A lot of wrong information.  Your right it is the protocol which prevents more than 21M coins however the mechanics are all wrong.

1) Mining will always continue.  The day mining stops is the day Bitcoin is dead.
2) Difficulty rises based on hashpower but that has nothing to do with the subsidy.
3) The block subsidy began at 50 BTC and is cut in half ever 210,000 blocks (regardless of hashpower or difficulty)
4) Difficulty can never get so high it is impossible to mine a block.  If difficulty is too high the time between blocks will increase and thus difficulty will go down.

TL/DR
The subsidy cut is what caps the number of BTC.
Difficulty is used to keep the average time between blocks constant.

In the long run even if Bitcoin kept a continual 50 BTC block subsidy the inflation would fall to ~0%.  It would be effectively deflationary.   It wouldn't attract Keynesian.  Sadly Keynesian honestly believe it is absolutely essential for central banks to do what the Federal Reserve is right now.  Magic trillions upon trillions of new dollars and flood them into the economy to end the recession.  They don't think the fed is doing a bad job.  So unless you have a crypto-currency where an elected board of miners can arbitrarily add as much coins as they see fit they wouldn't be happy.  If the fed oversaw bitcoin right now seeing massive price increase of BTC:USD exchange rate they wouldn't bump the block reward to a pathetic 50 BTC?  Are you kidding me?  Maybe 500 BTC or maybe even a brief period of 50,000 BTC per block.


If the supply is "fixed" (as in the money supply can't be manipulated by those who "know best") it isn't ever going to be attractive to Keynesians.  Monetary policy (which is a nice way of saying manipulation) is a cornerstone of that school of thought.  

For the record those aren't tanks.  They are Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (or Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle if you are in the CAV).

Could a govt 51% or 99% Bitcoin ... sure. However that would simply move crypto-currencies to even better protected alt-coins.  Necessity is the mother of all invention.  As we all know the take down of Napster ending p2p filesharing forever ...

Please tell me after the first compromise you threw away that entire wallet and started fresh?

If not the attacker didn't need to hack anything.  After the first attempt he had a copy of your wallet.  He just waited for you to put funds into it and stole it.  Once attacker has the wallet = has the private keys he doesn't even need access to the website anymore.  If you put more coins in there, once the attacker notices them he will transfer them out.  100 years from now he could still steal coins.

If your wallet is compromised, it is compromised.  Period.  You should assume all private keys connected to that wallet are totally and completely compromised.  Move funds out of the wallet (if any).  Destroy all copies and start fresh.

Well luckily over half the coins are already mined and difficulty keeps the supply controlled regardless of how much hashing power is thrown at it.

That is a crash?

The VWAP (24hr) is ~$152.  Not sure a 2.6% move off the average is a "crash" in any market much less Bitcoin.

No thanks just glad the service is more secure now.

Nope.  It just needs to be much much much bigger.

Compare a chart of BTC, Silver, and Gold.

BTC is $1.5B in total valuation.
Silver is ~$30B in total valuation.
Gold is $7,000B in total valuation.

There has never been a small low volatility open market.  Not once, not ever.  It just isn't going to happen.  More adoption, more services, more merchants all make the market larger.  With larger markets come more market depth. When BTC is valued at ~$30B I would expect to see it have volatility similar to silver (still pretty volatile compared to major currencies but significantly less than it is now).  When it takes $50M to move the price 10% the price probably won't move 10% as often.

The goal of some to have a ultra-tiny valuation and low volatility is just a pipe dream.   It won't happen ... ever.

It doesn't matter how your account was compromised.  The funds have been withdrawn by BTC.  They are irreversible you have lost the full amount.  I know it is tough medicine but in the future use 2FA to protect financial sites (banks, paypal, exchanges, eWallets, etc).

To any noob reading ... if you don't have 2FA activated on your account there is a very good chance this will be you in the future.  Look at the like Stephen compiled and those are just recent ones and probably less than a third of the ones reported. 

USE 2FA.  If you don't and your computer is compromised to a 0-day vulnerability you will be like the OP (who BTW has 0.0000% chance of getting funds back).  Long passwords don't protect you from trojans and phishing attempts.   When setting up 2FA I set it up to only require it for security center and withdrawals.  That makes logins easy and protects against CSRF attacks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery

Nice improvement.  Bitcoin enables provable systems.  Provably fair gambling.  Provably secure generated addresses.   Always good to take advantage of what Bitcoin enables.  Also good for you.  Someday in the future if one of your clients gets hacked, you never having the private key provides deniability.

No the house edge/advantage never changes (unless the rules change).  That is why it is called the "edge".  Might be a good idea to research your own industry?

Once again it is a red flag when you are unsure of the mathematics of your own industry.

