Not really.  Water makers already exist, and we use them on boats all the time.  They're only moderately expensive when you're buying one, and the filters are easy to clean, cheap to replace, and last a couple years in constant use assuming you don't try to filter oily water, polymers, or other artificial pollutants.  Here's a link:

http://www.spectrawatermakers.com/products/all_marine.html

These are filtration systems, not distillation systems.  Turns out that if you set up a reverse osmosis filter (they call them 'membranes' but they're rigid, about a quarter-inch thick, and look like fiberglass-reinforced plastic) and put 150 pounds of pressure or so behind it, you can keep saltwater on one side and make it ooze fresh water out the other side.  The nifty invention that allowed them to become practical was circulating seawater through the pressure chamber without loss of pressure - as opposed to having a pressure chamber that gets saltier and saltier as the filter works. 

Anyway, marine watermakers are mostly operated by electric motors.  But there are hand-cranked and hand-pumped versions sufficient for remaining hydrated for long durations on lifeboats (although you have to crank that damn thing six hours a day to get enough to drink) and several of my cruising buddies have put a belt pulley on their prop shaft to run them off the main motor or by sail power - if you're moving under sail and you don't have a feathering prop, the prop spins and you can get significant power from the prop shaft without running the motor.  Of course it slows down the boat, but these are cruisers, not racers.  If they can take a clean freshwater shower or two on the way,  and have plenty of freshwater to cook with, they don't much care if they get to Cabo a few hours later.

Hey, it's okay, that's just theory. You don't have to believe me and I don't have to believe you. Essentially there's nothing to talk about until there's a pragmatic test. 

I'm much more interested in a much less esoteric question.

How would you design a sailboat as a one family or extended-family dwelling to maximize freedom for its inhabitants by minimizing costs and requirements while leveraging benefits from all contacts with others?  I'd be emphasizing permanent construction (nothing that rots, rusts or corrodes in the structure of the boat), simplicity (minimizing points of failure and maintenance requirements),  renewable or free energy (winds, currents, thermoclines, tides, solar -- all can be harnessed) and self-sufficiency with regards to maintenance and mobility.

I'd also be doing a lot of research into edibles from the ocean -- not just fish/protein, but also edible seaweeds, vegetables, etc.  Finally I'd be looking for good boat-borne businesses and ways to take advantage of the marine environment for business purposes, with an eye to specialize the boat design for one (or possibly more than one) such business.

I don't think of seasteading as something that is going to be a practical way to get away from governments.  Ever.  By the time we can live out there without loss of all access to tools and modern necessities, we will have built so much there that we will need government as a way of preserving our infrastructure. 

But I do think that learning to live on water using technology is an essential stepping stone in the future of our species.   To put it gently, oceans are an environment a thousand times easier to maintain human life in than hard space, and if we can't live on oceans we will never even start to learn many of the things we need to know to make a viable jump off of this dirtball.

Right now there are a few groups of aboriginal and tribal people; Sea Gypsies, Bayau indians, the Tanka, and some of the further-flung "oceanic" polynesian groups.  All are dependent on land; all are socially and technically isolated to the same degree that they live off land; none have a technological/industrial base that exists on the water, and for most of them life is getting worse not better.  Living like that is not the goal, unless you want your children to die of what ought to be minor infections or become crippled by what ought to be treatable conditions, are fine with failing to give them a meaningful education or tools, you're okay with them being herded into "refugee camps" the minute they come into contact with people on shore, etc.

And there are stupid seasteading "megaprojects" like Freedom Ship:  A ridiculous boondoggle that cannot actually exist.  The damn thing would break up almost immediately on the ocean, because it is "designed" in complete defiance of the nautical requirements.  Also, it is not a viable colony in itself; it does not contain its own infrastructure nor the means of production necessary to feed, clothe, and provide for the people on board.  It is simple to say "it would work because the people we'd have here are already rich and don't need to use any local means of production to provide for themselves" but -- really?  You want to put a city on the ocean, when you have to supply it using a whole damn container ship every day and there are no significant exports to balance the trade issue?   That could work if you start with multimillionaires (and a sane design for the floating city, which Freedom Ship most assuredly is not), but there is no opportunity for a second generation. 

