Disagree.

The idea that if it was just named different everything will work and if it isn't everything will fail is kinda simplistic thinking don't you think?

If Bitcoin "acts" as a currency regardless if you call it a "pig simulator" governments & financial institutions are going to move to regulate it like a currency.  I mean these entities aren't run by nine year olds who will just not realize that "Bitcoin the non-currency" has all the properties and is being used as a defacto currency.  The name of something isn't really relevant under the law.  I mean if drug dealers started calling themselves "herbal supplement specialists" it wouldn't suddenly exploit this massive loophole under the law and make their activities legal.  

I would point out even if beneficial you can't force a name change.  Call it something else if you want, but as long as a significant portion of community calls it Bitcoin well it would be like saying gold bullion shouldn't be called gold bullion it should be called "solid form of element AU poured into ingots".  Go ahead and try to convince the whole world to change but I doubt it will be effective.


Finally to the "common man" Bitcoin is already confusing trying to explain to someone that:

kjj nailed it.  The 21st century is far more open (and getting more open/decentralized everyday) then the 20th century was.  Today finding even an academic flaw in say sHA-256 is the equivalent of winning the nobel prize in cryptography.  It instantly elevates you to the elites of the field.  SHA-256 has been extensively studied not just by countless governmental and corporate researchers but tens of thousands of academics all over the world.   The idea that the NSA has a "lock" on cryptography is ... well sad.  The irony is that the people claiming to be anti-state end up spreading so much FUD about the invincibility of the state that they end up being the biggest supporters of the state.  

Is the NSA doing crypto-analysis of modern cryptographic functions?  Sure but it is no longer a the largest area of research. Modern cryptography is an amazingly well built "lock".  Breaking these modern locks is increasingly difficulty expensive and time consuming. However at the same time despite having access to these superior locks, many people still leave the window unlocked (sideband vulnerabilities), or hide the key under the mat (poor key security).   The ROI% on going "around" the lock pays a much higher dividend then going through the lock and that is where the big dollars are being spent. 

Even with a large budget the NSA does have finite resources and is limited by real world constraints like energy density, and computing efficiency.   Even if NSA did (after billions and decades) "break" SHA-256 most systems will no longer be using it in a decade or two.  A huge amount of resources spent on something which has an amazingly short shelf life.  The NSA does a lot of defensive cryptanalysis.  It isn't trying break SHA-256 so much as make sure it can't be broken.  The NSA knows that US interests will use SHA-256 for the next decade or so.  It is looking for flaws that others might also be looking for so it can advise other agencies on the relative security and make recommendations on upgrades.

Lets look at SHA-1 as an example.  SHA-1 is considered cryptographically degraded.  It shouldn't be used for any new systems and existing systems should migrate to new ciphers as quickly as possible.  Still even if bitcoin only used SHA-1 (vs SHA-256 & RIPEMD-160 double hash) it likely would be secure from most attack even today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1#Attacks

The estimated cost to perform a preimage attack on a SHA-1 hash is on the order of $3M per collision.  Given the average value of an active Bitcoin address is <$3M it would cost more to exploit the known vulnerability and produce an alternative public/private keypair which could spend from a Bitcoin address then the address would be worth.

this vulnerability was first outlined in academic papers back in 2005 and is a carryover from the vulnerability known to exist in SHA0 since 1998. Should Bitcoin drop SHA-256 and go to the less secure SHA-1? No but it does give us some insight into how well built these locks are and how long it takes to develop a theoretical vulnerability into something which can be exploited in the real world. Over a decade of cryptanalysis later and the only real world attack vector involves millions of dollars worth of computing time.  I would point out the all powerful NSA wasn't able to prevent the publishing of any of these papers outlining flaws in this and other algorithms.  Even if at one time only the NSA knew about this vulnerability they weren't able to keep a lid on it.  Others found out and were able to move to more secure algorithms.

So for everyone who bought coins in 2010 and sold them today they "lost"?

We hedge our risk of volatility very easily.  The intrahour volatility is pretty low most days and we keep a large enough reserve to ensure it doesn't affect our operations.  I am sure bitpay does the same thing too.

Did you every think that maybe you just aren't "good" at currency exchange?  I mean rather than accept reality and build systems which function with Bitcoin as is it seems pretty much on an hourly basis you just spread FUD.

