Seriously.  Without even going into the accuracy of the source, or how the wikipedia article author came up with those numbers, the amount of foreign currency reserves that it claims for China is expressed in US dollar values.  The Central Bank of China doesn't actually keep it's currency reserves in US Federal Reserve Notes.  Much of those reserves are Euros, and many other currencies besides, not limited to Brazil, Argentina and Australia; China's most important non-domestic commodities source nations.

Done.

Which ones?  You, incorrectly, assume that economists agree that the deflationary model is universally bad.  That is not the case, and only Keynesians agree with one another on this point, and Monetarist depending upon conditions.  Austrians, almost never.  The gold standard was, due to rising population rates, generally deflationary over long stretches of time, and only inflationary for short stretches and in regions with close economic ties to the new found sources of gold.  A gentle, predictable deflation is at least as economicly benign as a gentle, predictable inflationary currency.  Currently, Bitcoin is neither, as it's highly inflationary (of it's monetary base) whilst also being incrediblely predictable.  Bitcoin's value has increased over the past year, as much as it has, only because the size of the bitcoin user base (and thus it's aggregate demand) has increased by several orders of magnitude since I discovered it in April of 2010.  The high (but declining) inflation is somewhat contradicted by it's predictability, which helps to assure early adopters and speculators (same thing, mostly) that the currency will have value in the distant future, once the inflation rate levels off.

That said, Solidcoin is not a better choice here either, using a much steeper inflationary model followed by a sudden stop.  Solidcoin might prove to have it's place in the market, but not as a direct competitor to Bitcoin.  Namecoin has a nitche.  A localized version of bitcoin might as well.  Solidcoin doesn't seem to have a nitche as far as I can tell.  The sudden stop nature of solidcoin could also prove it's undoing, as the geometric halving of Bitcoin's block reward (potentially) serves the function of weaning a growing market economy off of a subsidy.  If Solidcoin has any success at all at 2022, the sudden stop in block rewards is as likely as not to be a major disruption in the system.  If the market is weak, such a disruption would likely kill it off, even with it's own high degree of predictability.  The reward system in Bitcoin, as well as it's interval, are certainly arbitrary; but they are well considered.

What does "overspill" mean in this context?

And before it happens, no BitcoinPorn, I don't need a visual image.

And that is why it is reasonable to assume that there will always be at least one person willing to run a full node that does not prune.  It's also why I said that most full clients won't prune anything recent.  As already noted, light clients don't need the full chain anyway, and can start their chain when they create their first address.  Most full clients won't really need a full chain either, and can prune quite extensively and/or start from the most recent trusted checkpoint hash.  All clients do full chains currently, in part, because the network is still very small compared to the expectations, and the many-copies-keep-data-safe method is employed.  The concept of placing a full "quiet" node in orbit, on Earth protected in a safe zone, and eventually on the Moon, as archival devices have been discussed already.  For now, there is neither the need nor the resources to do any such things, but if Bitcoin is as successful as some of us predict, those nodes will be cheap insurance; largely inaccessable to most forms of destruction.  (one or another, but not all, depending on the kind of destruction being considered)

As noted, I've done my research.  Some of it, at least.  What I found isn't promising.  I'm willing to stake a bet between us.  What is the currency exchange rate?  Based on the rate today, in six months you buy me $50 worth of Bitcoins (on today's exchange rate) and I'll buy you $50 worth of Solidcoins (also in today's exchange rate).  You can buy those coins at any point along those six months, if you don't aleady have them. 

It doesn't need to be verified.  The client downloads the entire block, verifies it, and then proceeds to prune it to it's own liking.  That is what the merkle tree block structure is for.

Yeah, I'm starting to see it more your way.  Off-book land contracts tend to be shady deals anyway, and those who set up such things are either family of the homeowner or a criminal looking to launder some cash.  People who are willing to deal with such people tend to be criminal in their own right.

No, I knew what you were doing.  I said that you were stupid.  The other guys for trying to deal in contraband on a public forum, and you for getting your identity involved at all.

I didn't move this thread, nor have I deleted or moved any threads on this topic.  I locked the pot thread because permitting such things to continue invites legal liability to the ownership of this forum.  This is one reason that this forum is no longer part of bitcoin.org.

I think that they mean that if a coin hasn't been spent or moved by the time it hits the 100K block, it's probably a lost coin and is given to the miner of the next block as that one is destroyed. 

That's a false logic.  A license is required to perform real estate contracts, legal contractors are presumed to honest, thus any contract that lacks the written permission of the state must be dishonest.  Sorry, but a license doesn't mean your honest and the lack of one doesn't mean your dishonest.  In this case, it means your stupid, but malice still isn't the most likely cause of this breakdown.


Actually, he could.  That's the 'loophole' in a land contract, performed properly.  Still a good idea to use a licensed real estate lawyer to handle the details, but land contracts are legal for anyone in any state.  As I noted before, a land contract is simply a rent to own lease agreement wherein the object being rented is one's own house bought in a short sale prior to forclosure, instead of a tv or a computer from Renta-center.  It is, essentially, a long term lease agreement.  Real estate lawyers can't really make such contracts illegal.  BW's failure was accepting a deposit from potential clients.  If cash wasn't involved, the dogs wouldn't have had anything to hit him with.  If he had shelled out the fees that licensed agents expect, they would have left him alone.


I'm saying you can't trust anyone.  Saying that some judge is trustworthy, because he is a judge, is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy. 


