OP, you didn't answer my question. Tor registrations are not permitted on bitcointalk, so your registration IP might reveal something about you. Or did you use an anonymous VPN like molecular did at the time?

Howdy, I've created another graph showing the recent fiasco.

In the new graph you can see that there was a steady exponential growth for two months from mid-january to mid-march.

Then cyprus went beserk, leading to an immediate and crazy exponential period with a doubling every 11.5 days! To make it clear, this doubling was even faster than the June 2011 bubble. See the linked post for the image showing that.

So, I can offer a hypothesis. When the Cyprus crisis went public, many people thought "Ahh, Cypriots are going to be buying bitcoins, ahhhh, all of Europe will want to be buying bitcoins, ahhhh, the whole world will want to buy bitcoins."

So speculators saw a chance and pushed the price way way up.

I happened to read an article a while ago which stated something like Cypriots, and the whole world, never did go crazy buying bitcoins after all(can't remember where). So this always was (as many many people predicted) just a speculative bubble. I guess MtGox lag and possible DDOS didn't help.

The good news is that we've more-or-less returned to a longer term trend. In fact, if the Cyprus crisis and subsequent bubble hadn't happened, but the Jan-Mar trend had continued, we'd be right where we are now.

For reference, you can also see the long term trend which has been holding since roughly Jan 2011.

I have only an idea how webbugs work, but it seems everybody says OP is using tor, including theymos.  However, I thought registration on this forum through tor was not permitted, so theymos should have OP's real IP address from that - though IIRC, molecular used a VPN-through-tor to register for his "findmeifyoucan" thread - can you confirm molecular?  Theymos, does your post refer also to OP's registration IP?  If not, then: OP, are you willing to let theymos reveal your registration IP?

I can't help with the technical aspects of this hunt, even though I'd love to be more capable of that.  Would it be possible to trawl through every post made on this forum and gather timing statistics for each member?  Assuming OP is still posting under his real username, then there might be a strong correlation with this anonymous id though it would probably take a while longer, and plenty more posts, to weed out the false positives. For the prize of 2.5BTC you could afford to make over 100 trials though (though it's not clear if the donation should be 0.02BTC or 0.005BTC).

Here's some linguistic analysis, which is all I can really offer:

This might suggest American English, though -ize is common in the "Queen's English" lands now. OP also has another post with "synchronize".

This suggests colloquial English. Most foreigners would say "I need..." because they are taught that English requires that the subject be explicitly specified (unlike, e.g., Spanish, Italian where the verb specifies the subject, or Japanese where I understand the subject is usually implied). So either OP didn't know that (which seems unlikely given the quality of his English) or he is familiar enough with English to know that, casually speaking, it's not always necessary, eg: "Went swimming yesterday, bumped into a fish so I ate it up" - it's clear I am the subject.

Whereas this suggests non-English language origin. OP should say "... in the bitcoin community"

More stuff suggests non-English mother tongue.  OP should say "definitely gone" or "definitively gone" or "gone for certain" instead of "for sure".  This is not a hard and fast rule, though.  Just in my personal experience, lots of non-native English speakers say "for sure" more than you might otherwise expect.

This is not a trivial linguistic construction, but for all I can see there are no errors.

So, all I can offer, is the following. OP's first post was asking to be whitelisted to get out of the newbie jail https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg1621951#msg1621951.  Then he replies to a bunch of newbie questions with what seems to be very good English. Then he starts asking about escrow and penetration testers and we see a couple of mistakes creeping in, though a couple of posts still come through perfectly well. Then there are a couple more replies to newbie questions only now there are some errors:


So, all-in-all, OP seems to be a non-native English speaker but with very good English. Or he is deliberately introducing errors. Or... maybe... there might be more than one person writing. Last possibility, OP says he is following most of the advice from molecular's findmeifyoucan thread - my advice in that thread was to use an automatic translator (e.g. google) to translate everything he is writing.  Anyone here work at google and willing to search the translate history for a match, assuming the history is kept?    (that's just a joke, doing that would probably get you fired!)

