Wow guys. This is big news.

The start of a US led attack on Bitcoin is beginning.

How ironic that it begins in the USA, land of the free. It seems in this 21st century, USA is no longer land of the free. It's land of the heavily indebted ,  where government sponsored elitist cronies dictate everything in their own interest at the expense of the people at the bottom. I only hope this is not the beginning of increasing online state censorship. The internet is truly the one remaining outlet that can provide total freedom from government interference to the average citizen. Perhaps ,then, in some years US gov't will be shipping that statue of liberty back to Europe.

I am actually uncomfortable with the way Dwolla is handling this. Why are they telling anybody who asks that the MtGox account has been frozen by court order? Isn't there some sort of client confidentiality? This seems to be just making MtGox look bad.

Just a quick update. It looks like the smallest stone we can engrave is 3mm round .1 ct diamond, which is quite small. Perfect for hiding! :-)

THIS GUY SCAMMED ME DERP
BANZ HIM!

Money is debt.

It is not possible under the current system.

I think there is a possible flaw in the Ben Laurie paper on Bitcoin, called "Decentralized Currencies are Probably Impossible, But Let's At Least Make Them Efficient" (http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf).

If I may summarize his argument:
1. Bitcoin is inefficient, because it may require as much as 51% of the world's computer power to protect against a 51% attack.
2. Bitcoin solves this problem by doing periodic checkpoints, which are snapshots of the currency at a point in time beyond which its history cannot be rolled back.
3. These checkpoints use some other form of consensus which is more efficient than Bitcoin, but still secure and presumably decentralized, otherwise Bitcoin is not secure and decentralized.
4. He calls this hypothetical checkpointing mechanism "efficient unbounded agreement", and then claims that a more efficient coin than Bitcoin can be built on the basis of that mechanism alone.

The flaw in his argument, it seems to me, lies in assuming that the efficient unbounded agreement mechanism can somehow be separated from Bitcoin as a separate standalone protocol.  Checkpointing is merely freezing Bitcoin at a moment in time and refusing to roll back any transactions before that time.  Checkpointing relies on the assumption that the original Bitcoin proof-of-work is robust and secure, so that it is quite unlikely that a sustained attack can be made longer than a given period of time on the original Bitcoin protocol, thus it is presumed safe to checkpoint after that time.

However, checkpointing is only a secondary protocol that is not capable of standing on its own as the basis for a coin.  Checkpointing is merely a secondary validation of a primary security model.  Thus his conclusion, which essentially seems to say that we should throw out the Bitcoin and keep the checkpointing, is false and unworkable.

An analogy might be made with credit card security.  Imagine that credit cards have all their existing security mechanisms, plus you can't do chargebacks after 30 days.  An analogy to Ben Laurie's argument would be claiming that you can do away with all other card security and simply refuse to accept chargebacks after 30 days, and that would be just as secure as before.  That of course would be false, since a limit on chargebacks would just be a secondary security mechanism that can't stand on its own.

I bring this up because the PPCoin paper references this paper and seems to rely on it (http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf).  Elsewhere I have attempted to criticize PPCoin as well, along slightly different lines (an effort that I am still working on -- see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=202573.0).

I am not implying that it is impossible to make a more efficient coin than Bitcoin.  Also, I am not implying that PPCoin is insecure simply because it references that paper.  However, I did want to point out the apparent flaws in that paper's arguments, which if genuine, imply that it should not be relied on.

We will celebrate this day at our restaurant in Berlin (ROOM77) and as a courtesy to our customers our special offer will be:

'Pizza at the same price like back in the good old days'.

So two pizzas for 10.000 or one pizza for 5.000 BTC.

OFFER LIMITED TO THE 22ND OF MAY ONLY AND ONLY UNTIL MIDNIGHT!

Looking forward to as many of you as we can seat!

Joe

It can't be either this day or that day. It has to be a specific date. That's the point of a holiday! I say May 22nd considering that's when the deal was sealed, up until then we could have still thought of it as unbelievable.

It looks like tomato, green and black olives. The second has pepperoni as well.

Dude, BPD is on the 22nd of May! It's the date of this post and it is also the date the pictures were taken:


see also:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80844.0

It can't be either this day or that day. It has to be a specific date. That's the point of a holiday! I say May 22nd considering that's when the deal was sealed, up until then we could have still thought of it as unbelievable.

It looks like tomato, green and black olives. The second has pepperoni as well.

Dude, BPD is on the 22nd of May! It's the date of this post and it is also the date the pictures were taken:


see also:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80844.0

This poll is for sublime's Scammer list - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149147.0;all
My summary/viewpoint of charges against TradeFortress:
1) I had a horrible experience trying to get my site coded by TF.
2) He intentionally scammed me out of 27 BTC.
3) He knew he did not have the level of skill or experience required to sell web-programming services for a commercial bitcoin accounts based website.
4) He misrepresented his experience by failing to correct my mistaken belief that he coded a bitcoin accepting website in the past, specifically https://bitzino.com/ the website in his forum sig. This obviates any claim of "buyer beware" for his services.
5) He attempted to do what was necessary to present the appearance of successfully coding my site, but as the code/final site provided reveals, this was still a non-operable site that did not forward bitcoins correctly and was written so poorly and has so many bugs and non-usable aspects it is unsuitable to be sold as commercial website design. The only publicly released version of his final product (as of now) is available here:
http://www.megafileupload.com/en/file/398233/Moneypak-zip.html
direct link - http://94.75.216.85/en/file/398233/Moneypak-zip.html
I have stopped hosting it since I don't want customers to associate this non-functional and unusable site with my domain. I am instead paying for a complete rewrite of the site.
6) TF has not released a functional version of the website I paid 27 BTC to be completed.
7) TF agreed to pay arbitration, but never filed the case and instead slandered me in emails to the judge.me arbitration service and has not paid the fee for the case I filed at judge.me.
I've agreed to send any funds recovered from TF to charity.
9) TF Scam thread with lengthy details here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=126588.0;all
10) TF Review thread with more details of our dispute here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146319.0
11) TF solicited more work from others, using the non-functional/unfinished web-development he did for me, but few others were actually scammed and one user reports a good experience, however their site is apparently non-functional as of this post (see above threads).
12) Careful review of the evidence in the linked threads will prove TF is a scammer and not a proficient web-developer.

As many of you might know the first one way trip to Mars will take place in within a few years, to start up a Martian base.

What problems do you spot if BTC were to be used between the base, and earth, considering that the signal time between
Mars and Earth varies between 5 and 20 minutes? And how is those problems solved?

The first problem I spot is the difficulty to mine blocks, as some data lags this time behind, but there must be other
complications as well!

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Bitstamp style orderbooks for XRP/BTC and XPR/USD - not live I'm afraid, you'll need to refresh to get latest figures.

http://webr3.org/apps/xrp/charts/btc-xrp.html mirror: http://rippledb.com/
http://webr3.org/apps/xrp/charts/usd-xrp.html

They work on a 3x ratio, so 3x lower than current price through to 3x higher, will change this ratio as required in the future.

Consider them unlicensed, use wherever and replicate without worry.

Has someone made a spreadsheet for these games showing increased price vs probability of failure ?
Seems like it would be interesting.

100% draws a lot of eyes