Makes me wonder if it might make economical sense to turn your mining rig off for every other retarget cycle.  Turn it off when target goes up so next retarget it does down. Then turn rig on and you get more blocks per time and better profit margin. Clearly only workable if you have a sizable chunk of the total hash power.

It looks like a control server for someone's mining rig and now that you posted it, a hacking target.

I think mining in a pool takes care of most of this issue. I know most pools don't include fees in the rewards yet, but they will have to soon when the block reward drops.  The other problem is that you really don't know what the fees are going to be while you are mining(I guess you could know real time but it fluctuate widely from one block to another) so it is in the best interest of miners to keep their machines on at all time.  The real issue is that fees will become required for all transactions in the future and the sooner everyone comes to grip with this the better.

I have an idea to add the ability for miners to control which transactions are included into the blocks they make.  Basically, I'm putting the code in main.cpp lines 3160 to 3221 into an LUA script.  Is there any interest in this?  My motivation is that as the block reward drops miners are going to rely more on transaction fees and as such they will want to be able to enforce different rules, or priorities.

It seems the most vulnerable thing now is how your client finds other nodes to connect to.  Right now, I think, the irc channel is the way you find most nodes and if that server where shutdown there could be some short-term problems.  It might be a good idea of having the client save a list of ip address for every node it ever sees and if it can connect to the irc channel, or any other central place, your client could start trying ips in that list.

The only thing that miners can change is the rules on what transactions they will include.  If the guy running deepbit decide he wasn't going to include any valid transactions without at least a 1% transaction fee, he could.  It is the hard rules that decide what are valid blocks and transactions that can not be changed without the possibility of forking, or splitting, the community as a whole.

I think there is a bitcoin proxy you can setup that each rig connects to and the proxy is what connects to the mining pool to get work.  A setup like that might help you so you only need to change one thing to change pools.  To throw in my 2 cents you may want to look into solo mining with that much power at hand.

I've not tried your fork yet, but does it just ignore the suggested fee or does it tell you about the suggested fee and offer the option of ignoring it?

1) One transaction can actually contain many real transactions. Look at how most mining pools pay-out.  One input to many outputs.

2) Wouldn't a large number of transactions increase the changes of messing with the merkle-tree hash?

The crash was caused more by artificially low interest rates that allowed the economy to grow too fast causing supply to outpace demand and then causing prices to drop.

And to answer the OP; No I wouldn't trust banks with bitcoins.  Banks are highly regulated by the government and it would be counter to the advantages of bitcoins to do that.  In truth, bitcoins are best suited as a means of transferring wealth (possibly as an international standard of exchange) and not as a store of wealth.  It is interesting to see the recent price stability but the price is mostly speculation driven. The US currency money supply and interest rates are controlled by the Fed to minimize inflation and wild changes in prices, even to the point of allowing big increases in unemployment.  Bitcoin has no control mechanism, actually large mining pools could exert some control with changes in fee rules but there would be a huge backlash from that.  The Fed is independent from the normal governmental institutions so they can make unpopular, but necessary, changes, much like how the Supreme Court is unelected.

If you see the transaction on blockchain.info is has been transferred and should be added to a block, but if on blockchain.info it says that it is a "low priority transaction" it can take some time, usually only a few hours.  There is a branch of the desktop client that will ignore the fee rules and send a transaction without any fee and you can get stale transaction that no one will add.  I know you can use pywallet to remove those from a wallet, but I don't know how you could remove one from an online wallet.

I guess I will be the one to ask, but what are the advantages to your lottery over BitLotto?  I think that if you can cleary explain that you may get more interest.

I've watched the site for a while now and I for one have not even thought about buying a ticket until there were a lot more tickets sold.  I could do quite a bit with 1 BTC in the time it will likely that for all the tickets to sell.  I say set a date and the tickets will sell quickly, if they don't refund everyone on that date.

Couldn't you add code to bitcoind to add all the data to database on it's own, without notifying your app.  I'm assuming your app is doing that when it gets notified, so why not cut out the middleman?  If that is not possible, because your app is using some kind of internal database, you could have bitcoind save the data into a flat file if it can't connect to the app and when your app comes back online it can look for that file and import from there automatically.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0
Use pywallet to remove transactions.

You would think that the wallet only stored the public/private key pairs.  In that case it could have been a flat file.  But it seems that all transaction history is stored in there, too, which is what is really complicating things.  The issue I see is that there are so many files in the data directory.  I've read somewhere that this version of bitcoin was not intended to take off, so maybe that's part of the reason.  I'd suggest using an SQL database of the blockchain which would make the job of pruning unneeded data (redeemed transactions) easier, then you could execute some simple SQL statements and get address balances and transaction details.  You could also build in most of blockexplorer.com into the client.

I'd have to think that there is a limit to how much of a log the site keeps(Just thought of the fact that the wallet can act as a log).  Long-term (6 months+) I would expect that sites like this could do this.  And I would expect that you would want to use small bets so as to limit the chance of losing a large amount of the coins you wanted to wash.

That and it should display all the decimal places of bitcoins.  I have a few transactions that are 0.0005 BTC and they just show as 0.00 BTC.

Thanks.  I've seen other site offer this option but I don't wna tany hassle, if you know what I mean.

I mailed a money order last Saturday and got my Bitcoins this morning:

Bitcoin Price: 5.09 USD/BTC
Bitcoin Bought: 6.87623 BTC
Transaction Fee (5%): 0.34381 BTC
Bitcoin Sent: 6.53242 BTC

Can anyone tell my if you need to show ID or anything when doing a bank deposit?