Nice work. What I'd like to see next is the ability to ignore threads. Maybe people, too, though I'm not sure about that yet. Some threads keep popping to the top in a number of forums I do like to read, and I find their content... well, not of interest to myself. I'd prefer to just hide them altogether.

roll a custom livecd with Dropbox or other cloud storage installed, have your encrypted wallet backed up there?

Please mind the signal to noise ratio.

There is a lot of reason to favor deflation. Let's disregard the wild exchange rate fluctuations for the moment, since we're assuming deflation exists. If I offer you payment in BTC and you expect it will deflate, and I also offer to pay you in some inflationary currency, which would you rather take, absent anyone forcing you to use one currency over the other?

I'm not at all convinced an inflationary currency can be competitive without some sort of (coercive probably) immediate incentive for people to use it.

As for your coins, they should be fine, assuming they were sent to your address. The wallet doesn't contain any coins. Wallet.dat is a treasure map, with X's marking the spot where your coins are buried in the block chain, distributed to Bitcoin users across the Internet.

Maybe that analogy just makes things more confusing. It's a difficult art.

Either things will work out or they won't. We will see, I don't think there's much you can do to alter the outcome as far as economic policy is concerned. It's a decentralized currency, a lack of control is a core feature.

Sweft: So, assuming centralization really becomes that extreme, Wal-Mart could abuse their hashpower to double-spend their BTC. They could print their own USD right now and "profit", but the risk is too high. They're in business, and screwing over their customers like that is usually a bad idea for such a big target.

You trust a scammer to tell you where they live?

I think anyone operating an exchange, especially with their real names on the line, is much braver than I am. As far as Mt Gox goes, given how seriously they seem to be taking their business and expansion, I can't imagine they haven't considered their options in case of government interference.

Make sure you keep the wallet.dat file. That's about it.

I read through this whole thread just to make sure it really was just on the 5th page that someone brought up the point that if Bitcoin is still around in 2040 in any form that it makes sense to attack, there will be so many parties with vested interests in keeping the system stable that they'll mine their asses off even if it isn't directly profitable. (OK, someone on the third page kind of said that too, but not so directly).

Seriously. Poor show, guys.

Now, to digress a little bit... If you assume direct rewards from mining eventually decrease to the point where it's no longer seen as a profit vector, but rather a necessary cost of doing business in Bitcoin - is that a form of inflation built into the system itself? If holding Bitcoin means having to spend money to secure the system, what does that mean for spending incentives? I'll admit it's a pretty contrived comparison, but there it is.

Why would anyone choose the Fedcoin over regular Dollars with the credit card infrastructure it already has etc.

That will only help if the virus doesn't include a keylogger.

Bitcoin is nowhere big enough or tested enough for me to even begin to think about worrying about these kinds of consequences.

I expect governmental responses to Bitcoin will tend to be similar to their responses to illegal narcotics. If they don't manage to kill it off right away they'll marginalize it with propaganda and persecution of users. They can't stop it altogether, but that's something governments have learned to live with already. What I'm wondering is to what extent they can suppress Bitcoin usage.

How do we know you're the NielDLR in the references?
GPG signatures would be a good start for everyone to start to use. (I know, dream on...)

I'm running out of things to say here. I think the issue of distribution will sort itself out. The exchange rate is fluctuating wildly. Bitcoin has been, is, and will continue to be a risky investment. Sooner or later some of the bigger hoarders will start to chicken out and sell their Bitcoin. They may cause the exchange rates to drop a lot, or maybe they'll be sly about it and sell over time. Either way, the coins get redistributed.

If some of them do not sell and instead hold on to their coins, even at, say, USD10/BTC, or USD 100/BTC, they're taking big risks. No-one knows the outcome. No-one knows how the exchange rates would recover from a crash back to pre-dollar-parity days. It's entirely possible for a panic to decimate the exchange rates. Anyone with a few hundred thousand BTC has to have balls of steel not to think about unloading significant amounts of those sooner or later, unless they're already loaded, of course.

It sounds like you don't think Bitcoin is a valuable invention. Yet it seems you're very interested in it.

The BTC are from pooled mining, so I can't give you an entire block. If you're still interested, I'll get back to you after I check how much I actually have in that wallet. I hope you have some way of verifying the age of the whole amount.

edit: Just so you know, it's not much. Max 6 BTC or so, but I don't recall if I transferred some of those to my main wallet already. I'll have to check.