I think you pretty much answered your own question here.


There are some people who like backed money (money that has a applications outside of its use as currency, like gold/silver) and some people who are ok with unbacked fiat (like USD), It was probably a mistake for me to list USD as one of things that could be used to back an electronic currency.  The point I was trying to make was that NameCoin has the features of Bitcoin plus it has utility, that may make it acceptable to people who wouldn't be interested bitcoin.

If your document happens to hash to a valid bitcoin address.

Since your keys have to be in a particular format you are pretty limited, namecoin has a more flexible way of storing data which makes it suitable for a larger number uses.  

I just re-read the thread and I don't see the place where he asked for me or anyone else to reimburse him.

I look at it this way, if 1 of your neighbors says "I had the house locked and someone still broke in" I'll be more careful,  If 5 of them say it I'll be even more careful (like change my locks), each report I hear I'll increase my vigilance.  It is very useful to hear about them to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem.  If, after all that, I still get my house broken into, I'll tell my neighbors and it is still the thief's fault.

There are regular threads here about how bitcoin isn't backed by anything, generally followed by a plan to back it with gold or silver or dollars, however, every one of those plans relies on a central authority.  This doesn't work since that central authority is subject to bankruptcy, corruption, and government influence.

In order to keep the distributed nature of bitcoin you would have to back it by something that is itself virtual.  That got me thinking that maybe Namecoin is really a backed virtual currency.  Even if the dollar/bitcoin/whatever value of namecoin went to zero, you'd still be able to use it for something. Currently, that something is registering domains but it is set up to allow you to store name/value pairs.  This makes NameCoin a currency that is backed by the right to use a distributed data store, pretty interesting.

Yeah, and if a thief breaks into your house, you can't really blame the thief because you know that locks can be picked, it's partly your fault for not staying in your house all the time with an automatic weapon.

Satoshi's solution was a centralized payment processor (albeit one that commits transactions to the block chain immediately, not one with an alternative currency that is pegged to bitcoin).  He thought it would still take 5-10 or seconds, not microseconds. He is also depending on conventions of the client (that the first transaction seen is the only one kept/propagated) that could be changed without requiring any consensus (if some clients changed it and some didn't everything would still be interoperable).  There is also the risk that a malicious double-spender would be able to identify the payment processor's nodes and prevent them from seeing the other transaction even though miners were incorporating it into a block.

Then there is the issue of transaction volume, there are other threads talking about the amount of disk space and bandwidth required to handle 2,000 transactions a second (its a lot, the average user wouldn't be able to handle it), if we had fast transactions and if all the snack machines were connected you'd have a couple of orders of magnitude more transactions.

I don't think that anyone has come up with a good solution to the fast transaction (and high volume) problem within the current bitcoin blockchain.

The pool owner could return a block with a pool address when getfullwork was called and a private address when getwork was called, you'd be none the wiser.  You'd have to call getwork then be able to pass that block header back to the server and request the full block that matches it.

I think this proposal has a lot of promise.  I doubt that it would get incorporated into this version of the block chain but maybe a competing chain will pop up with it.

Markets work best when all participants have access to the same information and the more complete the information is, the better markets are at setting an accurate price.  Having coins that could be lost or could be being hoarded adds uncertainty which negativily affects the price.  If one trader knows that a certain set of coins is lost when everyone else thinks they are hoarded he has an advantage in the market.  Letting everyone be certain that lost coins will eventually be recovered makes pricing more accurate in the same way that letting everyone know that there will be at most 21 million bitcoins makes the pricing more accurate.

There are also sound technical reasons to do this.  There is no agreed upon way to switch hashes or encryption keys even though at some point we will need to.  After switching, current clients and miners will still have to be able to process new transactions signed with old keys which means that code will have to be kept around forever.  Code that is old, rarely used and poorly maintained is a prime place for a hacker to look for weaknesses.  If we could say with certainty, after block number XXX there will be no more transactions using old coins we could then remove that code.

Maybe it is just randomness, time will tell.  That is some odd clustering of times the blocks were found, 6 in 6 minutes, a dry spell of 15 minutes then 7 in one 10 minute interval.  Never a dull moment in bitcoinland.

That's some serious hash power that came online.  it was under 10 Thash last time I looked.  Blocks are coming at the rate of 13.5 an hour.

You should update the text of the website to make it clear you are getting data from TradeHill.  It currently states "Prices represent four hours of live trade data at Mt. Gox."

That's a great idea, I'm surprise no one thought of that before now.

*shakes head in disbelief*

The OP said: "some of his coding seems ad hoc and arbitrary"  The choice of 2016 instead of some other number appears to be arbitrary.  You also seem to agree with me, sayng "I guess a 1008 block size would still be fine".

I think it is still the default.  with data=ordered, the data is written to the filesystem but the metadata is journaled, fsck only has to replay the journal.  If you use data=journal then the data, as well as the metadata, is written to the journal.

You're probably right.  If the whole machine was compromised they could have taken the wallet file, no need to transfer coins out, no need to crash the market, and they would have gotten all the coins in it.

I wonder how many bitcoins Mt. Gox keeps in the online wallet and how many they keep offline.  There was that 400k transfer a week ago that everyone assumes was Mt. Gox transferring coins from the online to the offline wallet, hope that is really the case, but the idea that Mt. Gox would have 400k online to transfer all at once is pretty scary too.

Not sure it is a "Mega-Hack" but it certainly is about bitcoin.

There is some pretty poor research in this article though.  After providing a link to the password file, they go on to report that they don't know if the salt was per-user or site wide.  It is pretty easy to figure that out.  Here's one entry:
$1$yHWqORNr$rRF7U59c9UY9utiW/ZnF..
The stuff between the second and third $ is the salt, "yHWqORNr".  Here's another entry
$1$eVe/yQrF$HNws4a6lsEuUCvvUHZPil/
See how the salt is different?  "eVe/yQrF" so there were per account salts.

That's a good bit of information, thanks for sharing it. 

Now we know that this list was posted less than 24 hours after it was retrieved, and, either the account compromises from 3 days ago were unrelated, or this file was retrieved on multiple occasions.

That's ok, the irony is that while I was writing that someone else posted the moving average idea and I inadvertently repeated it.  I guess these ideas aren't as novel as we think they are.

I wish I'd thought of that.  Oh wait, I did. http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19672.msg246725#msg246725  (Not sure that you read that post though.) 

Clearly, that $1,000 withdraw limit for bitcoins should use some sort of moving average price, maybe over 7 days or so.

I don't they'll open on the 20th, no way they can really be confident they have secured their system by then.  If they do open, I won't eat my hat, but I'd be very concerned that they'd get hacked again.

A bank run will probably happen but it shouldn't be a problem, Mt Gox doesn't do loans and should have bitcoins to back every one on deposit, except possibly for ones in the online wallet which might have been stolen or transfered out.  Hopefully they have kept some of their commission in bitcoins and that will be enough to cover losses.