Hi, another suggestion... apparently the maximum number of candles displayed is ~900 (~37 days in 1h intervals, ~18 days in 30m intervals, etc.)   With the compact format (2 pixels per candle) that is about 1800 pixels, which is reasonable limit for a window that fits in a single display screen.

However people who have two or more display screens can stretch the window across them to cover almost double that amount of pixels.  Or also stretch a window to be much larger than the screen, in order to look at details in the past.   Do you think it would be worth to accomodate such cases, by increasing the max number of candles according to the window width?

Forked again, rats -- now, which question would answer both questions above?

Is there a rule like in chess, namely if the same question gets repeated three times the thread gets closed and no one wins?

To people outside the bitcoin community, they are the identifiable "voice of bitcoin".  See that Wall Street Journal article.  Brock Pierce did not push his way into TBF and all the way to the top just for vanity.

In case someone has not seen it, this article gives some background on Brock Pierce's  experience as the "king of virtual game money":

Wired Magazine, 2008-12-04
A Drive Through Laurel Canyon With Brock Pierce
http://archive.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_ige_pierce

He does not seem to be just another bitcoin enthusiast/entrepreneur.

He hasnot logged in since 2014-06-17.  Someone, somewhere on this forum, claimed that he is on holiday.  Someone else tried to call him about some unresolved business, and no one answered.

Thanks!  It would be nice to know how that 1 M$/day figure is evolving.

Even nicer would be to have a breakdown by type of merchant.   Are people using BitPay for purposes other than paying for purchases of goods and general services?  E.g., to convert bitcoins into dollars (instead of doing so at a regular exchange)?

By the way, last time I looked, BitPay had an entry-level plan that delivers dollars to the merchant at zero cost for him, and charges a small percentage from the customer.  Thus, there is no reason for a merchant not to "accept bitcoin" through them.

Have we run out of questions already?

You mean, someone like Brock Pierce? 

Wired Magazine,  2008-12-04
A Drive Through Laurel Canyon With Brock Pierce
http://archive.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_ige_pierce

Looking at the charts in blockchain.info:

* The number of transactions per day has increased only 50% in 12 months, and has remained practically constant (with some fluctuations) since November. 
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular

* The number of new unique addresses per day has increased 200% in the last 12 months, but it too has remained pretty much constant over the last 4-5 months:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses

Note that there are 150'000 new addresses created per day, but only 60'000 transactions per day.

* The total trasaction output volume in BTC per day has decreased slightly over the last 12 months, and has remained fairly constant at 600'000 BTC/day constant since January:
https://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume

* The same holds for the "estimated real" transaction ouput volume in BTC per day (excluding the outputs guessed to be "return change"), which is now around 80'000 BTC/day
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume

* The "estimated  real" transaction ouput volume in USD per day (computed from the previous value and the USD/BTC market price of the day) varies more than the BTC volume, and tends to follow the USD/BTC price; in particular, it fell more than 50% from January to May, then recovered and is now at 50'000'000 USD/day.

If most of the "estimated real" output volume was due to coins being transferred from person A to person B in echange for goods, services, or national currencies, one would expect the volume in USD/day to vary gradually with time (hopefully increasing) and the BTC/day to vary inversely with the price.  What we see is more like the opposite: the BTC/day is steady and the USD/day varies with the price.

This observation suggests that most of the 80'000 BTC/day "estimated real" output volume is "fake", namely BTC being moved between addresses owned by the same person.  That may include traffic through tumblers, hot/cold wallet transfers, stress-testing of bitcoin software, etc.. Note that a single user could generate 600'000 BTC/day of total output volume by moving ~4200 BTC every 10 minutes between addresses of his own.

My conclusion is that those blockchain statistics are basically useless for estimating bitcoin adoption.  Much more useful would be the volume processed by BitPay and other bitcoin-to-dollar processors.  Unfortunately, that number is conspicuous for its absence in the CoinDesk report.

Just to pick a nit, the cryptography has not been proved unbreakable.  The only "proof" that it is safe is that many people have tried to break it, over a decade or more, and no one has found and published a significant weakness.

Scholars generally assume that the cryptographic methods used in the bitcoin protocol are unbreakable when they develop other things on top of them.  Strictly speaking, those methods could be broken tonight, or they may have been broken years ago without the fact having been made public.  However, in either case the world would face a much bigger disaster than the collapse of bitcoin.

Phew! Well, then, there is nothing to worry about, is there?

This thread is too precious to be left to die; will you be back after doing enough of those things?

The President of The Bitcoin Foundation  (the "The" being part of its name), billionaire virtual currency entrepreneur Brock Pierce, tells the Wall Street Journal that people should use RealCoin, a second-generation cryptocurrency, for e-commerce, instead of Bitcoin; since the latter is incurably volatile while RealCoin is pegged to the dollar. (However he expects some fringe bitcoiners to be displeased for silly ideological reasons.) 

I was about to ask exactly the same thing, isn't that funny?

I don't know if people are seeing the real problem.

"The bitcoin community, represented by Brock Pierce, the billionaire president of the Bitcoin Foundation, recommends the use of RealCoin for e-commerce, rather than bitcoin -- since RealCoin is a new-generation cryptocoin that fixes an incurable flaw of the latter, its volatility.  People should pay no attention to a few fringe bitcoiners who may whine about some irrelevant philosophical quibbles."

Well, the Fortress investment group had invested a largish sum in bitcoins last year, but since it gave them a red stain in their quarterly report, they quietly exchanged them for shares of the company that manages the PBP fund.  That company is going to make profit (from fees) no matter what happens to the price.

The bitcoin-denominated funds are a way of offloading bitcoin hoards without actually selling them.  The founders of SMBIT, for example, "seeded" it with a hoard of 17'800 BTC.  Those coins were effectively sold to the people who bought the first 178'000 shares of SMBIT.  Now, even if the price crashes, SecondMarket will make money, since the loss will be borne by the SMBIT clients.  In fact, SecondMarket will make more profit if the price crashes.

Sigh, this seems to be developing like all the other bitcoin scams (the count must be in the hundreds already).

People who are afraid of the SEC are most likely scammers.

When you realize that someone has been lying to you, you should not believe anything he says or writes.  In fact you should stop interacting with him, it is a waste of time.  If he got your money and is giving excuses for not delivering the counterpart, you should take legal action, which depends on your country -- small-claims court, police, lawyer, etc..

Scammers are expert in stalling. They will sound honest and forthcoming, give you bogus evidence, place the blame on events that you cannot check, and so on.

A scammer could easily obtain a fake ID, but he would be reluctant to do so since that would be another serious crime, independent from the original scam.

How could jerks possibly do that?

What do the bylaws say about "impeachment" of the director?  I read them some time ago and they struck me as exceedingly un-demoncratic.  The election of Brock Pierce for instance was decided by the board not the memers as a whole, AFAIK.