So what are you anticipating the pools vs miners will be doing with transactions in pooled mining (ignoring p2pool)?

The problem with not receiving the transactions is that the miner program must have a full bitcoin connection to the network.

What a mess. With payloads increasing linearly with transaction count in GBT that makes each getwork equivalent much bigger than plain getwork already is the longer a block takes to solve. As bitcoin becomes more popular and transaction counts increase, gbt becomes less and less efficient. I'd hazard a guess that it may even be less efficient than plain getwork at some stage unless pools start ignoring transactions... there's a disincentive to include them.

Are there different classes of MBS, all with their own additional requirements?  My understanding is that the business that the OP is proposing is somewhat different to that operated by BitInstant.  Are they likely to be subject to more regulations as they'll actually be selling BTC direct to the public rather than operating as a platform for others to trade BTC (like MtGox) or a conduit for getting funds into exchanges quickly (like BitInstant)?

Heh, and thats the easy part!

You also need to do the following, just off the top of my head:
- Quarterly audits that you pay for
- Every 6 weeks you need a verified and updated AML Program
- Attend BSA training twice a year
- Bend over backwards and get anally raped every day....

I was looking at starting up a site that would sell bitcoins through credit card transactions as a US based business. Not wanting to run into immediate regulatory problems I gave FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) a call. It took them a couple of weeks to get back to me but the answer was yes that business would be required to register as a Money Service Business.

I believe you are correct, but I don't think it matters much. They say 60% of coins haven't moved in 3 months; those can safely be considered some kind of savings. So the actual amount of savings would be somewhere between 60% and 78%.

FWIW, I contacted them saying this (trimming opening and closing words):

Of course

gabi rage: is it so hard to have a program that you just clic it, tell it where the bitcoin folder with the blockchain is and then you press EXTRACT and it create bootstrap.dat?

Also - it seems a bit strange to count the 2Million+ sub 0.01 balance wallets as the poor end of some sort of wealth pyramid.
Many of these are surely people who just tried it out, e.g by getting some from a freebie site. They may or may not even have kept that wallet, let alone become engaged as an active Bitcoin user.

I would say that he is right for certain values of "all".  If you pick a transaction at random from the chain, the odds are overwhelmingly high that a single owner controlled all of the input.  Thus, he is "mostly right", and his conclusions are likely to be approximately correct.

But I wonder how they managed to determine the exact number of unique address owners:

A very important feature of the Bitcoin network is that a transaction involving multiple sending addresses can only be carried out by the common owner of all those addresses, as it is demanded by the Bitcoin system that "Whoever sent this transaction owns all of these addresses". This legal requirement is also technically ensured by the fact that each received amount must have a cryptographic digital signature that unlocks it from the prior transaction.

78 percent of Bitcoin currency stashed under digital mattress, study finds
Significantly fewer digital coins are in circulation than previously presumed.

by Dan Goodin - Oct 17 2012, 8:00am EDT

More than three-quarters of the digital coins in the Bitcoin digital currency scheme aren't circulating because they remain dormant in user accounts that have never participated in outgoing transactions, a recently published study has found.

The figure translates to more than 7.019 million BTCs, the term used to denote a single coin under the digital currency, which uses strong cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to enable anonymous payments among parties who don't necessarily know or trust each other. Based on exchange rates listed on Mt.Gox—the most widely used Bitcoin exchange—the coins have a value of more than $82.87 million. On May 13, the date the researchers analyzed their data, there were slightly more than 9 million BTCs in existence.

[...]

Ah ok, yeah I carefully reviewed their stuff and if anyone invests money, lol consider it a donation.

I guess I can put up a website soon. But it seems I'm not really gathering any interest

Not sure if it's possible with the concrete public crypto algorithm that bitcoin uses. But messages could be encrypted with the destination public key to ensure he's the only one who can read it. If it's possible I think reusing bitcoin keypairs is the best option.

I am not sure if this has been mentioned by someone else. To make the decentralized exchange works, we need a standard peer-to-peer protocol to broadcast all the required information: IPO invitations, definition of assets, ask/bid orders, and cancellation of such orders. It's just like how transactions and blocks broadcasting on the bitcoin network. All messages should be signed by the private key of associated bitcoin addresses and/or GPG. For example, IPO and asset definition should be signed by GPG of issuer, and ask/bid orders should be signed by addresses holding enough bitcoin or colored bitcoin for completing the trade.

The peer-to-peer client should be able to check the validity of ask/bid orders. It should also generate raw transaction based on colored coin trading rules, allow transmission of partially singed transaction among the trading parties, and broadcast the completed transaction to the bitcoin network. It should also work as a bot, which will automatically sign transactions based on user instruction.