Yeah, hijacked by its own creator, who created the inflation cap!

Please lady, pay attention to what you're saying. Bitcoin has anti-inflation political/economical views since its beginning. Don't like it? Fork the project and create your "inflatacoin" or whatever, keeping the other characteristics. You may as well make it possible for the government to track transactions on your implementation, since you seem so reluctant against "subversive technologies" and the possibility of tax evasion.

And if the politics forum bothers you so much, just don't read the discussions. What's so hard in that?

I'm not sure such parallel is coherent. Drugs prohibition strongly decreases drugs supply, thus increasing their prices. Bitcoin prohibition wouldn't change its supply - unless people start destroying their wallets in fear of getting caught, what's unlikely to be substantial. At most, if done early, such prohibition might have a strong advertising effect, increasing the demand for bitcoins. But that's hard to predict.

This is big. Shouldn't this topic be sticked for a while?

If "everyone" wants to have their money devalued by government, then they don't need to move anywhere, just stick with government currency. Using bitcoins implies in not wanting monetary inflation in the long run. And it is built-in in the system.

Seriously, if you really want to get your money devalued by government's inflation, then don't use bitcoins, it doesn't make sense. I just think you are the minority there. Most people would rather being able to protect the value of their money, IMHO.

For doing the type of calculations it does, I think you can safely assume there is no network out there as powerful as bitcoin. But the type of hardware mostly used for hashing blocks might not be that effective when used for other types of calculations, so depending on what you need to do, I'm not sure the bitcoin network is the strongest one available.

Regarding variation, estimates of the total computing power are done using the number of blocks produced in a time window and the difficulty factor. If the time window is too short, like a few hours, you'll see wild variations. You should get estimates which use larger time windows, like one or two weeks.

Have I REALLY used these words? Honestly?


People, if bitcoin has no political-economical view built-in, then why in hell do you think it has a logarithmic growth, with an asymptotic limit? Stable monetary supply is an economical position supported only by Austrian economists. All mainstream "economists" support monetary inflation.

And, again, like it or not, using bitcoin instead of dollars or euros or whatever is a political position. It is not like "overthrowing government", but it is at least the equivalent of saying "I do not authorize the government to finance itself nor its banker friends with the inflation of my money." This political position is built in bitcoin. If you don't agree with this position, sorry but you should not use bitcoins. You should just keep using the currency of your government.

Saying that bitcoin has no political/economical view built-in at all is just wrong. It does.

Now if you don't like the political debates here, just don't join them. Honestly, I doubt that these debates scare more the condescending subjects of governments than stuff like SR for ex.

They can be payed with newly created money, in large quantities.

True, but Bitcoin and bitcoin.org are not business. Like it or not, bitcoins have a political and economic background, you cannot really separate them.

Instead, I advice you to link your friends to apolitical sites like weusecoins.com or that Bitcoin Consultancy I saw somewhere, and maybe prevent them that if they come to this forum they will see heated political discussions. That's inevitable and should not be banned, IMHO.

This would probably be the ideal solution, a dedicated device which is only used for bitcoin, never to surf the web. The annoyance would be getting addresses from your web-access machine to your bitcoin machine easily. It is so simple to just copy and paste it in the bitcoin client.

But yeah, I intend to do that with my old laptop, as soon as I buy another computer.

Actually, I think one should avoid using what mostly every body else uses. That's the problem with Windows.

Now, I wonder if the majority of bitcoiners store their wallets on linux or windows machines... it wouldn't surprise me if more than half of us were on linux, making it more vulnerable than windows on that matter.

I'm really not aware about how this Namecoin works, I should read more.

Can somebody just quickly explain me why its creators chose to make a separate chain which has to have its own miners? Why not reuse the work done in bitcoin mining? That could be done by only allowing a block to be created in Namecoin if it contains a signature done with the private key of the bitcoin block generation.

What's part of the definition of monopoly, by the way.

An exchange doesn't need to have a bank account, it can operate like OTC, bitmarket.eu etc.

I am not sure it will happen as you describe, particularly the price crash.
I understand it is not appropriate to compare bitcoins with drugs, but you can compare for example with gold. When it was forbidden in US, did its global price dumped too strongly?

And such "war on bitcoins" could work as a strong publicity for bitcoins, increasing the demand.

Also, let's not forget that not all governments in the world are so dependent of their monetary monopoly. Some don't even have such monopoly. And it's not all governments which impose revenue taxes either. These governments wouldn't have such a strong incentive to ban bitcoins. The technology might flourish in these places.

And finally, if the retaliation really starts in the US, there might be some anti-american governments out there (Iran?) that would embrace the technology just for the pleasure of making US government life harder.

And by safe account understand "an addresses generated in another wallet file". That's because if you just ask from a new address from the backup, it will get from the pool of addresses that was already there, so the thief will have it too.

E aceitar bitcoins como doações é particularmente fácil se a instituição não se importar em deixar todo mundo saber quanto recebe. Basta publicar um endereço...

Cuidado com meios de pagamento reversíveis (paypal, cartão de crédito...)


Não sei, mas se um dia crescer muito, creio que será proibido, ou no mínimo super-vigiado e taxado. Se eles proíbem até envio de dinheiro pelos correios, é porque querem poder rastrear tudo o que faz cada um de seus súditos.

Sugestão: se forem criar uma exchange brasileira, façam na linha do BitMarket.eu e não na linha do MtGox, ou seja, façam de forma que a exchange em si não tenha uma conta bancária brasileira para ser fechada. E hospedem fora do Brasil.

Imposto é roubo.
Ninguém tem o direito de arrancar o fruto do trabalho honesto de alguém a força. E dar "serviços" em troca não muda o fato de que esses serviços foram pagos com dinheiro roubado, mesmo que os serviços venham a ser "decentes" - e a ciência econômica demonstra que um monopólio nunca terá os mesmos incentivos para prestar um bom serviço que o livre mercado.

É o típico comportamento de uma máfia, te obrigar a pagar por "serviços".

Se é mal, não é necessário.


Engraçado que esse mesmo tipo de argumentação era usada pra defender a manutenção da escravidão. "Os escravos não serão capazes de se manter por conta própria, não tem o nível de conhecimento necessário.".

Hoje, não temos que entregar mais 100% do que produzimos aos nossos senhores, mas eu por ex. tenho que entregar mais de 50% aqui onde moro. Se ser obrigado a entregar uma parcela do seu trabalho a um grupo armado que te ameaça não é uma forma parcial de escravidão, não sei o que é então.

A competitive edge is not a property. It cannot be "stolen".
If you are the only baker in a town, that's a competitive edge you've got. But you can't forbid me to open a bakery in the same town.
Intellectual property is a monopoly, and there should be no monopoly at all.