Finally, there is the OP's idea that you could just take sailboats and GO.  This is less insane than most of the ideas proposed so far, mainly because it is smaller-scale and needn't isolate you as much from the land which (let's face it) you're going to be dependent on whether you like it or not.  The game becomes maximizing the benefit of your contact with land while minimizing the dependency, and while it's a game I don't think you can "win" at any scale that doesn't include on-water factories, universities, chip fabs, and processing plants, it's certainly a worthy effort and a way to learn valuable things that we as a species need to know. 

Problem is the sailboats you can buy aren't designed for it.  Very few of them are tough enough to stay out in the ocean for a long time and deal with the weather.  Very few allow you to do things like cook food or purify water without using fuel (although solar cookers and prop/sail driven watermakers are not too difficult to build).   Electrical generation capabilities are mostly fuel-dependent (though solar panels and wind generators are becoming better and more common).  Most are built with materials in their frames, decks, or bulkheads that will eventually corrode, rust, or rot.  Virtually none can haul themselves out of the water (whether vertically or up a ramp or up a beach) without damage and using their own winches so that you don't need a highly-equipped yard to do bottom work.  Hardly any can maneuver independent of wind without fuel (although you could hook an electric motor/generator to the props for electrical power under sail and maneuvering independent of wind for electrical power).  Most aren't much good for fishing; sailboats these days are yachts, and built to different design specs.

Now, you could make a good and worthwhile movement of seasteading with sailboats that overcome these easy-to-overcome design flaws and seek to overcome more, and work to establish productive waterborne businesses from salvage companies to bakeries. But ultimately, without a revolutionary discovery or six, you cannot provide on the water all the things you need to continue living on the water for future generations.  You'll be buying your electric motors and photovoltaics and electronics and ropes and sails and so on from people who manufacture them on land.

"works" is not the word I'd have chosen. 

That said, I gather you had roughly the same meaning as the words I would have chosen... 

I think I see more 'flex' in the situation than some of you.  

Just because a country (China, Russia, etc) may legislate against Bitcoin in the short term doesn't mean that decision is necessarily permanent.  

The same nations banned individual checking accounts and credit cards too, until it became clear that those bans put them on the losing side of economic history.  And then the bans fell.  

If they ban Bitcoin now, while it takes off in the North America, South America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Africa, it's pretty clear that the ban will be on the losing side of economic history.  I don't see those bans holding up for more than two or three years, and I don't see Bitcoin prices falling much during that time given that the uptake in other places is rapidly accelerating.

Bans will though have a horrible economic effect on the countries doing the banning, and they will realize this probably a bit too late.  They'll be keeping it banned through a long run-up in price.  That's a huge amount of wealth being distributed to other nations where Bitcoins are held and circulated.  The nations banning Bitcoin are cut out of this wealth, and further behind the economic eightball every week the bans stay up.

Oh, absolutely!  NOBODY allows withdrawing bitcoins while the payment made for them is still reversible.  That's just ordinary sense and nobody sensible would have a problem with that.  In fact if someone offered to do something that silly, I'd immediately re-evaluate their service for its potential as being a scam or for the risk of being an honest-but-incompetent player unlikely to continue for long.  It's a nonissue most places because they don't take reversible payments such as credit cards in the first place.  Most bitcoins purchased for money, are purchased with money orders or cashier's checks.

Your output is the one that you have the key to spend.  What's hard about that?  There may be no way for anyone *else* to tell whose output is whose, but you are the guy who created that key pair, you still have the private key, and you know damn well whether a given output has the corresponding public key.  In a coinjoin everyone can identify their own outputs.  But they can't distinguish anyone else's, and no third-party observer can distinguish them at all.