Bruce was broke, remember?  What would he have paid his lawyer with?  They don't work for free, justice belongs to the highest bidder, sometimes. 


I'll admit, that part does sound a bit fishy, coming from Bruce himself. 


Again, a license doesn't imply honesty.

The judge is a lawyer.  You presume that the judge was correct and impartial.  I'm trying to point out that isn't something that should be assumed.  The judge is, more likely, acting under the color of law.  Real estate lawyers don't like it when new guys muscle into their turf, particularly when they find some way to do it without jumping through the legal hoops (i.e. licensing) that they have erected to prevent it.  Lawyers stick together, and don't like it when their brothers are upset.  I've seen this crap in action personally, and I am inclined to give BW the benefit of the doubt based upon the plausibility of his explaination on the events.  Sure, he couldn't produce a single person who had been aided, most likely because his contract with any investors required confidentiality.  Something that the lawyers filing suit would have well known, considering that many (most?) of such land contract investors are persons with an excess of cash reserves who need discrete investment vehicles.  Said more plainly, particularly considering the locale, any investors that BW had would most likely had shady forms of income, and needed a means of washing the dirt of that cash.  Land contracts are infamous for such things, because the mortgage company being paid off does not have any incentive to report suspicious events, the homeowner gets another chance at the American Dream (tm) and even if the investor ends up in prison, no prosecutor is going to go after the house, because they want to keep their jobs. (if they aren't elected, they work for someone who is, and evicting law abiding citizens from their home because they rent from a scumbag is bad press).  And most of the time, civil forfiture laws can't realisticly even take the land contract, because they probably belong to some out of state corporation and not the scumbag in question; funtionally making the seizure of the asset (the contract, not the home) an out of state legal action.  Something that prosecutors aren't likely to do, because they don't like to work hard for small odds of success any more than anyone else does.

And if you had a confidentiality agreement like that with someone like that, would you risk breaking it by actually inviting a homeowner to testify on your behalf?  It's not like the homeowner agreed to keep quiet, and the lawyers are certain to ask the homeowner about the investor.

I went to the solidcoin website and this is what I found as the logic for this fork...

"As Bitcoin itself and other similar chains have seen, there are numerous vulnerabilities and issues in the protocol, including :-

    * Slow transaction speeds, often making waiting for confirmations unbearable
    * Near complete shutdown of network due to pump-n-dumps by large operators
    * Transaction fee nightmares, no way of knowing what a fee will be until you've tried to send funds
    * Concentration of Bitcoins into elitist early adopters that have no interest or desire to help Bitcoins be used by "normal" people"


Really?  That's it?  This is the complaint?

1) Slow transaction confirms?  (not transaction speeds, as noted by the faq later, actual transactions take seconds)
2) Pump'N'Dump
3) Unknown transaction fees
4) Elitist attitudes


1)  So to solve the problem of 'instant' transfer confirmations, they reduce the target time from 10 minutes to three minutes.  Okay, but it's still three minutes.  How does that help?  If you are standing in a checkout line trying to buy a hamburger, fries and a coke you aren't going to be waiting for a confirmation in either case.  If you are sitting in the new car dealership then you are going to be waiting for several confirmations in any case.  This doesn't solve anything, and is just as arbitrary of an interval than Bitcoin's 10 minutes.  By what logic is three minutes better?  And why not two minutes?  And what is the expected network latency going to be if Solidcoin is running transaction volumes near to that of Visa?

2)  Is this a problem with Bitcoin, and if so, how?  This kind of thing (sort of) happened last summer, when the difficulty was way lower than now and almost no one was mining with their GPU's.  But rules now exist to limit such events, even though they are astronomicly less likely since that was most likely done by someone with a GPU mining prototype and there just aren't any new jumps in tech on the horizon.  Bear in mind that we knew that GPU mining was coming at the time.  And ASICs represent a leap in power efficiency not hashing power per se.

3)  They aren't unknown.  All one has to do is take a look at the range of fees in the last couple of blocks.  If you want to be 99% certain that your transaction will be included in the very next block, choose the high end of that range.  If you just want to have a pretty good odds of getting it in within the next couple of blocks, choose the low end of that range.  If you don't need it to be included anytime soon, choose zero. 

4)  Really?  You don't like how others play the game, so you are going to go home and make a whole new ball game?  Is this Baseketball?  Is this a logical reason to choose a currency fork over the original?  Because you don't care for the attitude?  Do you really think that others who come after you are going to prefer your attitude enough to overlook the advantages of the original?

I'll admit up front that I don't know anything about what Solidcoin is trying to accomplish, but it's obvious to myself that neither of you have any deep understanding of what Bitcoin is really designed to accomplish, nor how it works to that end.

This is not the proper forum for this kind of transaction, regardless of what you might use to pay for it.  And even if it were, odds are even that this new 'vendor' is a police sting.  You two really are stupid.

Why?  Because he posted the legal opinion of a lawyer put to paper?  Or because you trust that he is honest while Bruce is not?  Have you people learned nothing?  Just because someone says so, doesn't mean that it's so.  This is no more true with Bruce than anything that Nagle, or myself for that matter, might post on this forum.  It's not damning, it's not even supported with a reference. 

Just because someone on this forum hasn't been yet shown to be a liar, doesn't imply that they deserve your trust.

Do you shop for books by their covers as well?

That's an excellent idea!  How long do you need to get it done?

Yes.