Sorry if this post seems a bit confused.  I'm pulling info in from a bunch of different tabs at once.

edit: hmm, rereading this again after I posted yesterday - a substantial part of OP's posts are better than any automatic translation. Scratch that theory.

I have given paper wallets to a few friends and family, with an expiry date, and I kept a copy of the private key. I've told them that if the bitcoins are still there at the expiry date, I'll take them back. At the current rate, it will a couple of hundred dollars back in my pocket in a few months, assuming things don't crash.

I would add that the bitcoin foundation should reduce its membership fees too. They were introduced when bitcoin was, what, maybe $7, meaning membership was about $18 per year, or $180 lifetime. Now it's $180 per year or $1800 lifetime (gasp!).

Damn... that easy, huh. Just click on "image". Thx.

I would, but I don't know how... I'm sure it's really easy. Can anyone else provide please?

I updated the graph with another interesting curve. Bitcoin first hit the news in 2011 with a couple of slashdot and wired posts. So if we take from there to today, and fit an exponential, we get a doubling every 150 days or so.  So with this hindsight it's clear to see that the June'11 bubble was truly a bubble. Growth since then has been intermittent but constant over the long term. I'm not one to speculate, but the graph suggests bitcoins bought today will be worth 4 times as much in 12 months.

http://imgur.com/Hs6zMoi

@timo: I wouldn't say exponential growth is necessarily bad, but it is certainly always unsustainable. Perhaps that's what the bitcoin critics refer to.

Just made a thread about exponential growth before noticing this thread:


A singluarity (mathematically) means the price would start to diverge; i.e. much faster than exponential. There is no indication of that in the graph.

How do you include a graphic directly in the post?

Hi, I just made a graph of the data from bitcoincharts.com for MtGox USD, taking all 6-hourly data since their records begin. Bitcoin seems to go through phases of exponential growth, which probably means that it spreads virally through a new class of user before saturating its presence in that group. I had a pet theory a while ago that each new phase of expansion of bitcoin would always be slower than the last, but this latest increase to $65 is actualy faster than the previous two. However it is significantly slower than the June 2011 bubble, which saw the price double almost 3 times as fast as it is doubling today.

http://imgur.com/L3raefv

For those that don't know, exponential expansion indicates that, on average, every entity participating in some network is bringing in another entity in some fixed time. It could be rabbits breeding, or cells dividing in a foetus. From 1 cell or rabbit, you get two. From 2, you get 4. From 4, 8. And so on. Each doubling occurs in the same time.

Right now, bitcoin price is doubling every 33 days or so. If this were to keep up (which it won't, I'm certain) until year end, bitcoins would be worth about $16k each, and market cap would be about $200 billion. However, each of the previous exponential expansions lasted typically about one or two months each. Which would suggesting we're near the end of this one, assuming no externalities to disrupt the trend (like global banking collapse).

I would have bought a couple of units, but increasing the price 3 times for substantially the same hardware seems a little... abusive? If the exchange rate drops significantly it's unlikely that these units would recover the investment.

My first thought when I read about this ruling was, like many, "great! bitcoin is legal!". Now I'm unsure again. I've always held nagging doubts about bitcoin, and how amazingly effective it would be as a 1984-esque tool for population control and governance. To recap, just suppose BigGovt gains >51% of mining, and suddenly the only transactions getting through are government-approved transactions, to government-approved bitcoin addresses - it would be the ultimate Big Brother.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, many people more clever than me have suggested measures against this, but I'm still not convinced.

So, now what, are these bitcoin "money transmitters" going to need to register their bitcoin address(es) with some government department so they can be monitored for compliance? How exactly are they going to police this ruling?

This ruling seems positive for bitcoin, but I'm seeing it more as a shot across the bow: "bitcoin: we're coming for you." In fact, many threads have said that the weak point in the bitcoin ecosystem is the fiat exchangers. How about that.

I call on the devs to prioritize a modification to the block approval code in the client, to reject blocks that do not include enough valid and well-broadcasted transactions. We need better discussion on this in order to establish exactly how to proceed.

