Most people already know about Google Moon and Google Mars, but if you like space stuff they are worth checking out. If you like pretty colors, click "Elevation" on the maps.

I don't suppose you have a backup from before you encrypted the wallet?

Hazek, how about this:

A. The private club has a membership fee, and a code of conduct. Send X bitcoins to the club's address to join.

B. Whenever you want to deal with other members under the terms of this code of conduct, use your Bitcoin client to sign a contract (or other document) with the key that was used to pay your membership fee.

C. If there's a dispute, the club adjudicates it. That's what the membership fee is used for. The adjudication process takes account of the club's "code of conduct", and issues a ruling which may include a requirement to make good a failing in a certain way.

D. If a ruling is not carried out, the member is in breach of the code of conduct and can be expelled from the club.

E. An expelled member can apply again by paying a new membership fee. There's no way around this, but they start again from zero reputation, and it gets expensive if they do this too often.

F. Perhaps the members can even choose their own membership fee, since it acts a bit like a security bond. If someone wants to show that they can be trusted, they pay a large membership fee so that others can see that they have a lot to lose if they break the code of conduct.

I like your concept, but I can't think of a reliable way to do it with photo ID.

Regarding the OTC web of trust: It's interesting, and it is built on sound principles, but has two drawbacks:

(1) GPG signing is not yet easy enough for everyone and their grandparents to do it.

(2) There's no limit to the creation of new OTC-WOT identities.

For your proposed club, limitation (1) would not be a show-stopper because we are a bunch of geeks. As the usage of Bitcoin broadens, hopefully the use of GPG by Joe Average will become easier too.

I think you also have to accept limitation (2), simply because there's no robust way around this limitation. I think there's a lot that could be done within this limitation - for example someone might start an escrow service where the WOT ID with shortest history has their side of the transaction held in escrow.

Cute anecdote, but it doesn't mean anything. Perhaps the driver doesn't normally have a passenger. Maybe you'll now claim that it was a taxi that had been plying the streets for five years, but I don't care.

The seat belt was available for you to use. Why advocate violent compulsion?

This is a common meme, but it hasn't been necessary for years. The search engines are more sophisticated than you imagine.

Sure, if you put keywords in the URL the search engines will notice these. But if you don't do that, the search engines will grab keywords from other places like headings. Keywords in the URL are at the expense of keywords elsewhere.

That's not accurate. Seat belt wearing became the norm, not because of the law change (which just rode on the coat-tails of increasing awareness of road safety), but because the inertia-reel seat belt was invented. This reduced the inconvenience of seat-belt wearing.

I was a child in the 1960s, and our family car came without seat belts. We voluntarily fitted after-market seat belts, long before there were any laws. But they were the old type that had to be adjusted for each person, which was a real nuisance.

Even today, if there were no seat belt laws, most people would wear them because insurance companies would charge much higher rates for non-wearers. But those few people who didn't want to wear them would retain that freedom.

Don't forget Satoshi. She didn't make a fuss about this, because she didn't want to be treated differently.

Like Andrew Bitcoiner said, "Bitcoin doesn't care about users gender and neither should we".

Those who value the services can pay for them. If the services deliver value, they will be funded. If they don't, they won't be.

You keep telling us about all these people who want a state so that it can force them to do what is "good" for them. Surely they will voluntarily pay for it?

Of course! But even in those countries, there is a common source of funding for the legislature, administration and judiciary: taxation.

Removing forceful taxation from the equation would add a further check (because those bodies would not be able to grow larger than the size the population wishes to fund), and would improve the balance (by changing it from a three-way to a four-way split of power: legislature, administration, judiciary, and citizens).

I've often noticed that apologists for the state have low opinions of their fellowmen. Contempt, even.

The old saying of "it takes one to know one" springs to mind.

Those who cherish freedom and voluntaryism, on the other hand, tend to respect their fellowmen and can see the great potential of human nature if unchained.

Here's how, and it doesn't require having the Bitcoin port open.

The user access a web page. The request is intercepted by the router, which returns a page quoting the rate. Suppose for this example that the rate is 0.1 BTC for 30 minutes.

The user has a bitcoin client with a nifty feature. By clicking "pay for WiFi" the bitcoin client sends a transaction to itself for 0.1 BTC. Then it sends the private key for that transaction to the router, within the address of an HTTP request. The router sees this, makes a bitcoin transaction to claim the payment, and enables web browsing for 30 minutes.

0.001 BTC = "one milliBTC" or one Millie
0.000001 BTC = "one microBTC" or one Mike

If you have to make that choice manually, your business is not going to scale anyway.

Perhaps make some design changes so that it's not so attractive to the scammers.

Well, no. As they say, "he who pays the piper calls the tune". And look how poorly the credit rating agencies did in 2007.

Much better that the auditors are paid by the customers and depositors, than by the businesses.

The heading on the Dashboard page is spelled wrongly ("Dahsboard").

What about merging the "Open" and "Discussing" categories? If I visit the site, I'm interested in seeing all the currently-active questions. The old closed-off questions are not so interesting.

I have an early linux Aspire One. On mine, there's a small slider switch on the front edge that must be slid to turn on WiFi. Maybe yours has something similar.

You're right. They will need to increase it to cover the costs associated with administration, spam fighting, advertising, etc.

For what it's worth:

1. This has been done before (http://bitqna.com/) but BitQnA has almost no traffic. The fatal flaw of BitQnA is that they mix free with paid questions. Free questions drive out paid questions.

2. Your notification options don't include the most useful one: to receive an email whenever a new question is posted for answering.

3. The site seems rather slow.

4. It's bizarre to have a dollar sign in the logo of a BTC-based site.

5. The site is open to the following "social" (i.e. non-technical) exploit: Suppose Fred wants to know an answer to an important question that will require a lot of work to answer. He posts the question with a generous bounty. Lots of people work hard on the answer, and post their answers. Fred creates a second account, and posts some kind of answer similar to what the others posted, then selects his answer as the winner. In that way, he gets a high-priced answer for 10% of the cost. This is a financial attack against honest answerers by dishonest questioners.

I've also been working on a Bitcoin Q&A site, but I don't feel I have a viable business model for it yet. Everything has to be "just right" if people are going to pay for answers in a world where most things on the internet are free.

So I will be watching bitquestion.com with interest.