I'm kind of glad this happened.

Firstly, it's better now than 3-5 years from now. We want evolutionary pressure that gradually leads to a battle hardened Bitcoin, but we don't want extinction events.

Secondly, it illustrates an important principle of Bitcoin in practice:

Social convention trumps technical convention

The implications are that even if a fatal protocol flaw is discovered in future, and even if there is a 51% attack, people will not lose their bitcoins, as long as the community reaches consensus on how to change the rules.

So if I understand correctly, the secure way of doing this is as follows:

1. Create transaction
2. Store signed transaction in a safe place
3. Store receiving wallet in a safe place
4. Delete private keys for sending addresses. Or empty the whole sending wallet and delete it.

If anywhere this should be solved at the protocol level, not at the social level. The bitcoin system should be completely agnostic about the intention of a transaction.  All it should be concerned about is the total cost of a transaction, both to the miners and relay nodes.

If people start using patched clients to block transactions based on perceived intentions, we are going to get into a huge mess.  Players like Satoshidice are going to start obfuscating their intentions, resulting in arms race, and before long there will be collateral damage, and innocent people who's transactions look like their intention is X,Y and Z are going to have them blocked.

It's going to be a bit like the old financial system. After some players misbehaved, government introduced rules like 'trading X with the intention to speculate is prohibited'.  Of course, this didn't stop traders from speculating, it just encouraged them to repackage their financial instruments to make it look like it's not speculation.  

These intention-based rules only make the financial system more complex, less transparent, less fair, and less stable.  We really don't want to do the same to Bitcoin. Let's keep it simple please!

The fact is, commerce is not the only kind of transaction that happens between human beings.  Just because you engage in non-commerce transactions doesn't mean you are a Marxist.

In a community, a consensus would eventually emerge as to what counts as a favor.

There are equilibrating forces at work:  If you refuse to do favors because you think your friends are asking for things that are 'more than a favor', two things can happen: (1) You convince your friends to be more reasonable with their requests for favors. (2) Your friends think you are anti-social and stop doing favors for you. This would make your favor credits unspendable too,  and encourage you to be more generous with your favors.

The lack of fungibility of the FAV can actually be an advantage over 'objective' measures such as HRS. If you spend 1 hour mowing the lawn for your 90-year-old grandmother, you would not expect her to do the same in return. You would be happy if she made you a cup of tea in return, as would your social circle.

The FAV isn't so much a currency as a way of formalizing and recording reciprocity within a group of mutual friends.  'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' works with the FAV but not with the HRS.

I'm just not sure if a Ripple-like system is best suited for this.

Your argument makes no sense to me.

If the price fluctuations are caused by professional 'pump-and-dump teams', what would prevent those teams from spreading their pump-and-dump strategy across several decentralized exchanges, if mtgox were not available to them?

Taking out a loan with the intent to file bankruptcy is fraud. Not to mention that it is unethical even from a libertarian viewpoint.

If something like this happened, I would invoke Occam's Razor, as would no doubt any investor with a brain:

Which is more likely?

1) That a lone hacker managed to to something that hundreds of cryptographers around the world haven't managed in a decade of cryptanalysis.
2) That the private keys are leaking in some way that the victims didn't think of (eg. zero-day exploit in wireless card)
3) That the whole thing is a scam.

Bitcoin's rise is NOT 'inevitable'.  There is still a 30% chance of Bitcoin failing in my opinion. There are a lot of things that can still feasibly go wrong, and probably whole lot of other things that nobody has even thought of.   Note of them would kill Bitcoin completely, but they would condemn Bitcoin as a niche currency trading at single figures.

  

Niemand weiß ob es eine Blase ist.

Auch wenn Bitcoin ein reiner Vermögens-Parkplatz bleibt, muss es nicht zwingend zur Blasenbildung kommen.  Wenn Aussteiger und Einsteiger sich im Gleichgewicht halten, kann der Kurs durchaus für immer stabil bleiben.  Aussteiger wird es immer geben. Neue Einsteiger wird es auch immer geben weil die Geburtenrate >0 ist.

Siehe:

http://gavinthink.blogspot.nl/2012/07/is-store-of-value-enough.html

Looks like that site has a following of 'doomsday preppers', spilled over from various peak oil forums. They are basically a religious cult and one of their dogmas is that all technology invented after 1800 is BAD and must be avoided.   Arguing with these people is as pointless as arguing with a concrete wall.

Google sign-in isn't for everyone, but for small websites run by people in their spare time it can save a lot of hassle.

There should be something like google sign-in for wallet management too.  At the moment, if you want to run a theft-proof bitcoin website you basically need to be a security guru.  That creates a big barrier to entry and excludes a lot of mom-and-pop web businesses from the Bitcoin economy.

You don't measure it. The favor is already an irreducible "fundamental unit" in terms of which other things are measured.

If you and your Ripple friend mutually agree that it is a favor, then it is a favor!  If you don't come to an agreement, then it is not a favor!

Simple as that. Whether it takes 5 seconds or a whole day is irrelevant.

That's not the case in Germany anymore since the Postbank was privatized.  There are reports about members of the above groups being refused bank accounts by banks.   I'm not sure what the situation is in Italy and Spain where similar cash bans have been introduced.

Ah. Looks like the order has been filled already.  I no longer own molecular IUOs. That went fast!

Ok, I'm intrigued by this BTC/BTC trading thing so let's have a go:  

I've created an offer selling 0.01 'molecular BTC' for 0.0096 'bitstamp BTC'.  (No offense, molecular!)

molecular: rpH3zuMch2GrrYX724xGWwbMGwiQ5RbSAU
bitstamp: rvYAfWj5gh67oV6fW32ZzP3Aw4Eubs59B

Any takers?

You should see the offer if you choose bitstamp as the base currency issuer and molecular as counter currency issuer.

I wonder, if other European countries follow suit and keep reducing the limit, what is going to happen to people who are unable to open a bank account (eg. foreign students, day laborers, homeless people, minors, refugees, people who have declared bankruptcy,...) ?

Are they going to be criminals by default? Are they expected to live without using money? That would be appalling.

If the government forces people to use banks then the least it can do is to force banks to open a bank account for anyone who asks.

True. But my idea is to use the time lock as an additional security feature on top of already existing security features, such as offline wallets and multisig.

Instead of using time locks that expire on a fixed date, I would suggest using 'ratchet' time locks where the expiry date can be postponed indefinitely by the owner of the address.

If draconian laws were imposed on the bitcoin protocol, in violation of community consensus, the result would almost certainly be a fork. 

Then there would be 2 bitcoins:  heavily regulated Bitcoin1, accepted by government-sanctioned businesses, and decentralized Bitcoin2, rejected by government-sanctioned businesses but accepted by system D businesses and dissenting users.

Joe Average would probably end up using both: Bitcoin1 for paying his utility bills and Bitcoin2 for getting a haircut.

If the rules got too draconian for Bitcoin1, eg. if there was a 50% tax on every Bitcoin1 transaction, people would abandon Bitcoin1 en masse, move their savings in Bitcoin2, and only use Bitcoin1 when absolutely necessary.

Then government would have to start subverting Bitcoin2, causing it to fork into Bitcoin3 and Bitcoin4. 

And so on.

Many workplaces also prohibit inserting unapproved USB drives into your work computer because they are afraid of malware and data theft.

In that case, your only option is to generate the signature on your portable device and type it into your work computer by hand. 

Probably much easier just to send bitcoins from your private smartphone.  Or are workplaces jamming phones now too?