It is not about taking the weelchair out from under anyone. No one wants that.
It's all about stop pointing a gun at someone who doesn't want to put a weelchair under someone else.

A nice short presentation for you to understand the principles better: http://www.isil.org/resources/philosophy-of-liberty-english.swf

It is perfectly possible to implement fractional reserves with BTC or any other currency.

That's not quite accurate.
What causes the inflation in our world today are central banks, when they inflate the monetary base.

Fractional reserves are direct responsible for inflation only when the compulsory decreases. When it increases, it causes deflation. In a period where the compulsory is fixed, fractional reserves are nothing but a constant multiplier applied to any change the central bank promotes. If the central bank doesn't inflate nor deflate, a constant-compulsory fractional reserve system won't inflate nor deflate either.
You see what I mean?

I'm not talking about tax evasion, I'm talking about places with very low taxes.


Estimates say that a concrete submarine with living space equivalent to a 60m2 apartment could cost something between $60k to $100k to build. It's not that expensive.

The challenge is for sure to come up with a "business plan" that could sustain a village and eventually grow to a city. White-collar labor is for sure a possibility, and there are others. "Medical tourism" is a big possibility if you consider existent medical laws in most countries. Drugs/prostitution/gambling tourism too, a sort of improved Las Vegas. Anyway, there are several possibilities. And the big deal is to start. Once the first steps are taken, more industries and services would be attracted by the economic freedom of the place.


These treaties don't concern what happens in the other country. It seems you see the seasteading idea as something to run away from prosecutions in your home land. It is not it. If all you want is to run away, just go to Rio de Janeiro.


Well, I see many potential benefits, yes. You should watch the talk I linked you to.

There are also those tax-havens which, due to low taxes, become a very interesting place for investors and entrepreneurs, like Hong-Kong for example. Maybe tax-haven is not the appropriate word in English. I mean "country with very low taxes".
There is also the example of Monaco, where millionaires go to live in order to avoid certain taxes. Their business outside of Monaco keep being taxed, but their personal income and wealth not that much.


The idea of seasteading is that people would move to live there. And by the way, it's not meant to be "for rich only". The idea is to create prosperity for all. Obviously that in the beginning poor people will not be able to afford floating houses, but as times goes by and technology advances, the "ocean tax" becomes smaller, while government taxes quite the contrary...


What armies do places like Monaco, Lichtenstein, Singapore and others have?


Maybe, maybe not. I think it's something worth trying. Way easier to achieve more freedom through this path than through elections, anyway.

An alternative to avoid this danger, at least in the beginning while these floating-nations are not internationally recognized, is to use a convenience flag. This limits your freedom but not that much, since there are small governments out there who make this "convenience-flag" business an important source of revenue. Once the city is big enough, it may abandon the convenience flag and declare sovereignty.
Take the example of the Women on Waves boat. It has already been forbid to dock on ports of conservative nations, but it was never military attacked.

Why do you think it would be shut down fast, the tax haven? Not necessarily... maybe they would be forced to cooperate concerning people/money from other nations, but no more than the existent tax-havens already are.
And the new nation could be free of all sort of stupid regulations that jam other economies.
Different nations could be created with specific purposes. For example, a nation with no labor laws could succeed in the Mediterranean or maybe west of Portugal, due to the draconian labor laws of Europe in general... a nation with no health regulations could provide decent and cheaper health care to patients from US and so on.

Once the engineering is feasible, you have a total new "startup sector" for nations. Different nations with different political systems could pop up, and the best would survive and grow. If you have time, watch this talk done by the creator of the seasteading project. It's quite interesting.

Concerning costs, there are big challenges there, but it may be brought down with some techniques. For example, using concrete instead of steel - heavier, but apparently much less expensive to maintain. Another approach are submarines instead of boats: in the case of a storm, you sink. For larger scales, there are those breakwaters, but that's for a big city only.

Not necessarily land: http://seasteading.org/

This has been discussed before. The problem is not Solo Mining, it's CPU mining. Nowadays, that's pure waste.

There are others who also think the option should be removed from the standard client or at least have a warning as you said. Probably something will be done concerning this.

Well said OP. Bitcoin is just an extremely volatile asset at the moment, and will keep like this for a while. Prices raise and fall fast. It's not the first time, it won't be the last. These are no bubbles, nobody is lending to invest in it, it goes up and down in days instead of years, people don't go massively bankrupt or unemployed after each price drop and so on.

Bubbles are a much more serious thing. They are the fruit of bad allocation of capital (malinvestments) over long periods. We should not mix the terms.

To be a government it has to do one of the following at least:

• Coercively maintain a monopoly, particularly a monopoly on ultimate decision concerning conflicts (Justice).
• Coercively finance themselves (taxation/theft)

If they're not initiating force or threat either to tax or to keep their geographical monopoly, they can't be considered governments.


Children are not slaves of their parents, who told you that?

