Exactly right, in my humble opinion.

I suspect you're going to have a hard time figuring out how to arrange yourselves without becoming a Corporation of some State and still have a business model that sustains sufficient quality assurance and customer support to make Dark Wallet a success.

PS: I'm really happy to see other implementations happening!  Diversity is great!

PPS: y'all should give the Foundation at least a LITTLE bit of credit for funding CoinPunk...

See: Average block size chart

Since implementing the "dust rule", block size has been pretty steady; I would guess we won't hit the 1MB hard limit for another two years, but that is just a guess, we could easily hit it sooner or later than that.

Consensus is the block size limit will have to rise.

Us geeks were/will/are arguing over how and when, not if...

I feel like we're talking past each other.

You said:  dev coin is a good model-- e.g. writer creates something, uses devcoin, 90% goes to them, 10% to devcoin miner.

I don't understand why a writer wouldn't just use dollars-- create something, sell it for dollars, writer keeps 96%, PayPal gets 4% for processing the transaction.

Or Bitcoin: create something, sell it for Bitcoin, writer keeps 99% BitPay gets 1% for processing the transaction (Bitcoin can do this because it is more efficient than PayPal/credit card/traditional fiat, that is where the wealth is created).

Or is there some magical way that using an alt coin creates wealth out of thin air?  I don't see it....

If I am a good writer, why would I pay out 10% of my income?  That is more expensive than credit card charges!

Again, don't confuse money for wealth.  Writers produce wealth in the form of the stories/articles/whatever they are writing. The currency used to trade that wealth only matters as far as:

+ What can the writer buy with it
+ If the writer saves it, will it buy more or less in the future

Good idea. I nominate you to be the Official Checksum Publishing Person.

I don't follow.  Where does the real-world wealth come from?  What will those pull-up-by-their-own-bootstraps people be doing that makes the world a better place and makes them wealthier?

I suspect you might be confusing "money" with "wealth."

Time-in-the-future transactions are non-standard (as of 0.8?  I can never remember when things happened...)

Why: because there is a fill-up-memory denial of service attack, and it really isn't reasonable to expect the entire network to store your timelocked transactions "forever".

Even in the past, the statement "unspendable by the sender because of replacement not being implemented" was not true.  Wait long enough and only a subset of the network will have the timelocked transaction (because new nodes, old nodes restarting, etc). Broadcast a double-spending version without a timelock and it will get mined fairly soon.

Peter's dust-b-gone:
  https://github.com/petertodd/dust-b-gone

If you're on OSX you can do this:
  http://mac.tutsplus.com/tutorials/productivity/how-to-tag-files-and-create-spotlight-comments-on-a-mac/

I don't know if Windows or Linux have a similar way of adding metadata to arbitrary files.

PS: there will be (or maybe is, can't remember when the option was added) a -wallet=<name> option to open up a different .dat file for the wallet.

... then volunteer to run through the test plan and help shake out any bugs. Code that touches the wallet is particularly sensitive, because an obscure bug might cause lots of people to lose lots of money.

Great idea!

If implemented, it would probably make sense to create a little protocol for the server and client to negotiate the amount of storage needed to "rent" a connection slot. Maybe the server reports something like "I've got 0 slots free, min/median/max proof-of-storage for my other connected nodes is 0/1MB/11MB."

"Impress with this protocol" ??

My primary motivation for the payment protocol can be seen in this mock-up of multi-signature transaction authorization:
  https://moqups.com/gavinandresen/no8mzUDB/p:af7339204

I want much more secure wallets, but we can't get there unless the "who am I paying" piece is authenticated.

You should save the "Gavin is trying to impress evil institutional investors" mud-slinging for when I get around to laying out the argument for increasing the block size, because that would be closer to the truth.

Relying on any single piece of hardware to secure your bitcoins is a bad idea. In the future, you should use two pieces of hardware created in two different parts of the world by two different organizations in two different legal jurisdictions to secure your bitcoins.

Right now... "only invest time or money you can afford to lose."

We all think we're very clever at coming up with unique ways to obscure our data.

We are wrong.

We tend to think alike, so pretty much any process you can think up is likely very similar to a process somebody else will think up.

In short: humans are really bad at creating randomness (aka entropy). And we're even meta-bad, because we THINK we're good at it.

No, they can't. You just extend the taint-tracking through the newly minted coins (e.g. if you try to "melt" 75 BTC with the 25 BTC reward, then the resulting 100 BTC should be considered 75% tainted).

RE: orphans:  orphans happen naturally when two nodes on the network find blocks at approximately the same time. Somebody should do a rigorous analysis to determine what are the most important factors affecting orphan rates (number of connections? quality of connections? bandwidth available to "blast out" the new block? block size? Number of not-previously-seen transactions included in the block?)

"Patches welcome."

A watch-only wallet that has a bunch of public keys (and multisig groups of public keys) is a good idea. But first you'd need multi-wallet support.

There is a pull request that adds watch-only addresses, but I think that is the wrong way to go. Mixing up fund that can be spent with funds that cannot be spent (e.g. because they're a multisig escrow you want to watch) is a bad idea, and as soon as we have hierarchical deterministic wallets we'll want watch-only wallets that are derived from a master key (or a set of master keys in the case of multisig) where the local bitcoind doesn't have the private seed for the key.

No, not if you use Tor.

Tor (or i2p or some other anonymizing proxy solution) is the only way to keep online merchants from figuring out your IP. After all, if you browse to their website without Tor, then your IP is sitting right there in their web server logs.

No, I don't have time to clean up the code, port it to the latest AppEngine API, etc.

The Faucet was the simplest possible project I could think of to get my feet wet with Bitcoin; the hard part is preventing cheaters who try to get more than their fair share, and I was never able to come up with a really good solution (that is tied into the whole identity-on-the-Internet thing, which nobody has solved).