That I do like.  How about 'obsolete the fed, [check|limit|restrain|control] the banks'?

What I would dearly love to see sometime within my lifetime is that banks serve a benevolent purpose.  I think it is absurd to ignore their utility, but, as always, that's just my personal opinion.  What I am groping for is a slogan-friendly way to say it.  Right now the commercial banks are, in my opinion, highly malevolent and getting worse and I see Bitcoin as the most promising way so far to alter the situation.  The fed, OTOH, is utterly useless and should never have blighted our country (I am an American of course.)

I would probably spend some time amongst the crowd if I were in the area and had nothing better to do.  If I saw a project which I knew little about and the project stated 'end the banks' as a centerpiece of it's promise, I would be sorta like "pffft..ya, right."  The 'end the fed' part would elicit somewhat less of a derisive response in my mind although the phrase does have some political baggage associated with it.

At the end of the day, I donated funds to a specific group of people who I thought would be likely to make sound decisions.  I do NOT believe that a decision to go with 'end the fed, end the banks' is UNsound for reasons that both you and I identified (associated with targeting.)  So, as far as I am concerned, do as you see best.  You seem to be analyzing everyone's input, and that is all I ask.

I could see that and do not disagree.  In fact, if we go with the 'campaign' idea, it makes a lot of sense to tune the 'campaign front page' to a target audience.  But 'end the banks' still seems a little bit over the top even for a fair percentage of the occupy wallstreet crowd (a total guess on my part.)  At the very least, such a statement needs some rhetorical padding in my opinion.

Here's a quick idea for a slogan before I head off to work.

  "alternative currency systems exist today.  choose freely, choose wisely."

This is not as big of a deal to me as I make it out to be.  If you guys think you can get something going in time for the occupy wallstreet thing, then by all means focus on that.  But I'll appreciate whatever efforts you (and whoever else) can make in this area.

I see little reason to hope that scammers and other associated low-life will not continue to be well represented in the Bitcoin community for as far out as the eye can see.  For that reason I do believe that it would be a big positive for a system such as this to have well implemented transparency mechanisms and that is why I've mentioned it several times and do so again here.

I have some hope that the system will become effective and remain healthy and can be used over and over to help draw people into the Bitcoin user community.  (Part of the reason I think this is such a good idea is that it can be tunned and targeted quite effectively.  Almost like Spear Phishing one could say.)

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On a similar vein, memorydealers, if you are reading this, I have no idea what happened to the 3 BTC I donated to one of the earlier 'charity' efforts which was escrowed by Bruce (or at least that was the initial plan.)  I was to humiliated to see if there was any accounting or follow-up.  If that wallet is still kicking around and funded and in your control, I'm happy if you remove the 3 BTC and use it toward this cause.

Some of the biggest appeals of Bitcoin to me are:

 - not 'debt-based' (same family as physical PM's in this regard.)

 - no barriers to transfer/movement (PM's suffer in this regard for operational reasons.)

It may (or may not) be worth seeing if they could be shoe-horned in.

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I like the 'experiment' term.  Truth in advertising.

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I personally am not sure at this point that I would lobby to 'end the fed, end the banks' at least without some pretty careful consideration.  Certainly I would like to see some significant re-structure in the power and influence that they have in pretty much all of our societies, but it's not (necessarily) the same thing.  I may choose to not make it a centerpiece of the front page and consider it to be potentially a little bit over the top,  but have no serious dispute about doing so.

I just sent 10 and some change as I mentioned I would on the other thread.

I hope that by using some random change, I will be able to track somewhat where my money went if you guys publish some of this info in the system you are cooking up (without giving away more of my anonymity than I desire.)

If the project does not fly for whatever reason, I would request that my contribution go to pay off anyone commissioned to do work on behalf of the project (like a printer), followed by reimbursing anyone who outlaid real money (for hosting or whatever) followed by anyone who did a degree of coding or significant grunt work.

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I'll putter around with IRC.  The last time I tried it was '97-ish.  I found it mostly full of channels with a single participant waiting for some kid to stop by for sex chat or something.  I moved on to usenet and never looked back.

