And here is a very good commentary by julz:
http://bitcoinmedia.com/the-effs-own-chilling-breeze/

This news shocks me: it show how powerful just one organization (SWIFT) has.
SWIFT can isolate a country from the rest of the world with the click of a button, causing enormous problems to the population.

That seems to me a very good reason to why countries should endorse Bitcoin, thus enabling them to be financial indipendent.

From the article:

When I studied International Relations in college, we were taught that economic sanctions could be on par with, “Rockets and bombs,” as one professor put it, and potentially much worse. Questions about economic sanctions amounting to collective punishment and other violations of International Law are ignored by the perpetrators. These types of policies resulted in a holocaust in Iraq.

The only conclusion that I can draw from the news below is that the decision has already been made to militarily engage Iran and this is an attempt to cause Iran to lash out first. In the event that Iran doesn’t strike first, a false flag incident could be fabricated easily.

If SWIFT actually pulls the plug, I’d consider the fuse to be lit. Also, if SWIFT does it before 20 March, this is probably the real reason:


Via: Reuters:

Belgium-based SWIFT, which provides banks with a system for moving funds around the world, bowed to international pressure on Friday and said it was ready to block Iranian banks from using its network to transfer money.

Expelling Iranian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication would shut down Tehran’s main avenue to doing business with the rest of the world – an outcome the West believes is crucial to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

SWIFT, which has never cut off a country before, has been closely following efforts in the United States and the European Union to develop new sanctions targeting Iran that would directly affect EU-based financial institutions.

The United States and EU have already moved to sanction Iran’s central bank.
“SWIFT stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted,” the company said in an emailed statement.

The United States has been pushing the European Union to force SWIFT to evict the Iranian firms but it was unclear whether the EU would reach an agreement.
For one, SWIFT’s home country, Belgium, does not think the global banking firm should be the only company of its kind required to comply with sanctions.

The Obama administration said it welcomed SWIFT’s intention to stop transactions involving designated Iranian banks. “We will continue to be in contact with our EU partners to urge action on this issue,” a U.S. Treasury official said.

SWIFT, with headquarters just outside the Belgian capital Brussels, is vital to international money flows, exchanging an average 18 million payment messages per day between banks and other financial institutions in 210 countries.

Ok, tutto chiaro. Dopo aver chiesto, ragionandoci poi c'ero arrivato pure io.

Grazie per le delucidazioni.

(P.S. Spettacolare questa cosa )

Non mi è chiaro in che modo le firme multiple possano risolvere il "problema delle zero conferme".

Zero conferme su di una transazione vuol dire che non c'è nessun blocco che la include, e nonostante il 99% questo non sia un problema, mi pare un rischio indipendentemente dal tipo di firma (singola o multipla).

Ciao, mi puoi dare qualche link o spiegarmi meglio questa cosa delle zero conferme che non mi è molto chiara?

Grazie

Is there a (even not so) simple way to use this library to dump the raw bytes of a transaction or even a full block?

I.e: something like example #3 of the post above, but in reverse: give the program the hash of a tx so he can get it from the network or the db, and dump it to stdout.

Thanks for any help

[ watching (mining on open source drivers would be awesome) ]

Hello Piuk and thanks for your reply.

I ask because as a (tentative) developer I found very useful to have the possibility to have the raw data of a transaction.

What I'm looking for is the ability to have binary dump of a block or a single transaction to make some offline test and batch processing.
Can you suggest something for this goal?

Thanks!

Great site piuk, thanks for your service.

Is it possible to explore the testnet with blockchan.info too?
Since I'm beginning to toy there it would be very, very useful to access it (too soon for me to use prodnet).

Thanks

Awesome project the magazine!

I second the petition for less content, but of very high quality :-)

Fascinating thread.

I'm not a bitcoin developer but I'm a sw developer with some years experience and I found very, very useful this article by genjix:
http://bitcoinmedia.com/the-truth-behind-bip-16-and-17/

By not knowing completely the bitcoin protocol, when I began reading the objections of Luke to Gavin I was unconsciously taking Gavin side because I have a lot of trust in him.
But after studying genhix work (who takes no sides, I think) I'm now leaning towards BIP17: it seems a better choice from a general software good development practice.

Ma moneybookers (skrill) non ha la possibilità di fare chargeback come paypal?

Thanks to every of you, first adopters!
You are great for us, late adopters, that will get better electronics at half the price ;-)

Hello Jim,
have you fixed the issues?

For the rest I want to say that your pool is great and it's the only one where I've 0% stale shares, kudos!

I run a virtualbox server with four 12-core opterona (48 core total) and 256GB ram.
Most of the emulated systems are Win7 and Win2k8.

It totally rocks.

Only downside is the disk access: 6 SATA III raid edition drives configured in RAID 10 (on a Areca ARC-1882)  can't deliver data fast enough for all the emulated systems in some occasions.

Immagino siano gli alert di google:

http://www.google.it/alerts

Great, work, thanks!

[registering]

And so much for the proposal of Doug Casey:

Maybe Doug now will start to understand what a "proven version 2.0" is and looking at bitcoin in a different way...

GREAT work, thanks!