I was the one who proposed the name satoshi.

On 15 November 2010, in this post, I suggested calling 0.01 BTC a "satoshi". At the time, 0.01 BTC was the smallest unit that could be displayed by the user interface in the standard client, even though the protocol supported eight decimal places.

The discussion progressed, and on 10 February 2011 I proposed naming the smallest base unit (0.00000001 BTC) either an "austrian" or a "satoshi". In retrospect it's obvious that "satoshi" was the better name.

On 18 February 2011, marcus_of_augustus posted "100 million satoshis = 1 bitcoin. Are we agreed?" to which someone responded "affirmative", and the usage caught on.

Satoshi Nakamoto referred to the base unit simply as a "coin" in his writings.

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tpantlik, you are correct. So far we have only supported the pizza industry by using the XRP part of Ripple.

Someone else can be the first person to get pizza using unenforceable debt created from nothing. That would be more exciting.

Ripple is made for stuff like that. No reason why it can't happen.

Take a bitcoin with you, just in case.

I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 ripples for two large pizzas, which arrived at 6:28. Mmmmm.

As requested, one was Marguerita and one was Half-and-Half (veggie supreme, and ground beef). The Garlic & Herb "crust dip" was a new concept for me, but I see there's some similar dip in laszlo's 2010 Bitcoin pizza photo, so I guess this just means I don't eat pizza often enough.

Thanks FuzzyBear and Tirapon!

I couldn't find my Casascius Ripple, so I included a Casascius Bitcoin in the photos instead.

Great! I'm getting hungry...

That sounds good to me!

That's the easy bit. Just call it the hazek.

I think a new currency is a bad idea. It's fiddling around, tweaking the peripheral things, while missing the big picture.

Bitcoin won't succeed or fail depending on whether the block target is 10 minutes or 30 seconds, nor on whether its rate of monetary inflation reaches zero in 15 years or 500 years.

Nor does the risk of 51% attack really matter that much. Over the next decades, there are going to be hundreds of types of attacks on Bitcoin, of which the 51% attack is only one type (and it's by no means certain that a 51% attack will occur). There's no point worrying about about a 51% attack, except as part of a general general commitment to make Bitcoin as robust as possible.

It's much more important to have a wise, experienced, and diverse set of developers who can respond quickly to any threat that is brewing, just as Satoshi did when a hard fork was needed due to exploitation of the overflow bug. I say a "diverse" team, because a hostile takeover of the dev team is probably a much higher risk than a 51% attack.

The success of Bitcoin won't depend on its technical characteristics. These are mostly "good enough" already, and the rest are capable of improvement within what we know as Bitcoin.

Instead, the success of Bitcoin will depend on legal challenges, the global political environment, whether Bitcoin's future crises (and there will be many) are handled in a way that maintains credibility and minimises damage, whether any Google/Amazon-type organization adopts Bitcoin or whether they introduce their own altcoin, whether Oprah Winfrey endorses it, etc.

Something that already works and is "plenty good enough" will always win out over something that might (or might not) provide a small incremental improvement in the future.

Yeah, "trust" isn't the right word. It would be better to replace it with "risk".

Instead of saying "I trust the PayPal gateway for $100" we should say "I'll risk $100 with the PayPal gateway".

See the "Pizza for ripples" thread. You can get a rate of 10,000 XRP per bitcoin by helping to buy the pizza in exchange for XRP.

Thanks FuzzyBear, this seems like a great way to do it.

Please send me a PM when you've raised the funds, then I'll send you the XRP along with my pizza preferences and delivery address.

There's nothing in the ripple system to stop evil gateways.

Suppose I have various lines of trust with other people and organizations, including with Pirate's gateway. I have "deposited" $50 with Pirate. In return I have an IOU from Pirate valued at $50.

At some point, I start to feel uneasy about Pirate, so I remove the trust that I extended to Pirate. Am I correct that the $50 owed to me by Pirate then automatically becomes $50 owed to me by others, specifically those whom I trust and who in turn trust Pirate themselves (and who have not "maxed out" their Pirate balance)?

