I'd like to know when people with the highest numbers registered, that would help determine when the file was retrieved.  I only signed up a couple of days ago and there are almost a thousand accounts after mine.

i) what makes you think they would accept your request
ii) If they do accept, what makes you think they wouldn't just say "nope, no problems" wait till people start using it then attack it, that would be lulzy

Google has what, a billion users?  Mt Gox has 60k of which only 21k used gmail addresses.  Do you really think Google would force every single user of theirs to change passwords because of this?

I think MTG said they transferred $1000 US worth of bitcoin out which makes me wonder if they transferred $1000 worth of $17 a coin bitcoins (about 60) or if they transferred $1000 worth of $0.01 a coin bitcoins out.  I could see an attacker selling enough bitcoins to drive the price way down in order to do a large bitcoin transfer out.

The MH/watt should be much better than GPUs, especially for the mobile version.  I'd like to see one with 2x the shaders and half the cpu cores.

I think the difficulty adjustment is pretty clever and is often misunderstood.

An encrypted, distributed social network is a neat idea, however, bitcoin relies on broadcasting all data to all clients so everyone would end up with every single post, picture, and video on their computer.  They wouldn't be able to access them without the key, but the amount of data would be staggering.  Nice idea, but unworkable with a bitcoinesque network.

I've never done this but take a look at: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/gcc-compile-static-and-so-537575/

One of the answers suggests you need .a (archive) versions of the libraries.

If you're using a solid state disk, even FAT or ext2 won't make shred useful.  SSD's do lots of stuff underneath the filesystem to speed things up and for wear leveling, so even if the filesystem things it is overwriting the file it probably isn't.  (On the bright side, many SSD's are agressive about reclaiming deleted blocks, so if your OS deletes it instead of moving it to a trash directory, it will get overwritten quickly.)

3.  the two week difficulty reset.

There are a number of things that may cause a large advance, not sure if it will be as major as CPU to GPU but maybe.
 * Webpage based miners, there is even one based on webCL.  Individually they may not be that powerful but if a large website gave the option of not seeing ads or some other premium in return for mining then it could really add up.
 * ASICs (but that has been pretty well covered)
 * SHA specific instructions.  New Intel cpus have support for AES and can do one round of it per clock cycle.  If similar support were added for SHA-256 you could see some dramatic speedups.
 * Lower power parts. Raw speed is only half the equation, power usage is also important. AMD released a cpu/gpu combo that has 400 stream processors and 4 cpu cores all with a 35 watt TDP.  If this same process were used on graphics cards you would see a significant reduction in power usage which would allow significantly more stream processors on the graphics card.
 * openCL compute cards.  AMD and NVidia have both been pushing the compute aspect of their graphics cards, bitcoin is just one of many applications.  If they came out with compute cards which had lots of stream processors, no support for video (no silicon for it, no connectors, less memory and lower clocked memory) it would have lower power requirements and better airflow.

This sounds like a strawman to me, I don't recall hearing it and I doubt "many" people suggest it.  MtGox is an unregulated exchange and bitcoin trades relatively low volumes (far less than a million coins) a day.  It would be easy for someone to game it, they'd just have to have a sufficient number of dollars or bitcoins. (as the price and volumes go up the definition of sufficient goes up too).

If you're worried about heirs stealing from each other you could make multiple wallet files and give each of them one encrypted wallet prior to your death, then put the passwords in the safe/safety deposit box (or vise-versa). Since each heir would only have their password they can't steal from each other. You can keep all the wallets zipped up and encrypted with a password that only you know so you can access them if needed.

If you stick with a single wallet, you could keep it encrypted in your safe then put the password in the safety deposit box.  You still have access to it for your spending needs when alive but your heirs get access when you die.  You could also put an unencrypted copy of the wallet in the safety deposit box but you'd have to make sure you update it occasionally so it doesn't run out of the pre-generated supply of keys.

I agree w/ one of the other posters that you'd also want to give them written instructions about how to access it, how to sell them, etc.

I believe this would be in the context of the snack machine and fast payment processor.  Since there is only a few (~15) second window for double-spend you don't dispense the sugary snack until that amount of time has passed.  If you do detect a double spend you block the coin and don't dispense the healthy/sugary snack, no one but the malicious owner is affected.

I'm sure a payment processor could block the coin within it's own network, but it could still get in someone else's block later.  If everyone blocked it then in the case you're speaking of, outside of the snack machine context, both recipients would get screwed.

Bitmunchies is an awesome idea, however, I'd really like to be able to find out the shipping costs without creating an account.

Please let us know how this experiment goes.

A bank might not, but a system of banks might.  In the latter case there may not be a trusted third party,  would Wells Fargo trust Wachovia to be in sole control of the money supply?  Extending it to the super-national level would Greece trust Portugal to control the money supply?

I don't really expect banks to suddenly switch over to bitcoin, but you do sometimes read "wouldn't it be great if Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart took bitcoin?"  Well, it would be, but they are so much larger than the current bitcoin economy that they could easily just start their own block chain. 

I don't pretend to know what is going on in markm's head, however, it did get me thinking about something that may or may not be related to his post.

Imagine you had several companies working on massively multiplayer games that wanted to have the in-game currency convertible between them but they don't fully trust each other not to create lots of extra in-game money.  They could use bit coin but then they have to spend their own money buying enough bitcoins to get this going.  Or, they could start a new block chain, maybe with new rules like the first block generates 5 million coins which gets divided among the companies, subsequent blocks generate just a few coins.  If these games become popular, they could start allowing out-of-game transactions and leverage their version of bitcoin into a real online currency, to the detriment of holders of coin in the current block chain.

You could also see a case where banks decide bitcoin is a good reserve currency, but instead of using the current block chain they start their own, again, providing initial capital (and an advantage) to the banks by having early blocks generate large numbers of coins (this is possible because the number of coins generated per block is just an agreement enforced by code, they control the code and the block chain so they make whatever rules they want).  They may even allow payment processors to join and generate blocks (after paying a yearly fee of course).  Again, this leaves holders of current block chain coins out of the loop.

Another interesting block was found today at 2011-03-01 14:34:41.  Block 111222 with 12 transactions in it.

http://blockexplorer.com/b/111222

Now I will patiently wait for block 112233.

Here's a couple more transactions of the same nature:
http://blockexplorer.com/t/9Z4YgzGqgT   IN: 0.5 and 0.5 OUT: 0.5 and 0.5 (block 109801)
http://blockexplorer.com/t/4B3i2NQWNM  IN: 0.02 and 1.02 OUT: 0.02 and 1.02 (block 109779)

I was looking on block explorer and I saw this:
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/1dc3384e7ffedf0036b0fd269f3fe46fb08e8c1436bb11f9d083e236cd0f620f

Two inputs, one 5.87BTC and one 10BTC.  Then, two outputs, one for  10BTC and one for 5.87BTC.  Obviously, this transaction could have been a single input and a single output.  Is there any reason why it would be better to have two inputs instead of one, or is it just a bit of brain-deadness on the part of bitcoin?