How many times do I have to explain this to you? They research because there is money to be made, and humans are inherently curious, and because if they don't somebody else will.


No, it's absolutely nothing like that, information is not an excludable good.

Just because you are unimaginative does not mean those are the only options.

For instance, there could be competing for profit research organizations who then sell their data to pharmaceutical companies. They might even have arrangements by which they share resources and results, to save costs on very expensive research.

Alternatively, the pharmaceutical companies themselves may pool together for research, perhaps with an internal bidding process to determine which entity gets a short "monopoly" on producing the drug.

I'm curious if you guys that are "against" an assassination market have read the article.

If not, the gist is that basically, the site is nothing but a death pool. It's just that, if you take matters into your own hands, you're most likely going to win the pool.

The CIA is obviously aware of Bitcoin already, otherwise they would not have contacted Gavin.

What do you fear that they will do, exactly, to make Bitcoin less anonymous?

If we should allow pornography because it is legal somewhere, then we should allow drugs because they are legal somewhere.

This one is good as well.

I like his ideas on how such a service might establish trust with its userbase. I'm thinking about working on a service similar to this.

Only in some parts of the world. In other parts of the world, drugs are legal, yet they are censored from the forums.

Don't forget that Bitcoin not only threatens taxation, but inflation of the money supply as a source of revenue. Additionally, national debt seems more difficult to accrue without a monopoly on money.

It doesn't seem right to me, to call it a bubble.



Does Bitcoin have intrinsic value, in the financial sense? I don't think so.

The other main issue I have with the article is your three possible scenarios. Cosmological ideas don't make very good analogies for markets. There is nothing "infinite" about the idea that due to supply and demand, the price of Bitcoin could be much higher than it is today. Here are a better three possible scenarios:

• It goes up
• It goes down
• It stays the same

For the same reason that a government agency would create a routing protocol that undermines the government's ability to censor and collect information.

The CIA would definitely be interested in a distributed, pseudonymous digital currency, in order to transfer money to assets. In order for such a system to be useful, it would have to be used by many other people (to provide cover) as well as be valuable (in order to be accepted by an asset for payment).

This isn't to say that the government as a whole won't be hostile to Bitcoin, but I think most government employees have a sort of tunnel vision.

One thing I'd recommend is adding some OpenID buttons, like here. I was really confused at first because I'd never had to know the long Google OpenID authorization url.

Also, I had to manually call jsonrpc.getnewaddress() in order to populate an address in my profile. Is that normal?

Other than that, I very much like this, good job!

Ok, but the following things you've said are false:



The Times article does not mention drugs once. Neither of the two articles "point at the drug stuff on bitcoin's 'official sites'". I have not seen an article that paints the availability of drugs in exchange for Bitcoin (which will not change by removing it from the wiki) in a bad light. Which articles in particular are you referring to?


Love the ad hominems. It's completely rational to believe that a decentralized, pseudonymous electronic currency will be a useful tool in the fight against statism. One does not need to be a teenager to hold this view. Are you really that closed minded?

You guys are killing me with this chicken little bullshit

You're either mistaken, or full of shit. The word "drug" only appears twice in the Forbes article (not at all in the Times article), both instances are in the following paragraph:


So... who's the one making a big deal about drugs again? Forbes, or you?


Nice try painting those against censorship as being for the failure of Bitcoin. Might want to turn down the crazy there, buddy... 

There is a pretty easy way to buy coinbase transactions that requires little trust and only the exchange of a public key. I'll leave the rest as a thought experiment, but there will probably be an implementation soon.

Satoshi hasn't visited the forums since December, I wouldn't count on an answer.

I just hope that someday, when Bitcoin has either succeeded or failed, Satoshi can reveal him/her/themselves and take credit for his/her/their work (if he/she/they so choose).

While this is exciting to me (it was only a matter of time IMO), I urge everyone to be cautious. This could just as easily be a scam as the real thing. Wait until WikiLeaks posts a Bitcoin address on their site and just use that address.

Wow. Most constructive first post ever. Thanks, realnowhereman.

Or is satoshi airing his regrets?

I'm fine with fractional reserve banking, as long as there is no central bank. If people understand the drawbacks of fractional reserves, I think most will naturally gravitate toward banks with high reserve ratios, and only those that understand the risks will keep their money with a lower reserve bank. The threat of runs will serve as a market regulator of the reserve ratio.

If you're going to continue to call it hoarding, can you please define the difference between "saving" and "hoarding"? To me, there is no difference, hoarding is merely someone saving more than you think is proper. Which is to say, it's none of anyone's business but the saver.

Anyway, I still disagree that hoarding/saving is detrimental. The key factor is "time preference", in almost every case, humans prefer to have things now instead of later. Think of it like two opposing forces, one is "if I wait until later, I can buy more things", the other is "I want things now". There is a different point for every individual at which these two forces cancel out. This cancelling results in trade. Now imagine you place everyone on a one dimensional graph represented by this function. There would be people scattered all over. Some will trade their Bitcoins when they reach $0.10/BTC, some at $1/BTC, some at $10/BTC. There is never going to be a point where a significant number of people are not willing to engage in trade. The more people unwilling to engage in trade, the more incentive there is for everyone else to trade, as their money has that much more purchasing power.

If you think about the two forces in an inflationary money supply, it's obvious why we are such consumers today. Inflation discourages savings, so the forces are "if I wait until later, I can buy less things" and "I want things now".