Of course legitimate use of force exists. What doesn't follow is that you have to use illegitimate force (steal from innocents, from ex.) in order to keep legitimate uses of force.

A very basic video for better understanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHe4OQ4bY4o

Then the short block reorganization will remain short. It's not the number of blocks added to it that counts, it is the number of discarded blocks. While you were offline, you didn't receive any new blocks in the bad chain, and people already started building on the other chain. The number of blocks that will be overwritten is small.

I think you're not clearing understanding what I mean by long block reorganization. I mean the number of blocks that will be overwritten. It's possible to mathematically determine a number for which the probability of it happening is completely insignificant. Honest block chains splits of such length will never occur.


I'm not planning into doing anything because I don't even think that will ever be needed. But I believe people would come up with a good plan if such thing happens. A whitelist of "transaction pools" to which every node could send their transactions could be a way to dodge the attack, maybe... If the attacker is only making transactions within his wallet in order to erase everybody else's and pause the network, such whitelist of transaction pools could show people which chain belongs to the attacker and which contain true transactions.


No you don't. You just need consensus, as there is consensus today that "the larger chain wins", as there's consensus today in the chosen inflation model etc.


Dude! I'm talking about a length that is impossible to happen honestly! That's surely much more than 5 blocks. In my first post I said of a week. But some good mathematician should do the calculus.

Seeing a longer chain is different from seeing a long block reorganization. The lenght that matters in the second case is the backward length, the number of blocks who had to be discarded. Network outages won't cause you this.


Again:


Who's talking about anything remotely closed to a central bank here? All I've said is that it's probably possible to prove with probability calculations that an honest block chain split will not be longer than a certain constant or that it would take several thousands of years for that to happen, so you could easily classify such kind of splits as dishonest.

What? I didn't get it... if I'm an honest miner, the attacker has no gain in "inviting" me.... I'll add honest blocks to his attempt of rewriting, basically I'll undermine his plans.

An overtake attempt must be done entirely in secret by those trying the attack, and then suddenly released, overwriting honest blocks. If this overwrite is too long, it's clear not an honest split but an attempt of exploit the >50% vulnerability.


You don't need to accept any particular authority, that can easily be a consensus, particularly if backed by good probability demonstrations. It's as much authority as the inflation control for example.

True, but still that could be suspicious. Suddenly, the block chain changes to another one with lots of transactions which have never been seen by anyone? And then that happens again, and again, and again? People will quickly figure out somebody's messing around, particularly if the network is already rejecting "too long" block reorganizations. And once honest miners see the network is under this kind or political attack, they might figure out ways of blocking it.

Fetokun, você não tem intenção de implementar preço dinâmico, como no MtGox? Acho que faz mas sentido numa exchange. Aí pouco te importa a volatilidade, e você poderia fornecer os dados históricos de preço, ordens à espera etc, para sites como o bitcoincharts.com fazerem os gráficos e análises bacanas deles.

By the length. Honest block splits cannot, probabilistic speaking, last too long.

They can pause it for as long as honest people figure out a way of identifying the attacker blocks. In the case of someone really trying to pause the network completely, it is easy. A block reorganization which sets a lot of empty blocks is clearly not honest, particularly if there are transactions with fees that were discarded.
If such attack really takes place one day, full clients could set a rule saying that, if there's available block space, transactions paying more than a certain threshold in fees cannot be excluded from a block, for example.

This should be a FAQ question. It's not the first time I answer this.

A >50% overtake is bad, but not that bad.

It only allows the attacker to erase/rewrite recent transactions, from the point he started mining in secret on. Keep in mind that he cannot create invalid transactions, like, create more money than there could possibly be at a particular address. Nor he can spend money that he never owned. So, basically, he can erase valid transactions, that's all.

This attack can have two purposes:

• Double-spend, or "profit motivated attack". The attacker could erase transactions of his own, for which he already received the good/service he bought. That would be stealing from the vendor. Bad, yes, but how far can the attacker go with this? I hardly think he could steal more than 20 million dollars to make it worth the investment, without being caught.
• Just mess around, or "politically motivated attack". This could annoy bitcoin users, but valid honest transactions will be resent anyway, so this won't do much more than annoyance. Honestly, it's a silly kind of attack for a government to take, as it may end up getting some quite bad press for this.

An easy way to mitigate the risk: reject any "too long" block reorganization. The "too long" constant should be determined mathematically, in order to be sure that there is no reasonable chance that such block reorganization is an honest chain split.
I can't do the math on my own, but I really doubt that an honest split could last as long as a week for example.

Glad you liked it. The first time I saw this explanation was in the video of a speech done by Patri Friedman for the first Austrian Economic Seminar done in Brazil. Judging by the slide he shows while talking about such incentive structure, the author is a guy named Mancur Olson and in the slide it names "The logic of collective action".
This speech, about seasteading, is quite good an inspired me. If you want to watch, it is in English, here: http://mises.org.br/FileUp.aspx?id=47