Yes they do. As stated here, it is a temporary company as Intersango LTD is owned by multiple share-holders who have to be present to open the account or be available to a notary abroad. That takes time, but we fully intend to switch the account from Interteni LTD to Intersango LTD in the future. Right now, there are more pressing matters.

Interteni LTD (company number: 07826131) under the Companies Act 2006.
Intersango LTD (company number: 07683978) under the Companies Act 2006.

The certificate of incorporation for Intersango is available on our about us page, and the one for Interteni should be available later today. For now you can download it from here.

We are required before opening the bank account to divulge all information and I was completely open about our activities. The manager was told about http://intersango.com and the full details of Bitcoin Consultancy's operations (which I drew her some diagrams of our company structure to explain to her colleagues). Considering that the Lloyds bank manager was extremely displeased at our prior treatment and took several photocopies of our past statements and letters, they know we are the same people behind Intersango LTD. Our website is on their records, and for us to lie or falsify information is highly illegal and would put me at risk of jailtime.

HSBC problems

Lloyds TSB new account

Earlier this year, we were banking with Lloyds TSB before being asked to take our business elsewhere. We have been in contact with Lloyds TSB who have assigned us a personal account manager who is also the manager of the bank branch. It turned out the previous account manager was ill equipped to handle the scale of our volume and is a person in a call centre in Birmingham, and sees 300+ accounts a day. This time around we've been assigned a manager who handles 30 accounts a month due to the complicated nature of our operations and the scale of our turnover.

Lloyds TSB were very keen to have our operations back, and a formal complaint has been launched by the bank staff at the way we were dealt with. We were told that our treatment was totally unacceptable as we're a high value customer.

We are accepting deposits again with Lloyds TSB (details can be found on the GBP accounts page). Deposits may be a little slower than usual (possibly up to a week) as registration for their online service is underway. Once that's done, we'll be processing deposits immediately. Withdrawals may take longer as we are in the midst of transitioning out of HSBC into Lloyds. We are also in talks with a few other banks who have shown a sudden interest in our business.

Does anyone see a pattern here?

Obvious to me, stolen bitcoins are being dumped on the market right now. Why else the major price swing all of the sudden?

Is there any other logical explanation for this occurring at this time?

Let's say I am an owner of gold and a seller of gold certificates.  People would like to use gold, but it's hard to buy and sell things with it.  I am honest; and trusted (people already buy my certificates).

snip

The payout address is baked into the work. If the evil pool changed it, they couldn't submit the hashed to the good pool. If they don't change it, then submitting that hash to the network would pay the original address, which belongs to the good pool. It doesn't work.

Yes, the address that the block reward will be paid into is already baked into the work that the pool sends to you. There is no way of changing it without changing the hash, which would ruin the "good" hash. The system is clean. No way to mess with it, no trust required. Besides hoping that the pool pays you your fair share that is.

You could hold it back, but why?

No they check your share by doing that one hash, on the server. Just a single one. Even a crap card can do 5,000,000 hashes a second, so they have no problem checking all the hashes themselves. Basically, we search for sort of rare hashes, and submit them, they check them, proving that we are doing work (because they are indeed sort of rare) and sometimes it'll be a really rare hash that solver a block. Then everyone gets paid by how many sort of rare attempts they sent.

Because we only submit rare ones, they don't have to do very much work at all, we already weed out the vast majority, and they satisfy themselves that we really did work because otherwise we wouldn't have rare hashes to show them.

You submit all of your share back. The shares are blocks that work at the "minimum difficulty", but not necessarily the "current difficulty". You get paid based on how many valid shares you produce compared to others. The shares can and are checked, and they prove you've been doing work. They don't just trust you on it.

The minimum difficulty requires several million hashes. The way we usually denote the current difficulty is by dividing it by the minimum difficulty to indicate how many shares you'd need to find, on average, as opposed to how many hashes.

I thought mining pool could simply check the nonce I send with their block hash to ensure it is a valid share (at the minimum difficulty), proving that I'm doing work. I don't think they need such tricks.

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Please see my post #14 in this thread for what I meant by envy-less.