I saw this thread got bumped, and it got me thinking. Well, if you buy & sell bitcoins, or if you trade for bitcoins, the tax implications should be fairly clear. I think in the former case, you declare capital gains when you realise the profit, and in the latter, you declare a dollar-equivalent income at the time of the trade. Right?

The interesting thing is mining. How do you tax wealth that comes "out of nowhere"? Well, let's examine more closely where it does actually come from.

Well, suppose I were to invent a new currency based on... peculiarly shaped stones that only I can find. Well, if no-one accepts my new currency the value is zero. If people start accepting them, then by their very acceptance, they ascribe a value to the stones. So, it's more like a gift than anything. So I might hold up a stone and shout to the masses: "what'll you give me for this?" and everyone shouts back "$100", and someone "gifts" me $100 for my (previously) worthless stone.

Of course, now that bitcoins are somewhat established, and mining is a big business, I suppose calling it a gift wouldn't cut any more. Yeah, it'd have to be income-taxed.

I'm pleased to say that my order with bitcoinin arrived this morning. I ordered 9 books on the 2nd or 3rd March, it was shipped on the 7th (from US) and arrived today (EU) - 6 days shipping instead of the stated 2 weeks. All was perfectly in order.

Actually, regards the discussion of the name "bitcoin in, stuff out", when I saw "bitcoinin" first, I thought of the verb "to bitcoin" meaning to deal in bitcoins, then "bitcoinin" would be a groovy way to say "bitcoining".  Like "to google" became a verb, so could "to bitcoin". I'm bitcoinin' dudes, I'm bitcoinin'...

+1 for bitcoinin

Cheers.

Hmm. What if the algorithm could be contained within the transaction's scriptsig? So, suppose I'm betting on.... who the next pope will be. The contracting parties decide on their authoritative news source (e.g. cnn.com). When the next pope is decided, cnn publishes a page stating "The new pope is Alice"  (yeah, revolution in the church, a female pope!) and they sign that statement with the bitcoin key which was presciently written in the original transaction. Now, since I was betting on Alice becoming pope, I simply download cnn's message and the signature, both of which match the transaction's requirements, construct a transaction with them, and redeem my winnings.

So, this would require the scriptsig to:
a) match the text "the new pope is Alice"
b) verify the signature from cnn

This would remove any subjectivity in the decision - you'd still have to trust your news source, but in any case, the outcome of the contract is defined. The news source *could* be corrupt and publish false news in order to profit.

I presume what you're trying to do is implement a user-friendly interface for implementing M of N transactions (which, I think, is not a trivial task). Are you thinking of going further and investigating an implementation of smart property (http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property), or at least an interface where smart property contracts can be registered and an API the smart property itself can interact with?

The outcome of some M of N contracts could be actually reduced to algorithms (e.g. betting on the value of MtGox_7day_USD which, I suppose, can be obtained programatically) - would you implement an interface where the writer of the contract can specify the algorithm which decided the outcome? I wonder which type of language that would use. I'd be interested in such a project, but I think it will be quite some time before there would be any real world example of it being necessary. I mean, bitcoin would have to take off before these complex features of bitcoins will be required, I think.

That would do fine too. I like it.

Would be reviewed periodically by developers - much like the transaction fee, now at 0.0005BTC. If bitcoins jump to $100 or $200, the minimum transaction fee will probably be reduced to 0.0001BTC. What I mean is, with fiat currency, there is a minimum transaction - $0.01.  Actually, in Canada, isn't it CAD$0.02 ?  I gather some European countries don't even use €0.01 coins anymore.

So the devs would introduce a minimum recommended transaction output of 0.01 BTC. According as 1 BTC buys more and more potatoes, the minimum transaction should be reduced accordingly. In any case, the minimum transaction output should ALWAYS be greater than the minimum transaction fee, so that these spammy outputs can always pay for their own redeeming and be eventually pruned.

But you still could. Look at it this way. On Friday the house shuffles all the card decks for the week's games (it has to be some time before the decks are used). For each game, it performs SHA256 of the deck, resulting in files like this:

Decks.txt:
MondayGame1Deck: KingSpades,AceDiamonds,4Clubs,..........
MondayGame2Deck: ......
...
SundayGame1000Deck: ....

