The second amendment was because they didn't want armed forces.
Loose enough wording that I must clarify  The Founding Fathers felt there were many dangers in a standing army, especially those of the type often raised by English kings. Armies of the English kings were not necessarily comprised of the citizenry, which had often been disarmed... hello 1600s "gun control". However, America's founders knew the lack of a national army could prove disastrous in a time of war; thus they gave Congress permission to raise one. This was not supposed to be permanent condition. i.e. the national army was to be disbanded following a war's conclusion. Long term, an armed citizenry, a militia that could be raised in emergency situations, was thought to be an effective compromise that would maintain liberty and freedom in the long term, while also providing breathing room, buying time to raise a national army for war. In addition to this logic regarding standing armies, anti-federalists in particular felt that disarming the citizenry was the most effective way of enslaving a people. As one example, English kings had in the past raised standing, professional, often mercenary armies while disarming their citizens. In response to this policy of universal citizen disarmament and resultant oppression, many at the time felt citizens should be universally armed. Given the march of technology, especially the Cold War arms race, we now have massive weapons systems that render the "disband completely, in times of peace" idea quaint. No country is willing to be the first country to entirely scrap their carriers, drones and fighter jets, just because, e.g. America is not in an active shooting war with Russia or China. As originally published in Valparaiso Univ. Law Review, see The History of the Second Amendment http://www.guncite.com/journals/vandhist.htmlQuite long, but very readable (and skim-able). |
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Good stuff. Shared to my social media streams. Protip: bitpay has a twitter feed... use it! This kind of thing should go out on twitter. |
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The fact is, country's with stricter gun controls generally have lower rates of gun crime. The idea that more guns results in less violence is simply a fallacy.
In America, gun-free localities are always high crime. In America, that is not a fallacy. |
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I just realized something that will need to be addressed with any such scheme that is used: how will a soon-to-be-full-validation-but-pruned node bootstrap off the network? Sure, we can say that at block X, the entire set of UTXOs is well-defined and compact (in whatever tree structure we're talking about). But any new node that jumps onto the network will have download that entire UTXO set, and surely peers will have updated their internal UTXO set/tree in at least once while the node is downloading.
The prevailing idea is that you download the block chain from "archive nodes", which are nodes that retain the full blockchain. |
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Yes, I'm saying if you make a place a "gun free zone", then you better implement airport level security, otherwise, you can't make it a "gun free zone", you are simply putting people in danger, basically you are putting up a sign that says "Everyone at this place is unarmed".
Pretty much. Most mass shootings in the US happened in so-called gun-free zones. |
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Looks like none of them are the standard Satoshi client, which sets subver to "/Satoshi:0.7.1/" or similar. Any idea what these nodes might be?
Those are just old nodes, prior to the strSubVer convention. Look at their numeric protocol version. |
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Title: A Eulogy for #Occupy URL: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/all/This says a lot about bitcointalk.org: Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.
Let us just hope that BitcoinTalk.org figures out that freedom of association is also a right, and as a private website BitcoinTalk.org has the freedom to not associate with users that an overwhelming majority of site users downvote or ignore. |
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URL: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/21001) Create COIN_DUST constant, to represent the dust spam limit used. 2) Update COIN_DUST from 0.01 BTC to 0.001 BTC Rationale: With the increase in bitcoin value (US$13.67 as of this writing), it seems reasonable to reduce the value level of which we consider "dust spam." 3) Update TX miner and relay fee defaults to 0.001 / 0.0005 BTC respectively Rationale: Reflects growth of dust spam in unspent transaction output dataset. Review of impact: a) Definition of COIN_DUST reduced from 0.01 to 0.001. b) Miners who mine with this code will require a fee >= 0.001 to include TX's with outputs <= COIN_DUST c) Normal clients will require a fee >= 0.0005 to relay TX's with outputs <= COIN_DUST |
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You would be commited too, possibly even more than they are, if you are sitting on 100k+ Bitcoins that you mined as early adoptor or bought at 10000000:1 ratio.
If you think this is true of either all or a majority of bitcoin-qt devs you're a loony. Pretty much. But just to put some facts on the table, {
"version" : 79900,
"protocolversion" : 60002,
"walletversion" : 60000,
"balance" : 80.99950000,
"blocks" : 211953,
"connections" : 8,
"proxy" : "",
"difficulty" : 3370181.79927784,
"testnet" : false,
"keypoololdest" : 1337909229,
"keypoolsize" : 104,
"paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
"unlocked_until" : 0,
}
Ever since getting involved in bitcoin, it has been my goal to actually spend my bitcoins, and buy more on the open market as needed. That helps stimulate and build the bitcoin economy. Those with short memories, and trolls, forget that I have also given away over 15,000 bitcoins through various developer bounties. |
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I think the proper statement, "nobody knows for sure what most bitcoins are spent on." Because we don't. Certainly some is spent on gambling, some on drugs, and some on porn. These three together might make up 90%, or 10% of the transactions, but we don't know.
