I'd still call it a bug. Actually, it's still an unsolved bug. We've only worked around it, but it's still there.

A non-understood limitation of an implementation dependency does not define the protocol. To the Bitcoin protocol, blocks up until 1Mb are allowed. That was the consensus, that was what every documentation available said. The <= 0.7 Satoshi implementation wasn't capable of dealing with such blocks. That implementation was bugged, not the 0.8.

Its encrypted seed, derp.

I realize you can do the same with a paper wallet, as I said previously, but then I wouldn't call it "paper wallet" any more.

Will you people just stop this bullshit?

If you feel SatoshiDice is "abusing you" somehow (pure nonsense, but anyway), run a custom client that doesn't relay its transactions. Run a solo miner or mining pool that doesn't include them. Do whatever, but just please stop bitching.

Come on, such obscure limit was not known by anyone in Bitcoin-world up until it blew yesterday. You may claim it's not a bug on BDB side*, what's arguable, but it is definitely a bug on bitcoin implementation side.
Everybody should be able to handle blocks up until 1Mb. That was the general agreement, the protocol spec if you will. The particular implementation of Satoshi client <= 0.7 was not capable of following such protocol specification as it should. 0.8 onward was. If anything, 0.8 is the "correct version". Bringing everybody back to 0.7 was an "emergency plan" since pushing everybody to 0.8 was believed to be much harder to accomplish (and likely truly would be).

* And bug or not, the fact that nobody here even knew about it just shows how much we cannot rely on BDB - not a single person among all the brilliant minds on the core dev team understands fully how this thing works (and neither did Satoshi) .
Moving out of BDB is certainly a desirable thing. Now with this even more crippling block size limit, it's pretty much urgent.

And I'd say paper wallets are less secure than Trezor, since you cannot back them up on the cloud (well, you can, but then it's not really a paper wallet any longer).

This time on the what-if blog: http://what-if.xkcd.com/36/

Regardless, he does have a good point in that these miners which were on 0.8 did make a monetary sacrifice, while it wasn't them which were using a buggy software in the first place, but precisely those which were on the older version.

I believe those pools which got their blocks in the 0.7 after the fork should donate perhaps half of the bitcoins they've generated up until the end of the fork to those who got orphaned for mining in 0.8 and then downgraded.
It would be a noble display of gratitude, since those in 0.7 were using "bad software" and those in 0.8 agreed on downgrading just to keep the network as a whole.

I view Trezor precisely as a way for non-technical people to protect their main chunk of Bitcoins, back at their homes, yes. Not as a way to move around your entire wallet and expose it to meatspace dangers frequently.
To walk around with Bitcoins, smartphones are good enough. You charge it with smaller amounts that you could afford to lose in the case of a malware infection, and you're good to go. No extra device to carry, since you'll be carrying your phone with you anyway.

It's not a matter of belief, it's a fact. Market prices are those determined by voluntary transactions. Taxes are coercive, not voluntary. Any alteration taxes provoke on prices is a distortion of the actual market prices. And taxing only a particular kind of good (land), provokes an unbalanced distortion.


Land can certainly be capital if used as such, capital == means of production. The land of a farmer, for ex., is part of his means of production. So it's his capital.
But whether it's capital or not is not my point, my point is that by taxing land only you'll create a burden on only this kind of good.


There are many problems with Georgism. Both on the ethical and on the practical/economical level. I'm aware that both Hoppe and Rothbard have written about it, you should perhaps search their essays.


It's a tax on consumption. That's the last link in the economic growth chain. Attacking that link will not break the chain thus will not seriously reduce future economic growth. It will reduce the amount of growth that people can profit from (consume), but the growth speed won't be be seriously reduced, at least not if we compare with taxes which affect savings and investments.


The usefulness of something to society is not to be determined by you nor anybody else. You don't get to say that land is more or less useful than other goods. That's something to be decided by people's actions and their subjective evaluations.

But you can certainly anticipate that it will be artificially rendered relatively less useful than other goods if you apply a tax on it.