Please don't take it the wrong way but maybe, just maybe you suck at being a currency exchanger.  Maybe the problem isn't Bitcoin it is just your lack of skill. 

How does that solve the confirmation wait time?  You do realize that bitpay doesn't pay merchants until the payment to bitpay has been confirmed right?

The supermarket is likely the last place Bitcoin will make inroads.

Bitcoin main advantages are high speed global transactions, irreversibility, low tx costs, and psuedo-anonymity.

None of those are really applicable at the supermarket.   Credit card interchange rates vary ...  A LOT.  An online high risk merchant (porn) can have a rate that is more than 10%.  Add to it high chargeback fees, high fraud screening costs (both technology and labor), higher reserves, and high monthly gateway fees and the real cost can be 20% to 30% of purchase price or more.

Low risk, physical world merchants can have a discount rate of <1% (0.89% isn't that hard to get and Walmart recently reported negotiating a 5 basis point reduction in their discount rate to something like 0.79%).  Fraud is almost nonexistent and consumer non-fraud chargebacks are unheard of.   Using something like Bitpay (no offense to that awesome company) would RAISE the cost of doing business.

Now is 20-30 years if the Bitcoin user base is much much much (think hundreds of millions of global users) larger many shops will accept it simply because consumers will demand it but "supermarkets" aren't the low hanging fruit for the Bitcoin economy.

Yes it is called drop shipping.  Who did NewEgg sell it to? You or the end consumer?  Who did the end consumer buy it from?  You or NewEgg?

Still you aren't going to do any real volume without the supplier's permission.  Sure you can probably do a couple dozen orders as a hobby but you don't think your credit card being used to ship thousands of orders to hundreds of addresses all over the country/world is going to pop up on their fraud screen.

Your issues aren't legal they are business.  The same issues all Bitcoin related enterprises deal with when connecting to the "traditional world".  It is unlikely that NewEgg would partner with you.  So you can do it behind their back and eventually they will shut you down.

A lot of wrong assumptions on your part.  Generally larger merchants pay LESS in credit card fees than smaller merchants.  Any merchant big enough to warrant scrutiny is likely big enough to go directly to the source and cut a better deal.  Large established swiped (i.e. not "card not present") merchants generally have discount rates that are half of what Square charges not 3x as high.

Nobody can provide you exact details because it all depends.  There are 280+ countries on the planet and in places like the US the law depends on both state and local level plus if the sale will occur across state or country lines.

In generally it is the responsibility of the merchant to collect sales tax when they have an obligation (due to tax laws).  In that instance the merchant would provide the supplier with a reseller cert so the the supplier would NOT charge sales tax.  The merchant would then collect sales tax from the end user.  However NewEgg likely isn't going to give you exempt status.  They aren't a distributor and they don't want people reselling their goods.

Where do you get this idea that square can't be used at a "fixed location".  If I stand still to long does that become a fixed location.  7% for a swiped CC transaction isn't a realistic number.  You made up some stupid explanation and now just can't accept that you are wrong.  There is nothing square's TOS which prohibits it being used in a POS location.

https://squareup.com/register/receipt-printer-and-cash-drawer



Credit cards might be last world technology and a ripoff but Square is at least innovating somewhat and they deserve credit (without FUD) for that.  Hell they actually now have a 0% fee option.  $275 per month for up to $20,833 in transactions (works out to about 1.3% for a merchant which maxes it out).

Bitcoin = the protocol/technology.  There is no such thing as Bitcoins.

bitcoin  = a unit of value, equal to 1E8 satohis in the Bitcoin protocol.
bitcoins = plural, more than one bitcoin (i.e. 2 BTC is "two bitcoins").

Not any more.  That was what the court case was about.  The courts agreed that the prohibition on cash discounts and the prohibition on charging consumer for using credit cards amounted to collusion between the major credit card networks.

Today merchants are free to offer any discount % for cash buyers.  Merchant can offer 50% off to cash buyers if they want.
Today merchants can charge consumers a surcharge on credit cards but not more than the actual interchange rate or 4% which ever is less.

The 7% in the OP was simply a merchant ripping a consumer off.  The court decision is relatively new most people don't know the details I expect a like of stuff like this going on for a while. 

Correction the BTC money supply valued in USD exceeded $300 million.

Also isn't Bitcoin larger than Linden Dollars?

Can't seem to find a stat later than this one but...


