"Scrypt" or "Scrypt intentionally weakened by poor parameter selection by the authors of Litecoin".  You do no know that the parameters used in Litecoin make it about 14,000x less memory hard than even the low security (real-time) option recommended by the author of scrypt.  An LTC ASIC is more than possible and the scrypt whitepaper provides the analysis.  Litecoin "could" have been made highly ASIC (and GPU) resistant but wasn't.  The only question is ... why?

Um welcome to the 21st century they make graphics cards capable of powering 4,5,6+ monitors.  Still if your computer has no PCIe there is no point in upgrading.  Really the lifespan of GPU mining is probably very limited at this point as ASICs will eventually push them out the door so you likely aren't missing much.

there is a simpler way.  I can't remember it off the top of my head but there is a config flag which turns off pruning.

from your backup.  you have a backup right?

replace the wallet.dat in the bitcoind datadir with the backup you made.

Currency (i.e. Forex) trades pay taxes on their gains as well.

Simple version: if you profit from it the IRS wants a cut.  Now our tax code fills a small room so the rules get complex and there are long term capital gains, short term capital gains, special tax rates for dividends, rules for wash sales, limits on this, cutoffs of that, etc.  Simple version if you profited the IRS wants a cut.

You need money already on an exchange (preferably multiple exchanges) and you probably already need the buy order in place (i.e. if next week BTC is at $220 you have a ladder of buy limit orders at $175, $150, $125, $100, etc).  I was able to scoop up some but it was excruciating.  On Gox the average time between placing an order and executing for me was about 32 minutes.  bitfloor never lagged that badly but went offline at least two dozens times and getting market depth was hit or miss.

Now having money on the exchange has its own risk but nobody buying on the way up from $105 to $180 was using anything but reserve cash sitting on the exchanges and waiting.

Well written request DutchBrat.  The good news is Bloomberg doesn't want another company to move first so it is only a matter of when not if.  The more requests they get from existing clients the more likely it will get priority.

This.  Exactly.

For those who can't handle this concept here is a simple solution:
1) take the amount of bitcoin you are comforable seeing be worth nothing (yes absolutely nothing) someday
2) put the bitcoins from #1 on a paper wallet, multiple backups, safe storage, etc.
3) sell all the rest of your bitcoins
4) wait 10-20 years.

Tada the growth rate will be much more "managable" and with massively deeper markets the intraday volatility will be much lower.  Either that or Bitcoin will be worthless.  Still the problem is solved either way.


Those worrying about the rapid growth and volatility likely would be trying to plan the growth of the internet circa 1972.  "see we just connected the first two nodes.  We anticipate 100 new nodes to connect to this "internet" in the first year ......

WTF MAN?  100 nodes per year?  That is like 5000% growth rate.  BUBBLE, TULIPS, PARABOLA.   You internet idiots don't know anything about stability.  I going to do make my planned internet.  10% growth per year and minimal volatility.  By the year 2202 finally all 7 billion people on the planet will be connected to the planned-internet (although only 4000 in the first 30 years).  It will be a perfect no volatility line from 2 nodes up to the entire planet.

Which likely would have worked out better:
a) the chaotic explosive growth internet based on the free market.
b) the centrally planned internet based on a stability plan to minimize volatility and manage growth.

 

There are cryptographically strong methods of creating escrow contracts on blockchain, they just haven't been fully implemented yet.  Anything that escrows funds at the client level is doomed to fail.

If farts were made of Gold then we would all be rich!

PayPal policies make any exchange that accepts it a bankrupt exchange in a matter of months (if not days).  It isn't going to happen.  Sure there need to be more "user friendly" funding options but it will require thinking outside the box, take off the PayPal blinders find the solution and you will likely become a Bitcoin millionaire in the process.

Of course you do.  You think the merchant reaches into his big bag of charity money when paying the VISA bill?  The price you see includes a 3% VISA tax.  For online merchants with even a small amount of fraud it is more like 5% to 10%.  That steam game for $6 it really is $5 but Steam packs in the projected fraud losses, plus costs of anti-fraud software plus VISA $0.35 PLUS 3% which just kills on low value txs. 

Well I would say Bitcoin is more used as a store of value today than a method to buy cheap things on the internet so it would be more like it not expanding beyond its most significant use case then some "new utility". 

Still the idea that Bank Wires are only used by financial institutions is kinda bogus claim.  I sent 23 bank wires today so I am now Bank Of America?  Now today I have to go through a bank but in the future maybe not.  If most businesses and individuals accepts Bitcoin transfers I could bypass the bank. 

