Yep, paypal is subject to chargebacks, while bitcoins are not. It's dangerous to sell bitcoins for paypal if you don't trust the person buying from you.

I was going to say something on those lines but you were faster than me. Finally somebody understands it!

People, these sites don't belong to any of you! It's not your business. AFAIK, the owners haven't even asked our opinion. Or have they?

Sorry, but I don't like this proposition.

I can give a proposition of my own though: the owner of each site decides. Whenever - if ever - they ask our opinion, then each one is free to give it or not.
What do you think?

The tulip bubble was also caused by inflation and cheap credit. The difference was that the inflation source was not a central bank, but the enormous theft of gold and silver promoted by Spanish conquerors in south america.

Nothing has intrinsic value. Value is not an intrinsic attribute of anything. Value is on the beholder.

And please, realize it's impossible to determine whether the price of bitcoins is overestimated or not.

I don't think this is a bubble, as the housing or internet bubble, since I don't see people getting loans in highly inflated currencies to buy bitcoins. What creates bubbles is easy credit created by inflation.

There's definitely a lot of speculation going on, and bad speculators tend to provoke more price variation than what would happen without them. So, yes, if a lot of bad speculators are putting their money in bitcoins, that could result in a lot more turbulence. But still, I would be careful before calling it a bubble.

I don't agree with it. It's true that a few extremely conservative and silly people may turn away for this reason, but in general, people from the "black markets" using a technology is a positive advertising for that technology. It shows that's a robust, trustworthy technology.

Truecrypt officially states on their FAQ that a Brazilian bankster managed to protect his data using their software, for example. (http://www.truecrypt.org/faq, link at the end of the first response)

I think your doing something similar to "self-negotiation", what's silly in this case.

Self-negotiation is when you want X, but you know the counterpart you have to negotiate that X with won't accept what you want, so you previously try to predict what that counterpart will accept and you decrease your own ambition, asking less than what you wanted.

What I mean is: has the administrator of bitcoin.it received any formal threat from any government agency of his jurisdiction? If not, why are you worrying? Before coming with guns on your head they will threaten you, simply because that's much easier and cheaper. And when they do threaten you, then you think about what you want to do (either stick to your principles no matter the consequences or obey the gangsters).

I see no reason for banning the links to the illegal services right now, so I voted yes.

I have no words to describe how stupid such a thing is... unbelievable!


Back to the topic... what's actually the point of us discussing this here? I mean, it's up to the owner(s) of SilkRoad to decide it, and as far as I know, s/he hasn't even asked our opinion on this matter.... (unless I've missed something).

If your point is just discussing how you think the ideal anonymous market should behave, and you don't think SilkRoad is being this ideal anonymous market of yours, then think about competing with them. I realize it's not easy, but I guess it's more effective than discussing stuff here at least.

C'est sérieux ça?

Si vrai, vous êtes une exception chez les exceptions. C'est admirable. Je fais les mots de grondilu les miens, je voudrais arriver à cette age avec une tête tellement ouverte et capable d'absorber des nouveaux concepts.... bon, en faite, avant tout, je voudrais un jour arriver à cette age déjà!

Yeah, I can't do it anymore... I have to ignore the greatest majority of posts, unfortunately...

Couldn't there be different RSS feeds, instead of only one with all messages?
It would be nicer if the RSS also showed the entire message and the message author username, that would make it faster to go through the messages I think.

Well, you have to really believe in the Fed in order to think that the dollar will not collapse. By keeping their reserves, they risk losing much more.


Why?
The Chinese improve has not so much to do with the US buying their stuff with dollars but much more the Chinese being able of producing these stuff in the first place. They should stop accepting subsidizing the dollar and start feeding their own internal market with their production. It's true that their internal market demand is probably not the same of that of US and therefore the capital structure would have to change, what can be a bit painful. But it would be in their own benefit. They should really stop being mercantilists and let the Chinese people enjoy more the increase in capital the country has gone through.

Not to mention the reserves they're sitting on are a bomb...

I think the Chinese government has somehow realized the problem they've put themselves in, they just won't admit or take desperate actions. But they're slowly acquiring gold for example, they've strongly shifted from US long-term bonds to short-term ones etc.

These governments are not dumping anything, the topic title is a bit misleading. They keep huge dollars reserves... if they dump that, then you'll see the dollar plunge. I don't think they'll do it though, not while they remain believing in mercantilism.

You mean valid transactions? I agree invalid transactions don't need to be forwarded, I just don't like this mandatory fee policy.

But I see the point... somebody could send millions of 0,01μBTC with no fees, flooding the network....

Eventually something better than a mandatory fee policy could be implemented, don't you think? Like rejecting "too fast" transaction series, for example... [mike] suggestion comes handy there. A node that "suspects" one of its peers is flooding the network could just send him an error message with a proper code or text indicating something like "I think you're a spammer, won't accept more than one transaction of yours per second".

I agree with that (although I also agree with [mike] that a failure message wouldn't harm either).
I just don't think there should be anything automatic... reclaiming should be always manual.

You mean nodes won't forward a transaction that doesn't suit their own fee policies? This is bad if it's the case... transactions should at least be forwarded, in spite of fees.

What about Singapore?

Whose image would be more tainted, the victim's or the attacker's? Imagine the headlines: "US government spends millions to hack and steal digital money from US citizens and foreigners".

This would need completely disguised from the public. A government openly doing such attack could even cause some international friction. And I'm not sure it's that easy to hide such an expensive attack from the public, they can't manage to hide even their secret documents!

Well, if you care about returning the money to the correct person, then you should worry to whom you send it! If you just want to get rid of the coins, feel free to send them to the address in my signature!

There's no guarantee that those in charge of a share wallet can determine that the refund you send was meant for person X. Actually, the address in question could be a deposit address of another person, or just a change address of the bank, anyway, it's impossible to know.

Please understand that having more computing power than the entire honest network doesn't allow you to "destroy bitcoin", it only allows rewriting recent (couple weeks, few months at most*) transaction history. Only miners who have their blocks replaced would "lose" money - and consequently everybody that bought their coins - and everybody else would have to wait for their recent transactions to be confirmed again, in case the attacker erases everything.

This could also allow the government in question to double-spend, but if it has no profit motives, it would probably not take the risk of showing itself like that. It's not on their interest, taxes are easier.

Yes, it could cause some awful problems, but in the end, being the target of attacks from a government may have positive effects for bitcoins, meaning, recognition and support from those who don't approve such action. And it could cause bad effects for the images of that government as well.

I don't think it's a good strategy, neither for profit-oriented criminals, nor for political oriented ones.


* I don't know if developers keep moving the "milestone block" at each release as previously planned. Nothing older than this marked block can be replaced. I wonder if there should be a sort of "semi-official" marking of blocks like that, done here in bitcoin.org, in order to avoid long rewrites of the network. This policy could be followed by other clients, eventually.

Your contract could specify salaries reductions based on some deflation index.

Just watch out for the laws you live under... in many countries, paying salaries with bitcoins is indeed not possible, not because of bitcoins' economics, but due to labor laws.