1861
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Bitcoin / Project Development / Re: 100 BTC for a key extracting program
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on: December 29, 2010, 08:12:21 PM
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i think gavin's bitcointools can already extract keys from wallet?
It dumps out keys in abbreviated hex (I worry about naive users accidently publishing screen snapshots showing their full private keys). Teaching bitcointools to dump out keys in OpenSSL ascii-armored format is a great idea. It is just not high on my personal priority list right now.
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1862
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Emotional Arguments
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on: December 27, 2010, 07:56:48 PM
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Can we brainstorm positive emotional arguments? Maybe:
* Get back at the bankers and megacorporations that robbed us blind and drove the economy over a cliff!
* Bitcoin is The People's Money-- created by YOU, controlled by YOU.
* Use bitcoin and tell (PayPal/your credit card company/the foreign currency exchanger) you're tired of paying outrageous fees just to send YOUR money to somebody else.
More?
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1863
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Economy / Economics / Re: Savings account vs Treasury bills
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on: December 24, 2010, 04:03:12 PM
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So, I decided to open an account at http://www.treasurydirect.gov/ and now I am considering what percentage of my savings should I move there.
What would be the equivalent APY that the treasury bills will yield? Will they compensate for inflation?
TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), which are sold by treasurydirect, compensate for inflation. They are a good place to put money that you're pretty sure you will need "soon" -- within the next 5 years or so. Assuming you trust the US government not to default on its debt (I do-- I think the government might try to inflate away the debt, but won't outright default). Money you won't need soon aught to be invested in something productive-- invest in some business or person that is making our lives more efficient or pleasant. That should give you the best long-term return and will make the world a better place, too. Stock market index funds are an inexpensive, mostly safe, mostly inflation-proof way to invest. If you have some 'playing around' money that you can afford to lose, you might want to invest in Bitcoins. But bitcoin is a startup currency, and should be treated like a high-tech startup company-- high-risk, but very high potential reward. You might lose your entire investment or it might turn out to be the best investment you ever made.
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1864
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: [PULL REQUEST] add address to listtransactions output
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on: December 23, 2010, 01:52:10 PM
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Yea, that particular edge case makes it pretty hard to track payments and map the transactions to database records If you expect a one-to-one relationship between transactions and bitcoin addresses, then yes, a multisend will be a problem for you. If I were implementing the anonymous fund-with-a-bitcoin-address system, I would do something like: Customer "Ed" gives a "send winnings to address"-- lets say it just happens to be 1Ed.... Casino gives a funding address -- lets call that address 1fundEd... Casino creates an account named "1Ed..." and associates it with address 1fundEd. So any coins Ed sends to 1fundEd.... go into the 1Ed... account. When Ed wants to place a bet, casino checks to see if he has money: getbalance 1Ed.... If he does, he can place a bet. If he wins, casino sends money: move BANK 1Ed... <amount Ed won above his bet> sendfrom 1Ed... 1Ed.... <amount Ed won> # Account name and cash-out address are the same. If he loses: move 1Ed... BANK <amount Ed lost> listtransactions is for showing Ed a detailed list of what happened to his account.
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1867
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Random Access Block Chain
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on: December 22, 2010, 02:17:45 PM
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A blockchain index? Doesn't the vanilla client index the blockchain for itself already?
Yes, that is exactly what the blkindex.dat file is. wallet.dat contains "extended dance mix" versions of all the transactions you care about (all of "your" receives/sends). Those are loaded into memory at startup (and then kept up-to-date as new transactions are seen), so calculating "your" balance is quick (just scan through all wallet transactions in memory and total them up).
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1868
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Website and software translations
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on: December 22, 2010, 02:09:22 PM
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Hi there! I noticed that the NL locale for Bitcoin has some errors (quite some actually) So i made my corrections, attached is the nl locale .po file. edit: correctly used poedit this timeThanks! Can somebody volunteer to be "translation pull person" for the new git integration repository? The job would be packaging up changes into "pull requests" (if the person doing the work can't or won't use git), giving them a sanity test, and then pulling them into the integration repository.
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1869
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: [PULL REQUEST] add address to listtransactions output
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on: December 21, 2010, 08:07:20 PM
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Normal send; this one was: sendfrom Test1 mytzSq1rkXzPidP9tHvfhDuzXqDSSvvaCg 100 { "account" : "Test3", "address" : "mytzSq1rkXzPidP9tHvfhDuzXqDSSvvaCg", "category" : "receive", "amount" : 100.00000000, "confirmations" : 344, "txid" : "210ea061bd3664c34349dfa4849b9f33889cfe2117bf02d62fd765cb0ee5b5b0", "time" : 1292527858, "comment" : "Test1 to Test3, 100" }, { "account" : "Test1", "address" : "mytzSq1rkXzPidP9tHvfhDuzXqDSSvvaCg", "category" : "send", "amount" : -100.00000000, "fee" : 0.00000000, "confirmations" : 344, "txid" : "210ea061bd3664c34349dfa4849b9f33889cfe2117bf02d62fd765cb0ee5b5b0", "time" : 1292527858, "comment" : "Test1 to Test3, 100" },
And a wicked-crazy multisend: sendfrom Test1 to: mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX 3.0 AND mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX 3.3 AND msVM67gJZ4EKMRVdMjMFzwWEU32VzBUnqu 2.0 { "account" : "Test3", "address" : "mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX", "category" : "receive", "amount" : 3.03000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" }, { "account" : "Test3", "address" : "mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX", "category" : "receive", "amount" : 3.00000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" }, { "account" : "Test2", "address" : "msVM67gJZ4EKMRVdMjMFzwWEU32VzBUnqu", "category" : "receive", "amount" : 2.00000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" }, { "account" : "Test1", "address" : "mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX", "category" : "send", "amount" : -3.03000000, "fee" : 0.00000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" }, { "account" : "Test1", "address" : "mo5JUdFcaHQdT6VbWxee9q7Y7U8GZta4QX", "category" : "send", "amount" : -3.00000000, "fee" : 0.00000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" }, { "account" : "Test1", "address" : "msVM67gJZ4EKMRVdMjMFzwWEU32VzBUnqu", "category" : "send", "amount" : -2.00000000, "fee" : 0.00000000, "confirmations" : 342, "txid" : "ed9d338586c0893b2469cd9e3af4d074654d807329a5a789e066f03063a08136", "time" : 1292531730, "comment" : "multisend, Test1 to Test2 and Test3 twice (same addr)" },
Again, multi-sends are non-standard transactions. And no, I won't give you the hacked code I wrote to generate multisend test cases...