Hashes.txt
MondayGame1Hash: sha256....
MondayGame2Hash: ......
...

So, you publish Hashes.txt on the preceeding Friday, and burn *it's* hash into the blockchain somehow.

Now at the start of each game, the players say their magic words, and these magic words shuffle the deck according to some fixed algorithm, and the game is played.

Now, in the event that no player says any magic words, or that JohnDoe is a regular player and he *always* says "abrekadabra", we need to prove that the house is not somehow filtering their decks (i.e. on Friday, the house shuffles their decks, applies "abrekadabra" and checks to see if the deck is favourable to them, given that JohnDoe comes in to play every Tuesday evening at 8pm). This would require an extra source of random shuffling from an externally verifiable source of entropy. e.g., the blockchain. So the shuffling algorithm need only insert an extra "lucky phrase", which is the block hash, or the merkle root, of the latest block in the block chain. Given that the house can't possibly know this value on Monday morning when they shuffle all their decks, this would absolutely prove that the house is not pre-filtering their decks.

After the game is played you allow the players to view:

1. the hash of the initial shuffle which is burned into the blockchain via the file Hashes.txt
2. the initial shuffle
3. the players magic words, the latest block|merkle hash, and the shuffling algorithm
4. the new shuffled deck
5. the play
6. the winner(s)


Oh... gosh, if we wanted to be *really* paranoid, the house *might* technically have a choice over which blockhash to use - the latest one, or maybe the one before that. If one or the other turn out to be more advantageous (again assuming the players say nothing, or say something entirely predictable), the house could claim they hadn't received the latest block at the time of the game. This would be solved by putting a visible blockchain counter in each gaming room though, or maybe writing it into the chat.

Hot damn, I should build myself a casino!

How about a solution like this. A transaction can include outputs that anyone can spend, without requiring a private key to unlock; let's call them "free" outputs. So, the smaller any single output is, the more free outputs the transaction must have, with each free output equal to the standard transaction fee.

Obviously the free outputs will be claimed by clients that relay or mine the transaction. Some clients might not relay the transaction if all the free outputs are already taken, therefore in the interest of propogation, a single relaying client will not be tempted to immediately claim all the free transactions.

However -- I'm not sure about a technical aspect of this. Suppose I send a transaction with two free outputs. The first relay claims one and leaves another blank. The transaction is then mined, so the miner claims the second. However: could the miner also *erase* the claim on the first free output, and insert a new claim on it?  In other words, can the original transaction be derived from the one in which the first free output is claimed?



An alternative solution is this. At the moment, the fee is TXFEE * TXSIZE, where TXFEE is 0.0005BTC and TXSIZE is measured in kB, right?  And the fee must be applied if: a) the priority is low b) TXSIZE > 1 or c) any output < 0.01 BTC. How about changing the fee to:  TXFEE*TXSIZE + SUM_{OUTPUTS<0.01}(TXFEE*log2(0.01/outputvalue)).  Let me explain:

TXFEE*TXSIZE is the same as before.

0.01/outputvalue = 1.0 if outputvalue=0.01
                        = 2 if outputvalue=0.005
                        = 8 if outputvalue=0.000125
and so on.

log_2(...) = 0 if outputvalue=0.01
              = 1 if outputvalue=0.005
              = 3 if outputvalue=0.000125
and so on

So, for each output below 0.01BTC (threshold which depends on bitcoin value, currently ~$40), every time the output halves in value, the transaction fee must increase by TXFEE.

So, a 750Byte transaction with outputs (0.5, 0.01, 0.009, 0.001, 0.00000001) will require a fee on the last three outputs only:   TXFEE*[log2(0.01/0.009) + log2(0.01/0.001) + log2(0.01/1e-8)] = TXFEE*[0.15 + 3.32 + 19.93] = 23.4 * TXFEE.

As you can see, the 1 satoshi output really costs alot of fees.

The problem is that this will merely make the transaction more expensive benefiting the miner - it will not reward non-miners for having to store, relay and validate the output (though that might be impossible anyway).