I think this is a great start. The concept of double signing transactions, while at first blush may seem to conflict the minimalist ethos of Sheercoin, is in fact a key feature as you suggest. As someone said above, it kills plausible deniability regarding receiving payments, but this coin clearly isn't seeking to be all things to all people.

When reading about Sheercoin (S?) it immediately reminded me of this post from a couple days ago:

http://codesuppository.blogspot.com.ar/2013/12/work-in-progress.html?m=1

Visualizing just how much dust and blockchain spam there is out there had an impact on me. I think a very important part of Sheercoin will be finding ways of cutting down on this spam and dust to limit the size of the blockchain from day 1. Have you considered implementing the coin with a method of pruning spent outputs? Perhaps there could be an even more aggressive pruning mechanism where dust gets pruned, or all transactions older than a year or two get pruned automatically (but this is dangerous territory).

Another idea is to consider significant figures (s.f.) in transactions. Even if the currency has, say, a billion units and 100 million subunits, there never really is a good reason to use all those digits in any given transaction. For example, say I buy a tv for 1.23BTC. It makes sense to make the transaction for 1.23BTC (3 s.f.) or even 1.234BTC (4 s.f.), but it really is unnecessary to make the transaction for 1.23456789 (9 s.f.), as the least significant digit (lsd) is only one billionth of the most significant digit (msd). 4 s.f. should be sufficient for any transaction. Therefore, the algo could have miners automatically drop any digits beyond the 4th msd (so, 1234 or 1.234 or 0.1234 or 0.0001234) before including it in a block.

Beyond satisfying my OCD need for neater transactions, what would be the benefit? Well, paired with a (ideally, dynamic, or market based) transaction fee, it would mean accounts would tend not to have a bunch of dust. Why? Say the transaction fee is current 1S. If you want to send 0.000000001S, you'll have to pay 1 billion times more in transaction fees, so that will be uncommon. But also, since the transaction fee is dynamic, and transactions only have 3-4 s.f., usually addresses will only contain significant figures just a few digits beyond the transaction fee digit, the rest will be zeros. Does this make sense?

EDIT: Capitalization, punctuation.

I love the idea, OP.

By the way, why does everyone post "reserved"?

Just in case, consider this my "reserved" post. haha

That's a cool chart. I'd like to see it updated. I checked the price right now (~$420 on 2013-11-14) and we're topping out on that triangle.

What a great post! Thanks for writing that up!

[side note: What did you use to make your graphs?]

UPDATE:

The transaction ended up going through 6.5 hours later. In the first two hours I sent two emails to coinbase support, but I didn't hear back from them. I know they have a huge backlog of emails, so I didn't really expect a response.

I do trust those guys and I like coinbase so I wasn't really worried that the coins would disappear or anything. My problem was that I had a customer (a stranger) who had given me fiat and now I had this pending transaction so he was out hundreds of dollars and no btc, and I had a transaction that was in indeterminate status.

A couple hours after I left his office (where I had left my government ID with him so he could somewhat trust I wasn't ripping him off), the transaction still hadn't confirmed and he was panicking because he had committed previously to send those BTC on to someone else. So finally I had no choice but to bite the bullet and trust him (and the fact that I knew where he worked, and that he seemed like a nice guy, etc.) and send him a new transaction. He received those BTC and then 3 or so hours later when the coinbase transaction finally went through he was true to his word and immediately sent the btc back to me. WHEW!

So I guess this is a "faith in humanity restored" kinda story, I suppose.

As for using a real wallet, I agree. I just didn't have any other option because the only working wallet on my phone is coinbase and I couldn't take my laptop. I believe in diversifying my risk, so I have many wallets, including paper wallets for cold storage, electrum, etc. etc. But your advice is correct. Obviously I won't be using coinbase for time-sensitive transfers anymore, but I will continue to buy/sell there.

Thanks for the responses.

I sold some Bitcoins for fiat a couple hours ago. I sent the Bitcoins from my coinbase account, but the transaction never got pushed to the network. I waited at the guy's office for an hour and finally had to leave and give him my Government ID so he would know that I wasn't ripping him off. Despite that he's understandably upset because he still hasn't seen the transaction on the network and it's been over two hours.

I saw on reddit that someone said you could use the JSON text to push the transaction yourself manually using brainwallet. However his instructions weren't entirely clear and I can't get it to work. Could someone please help me ASAP if they know how to get this done? THANK YOU!!!

I'm down to start talking in mXBT, for all the reasons stated and more.

The only way it's gonna stick, though, is if you start using it casually in all of your posts, not just in this thread. Only once it becomes pervasive on bitcointalk will it start spreading to other sites. Let's do this!!!

This is true. It's called Zipf's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law

Here's the Log(rank) vs Log(Invested amount) chart using JD invested data. It's not exactly like similar plots of, say, bank balances, income, city populations, etc., because it's not a straight line. Perhaps this has something to do with JD (risk seeking or risk averse behavior at different levels of BTC ownership? Use of multiple accounts?), or perhaps it just reflects the underlying distribution of Bitcoin ownership (which we do not know precisely).

Why even allow users to bypass creating a username and password (and 2FA)?

