Except BTC is 1000 times easier to transfer and move around with you than gold or any other hard assets are.

I don't think it matters much even if the spammers have infinite money and just keep on doing this without stopping. If that is the case, then we'll just have to raise the default transaction price and increase the mining reward so that enough miners get on it to bring the confirmation time back down.

any spike in transaction spamming should in theory be met with an equal spike in increased hashpower going for the higher mining rewards, and it should all even out in the end.

This is a great chance to put the resilience of the btc mining system to the test.

Since there is a huge backlog, that means TX fees are going way up. If TX fees are going way up, that means the profitability of mining is also going up. If mining becomes more profitable, then we SHOULD start to see the number of miners and hashrate go up as well, until it evens out to the point where mining becomes just barely profitable enough again.

Let's hope that this theory holds true in this situation. The increase of txs will not be a problem if we also gain an increase of mining power in proportion to that.

I think this would be a lot more popular if the site admin didn't need to take "a few percent" out of the bet pool. I don't see why that's necessary, it's like you're just trying to get rich with minimal effort... agar.io is completely free and can sustain itself even with a large number of players... In fact there's nothing stopping anyone from making a free version of chopcoin.io that uses ads to pay for its server rather than taking a huge chunk from the bet pool and reducing people's winnings for no reason.

it doesn't matter how many businesses accept bitcoin, if all of them are pegging their bitcoin prices to the exchange price. it doesn't really count as helping the BTC economy unless they offer their goods/services directly for a specific amount of BTC itself, and not just the $ equivalent amount of BTC.

Bitcoin doesn't even need the huge ASIC farms that exist today. The difficulty right now is way overkill.

Honestly, I think it would be a good think if a bunch of ASIC farms were forced into shutting down because of falling profits. Bitcoin can function perfectly well without them. With USB ASIC miners available at $5, there's always going to be a low barrier option available to enthusiasts who can support the network on their own if professional mining becomes unprofitable.

you can already be rewarded for having a full node. just turn your full node into a p2pool node with a moderate mining fee.

why do you ignore the very valid theory that the willybot manipulation was the main cause of most of the explosive growth up to $1200? And everything since then has been from people HODLing... it's very possible that the true price of BTC without manipulation should be still much lower than it currently is... I wouldn't bet the farm on it either way, I'm just saying...

If the client has a built-in feature that takes a checkpoint of the UTXO every so often based on the longest valid blockchain, and the code for that feature is well documented and understood, then I think there would be no problem with trusting the built-in UTXO checkpoints.

Let's say I want to start running a full bitcoin node. From my understanding, I first have to download the entire 20-30gb blockchain in order to verify that I have the correct information... but after I do that, I should be able to discard everything but the UTXO, while still remaining as a fully secure node. At that point, I only need to keep my UTXO updated with each new block that I recieve, and I won't ever have to store the full blockchain again because I know the UTXO that I have is correct.

To use a more specific example, let's say I only have a hard drive that is just barely big enough to store the current full blockchain + a few extra gb. Could I start a full node on that hard drive, and after downloading the full blockchain and cutting it down into the UTXO, I could run that node forever without having to worry about running out of space? And will that be just as secure as running a node that keeps a full copy of blockchain, since I already know that the UTXO that I'm using is the correct one? Is there a way to do this with the bitcoin client currently?

no it's really not in this case. I am directly comparing the power consumption of one method of financial bookkeeping (the banking system), with another method (bitcoin). In this comparison, bitcoin clearly is the far more power-efficient way to go.

Do you need to be reminded of how many different, competing bank companies there are? and that EACH of them separately uses up about as much, or more power than the global Bitcoin PoW system uses each day? There's not even room for argument, Bitcoin is far greener than any other alternative we have at the moment.

Bitcoin's not a waste of energy at all. Think about it. How much power do you think every single bank facility and banking-related office building in the world uses up each day?

I'd wager if you were to see a direct comparison between the total daily power consumption of Bitcoin's PoW and the average daily power consumption of, say, Goldman Sachs... you would then find the statement "Bitcoin's PoW is a waste of energy" completely laughable.

I'm surprised that the value of Gox's imaginary bitcoins are still holding up this well.

If I had funds in Gox right now, I'd rather have it in imaginary fiat than imaginary coins, because at least the imaginary fiat is more likely to physically exist somewhere.

I think if you have fiat available, and you can afford losing it in the event that BTC ultimately fails and goes to $0, then it's always a good idea to spread out that available fiat into small buy orders at random intervals. so like at every $10 drop you buy a trivial amount of bitcoins with your available fiat. As long as events like this keep happening, where people panic even though BTC is still fundamentally still working perfectly, you can just relax and forget about it.

So, has anyone tried contacting Gox, and informing them that this "fundamental flaw" can be fixed simply by keeping a proper full record of the transaction rather than only keeping the tx-id?

I don't think store of value will mean anything if there's no commerce behind it. Even gold has inherent usage in non-speculative commerce (jewelry, etc). A savings account that is so volatile that you can never know what it will be worth at any point in time, is not a very good savings account.

It seems that the volume of BTC transactions being made for speculation still far outweighs the economic usage of BTC. As long as that's true, volatility will still happen and we will still crash and tumble and spike back up over and over again.

In order for BTC to become a legitimate currency, its non-speculative economy will have to step up and become much bigger than it is now, so that the speculation and volatility becomes less of an issue. There's still a long way to go for that to happen.

Selfish mining doesn't break bitcoin at all. All this does is speed up the confirmation time, and increase the fees required to get your transaction in a block. In any case, bitcoin was meant from the beginning for miners to be incentivized, so of course the most profitable mining strategy will win out. It does not need "honest miners" who only mine for the good of the world.

I'm still confused about how Ripple works. Is there like, a simple, straight-to-the-point guide that walks you through the process of using Ripple to exchange your money into another currency?

Like, say I have fiat in my bank account, and I want acquire real bitcoins that I can add to my cold wallet. How can I use Ripple to accomplish this?

I would like to know this as well. Is there really no safe way of keeping funds that can be immediately liquidated for trading?