Ted

This. Perhaps as the health service is so crucial to this country, why not put it to the public to decide, with a referendum. Do we want a full 7 day service for which we are prepared to pay x% more of our income tax for, or are we happy with the status quo? If the public votes yes, we hire more doctors and ramp up service at the weekend.

If you have an iphone, breadwallet is a fantastic application for using Bitcoin. It uses simplified payment verification meaning you don't need to download the whole blockchain to verify your current balance. It also gives you a backup phrase which you can write down and keep in a safe place. Should you ever lose your phone, you can recover your wallet by reinstalling breadwallet on a new phone and entering the phrase. Other wallets can be found here If you're running windows, Electrum is also a deterministic wallet meaning you can recover the wallet using a backup phrase.

I pay DD monthly, it recently came up for renewal. They sent me an email confirming the renewal and asked to double check the bank details so it would be processed correctly. Seems better than how it used to be, no need to do anything.

In our time is worth the license fee alone. The best back catalogue bar none.

I'm sure this has been posted, but I had been reading this thread and checking the news sites and could not see where this change was coming from. You can read about the changes here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restricting-finance-cost-relief-for-individual-landlords/restricting-finance-cost-relief-for-individual-landlords

I don't understand this part about forced sales. Can someone please explain? They will force councils to sell high value property which people are living in, in order to allow others to buy the houses they are renting. People will be evicted ? Apologies if I have got this wrong.

Various news sources. 3%-15% recoverable. Might help to pay of a lot of the national debt. Interesting to see if this has any impact on the election.

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read the OP I stumbled across Solyaris after watching the Soderbergh 2002 version. Both are great films imho. The 2002 version is very chilled out in some parts. I recently watched bitter lake and was really surprised to see Solyaris mentioned, its not really a film you hear about very much. The book is also worth checking out, written in 1961! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28novel%29 Bitter lake is definitely worth watching.

Thanks for this! More d3 examples can be found here https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery for the javascript programmers amongst us Very good tool. The only thing which can't be factored in though is having to move due to the landlord selling up. This is an inconvenience in itself, plus you have the additional agent costs. If you are free and single, this isn't really so much of an issue. With a family though it is a big headache.... I'm speaking as long term renter who has had to move on twice for this reason.

Yes, on the one hand you could view it as the contributors to the pools are just processing power, being centrally managed and directed. However, if an attempt was made to subvert and manipulate the blockchain, it would be quickly detected and steps would immediately be taken to eliminate this threat. A great example of this is what happened in March 2013 where we had a hard fork of the blockchain. On that occasion a block was found which was accepted by clients running version 0.8, whilst being rejected by older clients running 0.7. The chain forked due to older clients rejecting the block and continuing to mine, building on this chain. On that occasion the community quickly came together and two of the biggest pools at that time downgraded their clients back to version 0.7. You can read about what happened here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki Obviously this is slightly different to an attack, however it does demonstrate how a future attack could be thwarted.

To be fair though, that headline is very misleading: GHash is not a single entity but a mining pool. https://ghash.io/ Thousands of miners have their equipment using this pool as it provides a consistent payout of btc. If there was anything untoward going on, these miners could quickly switch to an alternative pool. Alternatives to these centrally controlled pools are already spreading, such as peer to peer mining: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool However why would GHash attack the same protocol that is generating them profit? As soon as they tried anything, they might be able to double spend a few transactions, but this would quickly be noticed and people would immediately switch away, killing their business. I agree it is something that the community needs to be aware of, but it's not overly concerning.

+1 It really is this simple. I just don't understand why it's not discussed more in the media. We'd all be better off with a lower cost of living, and the easiest way to reduce this is to lower the cost of housing. We'd then have more disposable income to spend in the economy.

I agree with this. Morrisons is my preferred supermarket by far. Perhaps it shows people are giving the discount supermarkets a try, but Morrisons has some good deals if you stick to what is on offer for that week. They should have moved into the online arena much earlier though.

If one btc was worth $1million, it would have to become one of the major currencies of the world. If that was the case, costs of $3.6 billion per day or $1314 billion per year (or say £817 billion) to secure the public ledger don't seem so out landish to me(edit : it is actually 1.9% of world GDP :-) so a fair bit of cash!). Small beer really compared to the amount of money sloshing around. However, still a significant amount. Mining is completely self adjusting however, on average, 1 block will be found every 10 mins, if this increases, the difficulty adjusts to counteract this. On the other hand, if miners stop mining as profitability drops, the difficulty reduces, to ensure the magic number of 1 block is found every 10 mins. Once all bitcoins are produced, money is made from the small transaction fee you can elect to include when sending coins to increase the chance the transaction will quickly be included in a block and confirmed. The protocol self adjusts. As mentioned before, whatever happens to bitcoin, the original developer was a genius.