The method you are using is insecure.  You will know the private keys and thus can access funds at anytime.  Potential buyers should be aware of this.  It is possible to produce vanity addresses in a manner where you don't know the private key do a little reading and you will find the topic on it.

I would be reluctant to invest in a casino where the operator confuses house edge with variance. 

Loan to increase working capital and reduce risk of ruin = makes sense.
Loan because you are suffering from negative house edge = makes no sense.

Now for Joe Public to confuse those concepts it understandable but for someone running a gaming business to make that kind of mistakes it is somewhat scary.

It does reduce the UXTO however the problem is current rules don't give an individual an incentive to do so.

As far as spendability.  Not really.  You are simply paying the fee now vs potentially paying a fee in the future.  Depending on other inputs, coin age etc it is possible the min mandatory fee will be lower or non-existent in the future.

There is no need to consolidate a wallet before upgrading the client.  It serves no purpose.  The issue is that the critical resource in the blockchain is space (not value).  Your wallet likely has a huge number of very small transactions (dust).  The wallet will pick inputs for the tx in an attempt to minimize fees.  As you send more and more that means the tx gets larger and larger (size not value).  Eventually you hit a point where all that is left is spammy garbage inputs (like hundreds of 0.00000001 BTC).

A couple thoughts:
a) there is no need, value, or reason to "consolidate" a wallet.
b) try to avoid engaging in "spammy" tx.  If you mine then make your payouts from the pool larger (i.e. get one 0.1 BTC payout a day instead of 10 0.01 BTC payouts). 
c) Add some more coins to your wallet.  Due to the way that Bitcoin works having more funds than you need to the wallet means on average you are going to pay less in fees (client can pick larger inputs, and smaller inputs become older reducing required fees).

Confirmed receipt of code.  Nice trade.   

I think there is a massive misunderstanding about how Bitcoin works.   You can't change Bitcoin.  Ever.  All you can do is fork it.  As long as single user is running the current Bitcoin code the network will still exist.  So the best you can hope is that such a massive supermajority of USERS (not miners but users, exchanges, merchants, bitcoin holders, developers, service providers, etc) jump to your fork that the existing fork simply dies off.

There is no voting.  There is no mechanism to halt the existing (current) fork.  There is nothing miners can do to fork the current blockchain to stop.  So Bitcoin as it exists today will always exist if people want to use it.  Now could a fork of Bitcoin becomes more popular than Bitcoin well it certainly is possible but it would have to compete on its own merits not through some dubious "democratic" process or by decree from a cartel of miners.  If Bitcoin2 is superior then it may replace Bitcoin, if it isn't then it likely will die out.


As an example say you think blocks should have a reward of 100 BTC and never decline to expand the monetary base.  You can change this TODAY (this very second).  No you don't need anyone permission, no you don't need to hold a global vote, no you don't need 51% (or 66% or 99.9%) of miners.   Fork the project, distribute your new client and start mining.  Your "newBitcoin" is now incompatible with the rest of the network.  If you send some "newBitcoin" coins generated from future blocks to MtGox, MtGox won't "see" them.  That is because they are looking at the current fork.  Convince MtGox to use your fork and they will see them.

TL/DR
You can't change Bitcoin.  Not today, not ever.  All you can do is fork it.
When you fork Bitcoin the current Bitcoin will exist. 
People are free to use either fork.
You can't force the existing/current fork to stop. 
Unless your fork has overwhelming support it is unlikely it will get any traction over the existing and well implemented current fork.

Yes against a collision attack the effective strength is 2^160.  However it is possible the security of ECDSA will be degraded in the future.  Asymetrical encryption historically has been more vulnerable to cryptoanalysis than hashing functions.  So say in 2020 a defect is found in ECDSA which recudes the effective key strength to only 218 bits.   While we should look towards migrating to stronger addresses types in the futue it would be of only academic value in the short term.

Say on the other hand, Satoshi used 160 bit ECDSA keypair and a flaw is discovered which weakens it to 118 bits.  Still a lot of hashes but you are getting close to what is theoretically possible to attack.  If the flaw was critical and further analysis weakened 160bit ECDSA down to 80 bits you are in brute force range especially with a custom ASIC processor.

TL/DR using a larger keypair provides a level of insurance against marginal degradation in the security of ECDSA but your right the effective key strength is the min of all crypotgraphic primitives.

Yes it is an open standand.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238

Google Authenticator is just one (possibly the best known) implementation of RFC6238.

There are numerous libraries available.

Essentially it is just a HMAC hash of a seed and current time.  No communication between server and the "token" is necessary.  The site (say MtGox) generates a random seed value and displays it as a QR code (or it could display it numerically).  The TOTP software is loaded with the seed.  Now both the site and TOTP device will generate the same code as long as they are using the same time.  When you enter TOTP value the site will lookup your seed (which is stored securely) and genrate the TOTP and compare it to what you provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_Algorithm