Even if limited by technical reasons to "only":
* store of value
* high value purchases
* fund transfers
* international remittance (think WU - even your inflated Bitcoin fees kill WU)
* gray area transactions
* high risk/fraud transactions (online gambling this could be $500B annually easy)
I certainly can see $500K to $1M(+) as possible (plausible? who knows?).



+ Note I don't claim Bitcoin is going that far but if it doesn't IMHO it won't be because of the blockchain limit. 

No you wouldn't.  You could borrow the BTC from a depositor (paying them interest) and then credit them to the shorters account.  The person shorting them couldn't take physical possession.  The lender has absolutely no counterparty risk beyond the exchange.  If you trusted the exchange you could lend at a relatively low rate.  Even the tiny undercapitalize and of quasi legal status platform bitfinex has BTC available for borrowing at a token interest rate.  I would imagine the rate would be much lower for a massive highly capitalized company.

Bitcoin is deflationary.  The gold margin costs are pretty low as well.  Assets holders generally don't mind collecting a small premium on their asset which is also going up in value.

"Lend BTC for a year ... BTC doubles in value AND you get a bonus 10% ... the horrors".

There was a reason why Satoshi published his paper over a year before the genesis block. 

Bitcoin is inflationary.  The Bitcoin money supply is growing at about 12% annually.  That will drop to ~5% by the next block halving and 2% by the following one and then <1% by 2024. 

Which has nothing to do with your post.   Bitcoin can rise much higher than $1,000 per unit (possibly to $500,000 per unit) being used as nothing but a store of value (with very low tps).  It could also be used a reserve currency of sort, it could be used as a backing for next gen crypto-currencies, or it could (potentially) be limited to large transfers of wealth like FedWire system which operating at less than 7tps transfers >$600T annually (>2T BTC at current exchange rate or >60x current estimated trade volume).  At ~70tps we are talking a potential of 10x US FedWire system (the highest volume value transfer system in the world) or something on the order of $6 quadrillion annually.  Your belief that fees will rise linearly is nonsense.  Nothing supports that.   If fees get too high then people will use alternatives (off blockchain txs, alt-coins, etc) however those very actions will reduce demand on blockspace and fees will fall.  To put it into perspective imagine Bitcoin was operating at say:

70 tps = 2.2 billion transactions annually.  At $0.01 per tx that is $22 million annually probably too small to support the network, but even $0.10 is $220 million.  Sure microtransactions aren't possible but on blockchain microtransactions are a pipe dream anyways.   

The idea that if Bitcoin can't replace all transactions on the planet it can't rise to very high levels is an unsupported opinion.

Yeah none of that made sense.  Fees in nominal terms will continue to go down.  We have seen the move from 0.01 to 0.0005 to 0.0001 already.  In 20 years who knows maybe the average fee will be 1 uBTC and that happens to be worth about $0.02.  

Still even if the block size never increases the 7tps "limit" is roughly large enough to handle the entire volume of the US fed wire system which processes about $600 trillion (yeah with a T) in transfers annually
http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_ann.htm

I am not saying there aren't challenges but the idea that Bitcoin can't rise above $1,000 due to technical limitations is laughable. How many gold transfers are there annually?  The value of all gold above ground is one the order of $10T.  If Bitcoin was ONLY used a store of value and acheived similar value we are talking ~$500,000 per BTC. 

Now before someone goes off the deep end I am not saying Bitcoin is going to $500,000 just pointing out that the technical challenges can be solved and even if there are some limitations Bitcoin can move much much higher than $1,000.

There are gone*


*Until such time as SHA-256 or ECDSA become cryptographically weak due to discovered flaws to make collision attacks possible, but for all intents and purposes they are gone as we don't know if that will happen or when it happens.

mills, millibits, or millicoins seems likely.  I don't see anyone calling mBTC "one Bitcoin" though.  It is simply confusion without a purpose.  "Yeah send me 20 Bitcoins, of course not the Bitcoin on the client, you will need to change to mBTC or divide the amount I previously told you by 100, I just like calling mBTCs, "Bitcoins" to created added confusion for no reason or value".

As a experiment say I offered 1oz Silver Maple in the marketplace forum for 127 Bitcoins (without explanation these aren't really Bitcoins they are just my way of saying mBTC) how effective do you think that would be?  

For that reason I don't see BTC being anything but BTC = Bitcoin = 1/21,000,000th of the Bitcoin money supply.  Sure other units will develop and their own slang will develop two but that is different than doing a split or renaming Bitcoin.  Nobody likes working with very large or very small numbers so formal and informal naming conventions will develop.



* or whatever slang develops

Um?  In any other area this might be not that bad but we are talking about irreversible money here.  Sorry not really sure why you wanted to include this is your explanation/rant/thesis-thing but it kinda derailed my thought process.  You obviously know about the merits of unit testing, you obviously know you should be, and yet ...