Let me guess, you think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration and we never sent a man to the moon?

This is exactly why I don't come here much any more, and exactly why the Foundation forums are real-name-only, member-only.  None of us have time to respond to all the tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy-mongering (I don't remember why "Bitcoin Foundation" was originally a legal entity in the midwest; something about an aborted previous attempt to get one started by... maybe Mt. Gox?  who cares? why does that matter? focus on the present and future, stop worrying about how things weren't done perfectly in the past exactly how you wanted them to happen).

Sigh.  Ok, I'm going to go back to my default "don't feed the trolls" now, and actually get some work done.

I'm allergic to that kind of bureaucracy. The agenda will probably be decided ten minutes before the meeting, and will probably be something like "Peter talks for ten minutes and answers questions for 20 minutes while everybody is eating. Then we all talk to each other about whatever we like."

One day maybe the Foundation will be big and bloated, and will have lots of staff to prepare Official Agendas, solicit feedback from members months in advance, tabulate the responses, then hire a consultant to figure out how to increase the number of responses received, etc.

I hope I'm not on the Board any more when that happens.

Board meetings are board members only.  If you've ever been on the executive team of a company or non-profit I'm sure you can appreciate that if you want to actually get things done (as opposed to wanting to talk endlessly about things) then small, focused meetings are a necessary evil.

The Bitcoin Foundation Members Only Lunch Forum is on the conference schedule.

Last quarter's plan:  https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=99

What is next:  I dunno.  Foundation board will be meeting all day before the conference, and we'll all be talking to lots of people at the conference to figure out what the priorities should be going forward.

As for excluding certain voices:  "okey dokey."  I listen a lot harder to people who are actually getting things done, and have learned to tune out trolls.

Huh. What evidence do you have that the Foundation has been hurting the evolution of Bitcoin?

Because it seems to me things have been going gangbusters since the Foundation was formed (with all the usual chaos and drama).

Or, to be less polite to all the haters: we've all been working our asses off (especially Peter), to make Bitcoin a success. What have you anonymous cowards been doing besides spouting off about things you know NOTHING about?

Meh.

Lots of other ways that merchants could arrange to pay transaction fees, I don't think we need a hard fork to solve that problem.

E.g. : child-pays-for-parent.

Or an extension to the payment protocol so the merchant provides an already-signed SIGHASH_SINGLE / SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY input to pay the fee that the client includes as the first input in the transaction.

Probably more effective to ask if you can contribute to their campaign using Bitcoin.

They like getting money.

Thought it might be interesting for y'all to see the 'raw interview':

Bitcoin is an open, international payment network. More and more businesses are choosing to accept bitcoins because it is an easy way to allow anybody, anywhere in the world, to pay for products or services-- even people from countries where credit cards and bank accounts might not be common.

It is also very low-cost, because it was designed for the Internet.

Individuals use it for a few different reasons.

The earliest adopters started using bitcoins either because they like the idea (for political or personal reasons) of using a currency that isn't controlled by a government or corporation or just because it was "new and cool."

Some people use it because they have no other choice; for example, more and more legal, online gaming sites use bitcoins to make it possible for players in countries that try to restrict onling gaming (like the US) to play.

We're just starting to see individuals using bitcoin because it saves them money; merchants are starting to pass on some of the savings (much lower transaction fees, no "chargebacks") to customers who pay using bitcoin.
 

People trust that it isn't going to disappear, because there is no central organization that can either go bankrupt or be forced to shut down by a government. Currencies are all about trust, and more people are beginning to trust this decentralized currency that is supported by everybody who uses it.

 
I still tell people "only invest time or money into Bitcoin that you can afford to lose." I expect more drama and chaos and price fluctuations in the short-term.  The current price bubble was driven by lots of attention in the press here in the US and in Europe, and all of the attention was self-reinforcing: stories about Bitcoin's dramatic price rise got people interested, which drove the price higher, which triggered even more stories.

I expect that will happen again in the next few years, perhaps in a different area of the world (maybe there will be a China-driven bitcoin bubble in a few years that will pop when the Chinese government decides to try to restrict bitcoin transaction across their Great Firewall).

But in the long-term, I expect that to settle down, and the value of a bitcoin to become much more stable.
 
Actually, the valuation isn't a big barrier to adoption. There are already services that help companies manage the currency exchange risk (you can peg your prices to dollars, your customers can pay the equivalent amount in bitcoins, and you get dollars deposited to your bank account), and as the financial service infrastructure for Bitcoin get more mature that will just get easier.

Any important new technology grows by starting with successes in some niches where its advantages are overwhelming; ubiquitous technologies then manage to slowly grow out of those niches to take over markets where they have a marginal advantage (either in convenience or price).

That is the pattern we're already seeing with Bitcoin, starting with niches where the advantages are too large to ignore (e.g. online gaming, international payments). It remains to be seen whether or not Bitcoin can grow out of those niches to become a ubiquitous form of payment. In theory, the value of a currency increases as more people use it. Since the potential market for Bitcoin is every person connected to the Internet, it could become more valuable than any national currency that is tied to one specific geographic region of the planet.