Would indicate the Linden Dollar money supply is valued on the order of ~$30 million USD.

Muted is good unless you are just looking for a quick bubble hype mania to profit from noobs.  I see Bitcoin as a marathon not a sprint.   Time and steady growth (in features, adoption, security, clients, merchants, press) is all it needs. 

No 7% isn't on the high end 7% is just a way to the merchant to pad his pocket.

The court decision limits surcharges to actual costs or a max of 4%.  Any swiped merchant is going to pay <2% these days.  Hell Joe Blow with 0 days business experience can get an account with Square (or a host of other providers) and swipe cards at <3%. 

You have it right Walter.

Bitcoin uses three distinct elements:
* The Bitcoin Address (I sometimes use term public address) which is double hashed plus checksum of the public key.
* The public key which is created using ECC from the private key and represents a point (x,y) on the secp256k1 curve.
* The private key which is a random 256 bit number.

Why would you think that?  Using more efficient technology is inevitable.  General purpose computing on GPU already existed prior to Bitcoin in the form of NVidia CUDA.   Even ASICs are possible on LTC and for a lot less than most people imagine.  Just reading the scrypt whitepaper one can figure that out.  Now LTC will warrant that kind of investment but it would only be for the same reason there are no SolidCoin ASICs not because it isn't possible.  The crippled parameters of LTC made sure of that.

I never said ban LTC.  I said it is nearly worthless, I stated my opinion and justification for those opinions.  Guess what the free market you love so much would seem to agree with me.

I think you misunderstood any node following the reference client rules will drop and refuse to relay a double spend.  So if you have tx A and you wish to replace it with tx B, when your node broadcasts tx B to the 8 (or 50) immediate peers the most likely outcome is they all detect tx B is a double spend of tx A (because tx A is in their memory pool) and promptly drop it.  You can keep broadcasting tx B thousands or even millions of times and they will happily drop it each time. 

Now eventually nodes do "forget" about unconfirmed tx so after that you can broadcast tx B, and your peers not having a record of tx A relay the tx on to other nodes, who will relay it to other nodes, and eventually every node and miner will know about tx B.   There is one "gotcha" though. As long as your node knows about tx A (it is still in the wallet) your node will keep reminding other nodes about tx A (who will remind other nodes) this will ensure that nobody ever forgets about tx A preventing a spend of tx B.

So simple version:
a) Bypass the peer network and get the replacement tx in a block.
OP can contact a mining pool and ask him for help (likely for a fee)

or

b) Allow the network to "forget" about the original tx and try again.
OP (or someone who in the future is in the same scenario and doesn't want to need to contact a miner) can remove the tx from the wallet file, wait long enough that the network forgets about it and create a replacement tx.

The public key is only needed to verify transactions. 
The public key is included in the transaction itself. 
This means until you spend from an address the public key is unknown.

It isn't part of memory pool selection rules in bitcoind.  Most (all?) major pools use custom software but AFAIK unless it has changed recently no pool does "forward looking of fees".  

The OP has two solutions:
The first solution is to delete the offending transactions locally (requires some wallet.dat surgery).  Other nodes including miners will "forget" about the unconfirmed transactions in time (I believe 24 hours?).  This would allow creating a replacement transaction with an appropriate fee to ensure timely inclusion.

The second solution is to contact a pool operator directly, provide them the transaction hash(es) and for a manually paid bounty (fee) they may be willing to manually add the offending transactions to the pool's next block.  IIRC Luke has done this in the past.

If both of those solutins sound like they suck, well that is the point.  The mandatory fee rules exist to protect the network from a denial of service attack.  If one could create 600 outputs using 22KB for a mere 0.0005 BTC (about 1.2 cents) then one could also create transactions totaling ~30,000 transactions and 1 MB for about $0.50.  For less than minimum wage an attacker could denial of service attack the largest computing network in the world and add roughly about 4GB of spam to the blockchain per month.

Simple version:  DON'T BYPASS MANDATORY ANTI-SPAM RULES.  They exist to protect the network.  When you bypass them the network teats the transaction like a threat and the "immune system" which consists of dropping and delaying high-cost low-value transactions kicks in.

Next franky1 will be attacking coblee for being a "bitcoin superfan".  Franky1 you can't fix stupid so I won't try.   It wasn't Luke Jr stating LiteCoin has GPU hostile it was essentially everyone. It is obvious if you read the actual launch thread.