This isn't true. You can ask for permission (yeah, permission) to buy dollars, but everybody except political friends of the administration are denied (in fact, they removed the option of saying your purchasing them to save on the online form). It's true, if you travel you can be authorized to buy dollars in an amount equal to a stipend of $70 per day of your trip (i.e. if you go to the US for 10 days, you are authorized to buy US$700, no more). Try traveling to the US or europe on $70 per day. Ha! How do people do it? Brings us to the next point...

While overseas you can use your credit card (plus a 20% surcharge that goes against your taxes next year--not adjusted for inflation; also if you try to claim the credit, don't be surprised if you get audited in retaliation), but we'll see if this lasts past these elections next week. At the very least a hard yearly cap like in Venezuela is coming.

That 20%/25% inflation/salary figure is incorrect. It might have been true at some point, but inflation right now is easily over 25%, and that's all day everyday. Salary adjustments are once or twice per year.

+1

A few months ago I switched to android because of the lack of bitcoin apps on iphone and because of the small screens. I'm relatively happy with android/galaxy s4, but I have to say it's been mostly a pain in the ass.

After this coinbase app, I'm halfway back to going to iPhone. All they need to do is release one with a 5" screen and I'm back.

Could you share that correct math with us?

(btw, TIL you could do higher than 98% "chance to win" on JD. I always thought 98% was the max.)

I am also worried about this. Has anybody heard from him? Has he been on the chat?

+1 to putting a disclaimer when you invest. You can use any legal prospectus to find suitable language (Something like, "Bankrolling Just-Dice represents a speculative investment and involves a high degree of risk. An investor could lose all or a substantial portion of his/her investment.")

Suggestion: Stop calling it "investment". I think a better word could be "bankroll". This might help people lose the idea that this is some sort of Savings Account with FDIC insurance.

I'm glad you took it well, I was worried when I pressed send.

What I'd say is I feel your pain in trying to make up for your losses, but keep in mind that that's a classic gambling problem. In fact:

http://jeu-aidereference.qc.ca/www/signs_problem_gambling_en.asp

#2 Chasing losses.

The reality that 35% you lost is gone. And, honestly unlikely to return with fractional kelly and the increasing value of bitcoin. So you need to ask yourself what is the best option for you as of right now. Well, as of right now your confidence is shaken, you can't convince yourself that the site is not in fact hacked (that 0.51% historical edge/luck thing you've referenced a few times now is incorrect: look up dooglus' explanation of why that is), you're afraid of the varience. So drop your investment a bit until you're confident again that it is a good investment. Again, not trying to spread FUD, for everyone, just saying in your case to drop it until you're comfortable again. I did the same thing. I had 15 invested, Nakowa had an enormous win, so I divested, investigated, was convinced the site wasn't hacked and re-invested.

Anyway, hope that helps. I'll leave it alone now

Please, please take this in the spirit in which it's intended. I'm not trying to mock you.

Mechs, in all honesty, I think you really should consider divesting, or at least severely reducing your investment. You don't seem to take this well.

I sympathize with you. I once played poker pretty regularly, and I was decent at it. Eventually I made my way up the limits a bit, but then I had a string of bad beats at a couple grand a pop, and I realized it was too much, I couldn't take the swings. So I stopped and played less regularly, and only 1-3NL $100 max tables. Here on Just Dice, same deal, I'd love to put in a hundred BTC, but it's too much risk for me. So I was at 15btc for a while, and with the recent variance I dropped to 10. I'm in it more because I find the website to be fascinating than because I think it's a rock solid investment (in fact, I think investment is a misnomer here).

From your postings I think it's abundantly clear that this is too much risk/variance for you. Maybe just re-invest when there's variable risk, or doog drops to 1/10 kelly or something. But not your full stack of Bitcoins.

Guys, the problem with using random.org to directly determine the result of the roll is not that random.org might be compromised (which we wouldn't know), but rather that you'd have no way of knowing if doog's server was actually spitting out a random number or not-- i.e. someone in control of the server could make it so it could arbitrarily make certain rolls win or lose at will. You'd be taking one step backwards dumping the provably fair system, and not gaining anything.

Nothing is wrong with me, it was a mistake. Thanks for the heads up.

I get what you're saying. For a given level of profit for the hacker, say 100BTC like you say above, there is a max profit low enough such that if a hacker were to attain that 100BTC, it would be known with, say, 99.99% probability that it was not though luck. I agree! 100% done and done, no discussion.

However, what I am saying is slightly different or can be adjusted to account for what you are saying: A hacker that is willing to scale down their ambition, could always win and make their winning statistically indistinguishable from randomness. As long as they change their effective edge of their play from -1% (or -0.5%, or whatever it's currently at) to  a positive %, as an investor, you must divest, no matter how low max profit is. Because while your losses in absolute value are lower, your losses relative to your potential gain (which is greatly diminished at 0.00001btc max profit) are just as large as ever.

Thus: compromised site => divest, regardless of max profit.

This would be worse than the current setup: without provable fairness, anyone with access to the server could slip in a number and you'd have no way of knowing that number wasn't chosen specifically to make you lose. The concept of "provable fairness" is actually a pretty genius innovation. Now the idea is to extend the concept somehow to protect investors as such as those in this site.

EDIT: Reduced length of quote above.