I think that this project would be better served by trying to avoid any tie-in with any established or upcoming for-profit organization, bitcoin related or otherwise.  If/when they reference any such organization, I would be more comfortable if the label lived amongst a list of all such organization, or better yet, was simply a pointer to such a list at bitcoin.org.  (I mention this due to the specific pointer to Mt Gox in the proposed letter.  By the same token, I would prefer that instawallet be encouraged to supply links to more than just Tradehill if that service is to be leveraged for this project.)

I would like it if whoever purchases the domain name to promise that it not be sold and to put up a 'closed' static page if/when it is retired.  It is more important to me that the domain name be in escrow than any funding.

I think that any person or organization making donations (either financial or technical) should be listed if they wish to be, but that the project should not show any sign of giving preferential treatment to such an organization due to such a contribution.

These are just my suggestions.  I've no interest in or ability to make demands.  I will, of course, be more likely to contribute to the project if I feel that my contribution will not be abused at some point and will end up promoting a more healthy ecosystem.  And I do NOT feel the domination by a small number of large players contributes to this.  I'll be pissed if I contribute to this thing, it goes well, then gets gobbled up by Tradehill or Mt Gox.

I'll pledge 10 BTC to start.  If there is reasonable accountability, nothing 'Bold Funding'-like pops up, and nobody else comes along and does a demonstrably better job, I'll put in another 25 BTC (but I reserve the right to adjust for market fluctuation.)  I'm not very familiar with 'trentzb' and 'deslok's ravings on this forum, and expect that people will fully understand a high degree of suspicion for...well...just about anything involving Bitcoin.

I would prefer that evoorhees were a core member of this group if he/she is interested.  I have some confidence in him/her for some reason I cannot put my finger on.  (But then I has some confidence in Bruce also...)   I liked the general theme of the wording outlined in the OP and thought it would be effective for this purpose.

The only thing _I_ can think of off hand is to ping the instawallet folk to make sure they don't mistake a the system for a DOS of some sort and are otherwise cool with things.

It would be kinda cool to me if the system could be as open-source as possible, but I've not thought things through very fully on this front...I'm supposed to be working   If the system presents a real-time log of funds going into the pool and being disbursed to visitors, that would be a big plus to me.

The amount that I will donate will depend a great deal on the accountability inherent in the system.  Also, the farther this thing stays away from Bruce and any of his associates, the better I will feel about it.

I like the form 'operationbitcoin'.  I don't think it should target 'wallstreet' by name since this is to nation specific.

I would suggest one level of abstraction to represent the 'campaign' so that the domain/system can be re-used.  In this case it would be something lile 'ocw'.

I prefer a hash (vs. a small set of numbers) since one of the points here is to make the system less susceptible to ass-wipes trying to game the thing by writing a program which scores free bitcoin.  The hash should be small enough to type easily, but big enough to be non-predictable.  In fact, two random words would probably suffice and be easier to type and remember.

So:

  http:  //www.operationbitcoin.org/ocw/dklw8jer

or

  http:  //www.operationbitcoin.org/ocw/bird_rock

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As for donations, I am happy to do so without an escrow, but I would like some level of accounting and progress reports.  Ideally there would be a small group of fairly well known and respected persons coordinating in this effort, and donation can be made to any one of them.

Seems like a really terrific idea in principle.

Here's a permutation:

 - hand out cards with a URL containing a simple hash which could be typed in easily.

 - when the URL is visited, a wallet is created in real-time and populated with whatever funds are deemed appropriate at the time given the funding pool size and interest (that is, what percentage of the cards seem to be being used.)

 - that web page visit could walk users through various niceties like the bitcoinnotify.com thing, options for donating the wallet funds so some organization, and whatever else.

 - if/when the simple hash URL is re-visited, the instawallet address could be re-displayed, along with current news, more funding distributed if there were any adjustments, etc.

I expect that this is more coding and system design than could be hacked out in time for this event, but maybe not, and maybe such a thing could be readied for the next significant target of opportunity.

OP:

I think that the possibility of something akin to what you predict is distinct and has a high enough probability for me to have put a pretty significant bet on.

That said, I still consider the odds of things working out that way and my being able to capitalizing on it in the face of various possible roadblocks are pretty low.  I expect to either lose all of my bet, or in a more hopeful case to sort of break even in the end.