Then when Pirate defaults, I try to collect from those people. Not surprisingly, they don't feel like paying me and they default too. It could turn ugly fast. Those who are quick to spot the scam will modify their lines of trust fast enough to ensure that everyone else is stuck with the worthless Pirate IOUs.

Or am I missing something here?

My offer is 10,000 XRP for two large pizzas delivered, as per the original post. This mirrors Laszlo's 2010 offer.

It can't work as a spam prevention measure unless it has some scarcity. And if it has some scarcity, then it has some value. And if it has some value, then it will find its exchange rate.

I think the exchange rate will be volatile for some time. We don't know how useful ripple will be, and we don't know how quickly XRPs are going to be given away.

Assuming ripple is successful, the value (after all of the XRP giveaways have been done) should increase gradually because XRPs are destroyed when they are used to pay for transactions.

A very optimistic exchange rate could be estimated by assuming parity between the "market capitalization" of BTC and XRP. If 21 million BTC have a market cap of $600 million as at present, then 100 billion XRP might have a similar market cap. This would value each XRP at $0.006.

I think if he gives you a 10 EUR bill in meatspace, you use the ripple system to send him 10 ripple-Euros. From his and your point of view, everything is settled.

Yes, do you deliver to the north-west of England?

I'll pay 10,000 XRP for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day.  I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.  You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I'm aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for ripples where I don't have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a 'breakfast platter' at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy!

I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that.  I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire.

If you're interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.

Thanks,
ribuck

What an interesting post!

Vegetarianism. Communism. The metric system of weights and measures. Environmental awareness. Rock music. Votes for women. Air travel. Freeways. Contraception. Antibiotics. Are these the kind of things you're thinking of?

Perhaps the only pattern is that these things came into being because of people who weren't afraid of doing something new and different.

Me too. CB Radio in the 1970s, Relational databases in the late 1970s, 4GLs in the early 1980s, Desktop Publishing in the mid 1980s, Internet from 1993, Wikipedia from its second day of operation, OpenStreetMap from 2007, Bitcoin from 2010.

If I knew the answer to that, I'd be there right now!

Bitcoin, of course, is a current hotspot that will soon become something really big. Once Bitcoin is entrenched, it will open up a huge range of new opportunities, just as the internet had to become entrenched before Bitcoin could become a possibility.

Let me throw in some guesses as to what might become big in the next decade or two:

• The system of education and qualifications is going to be shaken up like never before. Dinosaur-like traditional institutions based on years and years of structured learning will wither away, to be replaced by a system of education based around micro-courses that can be plugged together in different ways to meet different needs. That, in turn, will create a demand for new types of testing and certification bodies that can address these more-flexible educational processes.

• Thanks to Bitcoin (and probably via some kind of Bitcoin-linked subchain), micropayments will finally have a good enough infrastructure to prosper. I can see even the tiniest API call carrying a micropayment along with it. There are already lots of business ideas that would become profitable if micropayments could be used to call a Search API or a Maps API. As their advertising revenue stagnates, companies such as Google will find economic salvation in the provision of micropayment-based API services

• Some time soon a tipping-point will arrive, after which it will be possible (and desirable) for people to live in alternative ways: in undersea cities, or on linked platforms floating on the sea, or underground, or even in the air (at any one time, there are already half a million people in the air!). Mass colonisation of the moon and mars is probably much further away.

• Immersive virtual worlds are improving so fast that at some point they will become the preferred way for many people to live. This will open up all sorts of interesting possibilities (and will have environmental benefits too)

• Huge amounts of data will be recorded about everything. Every aspect of our lives will generate video data, transactional data, location data, opinion data etc. This will open up new opportunities to process this data. For example, our car insurance might have its cost determined by how many near misses we have had. For example, automatically-condensed highlights of a person's life could be offered for sale to the person as an annual one-hour movie.

• Self-driving cars are definitely coming. It might be 10 years or it might be 15, but it won't be 20. This will change the way that we travel in so many ways. (On the other hand, mass-market flying cars are not coming, even if Bill Gates will own one.)
  

What are your thoughts?

So obviously it needs to be securely hashed, or else anyone who compromises the database (or has authorised access to it) can impersonate the actual account owner.

Why is the "secret phrase" stored unhashed anyway? That's just asking for trouble.