Yeah but you bought shares in Ubitex so you're conflicted.

A disclaimer would have been appropriated.

So this is like this one?

http://tradebitcoin.com/

anyone used tradebitcoin.com that can report back?

yep.

http://btc.imnotacyb.org/dbm/

Ah, okay. But sending a Gift Certificate outside US in an envelope costs aren't great or?

I just assumed it was because doing business like this across international borders would be fraught.

I like the idea though because you leverage Ebay's payment system (PayPal), seller rating (trust) and existing infrastructure

The problem with creating many back-ups is that every back-up copy must be ultimately deletable, down to the bits deletable or wiped, or else you leave it open for reading by disc recovery means and it can get stolen.

Yes back-up but not too much and carefully or else there will be lots of copies of your wallet floating around all over the place waiting to be discovered by some disc recovery software.

I think he means "shipping costs" 

Awesome idea, electronic  "Gift Certificates", redeemable in BTC at your favourite supplier.

Could be electronic images, pdf documents of value, whatever ...

I'm not sure that safe deposit at the bank is such a good idea given the rate of collapse of the banks these days. Sometimes Federal rules have been know to over-ride the custody agreements involved with safe-deposit boxes and customers lose everything inside them.

Might be better off in vault at a private security company or something. Or if you have the option, in a safe under your own control. Banks are too heavily regulated by the govt. to trust that anybody knows what will happen when they lock their doors, even the best lawyers in town couldn't tell you definitely where you stand.

If it all goes pear-shaped I wonder if Gavin will be given a "burial at sea"?

I'm thinking de-linking the USD part from the other makes sense in that if the USD part gets shutdown you'll still be operational with the Euro side of it. But fragmenting a business at such an early stage is not advisable.

If you can somehow keep them under the same umbrella from the customer point of view (single point of contact on web, same website, address, etc) but have them split legally so that a shutdown of one does not affect trading of the other is the ideal solution.

I heard a rumour that the Satoshi was a dance ... here's the pseudo-code:

The instruction set goes as follows:

    * You put your left leg in
    * Your left leg out
    * In, out, in, out,
    * you shake it all about.
    * You do the Sa-Toshi and you turn around
    * That's what it's all about...

On 'you do the Sa-Toshi' each participant joins his/her hands at the fingertips to make a chevron and rocks them from side to side.

Each instruction set would be followed by a chorus, which is entirely different from other parts of the world:

    * Whoa, the Sa-Toshi!,
    * Whoa, the Sa-Toshi!,
    * Whoa, the Sa-Toshi!,
    * Knees bent, arms stretched, rah! rah! rah!

For this chorus all participants are stood in a circle and hold hands, on each "whoa" they all raise their joined hands in the air and run in toward the centre of the circle and on "the Sa-Toshi" they all run backwards out again. On the last line they bend knees then stretch arms, as indicated, and for "rah rah rah!" they either clap in time or raise arms above their heads and push upwards in time. Sometimes each subsequent verse and chorus is a little faster and louder, with the ultimate aim of making people chaotically run into each other in gleeful abandon. Invariably, somebody ends up on the floor.[citation needed]

Chodpaba:

How hard would it be to implement some kind of physical limit on growth factor into your model?

By my reckoning, the total number of GPUs on the planet that will ever be made available for mining is not infinite. The factories that make them can only bring them online at finite rate also. Exponential growth is monster that can hit physical limits quite quickly, without rapid innovation.

I suspect that the limiting factor for network growth will be the factories ability to supply GPU's in the near term if the exponential growth on price is sustained.

How would we go about determining the total number of GPU chips ever produced? (As a starting point for an upper bound on network strength calc.)

The primary problem the hashing solves is preventing double-spending of the same coins. Once the hash for the block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block of transactions from the last ~10mins is found, it is very difficult to change. After 6 blocks are hashed, it is nigh on impossible to brute force change the transactions that deep in the block chain. Secondarily, in the growth phase of the network it allocates the new coins as an incentive to the miner(s) who are hashing faster and thus providing more security to the network by way of making transactions harder to change. The mature network will be allocating very few new coins but transaction fees maybe an incentive for miners to keep hashing then.

Okay, thanks, you seem quite emphatic so I'll take your word for it. He's entitled to do that, just wondered if you had any other info?

Edit: here's what the wiki says
"Products or services illegal in US or Japan are not fit to be listed here - such links will be removed immediately. Any attempt to get those links up again will result in the account being blocked. "

Makes one wonder what they'll do if bitcoin itself is made illegal, will they allow drug links again?

By who's authority?

Any more info on how this dispute was resolved? Given the level of interest I think a little more explanation would be warranted. A bald one-line, corpro-speak, statement like that just serves to sow resentment.

Okay, I have a few questions;

1) your graph seems to suggest that by Jan 2013 (mining block reward halving date) BTC will be trading for $1500 to $2000 each, is that correct?

2) does the exponential growth rate in BTC/U$D have the same exponential power as the current rate of increase or something different?

Intriguing, that's sounds almost too predictable for such a seemingly chaotic system growth ... are you going to write it up and publish?

I'd be interested to read it at least.

jav:


Okay that makes sense. So even though I can no longer see that address it may still be receiving for my Instawallet. Maybe just list on the Instawallet page (on a pull-down button?) every bitcoin address that can receive to that Instawallet account?

Nice work btw.

You lost me there. How do you mean Contribute? I just put up a link to an exemplary article of why the Fed. Res. centralised model is finished.

The bitcoin decentralised p2p monetary system would doom this kind of societal raping and pillaging to history, imo.

Are you supporting the Fed. Res.?

I know this maybe should have gone into Economics but if bitcoin does have only a small part to play in changing this criminal state of affairs, it has done some good. IMO it has a big part to play.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Wall Street's Big Win

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

16 is old enough to go to war and die in most countries ... don't be so damn patronising to the guy.

If he misses this chance at bitcoin and spends the rest of his life scraping and scrimping to get by are you going to be sending him welfare checks ploum?

You'll be responsible for stifling ambition and vision, how sad is that? (What exempts you from the lifeless anonymous on internet label anyway?)

Listen to your heart kid, do lots of reading and damn the torpedos!

You got this far, figure out why mining is good or bad and go for it .... just between you and me, if your dad can not see the potential in bitcoin he is just about an idiot.