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1871
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: [git patch] Display additional output, when proof-of-work check fails
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on: December 21, 2010, 06:56:13 PM
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Now I remember why I added the option: doesn't the internal miner call CheckWork() if 16 bits are zeroes? ie. this message would be printed a lot for the internal miner, if added unconditionally, right?
That's what I meant when I asked "are there significant costs?" If one of the mining pool folks think this would be useful in a production miner, then I see the value. If it is only really useful if you're trying to debug a remote miner that isn't working quite right...
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1875
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Be careful of speading misinformation
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on: December 20, 2010, 02:23:40 PM
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Because Bitcoin has tremendous value, it's OK to underpromise and overdeliver. It always turns out better that way, in the long run.
If you lie, you only need one prominent journalist to say "I tried it, and it's crap, it doesn't do what they say it does", and the public loses interest.
Well said! Trust is Bitcoin's biggest barrier to success. I don't think there is anything we can do to speed up the process of getting people to trust that bitcoin is solid; it takes time to build trust. However, there is plenty we could do to lose that trust, including overpromising or misrepresenting what bitcoin can do. Bitcoin is beta software; nobody should trust it 100%. Do not invest your life savings in bitcoin-- in fact, do not invest any money you're not willing to lose. Expect more ponzi schemes and fraud. Expect irrational valuation bubbles, and, while the bitcoin economy is small, expect people to try to manipulate the bitcoin markets.
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1877
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Feature request : signing a text with a wallet key
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on: December 20, 2010, 02:07:46 PM
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I like this feature request; I think it will enable even more interesting uses of bitcoin. I created a feature request at github for it.
Example: a store that accepts bitcoins could verify that a customer sending in a question about some transaction actually IS the same person who sent them the bitcoins, by asking the customer to sign their message using one of the same bitcoin addresses they used to sign the coins.
If the "store" is a privacy-focused VPS provider and the question is "Hey, I lost the root password to the virtual server, could you generate a new one and encrypt it with this gpg public key", then tying that message to a bitcoin transactions is extremely useful.
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1878
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Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What is the number of transactions that Bitcoin can hande?
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on: December 19, 2010, 05:16:35 PM
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As I understand it, every client receives every transaction in the system, so it can check later if transactions are valid. What happens when the number of transactions gets very large?
When that happens, I think most people using bitcoin will not be running always-connected-to-the-bitcoin-network software. I think there will be at least three different sets of people: 1. People who trust a web site to keep their wallet safe more than they trust themselves. They'll use sites like MyBitcoin or MtGox, which give them an online wallet. 2. People who don't or won't trust anybody to keep their wallets safe, but don't have a high-speed, always-on Internet connection. They will use a 'payment gateway', where they submit transactions that are signed by their own computer (they don't have to trust the payment gateway to keep their wallet, the gateway just forwards relevant transactions onto the bitcoin network for the user). This doesn't exist yet, but writing the code to support this isn't terribly hard. 3. People who DO have always-on high-speed network connections; they'll run bitcoin just like they do today. But, assuming the volume of bitcoin transactions continues to increase faster than the cost of network bandwidth declines, that will become increasingly expensive, so I think more and more users will choose option 1 or 2. Does the client have to keep them all in the memory at once? If not, how can the client check if somebody actually owns the coin?
The current bitcoin doesn't keep all transactions in memory at once-- the blkindex.dat and blk0001.dat files in your bitcoin data directory stores them on disk.
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1879
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Development process straw-man
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on: December 19, 2010, 04:41:39 PM
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With Satoshi's blessing, and with great reluctance, I'm going to start doing more active project management for bitcoin. Everybody please be patient with me; I've had a lot of project management experience at startups, but this is the first open source project of any size I've been involved with. Anyway, I've created an integration/staging tree at: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin... and am proposing this for a development process: Straw-man plan for Bitcoin development (open source vets, please slap me around and help make this better): Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature is ready. Requests get discussed (where? here in the bitcoin forums?) and if there's broad consensus they're a good thing, well written, match coding style, etc. then they're merged into the 'master' branch. master branch is regularly built and tested (by who? need people willing to be quality assurance testers), and periodically pushed to the subversion repo to become the official, stable, released bitcoin. We'll create feature branches if/when there are major new features being worked on by several people. Discussion, feedback, etc, especially from people with experience leading or working on other open source projects, is very welcome.
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1880
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Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Bug/Issue/Feature Request tracking system
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on: December 19, 2010, 04:30:55 PM
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Problem with a vote is that it brings bureaucraty in the system. Peole will have to register to github, remember to participate to the votes, check on regular basis for new votes, and so on. I don't like that. Democracy doesn't fit cyberspace well, imo. I very much prefer anarchy.
Umm... there will be no Top Bureaucrat counting votes and telling people what to do. There will still be plenty of anarchy, I promise! Use the voting system to express what is important to YOU. Or not.
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