You can review what I've done with them, live and on github. And report what you feel is still wrong.

Concerning the "integrity of the blockchain is enforced by cryptography..", I wonder why you think this is wrong. Each block contains a signature that prevents any change in its own content _and_ in the content of all previous blocks. As such, the blockchain can't be corrupted or changed in any way. The same way, we also use a Merkle tree to share the blockchain with no risk of corruption just like torrent, thanks to cryptography. That is what I wanted to materialize in one sentence.

Thanks!

Some of these parts have been reviewed many time, so I included many of your changes but not them all. If you feel that one is especially important, don't hesitate to add comments about them so that everyone can discuss. I will explain why I felt we should keep the current version for these specific cases.

Can whomever is in charge of this new site version get in touch with me if they'd like to take my offer? Evoorhees on skype is probably best.

Thanks.  Is it easy to verify that the "deseeded" wallet contains no private info?

It seems like it should be possible to set up online/offline Armory instances, generate the public and private keys with a separate utility, and import the private key into the offline instance and the public key into the online instance.

I just downloaded it from the peterschiff web site. It didn't require joining or anything. You can't watch it on their site without being a member.

As a new user, you only need to choose a wallet that you will install on your computer or on your mobile phone. Once your wallet is created, you have your first Bitcoin address and you can create more whenever you need one. You can disclose one of your Bitcoin addresses to your friends so that they can pay you. The same way, you can pay your friends if they give you their addresses. In fact, this is pretty similar to how email works. So all that is left to do that this point is to buy a few Bitcoins and to keep them safe. As a user, you are not required to understand the rest of the technical details.

As a new user, you only need to choose a wallet that you will install on your computer or on your mobile phone. Once you have your wallet installed, it will automatically generate your first Bitcoin address and you can create more whenever you need one. You can disclose one of your Bitcoin addresses to your friends so that they can pay you or vice versa, you can pay your friends if they give you their addresses. In fact, this is pretty similar to how email works. So all that is left to do at this point is to get some bitcoins and to keep them safe. In order to start using Bitcoin, you are not required to understand the rest of the technical details.

The entire Bitcoin network relies on the blockchain. The blockchain is a shared public transaction log, in chronological order. All confirmed transactions are included in the blockchain with no exception so that new transactions can be verified to be spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The integrity of the blockchain is enforced with cryptography.

The entire Bitcoin network relies on the blockchain. The blockchain is a shared public chronological log of all past transactions. All valid transactions are included in the blockchain with no exception so that it can be verified the new transactions are spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The validity of the blockchain itself is determined with cryptography.

A transaction is a transfer of value between Bitcoin addresses that gets included in the blockchain. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key for each Bitcoin address. Private keys are used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof that they come from the owner of the addresses. The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been issued. All transactions are broadcast between users and confirmed by the network in the following minutes, through a process called mining.

A transaction is a transfer of bitcoins between Bitcoin addresses. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key for each Bitcoin address. Private keys are used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof of ownership for the bitcoins being sent. The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been carried out. All valid transactions are broadcasted between users and confirmed by the network through a process called mining in the following minutes.

Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to include and confirm waiting transactions in the blockchain. It enforces a chronological order in the blockchain, protects the neutrality of the network, and stops different computers disagreeing on the state of the system. To be confirmed, transactions must be packed in a block that fits very strict cryptographic rules that will be verified by the network. These rules prevent any previous block from being modified because it would invalidate all following blocks. It creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively in the blockchain. This way, no individuals can control what is included in the blockchain or replace parts of the blockchain and roll back their own spends.

Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to include new transactions into the blockchain thereby confirming they are valid. It determines a chronological order in the blockchain, protects the decentralization of the network, and allows different computers part of the network to agree on the state of Bitcoin. In order to be confirmed, transactions must be packaged into blocks that fit very strict cryptographic rules which allow the network to determine the validity of those blocks. These rules prevent any previous block from being modified because doing so would invalidate all the following blocks. Mining also creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively into the blockchain. This way, no individual or a small group of individuals can control what is included into the blockchain or replace parts of the blockchain and roll back their own spends or spend bitcoins they don't own.

Convince me this guy isn't an idiot.

I think this is flaw in the network protocol, and many blocks are too big because of this.
There is only one solution: ban SatoshiDice.

It's not obvious though that having no limit, and encouraging more participation and paying transactions, wouldn't give rise to more fees than limiting it and making the system less functionally attractive.

What your own philosophy should find offensive about your own suggestion though is that you're trying to push the cost for something you want (higher perceived security) onto others by artificially limiting the number of txns in a block.

If people like you as a group want a higher hashrate, they will be prepared to pay for it, and pay the market rate, whatever it is.

Perhaps people sitting with 1,000 BTC at an address should feel a slight need to transfer it back to themselves occasionally, paying a fraction of a BTC txn fee, to increase the security of their BTC rather than "coast" on the fees of others paying for transactions?  Or get a network assurance contract like Mike suggests.  Personally I suspect the network will be more than able to sustain itself on fees, even when the block reward runs out, provided there's enough space for the txns that people want to do.

These problems will be resolved by those who care about it paying for it.

Are community council members treasurers?

The agreement is without law? Without law or force? So if a treasurer takes the money... we will ask them nicely to do the right thing?

If this is where you are going with the agreement, just send it out as you wish. If there are no legal responsibilities on either side, why an "agreement" Just tell them what rules they can abide by if they wish, and if they don't want to it's cool.

Sounds a little silly to me.

Never could get multibit to work....

Storage

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshis paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoins performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

I can just picture some Wall Street veteran hedgie reading this article and seeing all the steps needed to protect a bitcoin investment and then after looking up how Shamir's Secret Sharing Service works thinking that maybe March 2013 would be a good month to enter retirement before it gets just too complicated.

I was under the assumption that the backups are automatic everytime a new address is added. Are they not?

The downtime is quite sudden. Why didn't they notify it in advance?

Also running the validator plugin doesn't hurt if one wants to be completely sure.