This problem could be avoided if we could assure that the only way the coins in a card could be spent was through the card destruction.

A way I can think of implementing this is by having only part of the bitcoin private key on the card, and the other part remains under possession of the issuer. Only the issuer, with the card in hands, could then sign a transaction. Such issuer could assure that all cards are destroyed right after such signature.

This would require a second, full private key in the card for signing challenges - and the issuer would have to sign the public part of this key as well - and, of course, would render the cashing-out of such cards more complicated. But, well, if they are supposed to be used as physical cash, this is much like how bank notes backed by gold were redeemed in the past.

Interest rates are a price. The price for "renting savings". As the price of anything else, it drops when the supply increases, demand being constant.

If lenders keep increasing their savings to lend more and more, they'll be increasing the supply of savings available for lending, thus decreasing the price one has to pay to have access to it.
At an extreme, the interest rates might barely cover the expanses of the lending process itself.

Also, with such low interest rates, consuming/investing becomes so easy, that many will do it. A raise in consumption decreases the savings available... these "forces" push to an equilibrium, that's of course unreachable since the variables of this equation are changing all the time.

Why? Each card should contain a different bitcoin private key, the key that owns the amount... is this key that should be used to sign challenges...

No, it gets harder and harder, the interest rate decreases until the point it's not worth lending any more.

Lots of savings allow easier consumption. People will stop saving so much and consume/invest more.

I thought smart cards were designed in a way that stealing the private content of the memory was practically unfeasible.... isn't that the big deal about smart cards?

You can rely on trust on the issuer, that's not a major problem, I think. All you need is a way to be sure it really was the issuer you trust who created that smart card, and that could be done by a simple signature of the card address/public key.

The problem I see in this is the card production cost... is it as cheap as a piece of paper? If the cost is high, this would only be useful for larger amounts of bitcoins, never for pennies...

Your hypothesis is just impossible.

And no, you don't need to have all money in existence being borrowed to have a credit market. Just a fraction is enough. Naturally, the higher this fraction is, the lower the interest rates will tend to be.

Interest rates are a fundamental price. They reflect people temporal preferences versus the amount of savings in the economy. These things exist despite monetary inflation.

So?

Interest rates don't depend on monetary inflation.

Depending on where you live, or mainly, how your house is (if it has a closed yard, if it is on a rural area etc) they cannot easily control that. It's an antenna not that big, you can hide.

Yes.

Ah, just remember that the software won't automatically know how to decrypt it. If you want to always keep the wallet.dat used by the client encrypted, you'll need some sort of script to decrypt it before launching the client.

The best approach to protect your bitcoins is to transfer the amount that you want to "keep safe" to a new wallet, encrypt and back up this wallet on off line medias and maybe on a remote server. And don't forget to back up your encryption keys too.

The default client doesn't have this built-in but you may always use an encryption tool.

FreeMoney gave a good explanation.

Even if you don't lend your savings to investors, the simple fact that you save - that is, you produce more than you consume - allows others to have easier access to the goods that you restrained yourself from consuming. This production share will be there, available for investors to use more easily.

Wait, but then the correction was not the good one, IMHO...

The best solution would be to change the sending priority. The client would first pick confirmed coins, since unconfirmed ones may remain like that for an indeterminate time. Maybe a warning message when there are only unconfirmed coins to be sent could be useful too. But completely blocking sounds "too authoritarian" to me... it's not up to the software to decide that.

By the way, the wiki section gives the impression that is the network that refuses <0,01 transactions, instead of the default miner. If I mine a block with my custom miner and accept to put <0,01 transactions in it, the default client won't refuse them, right?

Also, one doubt that I once had... can somebody else than the send of a transaction add fees to it? Suppose I'm the receiver of a transaction and I'm in a hurry, but the sender isn't.... so he sends a free transactions, that takes too long to get confirmed... could I add a few bitcents to it in order to get it processed quicker?

Why doesn't the default client let unconfirmed coins to be sent? It seems an unnecessary limitation to me...

ha! Soon we'll be hearing about stamps counterfeiting...

Nice. Who would be the spokesman?

I find it quite expensive though.... $1000, is it worth that much?

Has any agorist geek, expert on networks, ever tried to study the possibility of passing data channels through these easily hijack-ables US military satellites?
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2009/04/fleetcom?currentPage=all

I doubt it would allow for a good bandwith, it and the simple fact that is satellite probably impose a significant lag. But, anyway, if it works, it could be a feasible option to those under the Great Firewall of China for example.

Somebody could come out with an open protocol to allow the routing from this pirate-satellite-network to the Internet. Bitcoins could be used to pay for the routing service.

It would be interesting if possible.

Agora que o davout abriu o código da exchange dele, está ainda mais fácil de fazer uma exchange BTC<->BRL.
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2585.0

Alguém com um pouco de experiência em Rails (não tenho nenhuma ) e que esteja no Brasil caso precise de uma conta bancária ou algo assim, poderia fazer.

Alguém se candidata?

Congratulations! This is cool.

And thank you too, anonymous donor.