100% agreed |
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Sounds great, keep up the good work +1, Pieter has been doing the (majority?) of the Satoshi client heavy lifting. He deserves lots of kudos and free beer. And no need to rush Actually, we do! We need to stabilize 0.8 as quickly as is reasonably possible, because people are beginning to avoid 0.7.x due to slowness, choosing instead less secure but faster bitcoin clients. Any and all testing, on any and all platforms, is greatly appreciated. Even posting "it works, my platform is [Ubuntu version X | Fedora version Y | Windows version Z]..." is helpful. |
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There is quite a difference between BDB and OpenSSL here
The problem is that the rules (as defined by Satoshi's implementation) simply pass data directly to OpenSSL, so the network rule effectively is "whatever cryptographic data OpenSSL accepts", which is bad.
+1, quoted for emphasis. |
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but if you ask me what the majority of Bitcoin business is today, I'm still going to say drugs, porn and gambling.
1) Evidence? SatoshiDICE transaction may consume 50%+ of the blockchain, but the value transferred is quite small, certainly nowhere near 50%. The few Silk Road studies attempted were full of easily disproven hand-waving, and the media reports written based on those studies even more inaccurate. The revised version of Adi Shamir's paper even seems to contradict this. 1. So what's the measure? # of transactions or value transferred? SatoshiDICE exceeds 50% of block chain transactions currently, but transaction count is not relevant to any economist. Consider, you can have 100,000 SD gamblers each betting 0.01 BTC daily, and nobody would claim that such gambling represents a large part of the economy. Large transaction count just reflects on a poorly designed solution that spams the block chain with "dust spam" for each losing SD bet. The number of bitcoins sent in the past 24 hours is 1,162,027 BTC (bitcoinwatch.com), including change. The average daily SatoshiDICE BTC-in is less than 8,000 BTC (dooglus). Double that for conservative BTC-out. Maybe it's no longer the case that these types of exchanges make up the majority of Bitcoin transactions and/or value exchanges. If you've got evidence that there has been a significant shift in market distribution, I'm all ears. For the time being, it's my best educated guess based on all the available information. I'd love to be able cite some proof to the contrary.
You have dodged the question. On what evidence?If you are making the claim "the majority of bitcoin business is drugs, porn and gambling" the burden of proof is on you. Lacking actual evidence, it is inadvisable and bad PR to make claims based solely on anecdotes. Nothing personal. I asked the same question when people went around claiming that "speculation is the majority of bitcoin usage." Absent evidence, it is just a pleasant fiction that sounds good to you. 2) Every recent reply seems to be dancing around this, so, to be clear, did you say "child porn" or just "porn"? 2. I said what I said I said.
If you did not say CP, then I retract the ad hominem attack, and stand corrected on that point. |
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but if you ask me what the majority of Bitcoin business is today, I'm still going to say drugs, porn and gambling.
1) Evidence? SatoshiDICE transaction may consume 50%+ of the blockchain, but the value transferred is quite small, certainly nowhere near 50%. The few Silk Road studies attempted were full of easily disproven hand-waving, and the media reports written based on those studies even more inaccurate. The revised version of Adi Shamir's paper even seems to contradict this. 2) Every recent reply seems to be dancing around this, so, to be clear, did you say "child porn" or just "porn"? |
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Perhaps some of you are too caught up in the journalist's sensationalism regarding the drugs and porn quote to realize that Jesse also landed a dinner meeting with such prominent investors, and very much got them interested. Clearly he was doing something right. Don't hate on someone just because a silly quote is pulled out and trumpeted by a journalist... you should know better.
Did those words come out of Powell's mouth, yes or no? Day One of media/PR training tells you everything you say will get quoted. It is a soundbite world. What you don't see from your dinner meeting is how many people he didn't meet, how many people he turned off from bitcoin. Just like the US Dollar, people who break laws use bitcoins. Going out of your way to highlight such cases misrepresents bitcoins just as much as any slick salesperson who ignores crime entirely. |
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There are plenty of recorded instances of people using paypal and credit cards to pay each other for child porn.
I find it truly bizarre that in some sort of self-flagellating attempt at pre-emption - any Bitcoin evangelist would mention child porn in a pitch.
+1 Who invited that fool, Powell, to the conference? Who thought it would be a good idea for him to pitch bitcoin? *facepalm* |
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Yeah, who is that idiot? Multiple facepalms there. |
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Why is [Rob E's] ignore button not bright orange by now?
It's getting there He only has 70 posts under his belt, so he's a new troll (or new sockpuppet). |
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+1 good stuff, shared to my feeds.
In general, bitcoin is just a tool, and there is nothing wrong with some bitcoin users choosing to associate with the legacy banking industry.
Seeing as how 90%+ of the planet is tied into the "legacy" banking system in some way, if we want to convert people to using bitcoin, interfacing makes a lot of sense.
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