The economical thing put aside. Is it technically possible that the difficulty could decrease or will it always only go up as hash's are getting harder to find?

Are there any plans in the future for a feature of bitcoind to notify over JSON-SSL when a new transaction has a certain number of confirmations?

lets not start a flame war. he is allowed to ask.

Ok I think I am getting it..

My bitcoind takes a random group of unlocked transactions that its received off the networks bundles them all up and starts trying to create a hash that is complex enough.. if it finds one before another block is created then it can submit the block it was creating for confirmation, if someone else makes a block before I get done then I remove the transactions from my block that were locked by the "new block" and start over with a few new transactions and re calculated "winners" transaction of 50 BTC + fees..

This process of try to solve or lock my group of transactions before any other new blocks gets created keeps happening over and over again until I finally get a good hash of "recent" transactions before anyone else.. That becomes a block and gets submitted to the network for confirmation..

So the lifecycle is
* Transactions float in the cloud
* Bitcoind picks some transactions and bundles them
* Bitcoind adds 50btc + fees as a transaction to itself (bitcoind's wallet)
* try to create a hash of attiquit difficulty for the group of transaction (given the current difficulty at the current point in time).
* If I succeed before another block is created submit the new block to the cloud for confimation
* If I fail, bundle a new set of transactions and try again.

Ok so if that is accurate, then the next question is why does it take a few days for a change in difficulty to result in a slowdown in blocks? Or is that random happen stance?  BTCMine was solving 20ish blocks a day until the recent difficulty increase.. It kept the same pace for about 5 more days then it slowed down.. Now with more GHs of bandwith its solving fewer blocks...  Does it take time for blocks to "wash" through the system when the difficulty changes?

Thanks again, this has been quite enlightening.
~Hands

bitcoin client 0.3.19
mac 10.6.6

So lets say I am CPU mining, each share I solve has just as much a chance to find a block as anyone else.. So if I leave my CPU miner running for 6 years when it does finally solve a block its not like it solved a 6 year old block that is no longer valid.. It means it solved the current block and finally (after 6 years) got lucky...

Is that correct?

By the way, I have read that wiki page.. I read it a few weeks ago, but the lifecycle is still kinda murky... I understand a group of transactions are bundled into a block, then the block has to get hashed into the chain.. And somewhere in there a block is solved and someone (after 120 confirmations) wins 50 BTC.... What I don't understand is the path from bundle of transactions to 50 BTC, and the queing the network uses to apportion work..

I am trying to understand so that I can decide if I want to spin up a private pool (of about 10GHs between me and some friends) or stick with my current pool. I am less concerned with variance as I am winning a block but it becoming invalid due to how long we went before solving a block. (after all variance levels out over the long term)

Thanks
~Hands

I have had the client running for 5 days now and am stuck at 92146 blocks. I ma consistently at 1 or 2 connections. I have done the add node thing which made no difference. I have got two transactions accepted and confirmed by blockexplorer but I guess they won't show on my client until all the blocks are downloaded.

Is there a way to reinstall the client and start again but keep the same address or is there another fix to this???

Thanks

I'd like to know the answer to this as well. It seems that a bigger pool has a better chance somehow which is why deepbit is so large but I'm not making any money on Deepbit right now and was thinking of joining a diff pool - not if I'm going to make less there tho.

I sent a few bucks and put in a dispute.

Well, it's not that I thought it was unlikely this would happen, but I thought I'd go through the process anyway.

By the way, destro47 = richardfrancis, so he's sold bitcoins to himself apparently.

  Is there something done to prevent sending BTC on unknown address when backuping new wallet (without  100 new address created) - or we will again see something like -  " OMG  - i am followed instructions on backup, and my xxxx BTC  gone in unknown direction - where is nearest window to jump in ?"