I agree with your concern about people not knowing how to protect themselves, but then, I think that better than adding unnecessary features to the main software, we should just offer preconfigured bundles, as I said on my last post.

An "anonymous bitcoin" bundle to be downloaded from the main project page, that would include the bitcoin software + an embedded tor proxy, everything preconfigured... this is better, imho, than adding SSL support to the bitcoin client.

What's the incentive for ISPs to do that, despite government pressure?
Because if it's the government who's after you, they can do just like hadopi in France. Encryption alone won't help you, you need something like Tor.

Maybe a better thing would be to offer a bundle Bitcoin client + tor proxy with everything already configured, for those who aren't geek enough to configure it by themselves. Just like the firefox bundle that torproject offers.

I don't see a need to add encryption to the core bitcoin software.

May I ask why do you want public data to be exchanged through encrypted connections? I don't see the gain in that. If it's anonymity you want, encryption won't help you...

No.


Well, gold also requires lots of energy/resources to be mined.

The thing is, how to invent a currency that
-anyone can issue/mine/generate/etc, in other words, it's issuing is not centralized.
-doesn't inflate too fast
-doesn't consume too much resources to issue, in other words, it's easy to produce

So far you can at most pick two... if you manage to invent something that satisfy these 3 criteria at once, I bet everyone here would be really interested.

What's interesting is to ask what happens if in the inputs you have addresses that are "fine" and others which have their balance dependent on the double-spend. What happens to this transactions after the block reorganization?

That was not my question... 

These facebook credits are only a "decent competitor" to bitcoins if they are an independent currency, what I suppose they are not. If they are just another form of payment like paypal, then they are just a problem to paypal, not bitcoins.

Are these facebook credits really an independent currency or are they pegged to government currencies like paypal is?

The topic has grown a lot, I'll answer only what was directed to me.


Savings is totally necessary. It's the only way. Investments need to use good and services. These good and services had to be produced before the investment take place, and they must not had been consumed. Something that is produced and not consumed = savings.

A debt contract is nothing more than a "savings rental" contract. Somebody has savings, somebody else hasn't but need it for now, they loan. The interest rate is the price of such rental.
As of any price, in a free market it reflects the supply/demand. So, in a free market, the interest rate reflect the supply/demand of savings available for "renting" (lending).
When the government intervenes with its authoritarian inflation to push down interest rates, it causes price distortion. When the price of something decreases, that normally stimulate consumption of this something and inhibits its production. That's what happen when government artificially pushes down interest rates: people spend more and save less. But newly printed money is not real savings. People are consuming as if there were lots of savings to back up their long term projects, but there isn't. Voluptuous investments will start and won't be able to finish. You have a boom followed by a bust that destroys capital.

And the worst of all is that it all takes years, normally more than the term of the despots who rule us under most democracies... their goal is always to push to the future the more they can, and enjoy only from the boom.



I don't get your point. There's no inherent value, value is subjective. Your bread just got "less valuable" not "less inherently valuable" as value is not a property of bread.


Ok, some members can do that, sure. Particularly those who are allowed to use coercion. If property rights were respected, that wouldn't happen.

In what way would the wallet.dat logs be any different from what you find on the public chain already?
I don't think that's the kind of log he worries about... logs linking the input with the output that would be the problem... the wallet.dat wouldn't have such logs since bitcoind itself wouldn't have such info.

Democracy is just another excuse to control people. A much more elaborate and efficient excuse than "ordered by god", but still, an excuse.
If politicians themselves really believed in democracy ideals, we would already have direct democracy everywhere, since current technology renders it feasible. But I don't know of any direct democracy government anywhere...

I wonder though if direct democracy would have less bad economic incentives than representative democracy. Maybe secession would be easier in such context what would allow for smaller governments... but on the other hand, economic-illiteracy might bring destructive labor laws, regulations and "soak-the-rich" policies...
Does anyone know if somebody has ever wrote a good praxeological comparison between direct and representative democracies?

I've never used, but MtGox has built some reputation here already. He's shown honesty before, so I would trust.
Or your trust issue is somewhere else?

No, it's the other way around. Someone who hoards is abstaining himself to consume his share of production. His hoarding will make prices lower what will make it easier for others to consume and invest. He's making it easier for others.


What else could?
"Real savings come first, if you want to invest." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

Investment means employing goods and services with the goal of increasing productivity capacity by accumulating capital (=means of production).
Savings means sparing a share of what was produced (consuming less that your share of production).
If all goods and services produced by the economy are consumed (no savings), nothing is left for investment.
Some amount of production has to be saved and redirected to investments so there can be economic growth.

Savings => Investments => More capital => More production => Possible increase in consumption

Often people tend to view only the last part of this cycle (increase in consumption) and try to stimulate that, with authoritarian policies like lowering the interest rates through inflation, for example. This is awful, as by stimulating consumption you'll decrease savings. In the short run, you'll get an economic expansion. But that's unsustainable. Lots of capital will be lost in bad investments, who should not have started in the first place.


First, there's no such a thing as "inherent value". This is a fallacy: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-fallacy-of-quotintrinsic-valuequot/
Value is on the eye of the beholder. It's a subjective opinion people have on stuff, not an inherent attribute of valued stuff.

So, I don't know what you mean exactly. Do you mean that the demand decreases? I think that's more the supply which increases fast, but it doesn't make any difference actually. The fact is that it's very well known by everyone that eletronic prices fall down quite quickly, and that doesn't stop people from consuming them at all. And electronics are superfluous! Do you really think people would stop consuming "important" stuff just because it might get like 5% or 10% cheaper the next year?
And even if a percentage of society decides to go ultra-hoarding under price deflation, they'll just be making it even easier for those who want to consume or invest as I said before. No problem there.

And by the way, another thing that people often don't pay attention is that, for price deflation to happen in a scenario of stable monetary base, economic growth must have happened before. Otherwise prices will be stable. So, this claim that deflation would stop economic growth is quite weird since deflation would only happen after economic growth.


Sorry, this is nonsense.
The economy and entity of its own?
Something good for people is bad for the economy these people participate in?
 

Individuals are an end in themselves. They are not ants in a colony or pieces in a body.

This is "simple inflation", not exactly what we have in central banking economies.
In our current system, it's worse than a commutative-hidden-tax. They use inflation to lower the interest rates which provokes business cycles and lots of capital destruction.


This is fallacy spread by Keynesians. There are many other topics on this very forum explaining why this is wrong, and you'll certainly find good articles on the web. Check www.mises.org for example, there are very good articles there on the subject.
Just think of hightec products... their productivity raises even higher than inflation, what make their prices deflationary. And that doesn't prevent people from buying them...
And by the way, savings is good. That's what feeds investments which bring economic growth.

Yeah, but still, that's the monetary base... as soon as it reaches banks, through the fractional reserves system, most of this increase in money supply becomes debt... (at least until before 2008 it did )
Only the compulsory reserves remain, which normally is a small fraction.

The compulsory reserves banks hold on the central bank.

You know what would be nice?
Try to apply the same table to gold (or precious metals in general), just to see how better bitcoin stands.
Maybe even comparing to government fiat money too, but that might too much humiliation...

+1
Not that it will change much right now, but it would be good to develop such practice.

I agree with you. That's why I think it would be a good idea to try to create an artificial scarcity for transactions, while we still can: https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1865.0

Another ideal is free transactions. Bitcoin might have them now, while inflation rate is high, but eventually they might get expensive, as so much computational work has to be done in order to generate.

hehehe, okay, fair enough...