You can call me Ben.

First, let's understand transaction fees.
Transaction fees encourage miners to donate CPU to the network, which is a good thing because the premise behind bitcoin is that if we have a large network then attackers can't control more than 50% of the network. To understand this, assume that there were no transaction fees (and no 50 BTC reward). Then the miners would disappear.

Now that we understand what fees are for, let's explore alternatives. One alternative is inflation beyond 21 million coins. Right now, miners pay themselves 50 new coins per block. Why? Because the original bitcoin client has this allowance built into it, and all bitcoin users agree to accept these new coins. In several years this scheme will have the block reward dry up.

Once the reward gets small and transaction fee income goes down as people get savvy, miners will disappear and the network will be in serious trouble.

Miners will, however, have the option (and they have the option right now, too) to change the 21 million rule, and reward themselves whatever they want for each new block. No change to the official bitcoin client is required, because most mining is done by mining pools which can make the change to their own modified clients.

But wait. Won't miners just reward themselves insane numbers of bitcoins? No, because the general bitcoin public will modify their clients to detect these unfair coins and reject all coins generated on that branch. This places downward pressure on the reward choice. In essence, a market process will take place as individual miners weigh how many BTC they want to reward themselves per block with how much they can get away with without driving bitcoin users (and, therefore, bitcoin miners) to the branch point before the unfair reward block.

We need to put together a think tank to figure out where we go once the coins reach close to 21 million. Transaction fees will not work because large sites will form that have a huge bitcoin bank account, and money will be sent between users of the site instead of actual transactions on the bitcoin network. The only solution is to lift the 21 million cap. Remember, the 21 million cap is not set in stone. At the end of the day, the rules are set by miners. We have a handful of mining pools that collectively control over 50% of mining activity easily. Miners have the option to agree on a percentage rate of increase beyond 21 million. If the percent rate is too high, the confidence in the currency goes down and so does its value. If the rate is too low then miners are not paid enough to support the network.

These are just starting points of discussion but weshould get this out in the open sooner instead of later. The mining pools are going to be a powerful force in the monetary policy of the bitcoin network in the future.

A microbitcoin is way too small now and will always be too small. Even after the bitcoin markets arrive at the true value for bitcoins, the micro coin will still be less than 3 US cents. On the other hand a millibitcoin is a larger unit-- one thousandth of today's bitcoin-- and therefore it will settle between 30 US cents and 30 US dollars, which is a much better ballpark for people to deal with that are used to dealing with dollars and cents. These numbers are based on bitcoin world GDP penetration between 0.1% and 10%.

Plus, when it comes to the general public everyone knows what milli means, whereas hardly anyone knows what micro means.

Constance,

Please know that cashcow does not support fractional coin withdrawals.

If a player attempts to withdraw, move, or transfer a bitcoin amount of XXX.XX then nothing will happen. To solve this problem, enter only a whole bitcoin amount without a decimal point or period. Entering a whole amount followed by a .00 will also not work.

If a player has a fractional balance that they wish to move to a different account, cashcow asks that they please deposit the complementary amount of bit cents to bring the balance to a full bitcoin, then transfer or withdraw 1 whole bitcoin.

It is always safe to deposit fractional amounts.

We are eager to hear back whether this was the reason for your difficulty and these instructions solved the problem.

We are looking to add support for the decimal point in the near future, including decreasing the minimum roulette bet from B1 to B0.1 or B0.01. Poker is also coming soon to cashcow and freenode IRC.

Thank you for using cashcow.

jorgen,


Thank you for being a valued Cashcow customer at cashcow.no-ip.org. During the past 2 weeks a withdrawal was unsuccessful because we did not leave enough bitcoins in our bitcoin client to pay the win.

Cashcow generally maintains a balance of at least 5000 BTC in the bitcoin client that the site uses to make instant payouts. However, several weeks ago we moved most of the funds to a different wallet on a different computer, but did not move them back.

This issue has now been rectified.

The cashcow casino account that made the unsuccessful withdrawal has been credited with the amount of the withdrawal. That user will now be able to attempt the withdrawal again.

Cashcow Casino apologizes for the delay in attention to this matter.

We are aware that the cashcow1234@hushmail.com address is no longer working. We are in the process of setting up a new email address with a different email provider and will update the site to reflect this. In the mean time, this forum is the best way to contact us. Thank you for your patience.



chadqberry,


Thank you for playing at Cashcow Casino. Our records do not indicate any unsuccessful withdrawals matching your description. We see numerous withdrawals after May 19, all of which were successful. We think you may have entered your own cashcow receiving address as the address to send your withdrawal to. When a user withdraws money to their own cashcow receiving address, the funds will go back to a Posted state and will not be Available until 2 confirmations occur. That kind of withdrawal will not show up on your Bitcoin client software, and you will not be able to withdraw it again until those 2 confirmations occur.

