My order is in.

Here's to it being as good as I hope!

As a moderator here, trust me, they know all about us. That being said, Atlas, you should have known that too.

That's not that bad of an idea.

This. He doesn't need to pay out the amount you gained by hopping, but he at least needs to pay out the actual value of the work you provided. PPS seems to be a fair trade-off.

This is the risk you take when you join hoppable pools.

It does mean that you don't need to waste time generating new keys and can just do a hash operation. Hash operations are much cheaper then ECC operations. That being said, the difference isn't all that much to matter here.

I totally agree. However, it'll at least have the following implications, as you currently have the rule worded:
1) You wouldn't be able to sell game currency.
2) You wouldn't be able to sell game accounts.
3) You might not be able to buy/sell PayPal money for bitcoins (Bitcoin is against their ToS).

As such, this is a more complex issue than it appears to be. It's also a question on what we want to allow, as a community. I don't really know the answer here.

1) We find him amusing. (although, this is quickly going away)
2) We have HUGE questions about shakaru, so astana might be able to shed so light given this new information. (this, too, has now gone away)
3) He's pretty much sticking to these threads.
4) There was an active argument between you and him, so we didn't want to cut him off.

That being said, I'm ready to re-ban him should this argument continue now that it's resolved.

Bet you it's going to keep counting up, too.

Oh wow, I am totally surprised about this sudden turn of events!

"witnessed", too, is important, but like "subbed", it is also due to technological reasons. You see, in SMF, not even an Administrator can view/restore the original version of a post after it has been edited unless someone quoted it or a copy was otherwise saved (i.e. backups, web caches like Google, screenshots, direct copy/pastes saved by someone, etc.)

There is a whole 'nother dimension to this that you guys are ignoring, and that's time. In addition to only accepting transactions with a certain fee, miners might not even attempt to mine a block at all until it has enough in fees to be profitable. Alone, this may be bad. However, there are several interesting dynamics to consider, even if you assume miners are completely logical:

1) Plenty of people have reasons to get their transaction fully confirmed ASAP. For example, MtGox users. So, users will include a large transaction fee in hopes of convincing more miners to turn on to mine the block. They'd then likely send fee-only transactions in the next 5 blocks to make sure that the mining keeps up.
2) Many people will need to do this several times per day, however they won't know when they'd be able to "freeride" off of someone else until the transaction is on the network. Besides, if you need something to clear right now, you didn't plan ahead in the first place, and it's impossible to guess if someone else might shortly cover the cost of running a large amount of miners for you.
3) Different miners have different profitability points. Even if someone else already paid to have several miners running, there are always several more miners that can run if you pay just a bit more in fees. Currently, all active miners are mining at 100% anyway, so this is an effect that you can't yet see.
4) Businesses will contract out to certain miners to ensure that low priority transactions (such as low-value POS transactions where the person also provided their ID) get included in a semi-timely manner for a monthly rate (businesses love stability). MtGox already does this.
5) A certain amount of people will mine no matter what, likely including every transaction they safely can (remember, the larger a block is, the longer it takes to validate, the more likely it is that someone else will find another block that orphans yours).
6) After a miner successfully mines a (particularly profitable) block, they will either mine at full power for a few blocks to protect their block, send fee-only transactions using stored up funds that will hopefully be reimbursed out of their profits from the block to entice other miners to mine the block (this is where a protocol change would be nice so that this can actually come directly out of the mined funds or at least be dependent on them), or likely a combination of both. This will help smooth block times a bit.
7) Miners will have invested a good deal of money in specialized hardware to mine bitcoins. As a result, any attack that could potentially undermine Bitcoin would likely be met with the FULL force of ALL specialized mining hardware which will have been programmed by their owners to reverse the attack in order to protect their investment. As an added plus, we gain a huge security through obscurity benefit here since it'd be impossible for an attacker to predict how much mining power the whole network actually has until they've tried attacking it.

Altogether, this will come together in such way that Bitcoin will remain secure and block times will be fairly stable. There are so many variables in play here that it's really quite brilliant. At this point, the only thing I would be concerned about is a 51% miner that rejects everyone else's blocks. Any other attack, economic or not, will fail miserably.

Baah, you're right. That could be a backwards-compatible protocol change.
Protocol-wise, that's true. If we completely replace scriptPubKey with scriptHash in the protocol (which is how I'd suggest doing it), we can convert all of the legacy scripts to P2SH.

Practically, someone would have to keep the old script data around, but I suppose, thinking it over, the Satoshi client already saves that in the wallet, anyway. So yes, a straight conversion would work.

etotheipi, what backup case hasn't been considered?

I do. By officially deprecating it, that could mean that we will remove the ability to make new legacy transactions in a future hard fork. Eventually, another hard fork could remove it altogether, destroying any still-unspent legacy outputs.

Didn't we already go over this? I thought this was fairly well established...

The only reason why we haven't banned him yet is because we find him amusing. Well, that and a lot of interesting facts about shakura have come our way.

That would be back when astana decided to chargeback the previous successful transactions. Because shakaru had already submitted the refund for the transaction in dispute via his bank on PayPal, he had to quickly get the bank to cancel the transaction to prevent astana from receiving far more than he was owed. That one action (the chargeback) is what caused this whole mess. If he had waited a few days, he would have received his refund and been able to go on his merry way.

Ah, I see. I missed the inputs part. In that case, let me bring up another point:

What if you aren't mining any transactions (other than the coinbase, which may or may not have an input based on the definition of "input")? What would H2 be?

This does mean that it's easier for botnets to include transactions rather than not, if they want a minimal data footprint, I'll give you that.

Totally didn't think of that... It's now going to be throttled to 16 mbps as of tonight. I'll know if it worked in the morning. 

...really?

Stop being assholes.

Well, that'd be my bad, then. Every night at 3:30am PST the server will get hit by another server downloading the forum's backup at about 100 mbps for about 30 seconds.

Edit: I moved it one hour later, just in case. Turns out I needed to do it anyway, thanks to daylight savings...