Mmm.  And I'm working hard to try to delegate that authority, so can y'all please just work it out?

No, unless you take complete control over input selection and transaction creation using the raw transactions API.

If you have multiple users sharing the same wallet, then reasonable ways of handling transaction fees are:

Keep track of who owns which inputs and use the raw transactions API to charge users fees based on what the inputs look like.

Just pay transaction fees for your users. If you work out how much that will cost you versus how much time you'll spend with a more complicated solution, you'll probably find this is the best solution. If you're using the 'accounts' feature, then the logic is:  Send the transaction, then get the transaction details and reimburse the transaction fee (if any) with a 'move' that transfers bitcoins from a transaction-fee-reimbursement account (which you finance in advance, and top-up when necessary) to the user's account.

Or charge them a fixed fee that is enough to cover average costs (again, if using accounts you'd move bitcoins to/from the transaction fee account depending on whether a given transaction cost more or less than average).

Otherwise, you'll have a situation where user A gets gazillions of tiny inputs credited to their account, and user B ends up paying to spend them.

I think a diversity of views is good, as long as the people expressing their views are honest, trustworthy, and respectable.

I still think Luke causes more trouble and strife than he is worth. And I wish people would stop implying he is part of the core development team.

Howdy Adam!

I'm going to quote myself, this is from an email I wrote yesterday to somebody else concerned about chip/mining centralization:

In the very long run, mining will be dominated by your cost of electricity and your ability to put the excess heat generated to good use.

I don't think it will matter what algorithm is used or even if the algorithm was changed every six months; if a general-purpose CPU was the only thing you could use for mining, you might see general-purpose CPUs designed to operate at thousands of degrees celsius being designed so that aluminum smelting plants can also mine bitcoins with all that electricity they use turning bauxite into aluminum.

In the short run... I think there is zero chance that "we" will decide to change the hashing algorithm.

See -blocknotify and -walletnotify command-line options in the latest code, which will run an arbitrary command when new blocks happen or transactions hit your wallet (and that arbitrary command can be "POST information to this URL...").

I think including a message that is NOT stored in the blockchain but is just broadcast across the network is a good idea. The receiver would only get the message if they were online and saw the transaction broadcast, but I think that would be fine (and perhaps services would spring up to deliver the extra transaction data associated with old transactions).

First, though, I think the transaction memory pool needs to be re-implemented, and the transaction relaying rules need to be changed so that the entire size of the transaction (not just the part that will be stored in the block chain) is considered in the priority/fee calculations.

And fixing the client so it calculates fees properly is higher priority...

For the record:

I think testing a gazillion pulls at once is madness, because if something doesn't work it can be incredibly difficult to figure out which of the gazillion changes made it break.  Assuming that just once change made it break and not some subtle interaction between two or three or six changes...

If you want to help test, I think it would be much more helpful if you find a feature you care about, grab the binaries that the pull-tester creates, test thoroughly, and then report results in the pull request on github.

Nah, I now think that's a dumb idea.

Responding to gmaxwell:

RE: burden of unpaid full nodes: for the immediately forseeable future, that burden is on the order of several hundred dollars a year to buy a moderately beefy VPS somewhere.

I understand the "lets engineer for the far future" ... but, frankly, I think too much of that is dumb. Successful projects and products engineer for the next year or two, and re-engineer when they run into issues.

Maybe the answer will be "validation pools" like we have mining pools today, where people cooperate to validate part of the chain (bloom filters, DHTs, mumble mumble....). Maybe hardware will just keep up.

RE: race to the bottom on fees and PoW:

sigh.  Mike explained how that is likely to be avoided. I'm 100% convinced that if users of the network want secure transactions they will find a way to pay for them, whether that is assurance contracts or becoming miners themselves.

I think the big difference between the "bitcoin elites" and the existing financial system elites is the "bitcoin elites" are working really hard to distribute our power.

We're getting there, but it will take time. I really hope in a year or two there will be at least three or four different bitcoin implementations all producing blocks, validating transactions, etc. And in ten years there will be a dozen or more.

That is a natural progression; I was around when NCSA Mosaic was the one web browser and the NCSA server was the only web server, and there have been a couple cycles of certain browsers / web servers becoming dominant and then fading. I expect to see a similar evolution for Bitcoin infrastructure software.

Okey dokey.

If you want to be helpful, please write up a list of pros and cons for the various plans that have been proposed, including your own (last time I asked you, you waffled and didn't have any plan).

I've been pretty busy dealing with the avalanche of press and working on the payment protocol.

Exactly.

DO NOT SELL TESTNET COINS. You'll just piss off the core developers, because we'll have to waste time re-launching a new testnet to reset the chain and make the coins worthless again.

There a Fight Club "First Rule..." joke in there somewhere....