It's because you're crossing a security boundary with a bugged address.  Basically, if you posted your 1xxxx address on a torified website and you sent to it, no other information but that address has been passed on.  When you use a vanity name backed with txt record, you're putting a permanent bug in someone's client - since now it's a.b.c.d that needs to be looked up to be sent.  At any time their client leaves the security domain you have the chance of leaking IP addresses.

Not to mention having to wedge all of dnssec into the reference client in order to validate the signature.

So to pay someone on an anonymous transaction system you need to access a logging DNS server and leave a littered trail of queries?  I'm just verifying your plan here.  I'll be sure to use this on a torland website so idiots give me their IP addresses.

Congratulations, you just invented the 1x1 transparent .gif for bitcoin.

Ahh, perfect.  I knew the idea was obvious enough I wouldn't have been the first.  Thank you, I had no idea what people called the idea to search for it.

So yeah, that's great.  To bootstrap you ask nearby nodes what their max block is and their current UxO tree and for the block-header-history.  It doesn't matter if the one you ask is a few blocks behind, since once you verify you can just append new blocks to the end.   If you end up happening to bootstrap on a fork you just grab the UxO tree from the split and append the blocks on the longer chain.

My estimate of non-zero-balance addresses was wrong, what's required is a summary of unspent transaction outputs, with is a superset of addresses.  Still, serializing UxO into a summary will require a lot less space than the full blockchain, and should still be able to be defined in such a way that the actual summary block never needs to be passed around, except to be generated specifically to bootstrap a client.

Edit: It looks like ultraprune is more similar to this than I thought, so the only question is 'is it feasible to migrate the miners to signing that data every few hundred blocks so that it can be fully trusted no matter where the source?'

Right now, the proof-of-work (block headers only) runs ~20mb.  A full summary of non-zero-balance addresses is another 50mb.   If that balance summary could be generated in a fixed way, miners could include the hash of it as a transaction item and the 50mb summary wouldn't need to be passed around itself, since any node could recreate it from it's own data.

Full block header chain, recent balance summary, and full blocks since the balance summary.  That's on the order of 100mb download, instead of the current 6.5gb blockchain.

Am I missing an attack on this somewhere?  Network-wise, you can request full proof of any archived transaction by requesting the block from a peer, and since you have the sha256 of the merkle root as part of the headers nobody can feed you fake transaction data.  The proof-of-work only is exactly as hard to fake as the full blockchain, and it's trivial to verify that the hash of the balance summary exactly matches the generated balance data.

If the standard is 'sign the balance summary every 100 blocks' the overhead for mining would be insignificant.  Since it's just another transaction, no ASIC/GPU mining code would even have to know about it, and the overhead of running a single sha256 over data you already have to maintain to run a mining pool is insignificant.

This seems a fairly obvious proposal, so I'm sure someone has come up with it before - but googling for bitcoin 'balance summary' is flooded with descriptions of the client's user interface.

For all the "Why would they do it instead of cashing out?!?!?"  remember that a sufficently notorious theft could be tracked and the address-tree blacklisted.   But destroying them makes your own stash more valuable, and makes any link between your profit and the destruction immensely difficult to prove.

If a day goes by without a poster on this forum misusing an apostrophe.

It seems to me that people who upgraded their normal computer with extra GPUs to mine run windows, while the dedicated mining boxes use one of the linux-on-a-stick miners.   After all, a harddrive is an unnecessary expense when a thumbdrive is all you need.

What?  No.   That's rational actor.   The Invisible Hand is how Adam Smith thought that people would buy locally instead of cheap imports.   It's invisible because it doesn't exist.

Yeah, I figured that out in my car in a "Duh!" moment.   You know the transactions, since they give you the data, but you don't know the private key for the first transaction.   Even if you do report it outside their system, they get the 50btc.

Oh well.  Back to the drawing board.   Lots of resilience to technical cheats, not so much social ones.

The cheat is pretty trivial - when you get a "share", before you turn it in, see if it matches the current difficulty.  If so, claim the 50BTC for yourself.  Otherwise, hand it in for the share.

Let suckers pay for your solo-mining.

I don't see anything in the protocols that would prevent this, and without extensive auditing of every work unit handed out I don't see how the pools could even detect it.

Yes, but with the amount he's making mining bitcoins he shouldn't have a problem with the reduced lifespan.

Depth to $13 is only 6200 BTC.

That's way WAY smaller than the last big selloff.

Nobody is going to make a professional exchange for BTC.   At the hype-peak of ~33USD the entire "market cap" for BTC was under 200 million dollars.   That's less than the commission a goldman-sachs type institution makes on an average deal.

All the pro-markets have billions or trillions in volume.   With the micro-scale of BTC, you're lucky to get Magic: the Gathering nerds to break financial laws to exchange for you.   I've yet to see anything AT ALL in the entire bitcoin ecosystem that isn't rank-amateur.   From the hilariously basic scams to the mining pools to the exchanges, it's all done by people with no experience in these things.   Even the design of BTC itself suffers from serious naivety in financial matters - an inherently deflationary system can't grow.   Even if (and it's a big if) the exchanges manage to keep going, as the mining rewards dwindle to nothing over the next two years and more and more BTC is lost to deleted wallet.dat files, where is the currency going to come from for new entrants to the market?  Every new good will be chasing scarcer and scarcer BTC.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

There's always something "new" and "it'll work this time!" about whatever bubble.  Tulips, land in florida, dot-bomb stocks, CDOs, land in florida (again, now with air-conditioning!).  The current bubble-mania is Commodities, which spiked the price of grain and oil and sparked the Arab Spring.  Following closely on the heels of food is the student loan/for-profit-college bubble which is at it's early stages.

Bitcoins are as non-bubbly because of their "technology" as petsovernight.com was.

Hay look another ponzi scheme.   Hint: It's a scam and there's no mining going on.

I thought they were wiping all outstanding orders and restarting?

Anyway, I'm more interested in the GPU crash.   Newegg is already getting massive returns, so I expect to see a flood of high-end ATI cards on craigslist, ebay, overstock, etc.

$10 5770 please.

Get a second (smaller) power supply, put one or two of the cards on that.   As for thermals, I replaced the chincy fan on mine with an intel heatsink fan.   Roars like a jet engine but keeps it below 80.   As a warning, you will have to mould plastic and it will violate your warranty to do this.

Why make thousands when you can... get investigated for wire fraud!

With 130k+ blocks, it takes a long time to fetch them all via the network.   Is it possible to have a seed-file that you can scan-in and be reasonably up-to-date?   At that point it's just a matter of getting the newer blocks from your peers.

It would seem that the blk0001.dat could be "seeded" and rescanned to make the indexes, but everything goes pear-shaped when I try that.

Ideas?