Proof of Existence: Storing Hashed Files in the Bitcoin Block Chain (opens in new tab)

Nothing. Since BTC is deflationary by design you just increase it a little bit. Since modern economics really dislikes deflation at any rate it does not matter how much deflationary it is.

Increased value for the existing coins I would assume. There are plenty of cases of people "losing" or effectively destroying large amounts of bitcoins. BTC is designed to support smaller and smaller portions of a coin to handle the scarcity iirc.

Deflation. The value of the rest of the existing stock of BitCoins goes up slightly, assuming no net change in the demand for them.

Are you trolling? What the actual fuck are people thinking when they post comments like this? Disregarding that you can spend small fractions of bitcoins, what happens when you lose a dollar bill? inb4 "Oh don't worry about it because the bank just makes money out of thin air"

It's not hard to create a new coin as well. For example Litecoins are divisible a hundred more times than Bitcoins with a cap four times larger. If we need more, make more.

You can burn fiat cash, and fire gold bars into space. What are the consequences of those actions? Other coins are presumably worth more because there are now fewer of them.

To spend coins from given address, you need its corresponding private key. They can demonstrate that, the way they generate these addresses, they can't know the private keys. Or possibly matching private keys might not exist at all. In that case, as an analogy, think of unix account with disabled password, the password hash in /etc/shadow is "!". There is no password which has a hash "!". So effectively it is impossible to log in with password.

The transaction in question sends some fraction of BTC to an address which is not the hash of an extant BTC wallet.

Thus no one can ever spend those BTC ever again, they exist in BTC limbo, attached to a notional wallet that (probably) exists but can never be found.

What determines the size_in_bytes value?

In general, let's say a govt agency get assigned an $18.5m budget to break the Bitcoin currency as much possible, what could their plan of attack be, i.e. spend that money in the most efficient way possible? Create a large ring of wallets and send tiny payment around the ring? Create less wallets but send large payments between them?

Can't satoshi dice minimise the impact by running deposit accounts?

You deposit e.g. 10BTC then gamble it as you wish, and then each individual bet isn't on the block chain.

Then when you're done you can withdraw BTC back out as you wish?

This is how normal online casinos work because they don't want to handle lots of tiny transactions either.

You keep telling yourself that.

I understand fractional coins. I was over simplifying for brevity. I'll give you a hint. You have to move the coins between two wallets you own before you create a coin that will "break" when it goes in to the third's wallet. The Third wallet accepts a coin that no one will take afterwards. The coin becomes undependable.

Timestamping services are not novel and date way back before 2012. The earliest work I know of is from AT&T back in the 80's, where they proposed to publish the hash in the NYT. The idea was so well established that there is even an RFC [1] from 2001. And by the way, virtual-notary.org was online for several months or perhaps even a year before the blog post.

But the important differences are actually technical. Virtual Notary is a much more general service, offering to attest to any kind of online factoid. Let's elevate the discussion here -- it doesn't matter who was there first (because the AT&T folks were there two decades before both services), what matters is who offers the most useful service [3].

As for the previous work on selfish mining, see here [2].

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt

[2] http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835

There are still some Bitcoin Faucets open, such as FreeCoins[1]. They give out almost nothing, but it's enough to make transactions just for the registration, and you don't need to provide any information.

[1] http://freecoins.herokuapp.com/