If Bitcoin as a system and network does not fail completely it might still be leveraged as a mechanism of transferring assets around in unfavorable environments (e.g., under a currency controlled regime.)  I hope that this utility, if nothing else, props up demand and thus value to some level.

Probably the only idiot who could afford to take such a speculative risk is the kind of idiot who bought silver 9 years ago.  The price had gone down from $50.00/oz to $4.20-ish iirc, so only a real moron would have bought into that market.

I have not really heard any cogent arguments on SA about why there is no theoretical possibility that Bitcoin could not, under the right circumstances, become a sought after item.  But to be fair it is not really their job or area of expertise.

The run up into the sixes was like poking an ant hill.  What really seems to get (some) SA people going is when someone makes a purchase in the $10k-$50k-ish.  There are clearly some things which do not compute under the standard SA dogma on Bitcoin and Bitcoiners.

The sense of shock and despair on the SA board when the $/BTC ratio increase is palpable.

It's seems like a lot of the SA members are pretty attached to the idea that they are vastly superior intellectually to anyone interested in hedging with Bitcoin and (probably unconscious) sense the difficulty of maintaining that comforting thought in the face of an upswing.  I guess every board has their more pathetic contingent.

The 'bitcoinmedia' talking to 'bitcoinnambla' one was among my favorite of the SA material.  Another favorite was the 'before SA and after SA' graphic of Bruce.  Buttcoin really should publish that one.

SA had it's lockout at a very inopportune time for me.  Some other stuff was just getting very interesting, but I decided not to sign up until they accept BTC.  When the lockout ended I went back to catch up but was disappointed.  Not a huge amount of good stuff in terms of humor and the sub-themes I was interested in went nowhere.

One thing that I did find quite amusing is that interest in the price of BTC is higher on the SA forum than anywhere else except possibly the bitcointalk-speculation page.  Go figure.

I'll be interested in two things, and I'll make some of my own estimates for the fun of it:

1)  Ratio of BTC lost due to forgotten passphrase vs. those to stolen wallet.dat's:
1e) 10/1

2)  First post here from someone needing to know how to get their coins from an encrypted wallet due to forgetting their passphrase:
2e) 3 days

Don't get me wrong...I think this is good an necessary work and I thank the dev team for it and all the other work.  But I do anticipate the encryption contributing to the 'deflationary' nature of the currency

It seems to me that someone wishing to 'naked short' will have problems to deal with at the 'beginning of the day' also.  That is to say, if they are going to sell into the market, they need to have something to sell.

With stocks, this is relatively easy because the seller has three days to dig up the shares after he or she sold them.  The SEC doesn't really mind if the three days is extended out to three years, and the DTCC doing the accounting creates something which looks to the buyer as though it were a share.  (Gotta keep 'confidence in the markets' ya know...)

No 'three day rule' with Bitcoin.  I surmise that the best way to do it with Bitcoin would be to own an exchange or wallet service.  To the person who bought the Bitcoin, just manipulate their account balance and tell them "Oh ya...we just sold you some Bitcoin...check your balances."   They do so and see they have fewer $$ and more BTC on their browser window and are happy.

In this case, then I can see your argument about being 'fairly certain that you can settle at the end of the day' although the same holds for a lot of types of futures and options.  Another requirement is that you don't have a run on your exchange/wallet service before the 'end of the day' comes...though that holds for a lot of types of fractional reserve operations.

I think that the biggest requirement is that you can keep the loot and not go to jail if/when things blow up.  Bitcoin shines here.

Depends on what you want to do.

You could define it as 'providing liquidity' or 'allowing market cap to achieve fair value' if you were making a lot of money doing it.

I find 'counterfeiting' to be the most applicable definition personally.

'Failure To Deliver'

There is also a 'Stratigic Failure To Deliver' which means that it was not an accident of mis-placed paperwork but rather that the failures are deliberate.  I have never heard anyone aurgue that stratigic FTD's are anything but illegal, but the SEC not very interested in doing much about it.

Here's an interesting vid on the subject:

http://www.deepcapture.com/naked-short-selling-redefining-systemic-risk/