And for me that concludes this thread, I feel I've said what needed be said and am starting to repeat myself. Thank you all for your kind attention.

If you have more questions, remarks or whatever, feel free to contact me at http://bitcoinforum.org.

50% Or more will not be early adopters -> 50% or more will have envy -> 50% or more will have 50% of the computer power necessary to create the longest chain

Please do tell me my mistake?

1. Most important to understand is that a perfectly natural system for distributing a cryptocurrency in a fair, envy-less way exists. There is no need for a cryptocurrency to have an artificial limit. There will be inflation, yes. The second coin will cause 100% inflation, the 3rd coin 50%, the 4th coin 33%, etc. If inflation kicks in, mining will become less attractive and will be supported by mainly transaction fees (that are not newly created coins and don't drive up inflation further).

From today's Financial Times article, which itself is quoting New Scientist:

What Bitcoin lacks is “a clear attribution of a guarantor for every unit of currency”, says Ashish Goel of Stanford University, who is developing his own peer-to-peer currency model. “In centralised currencies such as the US dollar, guarantors are governments. For P2P currencies, it should be individuals.”

Did a very quick google search and couldn't find any more information, but according to his Stanford University page he also serves on the technical advisory board for Twitter. Could be interesting!

slush's pool has about 18% of the current network - and (although he's recently removed the 'connected miner' number) probably about 4-5,000 mining accounts.  many are multiple accounts - so call it 2,500 individuals.

extrapolating, that would be about 12,000 miners for the entire network.

now... how many use the system, but don't mine?  a tougher number to estimate.

my suspicion is not as many, but growing much faster than the mining segment.

so... my pure, wild-ass guess - without anything particularly factual behind it - is something on the order of 25,000.

by the end of summer, i'd expect that to triple.  or more.  i think that right now is the make or break moment for Bitcoin.

20 USD/BTC by the end of july is a lock.

There's not much difference between these two, as a channel operator can ban/filter addresses and an IRCop can alter the server to return basically anything. For both you need to trust the maintainer not to tamper with the service.

If you want the clients to dynamically add their addresses to the bootstrapping service, you can do this with DNS, too. E.g. set up a DNS server that accepts DNS UPDATE (RFC2136) to add new records (obviously deny delete attempts and purge outdated entries from time to time). Or set up a tiny UDP update service additionally to DNS where clients can submit their address to the database.

I haven't been having very good luck with the random IRC channels.  Each of the random channels joined didn't have enough other clients attached.  Eventually, I just modified bitcoind to connect to good old #bitcoin instead, and now everything is peachy.  Perhaps the client should join multiple channels until enough folks have upgraded to the random channel-using clients?

There are people making statements beginning with "Now that bitcoin is getting big..."  I think comments may be misleading to newcomers.  Bitcoin is often criticized for being nothing but hype.

Although it's impossible to know exactly how many bitcoin users there are, a chart in this post suggests that there might be approximately 20 thousand active bitcoin users.

The wikipedia article for PayPal reports that Paypal has 87 million active accounts.  And this recent article reports that they have 100 million accounts.

If we take the 100 million number for Paypal, the bitcoin user base is roughly 0.02% the size of PayPal's.

Bitcoin is very much in its infancy, but certainly has a lot of promise.  Bitcoin has the potential to reach users that are excluded from the PayPal system because they have no accessing to the existing global financial network.

Bad Peers:

I ran a few searches across the forum but could not find an answer to this: How does the Bitcoin client handle bad peers (Other than rejecting bad TX and Blocks)?

If this functionality is not already built into the client, I would like to suggest this simple approach that frees up connections with bad peers:

If PEER_IP sends more than REJECT_THRESHOLD malicious transactions or blocks within past 24 hours, Ban(PEER_IP) for 24 hours.



Net Neutrality:

Many countries around the world have poor record on net neutrality, with selective blocking and government-run snooping programs.  Recent case in point: Egypt.

I wholeheartedly throw my newbie support behind Madhatter's recommendations to:

• Use SSL connections
• Randomizing ports at start-up
• Populating SSL connect descriptors as "Apache" and "Firefox / Internet Explorer"

Thank you!