Haha, I think I remember that. Weren't you the master of a bunch of those?

sounds to me like the avg Joe in this country is already ALL IN:

    A broad look at the 6.5 million customer accounts at TD Ameritrade indicates that retail investors are "pretty fully invested" in stocks, the online brokerage's CEO said Thursday.
    Fred Tomczyk cited several signs of this: margin loans at high levels, client cash at low levels and account holders at the firm logging in frequently. "It's usually a good indication that people are very engaged in the markets and watching their investments closely," he said on CNBC's " Squawk Box ."
    But Tomczyk acknowledged the potential pitfalls of these trendsand what they may portend for stocks. "I wouldn't be surprised if we have a correction here. We've had six [or] 6½ years of up markets here."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-30/no-more-greater-fools-retail-traders-are-pretty-fully-invested-stocks-td-ceo-says

It's about time people are fighting back. These idiots need to be flat out embarrassed in  public over and over:

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/second-crypto-war-hearing-washington/

Right the "UTXO client" we've been talking about is a different animal with a stronger security model...

You say this as if they don't already do as they please.

Today's edition of The Economist has a short article  (p68) looking at the decline in the gold price.

"One reason may be that investors have so many options nowadays. Humble citizens who distrust their own currencies can buy assets ranging from shares to bitcoins."


Very encouraging to see bitcoin mentioned in the context of a global asset class in a magazine (sorry, newspaper) with this readership.

another example of outrageous volatility in the stock mkt that makes Bitcoin look trivial.  in fact, in the milliseconds in after hour earnings reporting, you have absolutely no chance to react to protect yourself.  and that's even if you have privileges to trade in after hours which most don't have.  how many examples of this have i shown over the years?  ans:  many:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/34g0s1/apple_cofounder_steve_wozniak_joins_next_gen/cquezii

Heavy hitters indeed   

SPV clients only request information on transactions involving addresses that they care about (well actually they ask for a range of address to preserve some level of anonymity).

Using the merkle tree an SPV is able to link a single transaction up the tree to the block's header. Since they do maintain the header chain of the longest blockchain, this mechanism allows them to verify for themselves the validity of a transaction. However since they do not keep data on other addresses or transactions, they are not able to verify blocks or other new transactions on the P2P network. Think of them as leaves to the network. SPV clients take information, but do not contribute to the P2P network's security in any way, they are leaches.

All full nodes maintain the full UTXO set. This is what enables them to verify blocks and new transactions on the network.

The UTXO hash clients mentioned before are still full clients. The only difference is how the node obtains the current UTXO set from the longest blockchain. One method is to download and process the complete history, another method is to download only the UTXO set (current as of block xxx) and verify that UTXO set within the current block (i.e. with a hash embedded in the block). Once done, such a node would be in the same state as another who processed the complete history and would contribute to the P2P network as a full node.

I would argue that a UTXO hash would be as secure as a coinbase transaction, which is very secure. The risk to UTXO hashes is that a miner might insert an invalid hash for a new incorrect UTXO set. Miners can do the same thing with coinbase transactions, i.e. reward themselves 1000 BTC instead of 25 BTC. But they don't because such a block is invalid and would be rejected. Same with a UTXO hash, a miner could insert an incorrect hash, but such a block is invalid and would be rejected. And if you were still worried you could always scan the complete history, there will always be some nodes who do so and who would scream if there was a falsification.