If you deleted your previous wallet.dat, and you had no backups, and you cannot recover it via recovery tools, then any money that had been deposited in any of the keys of that wallet is lost for good.

You should never delete a wallet.dat which has coins in it.

Unfortunately VAT on goods is almost impossible to avoid, in spite of having or not a way to spy on people's finances. Merchants have a strong incentive to declare it in order to reimburse the VAT they payed on input.

And even for VAT on services, some nasty techniques may considerably reduce evasion, like forcing merchants to allow customers to provide their fiscal number to be attached to the "fiscal receipt" (what's the correct English term?), and then reimburse these customers of a % of the VAT they payed. The government of the state of São Paulo is doing this right now. You may get back as much as 30% of all the VAT (there called ICMS) that you pay. As the default VAT percentage is 18%, it means by default you can get back ~5,4% of the price of everything you buy just by adding your fiscal number to the receipt. It's not a negligible amount, so most people do give their numbers. As a consequence, the state avoids a significant amount of tax evasion and also happens to gather an immense amount of financial data about its subjects. Total Big Brother, and would work quite well even in a cryptocurrency world.


Land tax creates price distortions. Why land should be rendered less useful to hold, relative to other goods? Interfering with market prices is never a good thing.
(of course that every tax does such interference, but a general flat VAT affects all consumption equally, so the distortion effects are less bad)

Ouch!
Any idea who did this mistake? I mean, it can only be a mistake, right?

Testing in prod is never good... it's particularly worse when you're testing with the equivalent of thousands of dollars....

There's no reason to worry.
It's already "implemented" if you pass your traffic through Tor, a VPN, a SSH tunnel etc.

The Bitcoin protocol itself should not be rendered more complex with useless (in what concern the application) cryptography. There's no need to worry about it. Packet filtering is not a serious threat.

Just drop the soft limit and let miners go all the way to the hard one.

Can't pool operators do that on their own? In the worst case, shouldn't that be a simple patch? What are they waiting for?


Oh, it's as simple as changing some configs? So pool operators are voluntarily limiting their blocks with no particular reason?

And some people seem to fear they would go the other way around....

Passing it through an encrypted channel should stop filtering.
Packet filtering does little harm to P2P protocols. There's no particular reason to worry IMHO.
China style IP-blocking, on the other hand, can be quite destructive, if it manages to prevent bootstrapping.

I'm sorry, but I also think it is your obligation. I agree with those who say that the insurance contract was between you and the insurer, not between your client and the insurer. Unless of course you made it quite explicit to be the other way around in your  ToS. But I don't think doing so is a wise customer policy, and as somebody said above, it's likely to be considered illegal by the US gov.


How come? Isn't the receiver obliged to sign a proof of receipt to retrieve his package?


That's just one more reason to eat this particular loss. You can dilute it on your other earnings.


How?


Summary of my opinion: Coinabul should reimburse its customer, and perhaps change its insurer if the current one really refuses to do his part. Eventually even sue the insurer, if the amount makes it worthy to.

Can you find your debug.log? Perhaps it says something.

The rescan has nothing to do with it.

Are you connected to the network? The client normally displays in the bottom right the amount of connections you have to the network. If you have none, it won't synchronize.

Wise people don't oppose banks per se, they oppose the current banking system (central banks cartels, inflation etc). In a "Bitcoin world", where opening a "bank account" is as easy as opening an e-mail one, we would definitely not have the same system.


If the volume of taxed money is the same, I'm not aware of any worse way to tax than via inflation directed to the credit market. Any other taxation scheme ever created is economically less destructive than inflation. Basically, even if they keep milking us just as much, the way they milk does make a significant difference. All these brutal economic cycles which destroy so much capital, for instance, would not occur if it weren't for inflation directed to credit.
Plus, another quite destructive taxation type is that which attacks savings and investments, since these are the fuel for future economic growth. Income taxes attack savings and investments. Some argue that a world in which cryptocurrencies are the norm would render income taxation unpractical: http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/