It's the way the protocol works.  You don't just have your balance lowed and some other balance somewhere raised; inbetween there is something called a 'transaction' specifying very specific things  which must be digitally signed.  

If you and someone else both send money to Wikileaks, you both sign your transactions.  The transactions, even for identical amounts, are not identical.  For one thing they will name different unspent txouts to spend; for another they'll have different timestamps.  For a third thing they will specify different addresses for "change" to come back to.  All of these things will be combined in a hash function to give your transaction a transaction ID which is unique.

If someone violates the protocol and sends some other guy's transaction to you to sign, your bitcoin client will look at it and say, "hey, I don't even own this particular txout that this transaction is trying to spend, and this isn't my transaction ID, and the timestamp is wrong, and the change address isn't any I've ever given out.  Heck, the change address is not even one I have a key to spend.  WTF?"  

Meanwhile, if someone tries to use a transaction that you have signed, but with a changed payee, it won't match the signature you put on it because the changed payee would make it have a different transaction ID.  It would be a transaction that doesn't match its signature, and he couldn't put it on the blockchain because every other client would reject it.

If there is probable cause to believe that property has been involved in a crime or results from criminal acts, then it can be seized regardless of whether the person whose property it is has been tried yet, or if tried, found guilty.  

US. Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act.  Ronald Reagan was annoyed that multi-millionaire drug dealers could hire multi-million dollar lawyers to argue their cases, and this is the result.  Property gets 'probable cause' whereas people get 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'  Effectively if there's sufficient evidence to issue a search warrant for some property then there is sufficient evidence to seize it.

This is very bad law in my opinion and ought to be reversed by a constitutional challenge; but it hasn't yet been.

No it wouldn't.  People would just trade it by the thousandth or the millionth.  It would have the same volatility as anything else.

Not as yet; I've read a lot of qt documentation and think I've figured out what I need to do to get the qt client working, but I haven't done it yet.  I'll be working on it this weekend and see if I can't get something real going. 

As far as I can see, the service on EToro is this:

1) You can sell your fiat currency for bitcoin.  (at some price they get when trading just four times a day)
2) You can sell your bitcoin for the exact same fiat currency. (also at some price they get when trading just four times a day)

And that is the whole of the service.  Additional services that most people on this forum expect and whose absence is threatening or confusing to them (prompting them to yell "SCAM!" when they don't find these services) are:

1) You can send your bitcoins from your EToro account to a merchant address to buy things for Bitcoins.
2) You can send your bitcoins from your EToro account to your own wallet with your own key so EToro is not involved with them any more.
3) You can buy other assets available on EToro directly with Bitcoins instead of paying fees twice for conversion to fiat and then to other asset.
4) You can send your bitcoins to a cryptocurrency exchange where you could use them to buy litecoins etc.
5) You can send bitcoins you've already obtained from elsewhere (for example by selling goods for bitcoins) to your EToro wallet.  
6) You can exchange bitcoins in both directions, at will, for *any* fiat currency from around the world (forex trading).  

So, as far as the community's expectations about services offered, they offer about one-third of the services of a regular Bitcoin account you could get anywhere else. And that's kind of a problem.

On the plus side, they are compliant with financial regs, have a good legal staff, and lots of other assets (including reputation) to protect, so they're unlikely to disappear overnight or have their (your) assets disappear in a government seizure.  Also on the plus side, they are well experienced in network security due to their existing business and aren't very likely to get hacked either.  

Dude, you do know that when you say something like that on a public forum, you have just lost your plausible deniability -- don't you?

Bitcoins are forgery resistant because they are managed by a network that rejects forgeries.  As such, they make a good money. 

But so are every altcoin in the world, and it seems to me that there is no really compelling reason to pick one over another for use as money.   

So bitcoins as a medium of exchange are just one part of a nearly infinite supply of possible coins, and inflation is going to eventually make the 'buying power' of each coin get smaller. 