Please return to your cashcow account and verify that all of your coins are there as you expect to be there. To make a withdrawal to your own Bitcoin client, carefully copy and paste the address from your bitcoin client software into the "foreign receiving address" text box; enter your withdrawal amount in the "Send [ ] BTC" text box, then click Send.

Please contact us in this forum either in this thread or a private message if this is still an issue.


Thanks
joe

Im revising this estimate to mid-May 2011 for poker in IRC (irc.freenode.net) and June for poker at the cashcow website.

The high price of bitcoins is due to an expectation of future value. Remember that if we know the price of something will double next week, then it will actually double today, then not change next week.

The value of any item-- gold, stocks, bonds, currencies-- is always equal to the limit (calculus) of the expected value at time X in the future, in today's dollars, as X goes to infinity. Example: Gold is worth 1000$/oz today. A worker at a gold mine leaks information to his friend that there is a HUGE gold deposit equal to all the gold previously thought to exist (so supply will double). But it will take 2 years to mine all of this gold. Result: gold price immediately drops to 500$. It does not take 2 years to slowly drop down to 500$.

Proof:
We know that gold is trading at 1000$/oz prior to the information leak. Therefore, lim x->inf (EV(x)) = 1000.
We expect that 5000 years from now (x = 5000 years) value will be 1/2 of what the market previously expected. (Note: 5000 years was picked as an arbitrarily long time, beyond which the market has no additional expectations, good or bad, about the value of gold)
With no information past 5000 years, the new graph of EV(x) is equal to half of the old graph, for all values > 5000 years, since the only new information we have is that supply will be double the old expectation once all gold is mined.
Therefore, lim EV(x) = half of the previous limit = 500, which is equal to the gold price.

The solution for sending coins to people is at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3427.0
I envision adding a "wallet" tab to the client, which lists every bitcoin bundle in wallet.dat, and if you double click any bundle you can: (1) copy the private key for that bundle so you can email it to someone, (2) split out a different amount, (3) combine with another bundle, (4) reissue. Very similar to that other digital currency ecache.

Because it would be harder.

With the private key idea the invitation message would be:

Hey friend! Here is 5 bitcoins: SDF8SFGD56F76DGS987FDGSDF9S76DFSFD7SD0F97FD097SFDGREY65T3TYU6CXB5N623VB

Download the bitcoin client at bitcoin.org to redeem your coins


With your proposed idea the message would be:

Hey friend! Try bitcoin! I've sent you 5 bitcoins on bitcoinfacebook.com. Download bitcoin at bitcoin.org, then go to bitcoinfacebook.com and enter this invitation code: 34JHG25KJ54H


Aka more steps for the person that is just starting with bitcoin.

The goal behind the constitution was that it would be self-evident that it forms the right government. It clearly had flaws; the proof is found by looking at the current state of government.

We can truthfully say that, looking at the set of all documents that a person could sit down and write, there exists one document that describes a self-evident (known to be correct) government. If we had this document, it wouldn't matter if dead people wrote it 250 years ago.

Is a law really a law if you can see into the future and know it will be declared unconstitutional in 10, 20, 100 years? All of these gay laws are unconstitutional under the 4th amendment (search and seizure aka privacy) and the enumeration of powers article.

Anyways, I do not think mt gox is freezing the funds just to obey the law. Because they are already breaking the law by not collecting and verifying names and addresses of every customer.

Agree. Mtgox did worse than paypal. While paypal's funds freezing scams usually begin with reversed credit card transactions that put paypal at a loss that they need to recover, in this case here, mtgox has not had any liberty reserve or coins pulled away from itself, but continues with a funds freeze anyway. Especially foolish since this community is comprised of many people that absolutely despise paypal's model and instead value economic privacy and freedom.

Demurrage is exactly the same thing as increasing the money supply. There are no special economic results that will occur under demurrage that will not happen under regular money supply inflation.

Demurrage is simply expressing the amount of bitcoins you have as a fraction of the total supply instead of hard units.

The only time it is good to switch is if you know ahead of time that the game show host will in fact open a door other than your own that does not contain the bitcoins.

