The trend has already changed. Over the last years they started hoarding gold.
China is probably desperate to exchange it's USD reserves for gold, but must do it as secretly as possible.
That's why I think gold will continue to rally.

Does anybody think it would be a big deal to price oil in Euro or sell directly for Euro?

The EUR/USD market is the most liquid in the world, so the difference would be purely psychological.

@phathash
Currently the only thing the blockchain are Bitcoin transactions. You can call that payload, if you want.

@kiba
Sorry, but I didn't read all pages, only the beginning and the end.

Can you link the post explaining who would rationally provide for the upkeep of a separate chain?

The expense of any chain is storage in the form of disk space and defence/upkeep in the form of compute power/electricity and bandwidth.
This must all be financed by the hosts = miners.

Bitcoin would still hold a special position, because it would be the unit of accounting for all other "transactions".
For example, for a BitDNS transaction with fee, you'd also need a Bitcoin transaction, solely for this fee.

The ability to use the blockchain as a service would provide a kind of real backing for Bitcoins.

Do you think that it would be too much data? The miners surely can meet supply and demand.

Isn't BitDNS Bounty (3500 BTC) for a system of this kind?
I'd start development, but I haven't even compiled Bitcoin, yet. Has somebody a guide for how to compile on Windows?
Starting from scratch is a little too much.

The discussion is not about the current protocol, but future extensions.

I don't see how any payload could be separated from the main chain.

This is my simple idea: enable the storage of any data in the main chain, for Bitcoin fees, at the miners discretion.

Hosts who do not understand a certain data type, ignore it, and those who do understand verify it.

Theoretically yes, but since it's a race with a half life of 10 minutes, you should be quick or somebody else will solve the block.

Really? I'd rather say he uses heuristics to solve the problem much faster than brute force, but still with exponential complexity.
The heuristics can have polynomial complexity, but they do not solve the problem 100% accurate.

Huh? The consensus seems to be that it would be a great boon. Some physicists go as far and say if P=NP, we would be gods. NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality.
If P≠NP is a fact of nature, it means, among other things, that quantum computation will not scale.

F.lux is good for general usage, but it should have an option to lower the brightness even more.
For coding, I use a dark color scheme:

Yes, but to be fair sports betting should reflect the (subjective) probabilities.

For example look at the one person betting on Draw in the above example. No matter what he risks, he'll either lose or win the whole pot. This cannot be called fair.

I tried to explain that it should be possible to make it fair with the current setup, but only under certain conditions.

The blockchain is basically an unalterable public register, and I would suggest to use a forward compatible format which allows storage of possibly arbitrary data, of course at the discretion of the block generating node, for possible fees and up to some maximum blocksize.
My main idea for additional usage would be credentials, which would greatly improve some interactions, going so far as to enable credit.
This needs the host and/or blockchain to be used for blind-signing: blind signs-proc.pdf.
The scripting language is already designed to be very flexible, maybe it would need a few extensions.

Disclaimer: I'm regularly programming in C++, but have not much experience with cryptography, so the details of above paper are a little over my head.

So the odds of a certain event are supposedly: money on this event / total pot?
It should be fair, as long as at least two individuals with deep pockets play market maker and even out the positions.
If you reduce the minimum bet to 0.01, this will work better. Also you should extend the deadline whenever a new position is taken, so nobody can change the odds in his favor, just before the deadline ends.
I think a lot of people could be interested in such a zero-sum marketplace for sports betting, to the extend of getting new people into Bitcoin, no?

Looks like a nice service, very simple to use.
They even have coding challenges, if you want to work for them. 

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The initial question is kinda moot, if we're talking about an identical clone, but the main point still stands:

Even though the technology is great and has lots of merits, adoption will suffer because rational people will not buy into the existing market.

I feel like a troll in these forums, but here are my 2ct:

This will be the major argument for government action against Bitcoin.

For example e-gold was taken down because of anonymous death threats demanding payment into an anonymous e-gold account.
This is different from cash, because you cannot hand over cash without risk.

It's nearly impossible to take Bitcoin or another decentralized system down, so this must be faced eventually.
With strong anonymity, the only option is to ignore the threats and prevent/punish crime in the real world.
With Bitcoins pseudo anonymity, there might be other solutions.

"It's high-risk venture capital." lol
As was said before it's more an experiment on psychology / creativity, because of the miniscule 2 BTC startup capital.
The task of turning 2 BTC into 8 is equivalent to turning 0 into 6, unless you're very lucky in gambling. If the 2 BTC should represent the fixed money supply of a mini economy (wages of 0.0001BTC, etc), there is no way for you to measure surplus value and success. They will eventually have to sell something to the outside world, but then it's easier to just do a freelance job for a 3rd party, from the beginning, requiring no startup capital at all.

@FreeMoney
The main point is that payout is proportional to difficulty, i.e. work done.
So, all else equal, it will rise exponentially as long as Moore's-Law holds, and there should be less (no?) incentive to get in early.

Because this would reduce the total hashing power, the point about the defense against attacks: I'm not expert enough, but there should be a way to detect an adversary based on "inconsistent" blocks in the chain? There are probably more ways to automate this.

But surely the aim is to keep Bitcoin (or an alternative) attractive for a steadily growing percentage of the population? You don't have a disadvantage if you join facebook or twitter today, just the opposite: they get more attractive with more users.

Of course this is also true for money, so Bitcoins only advantage seems to be its momentum, e.g. the established economy and exchange volume, which is arguably not much.

Here's a starting point for an alternate reward/inflation scheme:

Solved blocks transfer a dynamic amount of money to the finder,
depending on current difficulty, which is adjusted every block, based on a moving average of:

• storage need, e.g. data per second
  → more blocks are generated during peak hours
  → transactions are cheaper during off hours
  
• threat level, e.g. number of blocks in concurrent chains
  → electricity is not wasted on security when not neccessary
  → defense is payed for in small bursts of inflation
  

→ inflation is infinite and follows adoption level, FLOPS/Watt, the acceptance of transaction fees and the ratio of commercial / free hosts
→ inflation is predictable and will eventually become constant = neglible

Suppose a Bitcoin clone with little to no changes would startup tomorrow. Would miners switch?

I think they would, because early adoptors had (and still have) a big advantage with the current inflation model.
During the first year about half of all currently existing bitcoins were mined, while there were practically no transactions, and almost none of it has been spend.
Why would late comers simply accept this? If you newly learn about Bitcoin, you'll always have an incentive to start from zero.
Unlike gold, bitcoin is not unique and was never intended to be.
I'm not arguing on economic grounds, and do support the austrian school, so please don't restart the old inflation vs. deflation debate.
It's about sustainability of continuous network growth, which seems to need an equal playing ground in time.

You cannot change the smallest possible unit, so it could only be 21 trillion BTC with 5 decimal places.

Moving the decimal point would probably create create too much confusion. If it could still be done I'd vote for 2 places, but it's probably better to just use a new name like Bitcent for BTC 0.01.

It's interesting that the exchange rate is now about parity with USD, which will help in adoption.
I think the inflation scheme was chosen rather arbitrarily and should have taken adoption into account.