It's like Bob has a special printing press that can make 'BobNotes' nobody else can forge.  Okay, you could use the notes as money.  But then everybody gets a printing press and starts making notes, and people who actually need a medium of exchange have free choice.  Every time somebody uses AliceNotes or CarolNotes, they aren't using BobNotes, and BobNotes price is not supported by their activities as they do not seek out and buy BobNotes, and their use of BobNotes doesn't occupy the time of BobNotes making them rarer for others to seek out and buy. 

So here's my pessimistic view (and I say this even though I'm long on Bitcoin).  As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin (and BobNotes) will have its price driven steadily closer to zero as a steadily-increasing supply of cryptocoins inflates the market.  To people using a medium of exchange, the brand name on the bills doesn't matter much, so the money supply is "all cryptocurrencies", not just "Bitcoin". This will also kill its value as a store of value, and surveillence on the blockchain threatens its fungibility. 

As a speculative vehicle, Bitcoin will last until these things become evident, and then the investment bubble will burst.

The next generation of cryptocurrencies will face the same demands that followed the invention of paper money; in order to distinguish themselves from the ever-growing supply of unbacked cryptocurrency heading towards worthlessness, they will have to promise to redeem them on demand for some fixed measure of a tangible good. 

And then things get interesting. 

As to how high it might go before all this sets in?  I dunno.  I'm thinking maybe five to ten-thousandish, but there's no theory to back me up because it isn't much like what has happened before.

Price seems to be consolidating at around 840.  I can't tell whether it's going to break up or down, but when it does it's going to be sudden.  People have been putting limit orders on both sides.  But smaller and smaller movements get those orders out of the way as time goes on.  When it breaks resistance on either side, there's no more order volume to keep it bounded on that side.

Within the last generation China has shifted from Communism (which they called Socialism) to Mercantilism (which they're calling Capitalism). 

Mercantilist governments actively support established businesses, frequently forbidding competition and subsidizing exports while penalizing imports.  Often they develop "captive markets" if possible in controlled territories where people have no choice except to buy from their own favorite merchants.

Capitalist governments, at least in theory, allow and promote open competition between businesses and tend to break up rather than enforce monopolies at least when functioning well.

Dudes, get serious.  NOTHING with a password that's in any human-language dictionary is safe.  It wouldn't matter even if you spoke a really obscure language like Quecha (what the ancient Mayans spoke).  If there's a dictionary, somebody is going to feed it through a password guesser before moving on to anything more difficult.

I think it'll be used as a medium for online and international transactions, and that investors will use it to hedge financial positions that would go south if the economy melts down - the same way they use Gold today.

I'm pretty sure it'll remain too volatile for most people to consider using it as a store of value, and it'll start to see the effects of serious inflation as other cryptocurrencies gain market share.

By 5 years from now there'll be at least one or two other cryptocurrencies that are starting to be a serious challenge to Bitcoin because of developing new technology that Bitcoin doesn't partake of.  Some examples of the sort of thing that would give a challenger an advantage include a distributed 'tumbler' for financial privacy, GHOST protocol for resolving block conflicts, a good scaling strategy that remains distributed, peer-to-peer markets in digital assets (possibly including digital stock certificates), offline transactions, instant confirmations, etc.  Five years is probably too soon for them to have "replaced" bitcoin, but by then it's going to be a competitive market, and that competition is going to show in Bitcoin inflation coupled with deflation in the leading altcoins.  That'll be driving speculator money into the new altcoin challengers, tending to equalize the leading options as time goes on.

There's going to be more regulation.  It'll be seriously impossible for just anybody to legally launch a cryptocurrency starting sometime within the next five years; there's going to be registering, bonding, possibly requirements to back the new coin with some commodity, etc.

Also, the protocol is going to be used to transfer fiat money just as easily as Bitcoin sometime in the future -- though that'll probably be ten years or more rather than five or less.