On the other hand if the host announces to you that he will do it only after you picked your door, it's better to stay with your door. Why? Because if the host wants to beat you then he will only pick a door if you picked the right door to begin with, in an effort to get you off the right door.

We could update bitcoin client with the following modifications:
- if 2 double-spend transactions received within 20 seconds of each other ==> ordering unknown. Accept blocks with either transaction, and build on top of the longest chain. (Current implementation)
- if 2 double-spend transactions received more than 20 seconds apart ==> ordering known. Reject all blocks that include the later, non-original transaction(s). Do not build on top of the rejected block.
- stop rejecting blocks containing double-spend transactions if the block receives 6 confirmations (to prevent a permanent chain fork)
- clients should relay double spend transactions to alert the recipients that there was a double spend attempt.

If we do this, then fast payments will be possible using the method laid out by the original poster.

Yes, but only the public/private keypair of a temporary bitcoin address that your client loads with the amount of bitcoins you want to send to the person. Once you send it, your client should forget about it and not move additional coins into it.


The private key transactions would allow you to send bitcoins as text: through facebook, message board private messages, snail mail, basically any medium of communication. Bitcoinmail.com is not similar to this idea.

Satoshi may have made a small oversight in suggesting this could be done without changing the protocol. He suggested we add BitDNS (or BitWhatever) as the root/branch/leaf/something of the merkle tree. However this will not work because the current BitCoin protocol requires clients to verify that every leaf of the bitcoin chain is a valid bitcoin transaction. A hash value is not a valid bitcoin transaction, so this move would break legacy clients confused by the merkle makeup of the newer blocks.

In any event, I have a good understanding of a handful of ways to do the multiple chains.


The question you are asking about is not related to the BitDNS discussion. To erase spent transactions would not require any type of change in structure of the merkle tree. Each client can get away with forgetting most merkle leaf transaction data. Here is what it has to remember:

- The hash of all blocks
- All prior transactions that contributed to the availability of your own wallet funds
- The block header data for all blocks to which those transactions belong
- The merkle tree non-leaf hashes for those blocks
- All merkle leaf transactions that are siblings to the above transactions in the merkle tree of the block to which they belong.

Now, we must assume all clients are forgetting things by this same algorithm, so when a client spends money he has to spell out all the supporting transaction data over the network to convince other nodes and the recipient that it's legitimate.

Over time as coins become more circulated the supporting data that needs to be sent to the network for every new transaction will become large. So this should be weighed against the status quo where all clients store all data. Other solutions have been made up for tackling the data storage problem separately from bitcoin.

You want to send bitcoins to a Facebook friend who also has bitcoin, but you don't want to ask them for an address and wait for their response. You want to send the coins now.

Add a functionality to Bitcoin to support the following use case:

1. Alice wants to send 20 BTC to Bob.
2. Alice asks her Bitcoin client for a public/private keypair for a new temporary Bitcoin address, which Alice's client will load with only 20 BTC.
3. Alice sends the keypair to Bob through email.
Alice is finished.
Some time passes...
4. Bob receives the email and enters the public/private key into the client.
5. Bob's client sends the money into one of Bob's own addresses.
6. Bob can consider the money received when that send-to-self receives a sufficient number of confirmations.


To me, this sounds like a very basic and important functionality. This gives you the ability to "speak" bitcoins, and whoever receives your message will be able to cash them. You no longer have to ask recipients for their bitcoin address and wait for their reply. Also, this change does not require any changes to the protocol.

I am (slowly) working on adding this functionality to the client that i checked out from github.

Ideas/Thoughts?

The TOS is unenforceable. A company cannot shift liability arbitrarily to an uninvolved individual who may not be aware that the card was obtained fraudulently. This is another unfortunate example of a company, like Paypal, that responds to fraud against itself by committing fraud against its own customers.

The TOS language was not strong enough to be enforceable. If Amazon really wanted to get away with this, they would have to admit prominently that the Gift Card actually has zero value. A reasonable person expects a gift card to function like company paper.

That's all I wanted out of you. An admission that you're back on your feet, and you're just here to talk about your day to day life. You lie again, I'll kick your teeth in. You have shelter, you have food, you have government checks. Try to climb your way up the ladder to a decent job so you can pull yourself out of a bad spot. Your endless "bad coincidences" are impossible. That's why I let this thread go on this long before I laid you out. A lot of these guys come from wealthy communities and never encountered beggars or con artists before, which is why this thread went on so long. As long as the community understands that you're just here to talk about your life and for the attention, and you're not here for "food money", it's OK.