Quote from: rebuilder on May 31, 2011, 04:55:16 PM

If you haven't sold a lot of coins, you haven't made a fortune. It's not profit until you use the coins for something. The exchange rates might crash tomorrow.

I'm selling coins all the time, though sticking mainly to rally periods. If it starts to slump, I simply don't offer any for sale, which I figure protects the market as well as me. I have an open offer on the OTC book for 500 BTC.

Quote from: rebuilder on May 31, 2011, 04:55:16 PM

Anyway, as I said, all this talk about who deserves what is tedious. I'm wondering if this system you propose is even possible. As you've noticed, you have to have a mechanism for destroying BTC converted into BCP. Your solution is to send the BTC into an invalid address. Can this be done? The default client won't do it, so you'd have to use a modified one. Would "vanilla" miners accept such transactions into the block chain? If not, you can't prevent double-spending. If yes, then the vanilla Bitcoin client could be modified to not accept such transfers, if enough people wanted to make life difficult for your new currency.

Yes, it can be done. By "invalid address", what I mean is an address whose private key is unknown and unknowable. Since an address is made by taking a 160-bit hash of the public key, if I simply dictate that some of those 160 bits must instead be a constant value and the rest of those 160 bits were to identify the recipient BCP address, you would never be able to find a keypair whose hash collided with that value. The address would look "valid" to the BTC client, but no one could spend those BTC with the client anymore. The BCP client accepts that as assurance that the BTC have been destroyed and accepts that transaction as an input to the BCP address that is a partial match of the remaining bits that were dedicated to identifying the address.