I think I mined about 0.05BTC on my Q6600 CPU. I should have gotten into the GPU scene back then.

As for the next step from ASICs, anything as dramatic as the GPU/FPGA to ASIC shift would imply equally revolutionary advances in lots more semiconductor applications than just bitcoin mining.

It might appear that way, but consider the tax burden built into the goods and services they consume.

I agree with you in general, but for her it's definitely not an issue of education. She understands the relevant facts. She knows how the banking system works, how the Federal Reverse works, etc. I think I've managed to teach her how all voluntary transactions are beneficial to all parties involved. She still seems to struggle with the subjectivity of value. Anyway, it really seems to be an issue of psychology that I don't have the background to completely understand.

To be fair, I don't think they want people to rely on government (although the politicians certainly do). They want people to be able to rely on government, and they're willing to accept the side-effect of people who don't need to rely on the government becoming reliant. For money, they want the government to guarantee the value of their money through the use of force and don't care about the consequences (petrodollar wars, inflation, non-obvious tax burdens on the poor).

There's actually a lot more going on that I generalized into "afraid of it" with my terse comment. One of my Obama-supporting, Democrat, neo-liberal friends absolutely can't be convinced that there's anything wrong with the Federal Reserve system and banking cartel other than that money isn't issued directly by the government (her ideal, not mine). She thinks the TBTF bailouts were necessary. She absolutely can't be convinced that competition should be allowed in currency, even though she recognizes the dangers of monopolies in every other industry. She's afraid that if other currencies are allowed to prosper, one day she might walk into a store and not be able to pay for some goods. My best take on this ideology is a strong desire to preserve status-quo. It's ironically conservative. As long as her credit card works, she isn't willing to risk anything for the possibility of a better monetary system.

Libertarian-leaning Republicans. Democrats are afraid of it because it's unregulated.

Mainstream candidates from either party have little reason to "embrace" bitcoin. Their constituents won't change the way they vote based on a candidate's bitcoin position, and they get a lot of "campaign contributions" from the banking cartel.

You're right.

I assume it's called Onion.7z because it's going to have many layers, not as a reference to TOR.

I was checking the ASCII representation of the binary bits 7-51 of the SHA 1 and 256 hashes of the hint image. Maybe the original image? Anyway, the other problem with my theory is 45 = 9 * 5, so it doesn't break up evenly into bytes, 7-bit ASCII, hex nibbles, or really anything useful.

She wouldn't have to predict the hash. She could use any string for that password. She doesn't have to know it in advance.

Which SHA function? I'd assume 1 (the first commonly referred to as "SHA") or 2 (the 256 bit variety used by Bitcoin).

If there's a weakness to my theory, I think it's that 45 bits doesn't give much brute force resistance.

Contra is 8-bit, as are all NES games. Minecraft most definitely is not.

I think she wants us to use bits 7-51 of some SHA hash.

How about Zelda? The Dark Wallet logo with the additional triangle section suggests an inverted Triforce. In Link to the Past, you can get a magic cape and turn invisible, rendering enemies unable to attack.

Holding.

It's probably been discussed before, but why isn't anyone doing something for bitcoin analogous to the allocated storage common for gold?

I found a discussion on reddit about it, and everyone was talking about hash trees, wallet services having to disclose all their holdings, and other issues, but aren't they over-thinking it? Am I misunderstanding bitcoin, or would it be as simple as the customer providing a unique identifier, and the storage service transferring the amount the user requests allocated, including the identifier in the transaction? Then any third party could verify the transaction identifier, and monitor for spending from the allocated address.

The quantity of the reward increases, but if the value of each unit decreases, the value of the reward won't necessarily increase.

Miners would either mine other altcoins until the block reward increases, or not bother at all because of the devaluation of your proposed altcoin over time.

Not necessarily. There are certain optimizations made possible by the current structure of the block header.

check txid fed217510334f6a6c0679d549e4987c88fa0856a59566de95981387e5f48525e

5gAYfisHzmuYyWRPdAE516qDodveHcxLAe

Did Berkeley DB build correctly? If you can't find the library file, the linker sure won't be able to either. If you know where it is, add an -L/path/to/db_cxx.lib to the LDFLAGS environment variable.

Whenever I build an altcoin daemon in Linux, I have to add an -I/path/to/db_cxx.h to my CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. Libraries work the same way, but with -L and LDFLAGS.