This is a fallacy. Transactions simply represent money moving between addresses. They do not represent money moving between people. And in particular they do not imply trades of bitcoins for goods or services. I can shift money back and forth between two addresses all day long and pump up the transaction count, but I wouldn't be doing anything for the Bitcoin economy.

I wouldn't say nothing has changed. I'd say that the number of transactions has decreased by 90%. That's all I really could say. It might be the case that less trade was occurring using bitcoins. However, it might instead be the case that more trade was occurring using bitcoins and it was simply being represented using fewer transactions (i.e., more efficiently). Neither the number of transactions nor the sum of the transaction amounts tells me anything conclusive about the amount of goods and services that are being traded for bitcoins, which is the metric I would use to represent the health of the Bitcoin economy.

Number of transactions is a pretty meaningless metric. If you move money from one address to another, that's a transaction. If you play SatoshiDice, that's two transactions per wager. Neither of those are related to the "usefulness" of Bitcoin.

It's not possible to determine the number of Bitcoin users, but a fairly good (I think) estimator, at least for relative comparisons, would be the number of Blockchain.info Wallet accounts since it's reasonable to expect the number of wallet accounts per human user to be almost exactly 1. (In other words, it would be rare for a human to have more than one Blockchain.info wallet account.)

I didn't say anyone is being cheated. This is how Bitcoin differs from the fiat system. I'm also not arguing that Bitcoin should have been constructed in any other way. What I am saying is that Bitcoin is presently inflationary and that trying to hide this fact by pointing to the increasing value of bitcoins is dishonest. You cannot dismiss the inflation simply because the growth in demand is outpacing the growth in supply. The inflation deserves to be recognized and understood for what it is, not swept under the rug.

I wouldn't discount the possibility that this entire class of "bit-mixing" message digests may be broken some day. A brute-force search will not need to search a 256-bit key space. Successive breaks of the cryptography may significantly narrow that search space. Besides, you don't even have to search the whole 256-bit key space. There are numerous private keys that all produce the same Bitcoin address, and you only need to find one of them to claim the funds at that address.

I didn't say anything about quantum computing. Indeed, SHA has not yet been shown to be vulnerable, nor has ECDSA. I don't make the mistake of assuming that they are not vulnerable, however.

I must beg to differ. Prices (of goods) may be holding steady or even going down, and yet inflation may still be cheating people out of purchasing power. Inflation is never good (except for debtors), even if prices are falling. Inflation means prices are not falling as quickly as they would be if inflation were not present, meaning your purchasing power is still being stolen. In the case of Bitcoin, we know the inflation well in advance, and we all agree to it when we get into Bitcoin, so it's not insidious or evil like the inflation perpetrated by the central banks, but it is still significant and not negligible.

Even "lost" coins are not truly lost. They're more like gold that has sunk to the bottom of the ocean. It will be expensive to get them back, but it's not impossible. And the technology to do it will get cheaper over time. Eventually a device that fits in your pocket will be able to brute-force a private key to reclaim the "lost" bitcoins. The people actively using Bitcoin will have long since moved on to stronger cryptography.

Strange. Everyone in the Free State Bitcoin Consortium seems to like Coinbase. I've never used it, as I think 1% is too steep a fee, but I haven't heard of anyone who has been stiffed by it, and the user interface seems pretty polished.

It's a percentage. It could be calculated and plotted in discrete yearly steps, but this chart shows the instantaneous (i.e., continuous) rate of inflation. "Annualized" just means that the rates are expressed at each point on the curve as though that rate of inflation were constant for a whole year and the money supply at the end of that year were compared to that at the beginning of the year. Inflation is usually expressed as an annualized rate. When you hear that the Federal Reserve is targeting an inflation rate of 2%, that's an annualized rate.

If the inflation rate were the inverse of the monetary base, then it would have units of BTC^-1. But inflation rate is actually a unitless quantity. It expresses the fraction by which the monetary base grows in one year. This chart shows the instantaneous rate of inflation, annualized.

"Money supply" and "monetary base" are the same thing in the absence of fractional reserve banking.

Done.

I know where you got 25% from. That's the inflation that occurred in the last year prior to the reward halving. That's not the same as the annualized instantaneous inflation rate.

How do you figure? Before block 209,999, there were 10,499,950 BTC in existence. Then block 209,999 added 50 more, bringing the total up to 10,500,000 BTC. That was an increase of 0.000476193%. To calculate the annualized inflation rate, you take the natural log of 1.00000476193, multiply by the number of blocks in a year (52,595.9856), and exponentiate the product, base e, which yields 1.28461321188. So the annualized inflation rate at block 209,999 was 28.46%.

Maybe because they were on Facebook's CDN. I've moved them over to my own web space now.

A clarifying note: These charts show the monetary (supply) inflation of Bitcoin. They bear no relation to price inflation, which is an entirely distinct phenomenon. When Austrian economists say "inflation," they're typically referring to monetary inflation, whereas Keynesian economists are typically referring to price inflation.

Also, please note that the top axis ("Year") on these charts is approximate, based on the scheduled block generation rate of one block per 10 minutes. The actual block generation rate has averaged a bit faster than this, due to the perpetually increasing hash rate, so we're already a little bit further progressed than the labels along the top axis would suggest. This doesn't mean there will be any more than 21M bitcoins; it only means that we'll reach the end of supply generation a little bit sooner than we would have if the hash rate had always held constant.


Permission given to use and reproduce freely.

I bought this mustard at a Bitcoin meetup and can confidently say it's the best mustard I've ever had. For one, I'm a sucker for curry, and this mustard has a noticeable but not overpowering curry flavor. Also, being a hot mustard (think Chinese mustard), it does a good job of clearing/melting my sinuses, but it doesn't "blow out" my palate like some spicy foods do. This mustard has become a bit more mellow as it has aged, and it has just gotten better. Now I am noticing more subtle flavors that I didn't notice before because it was so hot. I like eating this mustard on chicken fingers, but I'm sure it would be good on many other foods.

No.

It was down for a couple hours, confirmed by downforeveryoneorjustme.com. This was the last straw for me. I've begun cleaning out my account, which, since ACH withdrawals are currently unavailable, I can only do by buying BTC and withdrawing it.

Bitfloor is presently suffering yet another outage. This is very unprofessional.

Is it just me, or have the event feeds come completely unglued today?

EDIT: Appears to be working again.