although it's not 'ribuck').

Weak passwords are never safe. Mine is 71% according to the Password Meter, and I'll be improving it.

Rich kids are going to buy much more than 10k from MtGox. You'll know about it then!

No, that doesn't work. Instead of trying 100,000 passwords on one account, the attacker simply tries one password on 100,000 accounts. Same chance of success.

I had often heard the conspiracy theories, but I had never realised there were so many aspects of the gold market that don't make sense.

More details here, with references:
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14818.html

Even if the price did return to 0.55 (and it doesn't look like it will), that's still 10% higher than 24 hours ago, a big daily rise by any measure.

The Nystrom representation itself isn't stupid, but using it for Bitcoin is. It brings absolutely nothing worthwhile to Bitcoin.

One bitcoin is 100000000 units of bitdust, and the maximum number of bitcoins is 21000000, both of which are convenient decimal numbers. What's the point of having one Bong-Bitcoin equal to 42.94967296 BTC?

If you do want to count bitcoins in hexadecimal, you should simply use the equivalent number in base 16. For example, 255 BTC = 0xFF BTC.

It seems unlikely, because the hacker apparently sold bitcoins. This would have tended to lower the MtGox price, not raise it.

Yes, although in practice most people already compromise (almost) all accounts if they lose the password to their email account, due to the easy availability of password reminder/reset facilities.

A bank does need something more than most other sites. I would be happy to pay a fee to have two-factor authentication on my MtGox account.

Keep testnet as close as possible to the live system. It will sort itself out in a few weeks.

Create an additional block chain for those whose development needs require something other than what testnet provides.

Did you actually read the wiki page that you're describing as "cool"? This "Tonal Bitcoin" stuff is just stupid. "Bong-BitCoin" indeed!

I bought one of these notes. It arrived promptly, and was well-packaged. It's a great talking piece, and an introduction to a discussion about inflation which naturally leads to a discussion about Bitcoin.

Maybe someone had been short selling BTC, and had an end-of-the-month deadline by which they needed to deliver the BTC.

In any case, BTC is now trading significantly above $0.50, so although the $0.95 was presumably due to a single anomalous trader, I think there's also a genuine underlying upwards trend.