I bought bitcoins at 0 dollars.  Had a friend who fiddled around with it a bit, got fed up with it, and gave me his remaining 8.95 bitcoins (worth about .8 cents at the time) for free.  Does this count?

=) No problem.  I'm always trying to help new people out... Sometimes I come off as snarky or confrontational, but that's not my intent, on top of which I have very low tolerance for belligerence and what I call "The throughput" (see: him), an archetype for new people that tends to be really stubborn, poorly spoken, and has very little grasp for the concepts of bitcoin.  Other than that, we'll get along great.

Please see this for ego boost.

    Send bitcoins from Wallet A to Wallet B.  Problem solved.
   Create new wallet.  Send bitcoins from Wallet A to Wallet B.  Problem solved.
    Because it's not implemented in the client, as the client hasn't even hit version 1.0 yet.  It's the network, not the client, that is the clever part.
    You can.
    Because each person owns and is in charge of his own money.  It's not pull-based, it's push-based.  It's one of the strongest consumerist protections around.
    Because there's no central authority to do this.  Because noone has an expensive contract with a credit card company.  Because this isn't what bitcoins is about.
    You can.  Share the wallet.
    You can.
    You can.
    You can.
    You can.

That doesn't guarentee they'll get the money though, that guarentees you're approved and under your credit limit.  You can dispute the transaction, and for relatively small amounts the credit company will just give it to you, and the store can't really do anything because taking you to court would be too expensive.  Do it too frequently, though, and your credit card company will start bringing you up on fraud charges.

See http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11814.0 (near the bottom)

Rather, at the time, he said it was a standing offer.  And yes, he has since rescinded this.

I love all of you, except for some of you.

Please, point out your problems with the issues as I have presented them.  [hypocritical ad hominem]Or did you not read my posts because they were too long and hard to understand? [/hypocritical ad hominem]

I know, and he offered to do it any time.   I was being snarky.

Just thought of something else:

The kind of people who have the resources for massive bitcoin mining servers are likely to be large financial investment firms.  It is very much in their interest to keep mining, as, essentially, their entire company can perform transactions on the bitcoin network without any fees, as long as it's solved by their own server.  This would be HUGE savings for the firm, likely doing high volume microtrades on thousands of stocks, on top of the income from the fees themselves.  So we've got an example of secondary or tertiary motivational factors.

Yea, I honestly think this was a kind of critical moment for the bitcoin economy, and it would have struggled far more than it did without some kind of transaction like this.  It's almost as if laszlo "sacrificed" himself for our future survival...

*starts writing this down.  Hell, it can't be more far fetched than Scientology...*

180 grand.

Your assumption that bitcoin derives it's value solely from security is false.  A large part is the security, yes, but it also derives from:

Convenience.  It's DAMN easy to send someone a bitcoin.
Intrigue. The concept is really clever.
Freedom to property.
Cost. It's a LOT cheaper to send someone internationally 1btc than it is 20 dollars.

If the hash rate decreases (or stagnates), that does not guarantee that someone will be able to overwhelm the network instantaneously.  They still have to ACQUIRE a substantial majority of the networking power.  At the CURRENT volume of miners, that's more than the top 500 supercomputers combined.  In a stable, vast reaching economy, "competition" (I use the word here for lack of a better term, not to imply that block solutions is a race) for the block solutions would be extremely high, and thus there would be several hundred times more computing power devoted to bitcoin.

Transaction fees will more than cover the costs of incentivizing miners, as I outlined above.  What you seem to think is that the value of bitcoins at this point will be extremely fluid:  A TINY decrease in security will cause mass panic and devalue the currency, causing a cascade.   Bitcoins will become stickier than that.  In the same way that you cannot notice a 100w lightbulb among 100 other 100w lightbulb, there's a certain point at which the fluctuation of security in the system is undetectable.  The value of bitcoins will stabilize.  The value of a dollar is not subject to stock-like panic swings, and in the presence of a rich economy, neither will bitcoins.

Similarly, the security of the system as a whole is subject to the same sensory threshold phenomenon.  The difference in security between 100THash/s and 99THash/s is not equivalent to the difference in security from 2THash/s to 1THash/s.  Just because it drops by 1 THash/s in the future doesn't mean it will have the same risks assosciated with dropping by 1THash/s today.

Finally, someone with substantial control of the computational power of the network has only limited attack vectors on the system.  He can claim he did not spend money which he did for limited amounts of time.  The longer in the past he wants to rewrite this "history", the harder it takes, and he can never say that you gave him coins that you did not.  The likely payoff for this in regards to the amount of computing power it would take to compromise a vast system that satoshi envisioned as a stable, worldwide economy would arguably not be worth it.  Seemingly against intuition, and in one of the most beautiful aspects of the bitcoin system, when dealing with the types of resources required to complete these attacks, it's likely more profitable to be honest than it is to be malicious.


No, the difficulty would also adjust down.  It's adjusted such that a block is generated roughly every 10 6 10 minutes, ad infinitum. (Woops! hehe) (Woops again!  That's what I get for trusting other people, eh? )

So much ad hominem it hurts.

Listen, the hashing rate doesn't need to INCREASE to maintain security.  If the hash rate remains constant, the security of the network remains constant.

For the past several months (probably more like the entirety of the project), the reward for mining has been decreasing substantially, due to the difficulty rate increasing.  Higher difficulty, less payout for miners.  This hasn't created a "catastrophe", or you wouldn't be posting on this forum.  In a stable bitcoin economy, the transaction fees for block generation will far outweigh the amount generated by block creation:  100,000 transactions in 10 minutes would mean 500 bitcoins at the new, reduced transaction fee.  And 100,000 is roughly the number of credit card transactions per minute... JUST in the US.  The system was designed to be a _lasting_, _stable_ economy, and has made assumptions as such.  Bitcoin will never reach it's true potential until it becomes one, and that's the goal of the project, so why design it otherwise?

Inflation, on the other hand, is a very real problem, and has caused the outright destruction and mayhem of many massive economies (Germany, Russia, and I'm sure other forum members can provide other examples.)  If bitcoin was not designed to avoid these catastrophes, what would the point of it all be?

My cpu gets 10 MHash/s

ಠ_ಠ

? That would be a digital mechanical turk, not a decentralized currency.  How would you actually make the payments?  The WHOLE point of bitcoin is to create a verifiable history of transactions so that you can prove you own the coins you own.  This problem solving system you propose has nothing to do with that.  Awarding people bitcoins for doing work is COMPLETELY secondary to the main purpose of verifying (I like to picture it as shutting the lock on a clear box that you can look into, but not modify, like a growing matrioshka doll.).  The awards are simply to incentivize people to actually do this verifying, to keep the system stable.  The system could equally have been developed with all coins in existence in the genesis block, and awarded to one person, and the fundamental ability to TRANSFER value through them would remain unchanged (a far more inelegant solution, as satoshi has to spend all the coins for them to get into circulation, and noone has any incentive to run a miner, but the core double-spend prevention would STILL WORK.)