As already mentioned, it's obviously very difficult to break the cryptography underpinning Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin address(or wallet) has a public and private key. You could try a brute force approach to find the private key of a wallet you would like to steel the coins from, but this would take a very very long time with the current computational power we have available. For example, here we can see bitcoin uses keys which are 256 bit long Private Keys. Wikipedia says the following: Wikipedia And remember, this is the time it would take just to crack one wallet. Even if we develop a way to crack these codes in a reasonable length of time, the bitcoin protocol can be modified providing more than 50% of the mining computational power agree to this change. Which would go something like: Developers: "Hey we have this new version of the protocol, which will make it more secure, should we all run it?" Miners: "Hell yeah!" Thus the protocol can be improved upon, providing the majority agree.

Remember that you can setup buy and sell orders on the exchange, that will execute once the price reaches your bid (or ask). I'm not saying that this is a DDOS, but the the trades can continue even if people struggle to login. There is also the element of automated trading through the mtgox api. Whilst it has been around since 2009, this is still all new, and no market that I am aware of runs 24/7. Once this all settles down, in years to come, whatever happens, I'm sure people will write papers on how all this went down

Not sure I get the point about loans, maybe it was a bad example. Let's say you wanted to shop at Tesco's each week, you could transfer a large amount to them at some point. This is registered on the blockchain. Then, each time you visit Tesco's to make a purchase, you deduct the amount from the balance you hold with them. You can transfer your money out at any point, and this would hit the chain. But the smaller internal transactions do not. Tesco's would never let you have a negative balance however, so nothing is being loaned.

I don't think a notion of a bitcoin itself actually exists within the code. The block chain just keeps track of the balances held by addresses, and how the balance is transferred. I could be mistaken here however! When a new block is found, the miner gets to award himself with 25 Coins (currently), and everyone else has to agreed that the block they found was valid and thus they agreed that the award is valid. I'm not sure I understand with regards to the bandwidth usage. There is an issue with the blocksize currently and the 1mb limitation. However the code can be changed to increase this. The bitcoin code can be changed, however, and this is important, the majority of clients must agree to run this new code. Bitcoin is democracy in it's purest form I guess. More than 50% of the computing power working away trying to mine coins have to agree on what has taken place. If a change to the code is viewed as detrimental to the currency, no one will run the new code and so it will have no effect. With regards to the blockchain itself, not all transactions have to hit the chain. Transactions could occur between accounts stored within a computing system. At the end of each day, if the system overall owes money to another computer system, it could then settle the outstanding amount, and this would hit the chain. Is this not how banks settle outstanding amounts at the end of each day? Edited for clarity (or not )

This doesn't mean more coins are created. People holding coins will not have their value effected. It just means you can transact in smaller and smaller amounts. The divisibility of bitcoins is one of it's strengths.

As they are still quite new, their price is obviously going to be volatile. Whether they eventually fail or succeed ( not sure how you measure success) their price is going to be extremely volatile initially. In 20 years if they are still widely used and have a much higher market cap, then I would expect them to be much more stable .

Surely you would need to purchase bitcoins to back the etf, else how would you pay out if the price rises? The value of bitcoins doesnt really matter, what matters is that at some point, two people can agree a transaction for a value and instantly transmit the agreed number of bitcoins around the world for minimal or no transaction fee. Whether each bitcoin is worth $0.01 or $100,000 it makes no difference.

The difficulty to create the later bitcoins is based on the amount of computing power being thrown at the problem. If people stopped mining, the difficulty would reduce. On average a block is meant to be found every 10 minutes and the algorithm adjusts the difficulty based on this. Once all the coins are minted, miners will take a cut of the transaction fees contained within the lock that they found. If bitcoin gets big enough, each one of those blocks may contain a significant amount of value just in the transaction fees,even if the individual transaction fee you pay is minimal. You can even pay no transaction fee, but it may take longer for your transaction to appear in a block and be confirmed. I think whoever wrote bitcoin just stumbled on a genius idea of how to make a peer to peer currency work.

Serious question here.... If you buy gold, and it rises 2000%, you then manage to find someone to sell a house for the gold , are you liable to pay CGT on the profit made? Or has any profit been made , since it is just an exchange? Is it just an issue when it is converted to stirling ?

Well we had a nice correction today. Day high of $70, Low of $52, current $64. I'm not sure if they will ever become mainstream, whilst they are a stroke of genius, I think the concept of how they are created, distributed and stored is difficult for non technical people to understand. Lets face it, it takes time to read up on them and work out what all the fuss is about. Fundamentally however, I don't think the general public actually see why there is a need, or perhaps, what the benefits are of a currency that no one controls. A digital currency for a digital age. Regulated by a peer to peer network and strong encryption.

Bitcoin right now is more like a new idea that people are buying into,rather than than just a commodity. Rightly or wrongly, many of people who have bought into bitcoins passionately believe that this is something new. So long as no flaw is found, their use may spread. It would only take a large company to come out and say they will start accepting these coins as payment for it to take off proper. Namescheap already accept them, for domain registrations and hosting. It's all a big risk at the moment, they could go to zero, or go to the moon. I think everyone is expecting a correction at some point. One thing this market doesn't have is shorts, no easy way to make money on the way down, only on the way up. Makes it prone to bubbles.